Mara Mattuschka_Different Faces of an Anti-Diva

Anyone already damned need not fear being damned. In Elisabeth M. Klocker´s film Different Faces of an Anti-Diva, the artist Mara Mattuschka tells how one of her Bulgarian ancestors made a blasphemous speech for which he and the next nine generations of the family were cursed. The way Mattuschka tells it, this fate almost sounds like fun. In any case, she lives out her fearlessness with pleasure. Various stations of Mattuschka´s career play out in front of Klocker´s camera, from her first successes with experimental shorts in the mid-1980s, to a feature length film made together with Andreas Karner and Hans Werner Poschauko, entitled The Entry of Rococo into the Island Kingdom of the Huzzis (1989), to her most recent films Perfect Garden (2013, co-directed with Chris Haring) and Voices (2014).

Her over-the-top Huzzi animations were created while studying at Vienna´s University of Applied Arts, under Maria Lassnig. Mattuschka assimilated Lassnig´s principle of allowing self-awareness and the female body to influence art-making in a most original way. Klocker, who is also a multi-talent, worked together with Mattuschka time and again over the course of eight years, shooting and interviewing her co-horts. At some point the director, as in her previous films, becomes part of the game: the filmmaker, her film and the subject of its portrayal meld into a "Gesamtkunstwerk". This is perhaps the only way to tackle an artist whose eclectic performance instinct does not make it possible to pin her down. Once Mara Mattuschka tells Elisabeth M. Klocker that an image is an entire jewel. And this applies to the image that the film makes of Mattuschka. One gets an impression of the elusive artist after all: as a painter and filmmaker, a mother and superstitious performance artist, and as a great comedian, somewhere in a realm between Dada and Groucho Marx: Amorrr, you are my heart´s viii-bra-torrr...

(Susan Vahabzadeh)

Translation: Eve Heller


For more than 30 years, Mara Mattuschka has been among Austria’s most eminent experimental filmmakers. In addition to her film work, the Bulgarian-born artist is also an actor, painter, manager, professor, performance artist, singer and film producer. The film portrait on the artist by Elisabeth Maria Klocker, who accompanied Mara Mattuschka over a longer period of time, shows Mattuschka’s complexity, her high degree of professionalism and the enthusiasm she brings to all her work – as well as her irony and humor and her courage in taking on new and different roles. Despite her success and international acclaim, Mara Mattuschka has remained unassuming; she calmly talks about her penchant for imperfection. Klocker’s film is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of a unique artistic oeuvre and talent.

(Viennale Catalog, 2013)