»The past is dust,« says the aging Hippie father in Ralph Arlyck\'s documentary »Following Sean« (USA 2004). Arlyck, who shot a student film in the sixties about three-year-old »flower child« Sean Farrell, takes up the myth of liberation surrounding the summer of love three decades later, curious to find out what has become of the protagonists of those days. These include Sean, in the meantime just a »regular guy,« his father, who still ekes out a living on the fringes of society (and on the margins of subsistence) and who doesn\'t want to talk about the past, and members of their extended family, glimpsed in a series of privatist set pieces. Their debates no longer center on some grandiose utopia; they don\'t even show particular political engagement – all that matters is the here and now, just getting by in their personal lives, mixed with a quantum of social consciousness. The latter, however, seems well on the way to vanishing from the world along with the grandparents\' generation. »Following Sean« is in this respect symptomatic – like many of the other celluloid rediscoveries from or about the sixties that were on view at the Viennale 2005. It\'s not that the past has really turned to dust in these films – this assumption is countered already by the intractable graininess and the garish colors of the lavishly utilized original footage. Instead, it is the offshoots of erstwhile liberation topoi that, in films like »Following Sean,« no longer let themselves be tied together coherently, are no longer capable of giving us a true impression of the times, at least none that would evoke the sense of awakening and the hope for something better that pervaded those days. Conversely, the »re-take« does not stray too far from the material on which it\'s based, leaving only a swan song or nostalgia as possible attitudes. »Following,« keeping in close pursuit, is the legitimate motto here, even if it implies descending into all kinds of biographical or individual psychological depths.

An unrevisionist take on its subject is also exhibited by Philippe Garrel\'s »Les amants reguliers« (France/Italy 2005), which looks at the events of May 1968 and their direct consequences. A loosely knit group of young people, who during that month climbed the barricades by night, and in the morning staggered home like night-shift workers, gather together to revisit this historical stepping stone – only to drift apart again in the end. There\'s no common ideal, no outward compulsion, no lasting love even that could hold together the temporary community. So they go their separate ways: into cadre groups and career paths, into affluent exile and squalid decline. Garrel lets the troubles of that time unfold again anew, in »memorializing« and technically high-quality black&white, without romantic exaggeration of the events, or the benefit of hindsight. And hence one of the few anachronisms in the film is when Nico sings a song from 1980 (aptly »The road that leads to Vegas«), while The Kinks, in keeping with the times, ponder what will happen »This Time Tomorrow.« But music is used sparingly in this three-hour epos, which painstakingly avoids giving the impression that life in those days was just one big pop montage of sound and color.

The latter is more the case in a film like Richard Crawford\'s »Captain Milkshake« (USA 1970), which, after being banned for legal reasons for the past 30 years, was now given a late Viennale tribute. A soldier in the Vietnam War falls in love during home leave with, of all things, a blonde Hippie girl. Her commune buddies react skeptically to the man serving his country, resulting in a series of woodcut-like discussions on the sense and senselessness of war. The film is not stingy with counter-cultural flair: a performance by the psychedelic band \"Kaleidoscope\" somewhere in the desert, presumably at a »Be-In,« is worth seeing, and the lavish use of music ranging from \"Country Joe\" to \"Quicksilver Messenger Service\" is a treat for the ears. The »freak-outs« recreated in the film also convincingly demonstrate the actionist state of the art. But the mannered-seeming switching back and forth from black&white to color, along with sunset love scenes, are a bit heavy-handed, and the film never really manages to achieve the political impact it strives for. In the end, the peace-movement/ Hippie world and the upright life of the soldier – one must remember that in 1970 there was still a general draft in the USA – are once again cleanly separated. The film brings these contrasts to a head, only to have them in the end drown in a cozy sea of color and then fade away.

Playing up contrasts is also what Milton Moses Ginsberg\'s »Coming Apart« (USA 1969) is up to. Instead of identifying the era with the anti-war movement or US imperialism, the filmmaker focuses on and chips away at a completely different fetish: the havoc wrought by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Ginsberg thought it was about time to knock these secret gods of social life, at least for New York\'s upper-class liberals, off their pedestal. To this end, »Coming Apart« conducts a simple voyeuristic experiment: a therapist, played by Rip Torn, clandestinely films his sessions with his patients, one after the other. The whole psychoanalytic process is unabashedly revealed to be nothing more than a great sexist exploitation maneuver – the war of the sexes using another kind of weapon. Sexually deprived women with a tendency toward masochism writhe on the doctor\'s couch in the throes of unbridled hysteria, managing finally to break through his machismo with an overabundance of feminine aggression. In the end, the male therapist is not only broken and drained, but the whole thing is dissected as a grandiose cathartic act in his voyeur\'s studio. »Coming Apart« pursues a closely meshed thematic concept: before the fixed camera, the collapse of the male individuum unfolds before our eyes – the women are already in pieces from the very beginning.

»Coming Apart« banks on the same structure used in the 1967/68 films of Andy Warhol, which are likewise revisited at the Viennale. »Bike Boy,« for example, or »I, a Man« follow a male protagonist as he experiences various (in some cases sexual) encounters, in the course of which the positions (strong-weak, active-passive, queer-hetero, etc.) continually seesaw. Here, the focus is not on the cathartic act, as in »Coming Apart,« but rather on an ongoing fickleness of identity, which, instead of being defined for us at the beginning of the film, exhibits blurred contours in constant flux. These rarely screened gems, created at the high point of the one-take film (»The Chelsea Girls,« 1966) and before the attempt on his life, after which Warhol gradually withdrew from the world of filmmaking, testify impressively to the »following« we mentioned at the beginning: keeping in hot pursuit and developing oneself along with the process, not looking down on things from a lofty perch or claiming to know it all in advance. In this way, sixties material can still reverberate for us today, without turning to dust.

The Viennale 2005 took place from October 14 to 26, 2005; the retrospective »Andy Warhol Filmmaker« ran from October 1 to 31 at the Austrian Film Museum.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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