10 - Choric Configurations and the Collective: Ruth Beckermann’s Films

Summary

In this re-politicized age, the collective and its representation has moved to the forefront of our interest. How can the collective be figured in documentary films with aesthetic ambitions? Is there a way for the body politic to emerge without using obvious historical footage of protest movements, parades, processions, or a panoply of talking heads? How might these kinds of films, which tend to wear their politics on their sleeve, represent the group without falling prey to propaganda? Are there new ways of representing the agon of collectives in the public sphere, and, if so, what stylistic means are used?1 How do the films negotiate the consent of their subjects, that is, what a director chooses to show about the implied community? And, finally, what are the possibilities for new polities— perhaps a kind of rejuvenated chorus of antiquity—to emerge from particular modalities of such documentary filmmaking?

In attempting to answer some of these questions, I take as my case study the films of acclaimed Austrian director Ruth Beckermann. She establishes a documentary mode of choric configurations, one that presses spatial qualities into the service of explicit and implicit collectives. In Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016, 89 min.), Waldheims Walzer (The Waldheim Waltz, 2018, 93 min.), and Mutzenbacher (2022, 100 min.), Beckermann reflects on contemporary socio-sexual, economic, and political mores through the lens of the past. Whether it be the fraught love story between two of the German-speaking world’s postwar literary greats, the election of a former SA member as President of the Second Austrian Republic, or the re-publication of the 1906 pornographic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher (2021), all three films represent marginalized or oppositional voices. In this regard, Beckermann uses overdetermined sites to profoundly reflect on the possibility and ephemerality of political collectives that arise out of a sense of historical injustice. She sets Die Geträumten in the soon-to-be-defunct inter-war radio broadcast studio Funkhaus Wien, she circles the central St. Stephen’s Square during Waldheim’s election campaign in Waldheims Walzer, and she situates an open casting call for Mutzenbacher in the now partially razed coffin factory- cum-cultural center Kulturzentrum F23 Wien-Liesing. These locales, where readings from the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, protests against presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim, and conversations about the pedophilic novel Mutzenbacher occur, become spatially and temporally porous.