Ruth Beckermann - Retrospective

Ruth Beckermann, born in Vienna in 1952, has been creating essay films and documentaries for 40 years and is well known internationally as one of Austria’s most courageous and spirited filmmakers. An examination of ”the work of memory“ combined with a close observation of present circumstances is at the core of Beckermann’s work. Time and again, she makes the viewer aware of how one flares up in the other, as in her treatment of questions of personal and collective identity (or their disruption). She never resorts to experimental gimmickry. Her films reveal an author who feels the need to express the time she lives in.

Her time as filmmaker goes back to the Vienna of 1977. As a member of an independent video collective, she compiled material on the struggle for an autonomous cultural center in Vienna: Arena besetzt (Arena Squatted). A documentation of a utopia and its end, but also an attempt to make cinema politically useful. 

A traveler from early on including studying in Paris and New York and working as a journalist in Switzerland, Beckermann’s interests are by no means localized. Die papierene Brücke (Paper Bridge, 1987), a cinematic quest for traces of Jewish life in the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, illustrates the geographical space of her cinema (even if the Waldheim election campaign in Vienna suddenly bursts in at the end of the film). 

Her road movie American Passages started after the financial crisis in Harlem on November 4, 2008 — the day Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States. Then the film continues as an associative travelogue ending in Las Vegas. At the same time, Beckermann’s films bridge gaps across time: from the fate of her father, born in Czernovitz (Paper Bridge), and intense conversations with communist Franz West about interwar Vienna (Wien Retour/Return to Vienna) to her present day doorstep, the Marc Aurel Street in what used to be Vienna’s Jewish textile district (homemad(e)). From the traces empress Elisabeth left in Egypt (Ein flüchtiger Zug nach dem Orient/A Fleeting Passage to the Orient) to the exhibition ”Crimes of the Wehrmacht“ and the memories it triggered in visitors, the majority of whom were former Wehrmacht soldiers (Jenseits des Krieges/East of War).

With the first Austrian retrospective of Ruth Beckermann’s films, the Austrian Film Museum explored the work of a director equally suspicious of both closed narrative forms and linear views of history and memory. As the images in her work become ever freer and bolder, they intertwine past and present, the here and there, the filming I and the world. This nimbleness, reminiscent of the work of Chris Marker, is reinforced by the titles of her most recent works: Those Who Go Those Who Stay (2013), an essay concerned with voluntary and involuntary movements across the European continent; The Missing Image (2015), a controversialartistic intervention on Vienna’s Albertina Square; and Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016) — Beckermann’s first, wonderfully harmonious hybrid fiction film, in which she imagined and staged the relationship between the poet Paul Celan and the young writer Ingeborg Bachmann. (Austrian Film Museum)

Films
Arena Squatted (Josef Aichholzer, Ruth Beckermann, Franz Grafl, 1977, 16mm/DCP, b/w, 77 min.)
Suddenly, a Strike (Ruth Beckermann & Josef Aichholzer, 1978, 16mm/DCP, b/w, 24 min.)
The Steel Hammer Out There on the Grass (R. Beckermann, Josef Aichholzer, Michael Stejskal, 1981, 16mm/DCP, col & b/w, 40 min.)
The Missing Image [Documentation of the installation] (Ruth Beckermann, 2015/16, DCP, col, 11 min.)
Return to Vienna (Ruth Beckermann, Josef Aichholzer, 1983, 16mm/DCP, col & b/w, 91 min.)
Paper Bridge (Ruth Beckermann, 1987, 16mm/DCP, col, 95 min.)
Towards Jerusalem (Ruth Beckermann, 1990, 16mm/DCP, col, 85 min.)
East of War (Ruth Beckermann, 1996, 35mm/DCP, col, 117 min.)
A Fleeting Passage to the Orient (Ruth Beckermann, 1999, 35mm/DCP, col, 82 min.)
Mozart Enigma (Mozart Minute 10) (Ruth Beckermann, 2006, 35mm/DCP, 1 min.)
homemad(e) (Ruth Beckermann, 2001, 35mm/DCP, col, 84 min.)
Zorro’s Bar Mitzva (Ruth Beckermann, 2006, 35mm/DCP, col, 90 min.)
American Passages (Ruth Beckermann, 2011, 35mm/DCP, col, 121 min.)
Jackson/Marker 4am (Ruth Beckermann, 2012, DCP, col, 3 min.)
Those Who Go Those Who Stay (Ruth Beckermann, 2013, DCP, col, 75 min.)
The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann, 2016, DCP, col, 89 min.)

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