»For beauty is only a step removed from a burning terror we barely sustain, and we worship it for the graceful sublimity with which it disdains to consume us« (translation: John Waterfield). Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these lines when he was a guest in a castle in a picturesque setting on the cliffs outside Trieste. They later became famous as part of the »Duino Elegies«, ten poems in verse, named after the village of Duino, in which the beauty of the place is really perceived as a curse. It is as if a demand made by a particular space to be enjoyed is in itself enough of a reason for despair.

As built potential, castles call on those who dwell in them to behave as if their life were a fairy-tale. Houses demand cosy domesticity: you find them in children’s drawings - compact, with a gable roof, shutters and a smoking chimney. An archetype that cannot be quashed in everyday life even where there are no role models. A symbol of the maternal womb, in Sigmund Freud’s opinion. You can find a doppelgänger of this primal Ur-house in abstract settings, for example as a home icon on a computer desktop. Conversely we encounter its nocturnal twin along the fracture lines of society and here above all in art: in the period between the wars, houses protruded like squint teeth from the film set of Robert Wiene’s »The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari«. Or literary structures like E. A. Poe’s »House of Usher«, an archaic edifice of fear on the threshold to the new era of industry. No cheerful smoke but instead darkness, cracks, buildings on the verge of collapse.

All of this can be read as the backdrop to three outstanding new documentary films from Austria, all screened at Duisburg Film Week. Three films about recollections of places, portraits of particular locations, announcing even in their titles that they are rooted in a specific territory: »Gibellina – Il Terremoto«, »Fischbach« and »Bellavista«.

The Bellavista is one of those places whose beauty is also an affront in the Rilkean sense of the term: an Alpine hotel with white walls and dark wood-panelling, the building with the »beautiful view«. Film-maker Peter Schreiner takes a conscious decision to fragment this idyll. His camera cuts out chunks or slivers and thus rejects the overall image. The postcard view of an Alpine guesthouse complete with mountain peaks is kept from us, yet the sense of a certain subverted familiarity remains: the Bellavista as an uncanny place in the Freudian sense of the term.

Like the house itself, Schreiner also fragments the body of its inhabitant, the film’s protagonist, Giuliana Pachner: forehead, cheek, eyes; door handles, window frames, a corner of a table. As Pachner, the aged daughter of an hotelier family, explains, the house has been part of her life ever since she was small: »Early on you had a feeling of having been brought into the world just to serve the hotel«, we hear her voice comment off-screen.

Whilst Pachner’s voice hints at a family tragedy from the past rather than unveiling it, Schreiner films the corridors, the dining room, the kitchen – without a soul in sight, just as Eugene Atget photographed the streets of Paris at the turn of the century. Walter Benjamin comment on Atget’s work also holds true for this film; the space is recorded like a crime scene. And probably it really is just that. The camera repeatedly roams over the cemetery where Pachner’s brothers are buried and over her face, criss-crossed with scars. Schreiner refuses to shoot an explanatory long shot of the hotel even from a distance. He cuts off the roof, leaves the environment, landscape, context out of the frame, so that ultimately we are forced to remain imprisoned with Pachner’s nightmares in the lovely »Bellavista«.

»Sometimes you have to lose memory to dare to embark on a new route«, is the assertion in contrast in Joerg Burger’s »Gibellina – Il Terremoto«. This sentence is spoken by a rascally older gentleman with a straw hat. He was the mayor in 1968, when an earthquake reduced the small Sicilian town of Gibellina to rubble. A communist, an idealist and an art aficionado, he was determined that at least something positive should come out of the dramatic event in its aftermath – for the general good. 18 kilometres away he had a new Gibellina built, a city designed on the drawing board, complete with a sculpture park, for the survivors of the earthquake. And while the mayor pushed ahead with his vision, artist Alberto Burri encased the ruins of old Gibellina in cement. The »Cretto«, one of the largest open-air sculptures in the world, came into being in the 1980s. A grey grave for a city that confuses its inhabitants to this day. In Burger’s film they wander through the blocks, talking sometimes in the present, sometimes in the perfect tense: »When I go to Gibellina, I always go to my house. To the place where my house used to be. «

An elevation of one, two metres of concrete now stands for several former storeys of buildings; a featureless surface replaces the many structures, patterns, details of the vanished Gibellina Vecchia. And yet in memory the old town remains larger than the new one: »There will always be more things in a small closed box than in an open one«, wrote Gaston Bachelard in »The Poetics of Space«: »To verify images kills them , and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience. «

Gibellina Nuova, the newly constructed city, is shown in Burger’s film as certainly picturesque, yet almost depopulated, with not a soul in sight, something that was offered to a community but pushed aside. Burger’s cinematography responds to this deathly calm with static images, mainly long shots, which give viewers time to formulate questions: What is it that characterises a city? Its past? Its future? Its inhabitants? The buildings? The ground beneath it? The work it offers? Or perhaps life in the streets, which is so painfully missing from Gibellina?

A tableau of great beauty is also found in the opening shot of the 25-minute film »Fischbach« by Thomas Grusch and Hannes Böck. Fields lie beneath a hoar frost, frozen solid and dusted with white. A sleeping landscape, reflected in the following shot: the interior of an abandoned glass-cutting plant, full of white cutting dust and cut glass like ice and snow.

»Fischbach« is the portrait of a bygone state of affairs. »Family« would be one way to describe it, »upper middle class « or »patriarchy«. We hear the voice of a woman that we never see – she sounds as if she’s middle-aged and, as we find out, she’s the daughter of the master glass-cutter from the Waldviertel region, Oswald Weber. The woman describes the glamour of the 1960s, the »high life« and the family’s sense of having »made it «: »Wir san wer«. She talks about the tourist coaches that arrived all the time and the ten employees that used to work here. The camera responds with emptiness, dimly lit rooms, the exposed concrete covered in moss. The sounds that are audible demonstrate that the interior of the workshop and the detached house is no longer hermetically sealed. Sounds penetrate from outside. Time has finished off the self-perpetuating system of the family business.

In portraying all of this, »Fischbach« is anything but a nostalgic swan-song to the death of old handicrafts. Here the end of the era of the family business means: liberation from family constraints, flattening of hierarchies, the death of patriarchy. It is only in spatial memory that an earlier state still resonates. The 1960s building in »Fischbach« is like the paradoxical edifice in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel »House of Leaves«: from outside it is smaller than from inside. If nothing else, the many childhood fears narrated by the voice in »Fischbach« adhere to the walls, stretch them out and thus prove responsible for the difference.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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