‘In the 1980s, Julia Wachtel sought to examine pre-linguistic thinking and forms of non-narrative communication to great admiration of her peers with whom she often collaborated. Using larger culture contexts, she has continued to politically challenge status quo assumptions of our cultural symbolic order for over three decades. Her paintings and silkscreens weave disparate images from popular culture into a subversive brand of social commentary. Her work is particularly notable for its jarring juxtaposition of low brow illustration and dramatic photojournalism.
‘Wachtel’s paintings emerged in overlapping American generations of artists active in New York and Los Angeles in the 1980s whose contributions have increasingly become admired by new generations of artists and curators. The conversation in the American art world of the 1980s was demarcated by venue associations, schools and generations, informing a new popular culture beyond the formerly quotidian school of thought. This was the decade that yielded the first wave of the newly professionalized gallery system and a commercial market, limited to few artists who were symbols of the various representative trends. Politically independent, directly critical or experimental activity by artists, (often by women) were arguably of even greater historical significance. Wachtel’s concepts continue to be referenced in a number of artist’s work of successive generations. Pertinent now, as we investigate another round of market dominance that is potentially more interconnected but equally blind to the integrity of creative influences, it is interesting to refer to works of the period that are extraordinarily relevant in today’s context.
‘Julia Wachtel’s work remains prescient to political and social media evolutions that began forming in the 1980s and continue now, embracing the conflict that these digital forms often represent. Wachtel has actively pioneered works that address the impact of “society of the spectacle” in the complicit media saturated age of the 1980s. Incorporating political images and discomforting cartoon figures, she pre-figured “reality” and celebrity culture’s impact on representation as a potential form of critical and emotional dissent. Wachtel’s work has often been credited as a notable precursor to similar artistic strategies by Jeff Koons and Richard Prince. Her work early on incorporated collaborations with artists and agitprop groups. A notable early public installation with Haim Steinbach and several projects with Group Material were fundamental to Wachtel’s development in this decade.’ — Elizabeth Dee
EMILY MCDERMOTT: I know you originally were only painting, and then adopted screen printing. What initiated that change?
JULIA WACHTEL: I actually started screen printing like a month after Warhol died in 1987. The work was always about pop culture, but I never really thought to make screen prints. It didn’t even occur to me. Warhol was probably the most important influence on me, but as I said, I wasn’t thinking, “That’s a process I want to use.” Then, after he died, I thought, “Oh, this process is available to me.” I don’t think I would’ve ever made silkscreen prints while he was making work, because you would just be in the shadow of him. Once he died, it was like, “This is a tool I can use,” and it seemed very adaptable to what I was doing. The first image I did was actually Janis Joplin, a very pop image.
MCDERMOTT: Growing up, what was the first piece of art you saw that made you realize you could take pop culture imagery and turn it into something else?
WACHTEL: I remember it very clearly. It was Roy Lichtenstein. I was in high school, and I had always made art—as a kid I always liked to paint and draw—but my senior project was an art project. I didn’t live in a [bubble]—I traveled around with my parents, had been to Europe, lived in the suburbs of New York—but I had never been to MoMA. So [I finally went in high school] and saw the Roy Lichtenstein painting Girl with a Beach Ball. It was a revelation. It was like separation at birth, a kindred spirit. I just couldn’t believe the painting. Seeing it…it’s so painterly. That was the first painting I saw that made me think, “I can be an artist.”
MCDERMOTT: Where did you go from there?
WACHTEL: I started making, in my first year of college at Middlebury, Rauschenberg-y assemblage things and then I became aware of minimalism. I was looking at Donald Judd and making minimalist, cube structures that were built and wrapped in black plastic. Then I went to SVA and studied with Joseph Kosuth, Vito Acconci, and Joan Jonas. I became much more conceptual-minded, but it was always connected to a pop vernacular. That’s been consistent from when I was 10 until now. Not much has changed.
MCDERMOTT: I like what you’ve said in interviews before, that you consider your work to act like a speed bump.
WACHTEL: I could make photographs, but I very purposefully make paintings because paintings, ideally, should slow you down. I put benches in the gallery to encourage people to sit down and spend more time. Everyone’s always in a rush and speeding around, but a painting should be an object of contemplation, something you can sit with. You should keep looking at it over time and things will reveal themselves.
When I started making appropriation work and entered into the gallery system, no one was painting appropriations. There was painting going on, like Julian Schnabel and neo-abstract painting and graffiti art, but no one was doing critical theory and appropriation paintings. It was considered a bad thing to do, because painting was associated with the market and institutional authority and other ideas that critically minded people were trying to deconstruct. It was a real act of perversity on my part to decide that painting was going to be the platform I would engage in these ideas.
MCDERMOTT: So did you receive a lot of criticism when you first emerged?
WACHTEL: The work was well received, but it wasn’t really well received in the market. It was a little rough for collectors to want to have these really goofy, pathetic, cartoon characters. They were the kind of images people wanted to disassociate, not associate, themselves with. I intentionally used them because I was trying to undercut the un-critical identification with glamour. You can be Richard Prince and take reproduced serial images and deconstruct the power of those images, but if you do it with the same glossiness, you retain the patina and the aura of the glamour. I was trying to say, “I’m not going that route. I’m not going to reinvest in the thing you guys are trying to criticize.” I think that made it hard for collectors to get behind.
MCDERMOTT: How do you feel personally about popular culture and its proliferation?
WACHTEL: You know, if you’re a fireman, I think you love fire, even if you’re trying to put the fire out. That would be a very good analogy to my relationship with pop culture. I love it, but it’s obviously extremely powerful, in a lot of negative ways, in terms of identity and self, particularly for women. Not exclusively women, but young girls, with the internet—YouTube and videos about image and concerns, there’s pro-bulimia websites. It’s not just pop culture now; it’s social media. A lot of it is user-generated, but it’s reproducing like a virus. The term viral is apt. But I love pop culture, too. I love the Gangnam video.
MCDERMOTT: With the increased number and relative importance of fairs, what’s it like knowing that you have to create work, rather than making it from your own will?
WACHTEL: It’s not good. I mean, thank god it’s an opportunity to sell my work, so I can’t complain, but it’s like, I hate having to buy a dress because I’m going to a wedding. Do I like buying dresses? Yes, but under the right circumstances.
MCDERMOTT: You also worked at Vanity Fair as the production manager for the U.K. edition and on the U.S. side of things as well. How did that impact your personal work or vice versa?
WACHTEL: The funny thing about working at Vanity Fair is that I have some kind of facial dyslexia. I can’t distinguish one white actress from another. [laughs] Kate Hudson could be on the cover and I would have no idea who it was. It’s hilarious that I’m working with celebrities, I’m working with images, and I can’t even tell one from the other. But I have to say, I miss the camaraderie of an office environment. It’s nice to work with other people in a collaborative way.
____ Video
‘At the beginning of this quarantine with Covid19 I was approached to participate in an online website project, “Passing Time”, organized by Alex Perweiler and Neville Wakefield, asking artists to submit short videos. Thinking to my “research” videos I thought to expand upon this, this time taking it another step further and actually editing footage and including sound. I started editing in iMovie but quickly realized Premier, part of the Adobe Suite, was a more powerful program. I guess I fell into the rabbit hole of learning how to edit, and capturing footage from live t.v. and the internet.’ (more)
___ Static
what, what, what, 1988
Landscape No. 3 (history), 1989
The History of Animals, 1997
Platform, 1997
Thrill, 2011
Circles and Door, 2014
The Execution of Abstraction, 2015
Position, 2015
Proof, 2015
Stripe, 2014
Time and Again, 2015
The Deconstruction of the Spectacle, 2015
Spirit, 2015
Girl, 2014
Witness, 2014
Endangered Species, 2014
Glare, 2015
UNTITLED, 2016
Soul No. 1 (Pinochio), 2016
Soul No. 3 (Subject), 2016
Picnic, 2017
Making History, 2017
Ascending and Descending, 2017
Target, 2017
Mapping, 2017
The Disappearance of the Sign, 2017
Investigation, 2017
Communication, 2017
Depth of Field, 2018
Iteration, 2018
Helpp, 2018
Modern Landscape, 2019
*
p.s. Hey. ** JoeM, Eek. Moving right along … Being entrusted to read someone’s novel while it’s in process is a pretty big compliment, I think. I’ve never done that, but George is tougher skinned than I am. Well, in certain ways. Agree about ‘HS’. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks. I was honestly surprised there was enough online to make it. I only very vaguely knew his name until a few months ago. So his work or rather the fact that there was such a thing as his work was Greek to me. Ah, I remember Arthur Js, of course. I was more of a Gold Cup (Hlwd Blvd @ Las Palmas) kinda kid. I’m pretty sure the Gold Cup predated your LA move. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Glad the DCA has a reopening plan. I hope it sticks. ** Jeff J, Hi. Well, I’m sure happy you liked it since were definitely its impetus. I think ‘Do Everything in the Dark’ is easily one of Gary’s best novels. Okay, interesting. I’m happy to have your ‘ZC’ report/review because I feel like I know how to approach it when I inevitably see it. Bonello is such an uneven director. It’s curious. Huh, I don’t think I’ve seen any of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s films. I’ll rectify that as best I can. And I’ll find ‘London Orbital’ as soon as today. It sounds amazing. Thanks for the share, man. If you see this before you split for Georgia, break every leg or I guess every fingertip, and if the internet comes calling, check in. ** h (now j), Hi. Thanks. I’m actually quite new to Schmid’s work, and I haven’t seen very much yet, but I think so far ‘Violanta’ is my favorite. It’s nice that ‘Memory’ is having a such moment. I’ve been reading/seeing a lot about it. Pretty seminal work. I love Ray Johnson, so the new book is great news. Uh, yes, I believe I wrote about a few artist books back when I was a regular at Artforum. I hope your day was as nice as predicted. It did sound lovely. We’re blasted with high heat here. I’m going to try to escape into some cold museum, I think. ** Steve Erickson, Yes, you seem fully yourself here again. Excellent. I Zoom with LA friends pretty regularly, and everyone just seems emotionally and psychologically decimated, even the normally brightest and bushiest tailed of them. Jeff Jackson got ‘Beeswax’ somewhere, so I guess it’s possible. Yes, I too am looking forward to those two releases, of course. ** cal, Cool, glad it fed you. Listening to? Hm, … still some of the things in the gig post I did here last week, the new KTL, talking here with Jeff J about XTC got me listening to their early albums again, the two new Aki Onda albums, … Blanking. I like the Arrival by Fire! I’ll hunt down the Mamaleek. And the others. Contemporary folk bands … not off the top of my head, but it’s a billion degrees here, so my head is sludgy. I do really like that GIF post! I’m going to dwell within it once I exit here. Awesome! Everyone, cal, who works wonders with GIFs in combination, has a new piece/stack up on his joint/site The Uvular Trill, and I highly recommend that you indulge in it post haste. Here. Very impressive work, man. Kudos! Thanks! And thanks especially for those cold winds. And from every citizen of Paris, it is safe to say. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, my hosting site (GoDaddy) has been having timeout/firewall issues every fucking day lately, and I’ve just about had it with them. Looking into switching homes. I’m glad Rigby is up and almost running. Yes, Amy always was the first to read my novels, but, even there, never before I thought they were completely finished. Showing anyone things before I feel like they’re set completes fucks my brain up. 15 years, whoa, I think you’re right. Nuts. This place in its present and past incarnations has been quite the boon on the payback front, I must say. I’m down for that post-COVID party assuming I’m still sentient at that infinite seeming point. It’s almost your birthday! Cakes galore starting … now! ** Okay. Today my little galerie houses a kind of informal survey show by the iconic 80s and beyond artist Julia Wachtel. Fun, etc. should ensue should you choose to wander about. So do. See you tomorrow.
‘The Swiss-born film and opera director Daniel Schmid, who has died of cancer aged 64, was a member of the self-destructive group of people who surrounded the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder throughout the 1970s. It was really only after Fassbinder’s death, from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills in 1982, that Schmid became recognised as an artist in his own right.
‘Although they shared a fascination for kitsch and an admiration for the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Schmid, unlike Fassbinder, had little interest in realism, or in his own time. This curious mixture of a baroque sensibility and radical aesthetics, which allied him to the new German cinema – especially that of the high camp works of Werner Schroeter and Rosa von Praunheim – marked his style. His love of ritual and artifice was used in his films as an acute reflection on art, and its illusions and delusions. “I believe that people have a need for mythical forms, mysterious images, atavistic fairy tales, and magical symbols that take them back to the hidden memories of their childhood and their culture,” he said.
‘Schmid and Fassbinder first met in Berlin in 1966, when they were both taking the school entrance examination for the German Film and Television Academy. They briefly became lovers, and afterwards remained close friends. In fact, Schmid accompanied Fassbinder and his wife, the cabaret singer Ingrid Caven, on their honeymoon to Rome in August 1970. “I was still in my 20s. It was before Aids. I was in love with everyone. With Rainer and Ingrid too. It amused Rainer to be with his ex-lover and bride in a hotel room.” (The unconsummated marriage lasted two years.)
‘Schmid’s first four features starred Caven, who had already appeared in four of Fassbinder’s films. The first, Tonight or Never (1972), is a satiric parable set in the 19th century, in which, for one night of the year, an aristocratic Austrian family exchanges roles with their servants. A troupe of actors, hired to entertain the guests, performing fragments from the “cultural scrapheap”: scenes from Gone With the Wind, Madame Bovary, Swan Lake, operatic arias and pop music, incite the servants to revolt.
‘In the stylishly decadent La Paloma (1974), Caven plays a Dietrich-like chanteuse called Viola Schlump, wasting away until she marries a rich man whom she treats badly because she has stopped believing in love. As the critic of Time magazine wrote: “It is a wonderful shotgun wedding of movie mythology, bad taste, obsessive romanticism and impudent satire.”
‘After Fassbinder’s play The Garbage, the City and Death, was banned in Germany because of its perceived anti-semitism, Schmid adapted it for the screen as Shadow of Angels (1976) with Fassbinder as producer and actor, playing the role of a pimp. The story concerns Lily Brest (Caven), a destitute prostitute who is saved by her marriage to a character merely called the Rich Jew. “I’ve always understood it as a strange, sad fairy tale,” Schmid commented. “It’s also a movie about Germany after the Holocaust, and I think the reason Fassbinder wanted me to adapt the play for the screen was that I was not German. He said he was too close to the whole thing.”
‘Schmid, who was proudly Swiss, was born the scion of a wealthy Swiss-Jewish family of hoteliers in the mountain resort of Flims-Waldhaus. Some of his experiences growing up in an hotel were recaptured in Off Season (1992), a reflection on childhood, dreams and expectations. “There is nothing as empty as an empty hotel,” he remarked. He moved to Berlin in 1962 to study history and literature at the Free University before entering the film academy, and for a time shared an apartment with Andreas Baader, later the leader of the urban guerrilla group, the Red Army Faction.
‘Schmid himself always expressed an aversion to all ideologies, although many of his films are implicit critiques of bourgeois society. Violanta (1977), which dealt with an incestuous brother-sister relationship, starred Caven, Lucia Bosé, Maria Schneider and Bulle Ogier. “To me, cinema has always meant beautiful women. I think women are better adapted to conveying emotions via the film medium,” Schmid said.
‘It was inevitable that his love of opera – and the operatic nature of his films – would lead him to direct in the medium. Among his acclaimed productions, variously in Geneva and Zurich, were Alban Berg’s Lulu (1985), Rossini’s William Tell (1988), Bellini’s I Puritani (1995) and Linda di Chamounix (1996), Verdi’s Il Trovatore (1996) and Donizetti’s Beatrice di Tenda (2002).
‘After The Written Face (1995), a beautiful and profound documentary on Japanese theatre, Schmid made Beresina or The Last Days of Switzerland (1999), a black comedy about a Russian prostitute who dreams of a “fairytale” Switzerland, only to be confronted by the reality. It was his final film, although he was preparing Portovero, an enticing thriller in which a man has a relationship with two women who may be look-alikes, twins, or one woman with two identities.
‘In 1984 he made the affectionate documentary Tosca’s Kiss, shot in the Casa Verdi, a Milanese home for retired opera singers, in which several of the residents reminisce and sometimes sing.
‘For many years, Schmid, who was nicknamed the Aunt among Fassbinder’s entourage, lived with Raul Gimenez, the Argentinean production designer on all his films, who died of AIDS in 1994 aged 44.’ — Ronald Bergan
In Memoriam Daniel Schmid (2010) de Gérard Courant
À l’occasion de la présentation le 6 juin 2010 au Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris du film “Daniel Schmid le chat qui pense”, réalisé par deux jeunes cinéastes helvétiques, Pascal Hofmann et Benny Jaberg, Gérard Courant a filmé la discussion qui s’en suivit et qui réunissait les comédiennes Ingrid Caven et Bulle Ogier, le directeur de la photo Renato Berta, le producteur Marcel Hoehn, l’écrivain Stefan Zweifel et le l’exploitant de salles This Brunner.
____ Interview from BOMB
Daniel Schmid When I talk about someone else, I talk about me, at a certain moment. If you tell me something about somebody, you tell me much more about you, than about the person. It should be like this, also, no? I mean, not in the sense of a constant radio program, which is sometimes quite tiring for other people—the danger is that those people who have their radio stations always on themselves, in this exhibitionistic way, get a little bit boring because they cannot receive, which means they never listen to other radio stations. They don’t support other radio stations, no? Isn’t this an experience you also have?
Gary Indiana Oh, all the time. But today is dedicated to Radio Daniel Schmid, (instead of me asking Daniel Schmid questions about Radio Werner Schroeter or Radio Ingrid Caven.) And I’ll ask you first about this film Miriam, which is listed in the catalogue of this Swiss Film Week, and which I’ve never heard of, Daniel.
DS Well, me too, actually. I never heard of it—I mean, I haven’t heard of it in 12 years. This has to do with a particularly German punctuality and bureaucracy, because I think it slipped in through all those cultural functionaries who are all the time in contact with each other, because what else do they have to do, instead of taking care of us—so some people of the Deutsche Filme Akadamie, I’m sure, do this very exact biography of people. This was a seven-minute try-out with a camera in the first year of film school. That’s all. It’s a seven-minute thing and I forgot completely, because while I went to film school I also did small movies in television, ten-minute things; with Rosa von Praunheim, we did a little movie about Samuel Beckett, which was Samuel Beckett walking in Berlin from the place where he was sleeping to the rehearsal of a play of his; we stayed on the same bridge for a fortnight filming Samuel Beckett walking by. In general the television didn’t accept those things afterwards. I never regarded them as that important. So Miriam slipped in through some German spy files. I don’t know if it even still exists, no idea.
GI What was the first real film?
DSDo Everything In The Dark. It’s a kind of invented documentary fiction about the last servant school in Europe, in Italy; you know, before the first world war there were millions of servants and butlers …
GI There’s a Walser novel about a servant school, Jakob von Gunten.
DS Yes, right, there’s a Walser novel; and there’s this wonderful thing by Jonathan Swift, Advice to Servants, that I took the title from; this got published in London in the 18th century. It has all these things like, “Never use your own knife, use the knife of your master, because your own knife you might use one day,” “Do everything in the dark, to save up the light of your master …” There’s a double sense to all of it, it came out and was quite a fashionable thing for one season in London, but of course it was never read by the people he gave this advice to because they couldn’t read. It was only the upper class that delighted in reading about how they should get killed by their servants. I shot it in Venice in five days, with Igor (Joczka), and with all these strange people I met there. An old mistress of Mussolini, and Principessa Cinni, the mother of this romantic figure in the ’40s who was so much in love with Merle Oberon that he flew over her house in Cap d’Antibes and every day threw thousands of roses down to her, and one day the plane crashed. People like that are in this movie.
GI The movie after that is about servants, too.
DS It’s about servants too, but it’s about master servant relationships. Tonight or Never. This is more a kind of definition—this is when I seriously thought I’d do movies. Because the climate in the early ’70s for this whole group we were somehow forming—Werner Schroeter, Rainer Fassbinder, all these people—at this time everybody was into political films, engaged films; and at this time everybody kind of looked at us like fascists. Or like completely useless. That was a time when I said, finally, “I want to do movies that are completely inutile and inoubliable”—what is it?
GI Useless and unforgettable.
DS Exactly. This was the period of this sozialekitsch, I would say, when all these bourgeoise people and intellectual people in Europe began taking care of the factory workers, without ever having spent one evening with a factory worker; it’s very far away now. I wanted to do a statement about how I would define my role in society. And it’s the classical old thing of the comedians, the clowns, the buffones, who are not really important; because we don’t change the world, we change nothing, the most you can do with a movie is to irritate; it’s an old, old thing, that if you overrate and overvalue things—these people who do movies and expect it to change people’s lives; in Tonight or Never I did a story about the role of these buffoons; a rich woman gives an invitation for them to come and for one night switch roles. Which in the Esterhazy family, in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in Prague, they had this custom. Once a year on this special day the masters were serving the servants and the servants became the masters. This is a kind of parable. So in the film I introduced a group of comedians who come to the house the night they switch roles and perform highlights from the summer sell-out of 19th-century culture, from La Traviata to Madame Bovary to the last scene of Gone With the Wind. Then one of the performers steps out and asks for the revolution, and that’s the top number of the cabaret, because the audience is very amused about it. He asks suddenly for the revolution and makes a revolutionary speech, telling how sick it is, this position, the servants letting themselves be driven by the masters, of course it’s a cabaret act, he’s paid for it, and he says all this bullshit, “I would like to recite and play in Nature, outside where it’s free and not in this bourgeois house”—as much nonsense as the rest, you know? And, of course, the comedians are paid by the masters, who play the servants and are also the only ones who enjoy this sophisticated number, because the servants don’t understand it. At the end of the night everybody goes back to his initial place. I like that with movies, you can do it so that everything is in a second, that the way it begins, it ends—because where are the ends in life? There is never an end, the end is in general mediocre, but these gorgeous theatrical endings we all dream of—it doesn’t occur, actually, La Paloma starts in a nightclub and ends in a nightclub, and it’s all in a second, where someone imagines on somebody a whole story—this I like, that you come back to the beginning. In Tonight or Never the first shot is the same as the last shot.
GI I was confused by La Paloma because it only becomes a hallucination at the very end.
DS Because you don’t expect it any more, you go so much into this story with this guy, by the very end you forget that it’s only a kaleidoscope. Then suddenly you come back, and, logically, you see the same five shots that the movie begins with.
GIHecate is the same way.
DS Yes. It all takes place in a glass of champagne.
GI Now that I’ve seen Shadow of Angels I can see some consistencies. One thing I always remembered from La Paloma was that Bulle Ogier was the mother, who was, oddly, the same age or younger than her son—
DS But it didn’t bother anybody, you know. And we have this strange thing also, that Bulle talks French and he talks German, they have all these dialogues; because Peter (Kern) in life cannot speak French, and she doesn’t speak one word of German. First the producers were shocked, and I said, “You will see,” and no one protested. Strange. And the public also accepted her as the mother. You can do anything. I think so.
GI I was thinking of Shadow of Angels—the dwarf is actually the tallest person in the movie and is always referred to as the dwarf.
DS And the Jew is the kind of incarnation of the classical blond Aryan German Nazi officer, and the fascist looks like a Jewish caricature, the German looks like a German Communist, the mother looks like Greta Garbo on acid, and Mr. Mueller, the real fascist who killed people, the SS guy, is a female impersonator who instead of going to South America with a ticket paid by the American CIA, like they did with this guy in France, Barbie, instead of disappearing to South America with CIA help he becomes a female impersonator in postwar Germany and only goes out at night to sing.
GI That just reminded me of something really strange. We were in your living room a few months ago watching Barbie arrive from South America and then you switched the station and there were all these drag queens in a nightclub.
DS Right. Mr. and Mrs. Mueller, the German father and mother. Shadow of Angels is a very German movie. I think that’s why Rainer, after he wrote the play, said “You should do the movie, because you’re not that much involved.” Because the Germans have one big problem—and it’s more than this political problem. It’s that for centuries when there was all this national feeling in England and France, all over, Germany didn’t have it, because it was split up into thousands of little countries; they had it much too late, in the 19th century, that’s why they got into this imperial disaster with the First World War, that’s where the tragedy started. And they have a strange thing, Germans, they have, I think, an absolutely unsolved father complex, they have an Oedipal story that’s very very strange. And of course Shadow of Angels is also about this daughter-father relationship, of this generation—of the Meinhof group, if you want, Hitler’s children. Among other things. But these are also the things that are kind of outside of it. When I read it as a play, and then we began to work on it as a script, we worked three months, I saw it always like a fairy tale—a chilling, but also romantic, strange fairy tale, with this nearly Proustian relationship, somehow, but set in the late ’80s, you know? Where the only possible love couple in the film, the Jew and the prostitute, those two outcasts—who know, but they know also they’re in this system. And when they go to the execution, actually, when she asks him to kill her, and he says, “We never listened to music with each other—” because he wants to stop her from going to her guillotine—because when she is gone, he won’t have anyone to talk to. And then no one will talk in the world anymore. Because it’s set in a world where, let’s say, all social problems have their solution. Everything is controlled, everybody’s in control, but no one has a solution for the fear problem. So actually it comes to a society where people aren’t even scared anymore. The only people who are scared, probably, are Lily and the Jew. They’re older than the others, they know. And they have these old-time morals, both, in a certain way—and they have this scene, when they’re driving in the car—I always saw it in this fairy tale way, when he says, “We never listened to music together,” and Ingrid (Caven) turns to him and says, “Music would have confused us,” and she takes his hand. And he says, “And who wants to be confused?” And she takes her hand away and says, “We all need songs that sing of love,”
GI And then she gets killed.
DS And then she gets killed. Of course it has political aspects, of course it has aspects of a possible psychological plot, if you think of someone who comes back to the country which killed his parents, comes back kind of looking for the murderer of his parents. And he finds him, but he doesn’t denounce him; he goes always to the nightclub, where the murderer of his parents is performing in drag, he takes his revenge through the daughter. The Jew is very open, he says, “I’m here, and the Mayor is my friend, the political people are my friends,” because he does business with the bad conscience of these people. Of the Germans. He knows, and he pushes it, also. But that’s not what Shadow of Angels is about.
GI I noticed that a lot of things in Shadow of Angels showed up again in In A Year of 13 Moons—for example, the verbalization of this idea that this person who is—
DS “Me is somebody else,” he says in German.
GI “Thank God that no one knows my name—”
DS “—is Rumpelstilskin.” And through the whole film goes this, “silently and very peacefully through my …” getmutlichkeit, it’s not soul, it’s not heart, it’s a word that only exists in German: “my inner constitution”—and through the film goes this little spring song, it was written by Mendelssohn, and the words are by Heinrich Heine, it’s a hundred percent Jewish product of the early 19th century, and it’s the most popular German folk song. Forbidden under Hitler. They forbade it, but they couldn’t, it went on, it was so much part of the German soul. That’s one of the main themes. Another is Zarah Leander—you know, the Germans are the most extreme people, for the good and the bad. They’re nuts. Goebbels in 1943 had this slogan, you know, “Do you want a total war?” and at the same time Zarah Leander did this movie where she was singing a song: “Because of that, the world doesn’t scramble, tomorrow the sun will shine again, and the sky will be Himmelblau!”—heavenly blue! And the bombs were falling on Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden by then, and she was singing in waltz, you know.
GI Let’s talk about La Paloma and Hecate. They’re very similar in a funny way.
DS In a funny way, yes.
GI This obsession that a man has with this otherworldly creature.
DS But who doesn’t have those obsessions? Constantly in my life I’ve had obsessions about people and I always had this hard waking up finding that they were all the time only a kind of projection I had in a lonely dance around myself. Especially when I got emotionally involved with people. And I am somebody who projects a lot on people. I see somebody and I immediately imagine stories, and when it interferes emotionally you really get out of control with it. Because it’s nothing to do with reality, this person, this object you project on. So this is very familiar. In Hecate it’s very strong—the idea in that film, for me, was to tell the story of an attractive, intelligent, completely uninteresting person who gets interesting through a woman, through an imagination, through someone who also allows him, for a short while, to imagine, for six weeks, a crazy story. Then he goes back into his mediocrity, but once in his life he was alive. And that’s wonderful, most people are never alive. It’s wonderful to be, for some weeks, alive, even if you project in a desperate, completely wrong direction. I think so. Sometimes people say that’s sick, but what is sick?
_____________ 9 of Daniel Schmid’s 16 films
_____________ Tonight or Never (1972) ‘A satire on 19th-century class relations that’s also a veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution. Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places. A troupe of actors are hired to entertain the guests.’— MUBI
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____________ La Paloma (1974) ‘Nightclub singer La Paloma (Ingrid Cave) succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer (Peter Kern) and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband’s love has cured her, but her efforts to love him die stillborn as she discovers true love with her husband’s old school friend (Peter Chatel). She plans to run off with the friend, but when those plans fall through she takes a series of various poisons and, wearing an uncanny kind of makeup, dies. Her last wish was to have her bones interred in a vase in her husband’s family crypt. To fulfill her wishes some years later, the husband opens her coffin and finds to his amazement that her body is as fresh as on the day she died. He lovingly hacks her into pieces so she will fit into the vase.’— Unifrance
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Bulle Ogier parle de Daniel Schmid et de sa participation à “La Paloma”
______________ Shadow of Angels (1976) ‘SHADOW OF ANGELS is the film adaptation of R.W. Fassbinder’s last and most controversial play, “Garbage, the City, and Death,” which was banned in Germany. The story concerns Lily, a prostitute too beautiful to have clients and the real estate speculator she befriends. Lily is paid to listen to her customers’ despairing monologues about politics, power, corruption, and guilt. SHADOW OF ANGELS is quintessential Fassbinder, a fable about victims and victimizers and not so nascent neo-Nazi sympathies in post-war Germany.’ — rarefilmm
_____________ Violanta (1977) ‘Maria Schneider, mist-soaked greenery, dark dank taverns, a hammered Gerard Depardieu, inventive visual use of a mountain lake, Lucia Bose gliding about in full operatic sinister diva mode, an overwhelming sense of isolation, Lou Castel’s confusing hairline, some nice supernatural touches and a Peer Raben score. It’s a damn fine oddity that blends Eurogothic tendencies, ETA Hoffman-esque pastoral paranormal, the borderline surreal conversational blocking found in Central and Eastern European TV plays of this era (and still found in Yorgos Lanthimos films) and bucolic nostalgia. So sit yourself down in a kiddie pool of melted cheese, blow your alphorn to alert the neighborhood to leave you alone for the next 90 minutes, stick a Ricola in the orifice of your choice and put this on.’ — Fnord
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____________ Hecate (1982) ”India Song’ and Somerset Maugham come together in ‘HECATE’, set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid ‘s favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde (played by the American actress Lauren Hutton) really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a “woman looking out into the night.” Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid’s film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.’— Pacific Film Archive
Interview de Daniel SCHMID au sujet de son film “Hécate”
______________ Tosca’s Kiss (1984) ‘Meet the inhabitants of the “Casa di Riposa” in Milan, the world’s first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. In his documentary Tosca’s Kiss, which has gained a cult following over the years and is a favorite among opera and music lovers worldwide, director Daniel Schmid has captured a world in which these wonderful singers (many of whom had significant careers on the opera stage) relive and reenact their triumphant roles of the glorious past. Tosca’s Kiss is a touching and often hilarious film on the subject of aging and the power and timeless capacity of music to inspire. With Sara Scuderi, Giovanni Puligheddu, Leonida Bellon, Salvatore Locapo, and Giuseppe Manacchini.’— FSoLC
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_____________ Les Amateurs (1991) ‘Using early family, tourist and publicity films (between 1905 and 1930), Schmid articulates the pleasures of filming – the play of amateurs, visiting Switzerland, both in front and behind the camera.’— DS.com
______________ The Written Face (1995) ‘Daniel Schmid got to know Japan because his films are highly regarded by the Japanese and he was repeatedly invited to Japan over the years with his new films. After all those visits, he had brought a suitcase of images of Japan back with him, to put it in his own terms. In this film, he opens the suitcase. The film came about because a Japanese producer asked the Swiss film-maker to make a film in Japan. Das geschriebene Gesicht is about Schmid’s fascination with the classic Japanese Kabuki theatre and with one famous actor in particular, Tamasaburo Bando, who dedicated his whole life (his acting career started when he was five) to playing female roles. The form of the film is an intriguing combination of feature and documentary: reality, theatre and the dreams and fantasies of the film-maker are repeatedly mingled together. Schmid is obviously among the connoisseurs of Japan who argue that westerners will never penetrate the essence of Japanese culture. That is why he regards his film as more of an impressionist travelogue portraying Japan, than as a film essay about Kabuki theatre. Since Das geschriebene Gesicht could not be a film about Japan, about Kabuki or about Tamasaburo Bando, Schmid decided to make his film with Japanese, with kabuki actors and especially with Tamasaburo Bando. The result is a beautiful ode to what is incomprehensible in Japan.’— IFFR
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_______________ Beresina (or The Last Days of Switzerland) (1999) ‘Leading Swiss helmer Daniel Schmid applies his wicked sense of humor to the fatherland in “Beresina or the Last Days of Switzerland,” a rollicking socio-political farce that roasts just about everybody in a position of power. You don’t have to be Swiss to enjoy Schmid’s scathing indictment of corrupt stuffed shirts or to applaud the irresistible rise to power of a Russian call girl who just wants a Swiss passport.’— Variety
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, My pleasure. Yes, and there it is, right up there. Hope it’s worthy. ** JoeM, Hi. Oh, wow, that’s wild about Mad Magazine’s editor’s son publishing your novel. I’m impressed! Oh, I did read that Kelman novel. It was quite good, so the Booker is batting at least 1 in my park. Never got the appeal of Hollinghurst’s work whatsoever, but the gay lit crowd sure deifies his stuff. Is the George Wines novel you read the one he just finished? Privileged, if so. Well, if not too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Big good morning to you from there across the channel and also a fair amount of dry land, Ben. ** Jeff J, Hi. Cool, you found that comp. Nice, yeah? Some of the B-sides are so good. I’m particularly fond of ‘Pulsing Pulsing’. XTC were a ton of fun live. If you’ve seen live footage of them, say their stint in ‘Urrgh’ or other, you can see that Partridge was quite lively onstage, which is why his crippling stage fright thing was so surprising. Last malady I would have expected of him. I actually went to what ended up being their final gig in Hollywood, or rather would have been the final gig. After hours of waiting and delay, it was announced over the loud speakers they weren’t playing, and we all filed out, and I guess that was the night he had his big breakdown. Hope the Schmid Day is something of what you hoped. Rappaport’s great. No, strangely, I have never run into him here or been introduced or anything even though I think we must have been at some of the same screenings and things. I really should get in contact with him and have a coffee. I haven’t seen ‘Zombi Child’, but the friends of mine who did, and most of the critics here, said it was pretty bad. That’s all I know or remember at least. What did you think? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Very good news! Keep it up! Or keep the lack of it up, I guess I mean? ** Right. Guessing many of you don’t know Daniel Schmid’s films. They’re strong, they’re things that are very good to know. Today I’m doing my part by forefronting them. I hope you will have the interest to acquaint yourselves, if you don’t know his films. There’s time, if you can spare it. See you tomorrow.
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