Cinema
E
W
M
Music
Exhibition
Essays
About
Contact
Channels
Essays →
M, W, E (Thoughts, notes, visions)
The film trilogy has welcomed its third and last part. It is now complete. I feel immense joy, but also a sharp sense of melancholy. I will always consider its completion a small miracle.
I thank from the depths of my heart the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who wandered for many years in my dreams, ethereal and restless, sometimes irritable and demanding. I know that no finer film has been made about her and the darkness that constantly lurked around her than M. She knows it, too – and occasionally flies to me in the form of a moth to remind me of herself. As if she would ever need to.
I thank the three famous hysterics of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Without their sufferings, this trilogy would not exist. Almost a century and a half has passed since these women departed this world. Their names are Blanche Wittmann, Augustine Gleizes, and Geneviève Bazile Legrand. In the hospital's records, photographs, and drawings, they are often mentioned with mere letters: W, X, and G.
Upon arriving at Salpêtrière, these young women, who had endured so much, suffered from severe psychosomatic symptoms: convulsions, sensory disturbances in limbs, temporary loss of mobility, hearing, or speech, stigmata appearing spontaneously on the body, hallucinations, insomnia, fits of rage, ecstatic seizures, and false pregnancies.
Salpêtrière's esteemed neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, considers hysteria exclusively a women's nervous disorder. The concept of trauma does not exist in medical understanding at this time. Sigmund Freud would introduce it only a couple of decades later.
Dr. Charcot rises to international fame by organising shows where Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève are made to dance in minimal clothing, behave violently, ecstatically, or provocatively, or mimic animals through hypnosis and suggestion. Long needles are inserted into the numb limbs of the hysteric. A "devil's mark" is painted with blood on the back of Geneviève, who suffers from religious delusions. Then Charcot pretends to exorcise the devil to make the patient's hysterical seizure as impressive as possible. Lights flash and dramatic music plays in the background.
These nearly occultist, apparently sadistic, and theatrical performances are popular and are attended by the high society of the time: notable artists, politicians, and scientists. Women too. Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève become famous. They are taken on tours.
At the Salpêtrière hospital, they hold a special status. The women live under the constant control of Sorcerer Charcot but rebel when the opportunity arises; they cause havoc, expose themselves, quarrel with each other, drink, and disappear on their own excursions. Augustine has a relationship with the hospital's errand boy. This enrages Charcot. Blanche, the absolute high priestess of hysteria, acts like a diva and refuses to be hypnotised if she cannot be the first woman to take the stage.
Sometimes rebellion has a healing effect. Expressing her own will makes Blanche's symptoms disappear for a few months.
In this historical period, science and the church are locked in a power struggle. They fight over these women. According to clergymen, W, X, and G are either possessed by saints or the devil. A few centuries earlier, they would have been burned alive at the stake.
In the opinion of his colleagues, Dr. Charcot is hardly interested in treating his patients. Rather quite the opposite. If a hysteric's symptoms temporarily disappear or fade with age, as they tend to do, Charcot loses interest in the patient. Fortunately, this pattern works both ways. When Charcot finally dies, Blanche Wittmann recovers from hysteria and goes on to work in the hospital's radiology department.
Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève are treated with long baths or electricity. Sometimes they are tied to the bed. Breathing ether makes them docile. In my movie W, Madame Europe is an ether addict. Blanche 'W' Wittmann similarly becomes addicted to it, as do many other women diagnosed with hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital.
Madame Europe's metal corset is a variation of a device called an ovarian compressor. According to Charcot, pressure applied to the ovaries soothes the patient. Blanche puts it on whenever she senses a hysterical seizure approaching. Women who have partially or completely recovered from hysteria often remain living in the hospital and serve as assistants, sometimes even as nurses. If symptoms return, they are taken back to the ward.
In the notes of the movie W, it reads: The status of the nurses remains unclear. Are the nurses in fact patients in nurses' uniforms? They walk along the institute's corridors, talk nonsense, sleep in the morgue. But if they are patients, what happened to the nurses?
Hysteria is contagious, has always been, and will always be. In France, the phenomenon has been familiar since the Middle Ages. In convents, it is uncontrollable—the meowing nuns of Loudon, sex-hungry nuns. Hysteria feeds fantasy.
After two long pandemic years, W is released. Dismay. Confusion. How can the mental state of Europe be comparable to emotionless nurses or a hysterical woman urinating on herself? What on earth am I trying to say?
Now, three years after completing the film, reality appears much more absurd than the fiction I created. I note that those famous European values are above all a matter of faith. Democracy, too, is a matter of faith. It is something abstract and independent of us. Taken for granted. If one is forced to believe in something, one generally tends to doubt its existence.
It is more comforting to have blind faith in something than to open one's eyes and realise that the system which claimed to defend these values has long been gambling with them – and lost them. Madame Europe climbs walls, howls, and begs for pity. In her drug delirium, she grinds her teeth and yearns for her days of glory. Madame Europe is sick, but not as sick as she pretends to be. The blood drinking and urinating are merely theatre of cruelty. She is a martyr without a cause. She disguises herself as a victim, in keeping with the irresponsible spirit of our time.
War is raging. The stakes increase. It seems impossible to influence the course of events. The oiled machinery grinds on. It grinds our reality at the speed of simulation.
We are already in another reality. A crack appears between the old and new world, and the pungent stench of ether rises from the crack. It is a special moment. At any moment, Europe's possessed, raped, and massive carcass, ravaged by time and depths, emerges from below. Black water bubbles, gushes, and foams as it appears, massive and corroded. The carcass fumes, and in that fume truth and holiness flicker for a moment before they evaporate. The body turns around slowly in the water. The face is swollen beyond recognition.
Blanche Wittman works in the radiology department and receives radiation. No one yet knows that this exposure will eventually lead to her death. Her arm is amputated, then another. She is put in a wooden box and pushed along the corridors of the hospital until she dies.
As she dies, she swears that everything was true. Then she submerges into the depths.
Memories. Apparition. We stand on an ice floe, and no one knows where it's heading. Madame Europe receives a call from the Captain of the Raft of the Medusa, who announces he has arrived in the future. He is disappointed. It isn't what he had imagined. The future is just accumulated waste. The catacombs fill with water. The water keeps on rising.
The time of illusion is over. All points of comparison will be destroyed. The membrane becomes tighter every moment, but it does not tear.
The oracle in mourning dress in E throws herself on the sand and cries out: "There must be something other than this." And there is. The miracle of the empty desert. I write down in my notebook: The film doesn't just take place in the desert. The desert is the film itself. It is a silent, protective force.
As illusion disappears, multiplication begins. The doppelgängers of the hyperrealistic era are neither good nor evil. The violence of the hyperrealistic era is neither good nor evil. It is a constant. An uninterrupted live broadcast.
In the final part of the trilogy, former politician Eva Vogler performs Anasyrma at the Nobel dinner. A restrained and controlled woman reveals her vulva like a hysteric madwoman at the Salpêtrière hospital. What force drives her to behave this way?
I will not answer the question. This movie will not be soul-searching in the style of Ingmar Bergman. My movie is B as in Baudrillard. A world spinning at the speed of simulation is not interested in souls or causes, but in phenomena. Cinderella stories. They can be recycled and consumed again and again, endlessly. I decide to take the name "Vogler" from Bergman's film Persona. In it, Elisabeth Vogler is an actress who stops speaking altogether.
At Salpêtrière, Geneviève is put under hypnosis. She sinks so deep that her vital functions almost stop. Her body is cold and her pulse weak. For days she lies motionless, on the verge of death, much like Snow White in her glass coffin. Deep-frozen.
Walt Disney. The stepfather of the daughters of the age of simulation sleeps in liquid nitrogen. I see Eva Vogler standing by his coffin.
The ownership of all stories is transferred to simulation. Simulation directs the course of all events. Eva Vogler wanders in the Desert of the Real, while a strategy is being formulated elsewhere. The game needs perturbations, spectacles. If Eva wanted to end the game, she would find it impossible. Simulation has already duplicated her. Simulation owns her.
The Desert of the Real. An Empire ground to dust. The map is ripped to pieces, and what would one do with it anyway? I write in my notes: The sky is not shown once during the movie. Only sand. A desert stretching as far as the eye can see. Close-ups are sparse, or there are none. The distance makes the viewer feel that they, too, are in the Desert. We are all in the Desert. It is a shared mental state.
Baudrillard obviously didn't refer to any existing desert. Yet one wonders...
Geneviève wakes up. She remains sick and weak for a long time. Charcot sends her to the healing springs of Lourdes. It is at the same place a girl named Bernadette Soubirous once saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Charcot presumably doesn't believe in miracles, but in autosuggestion. Toward the end of his life, he sends other patients to Lourdes as well. Many of them recover.
We see the peak of hysteria at a moment when the world is in a state of great upheaval: intense industrialisation, wars, revolutions, the theory of evolution, colonialism, science breaking into the realm of religion... People are pushed into smoky cities to be used as test animals, to work in factories. To live in small, dirty hovels. Everything that existed until now has been eradicated.
My notebook reads: Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève are instruments between the old and the new world. Mental and physical mediums of great, earth-shattering changes. Seers. Scribes of the body. The spirit detaches from the flesh. They fall into the crack, and hysteria along with them.
"Women's bodies have become political battlegrounds." UN Secretary-General António Guterres is only partly right in his Women's Day speech. A woman's body has always been a political battleground. Guterres utters sweeping statements about "external and digital threats" to women's rights. He carefully avoids speaking in terms which everyone would understand. He doesn't say: Wars devastate the status of women and children. He doesn't say: As a result of war traumas, domestic violence increases explosively and transfers as mental suffering to future generations. He doesn't say: Militarism upholds and idealises the model of the violent man. Militarism idealises the model of a woman who sacrifices her son to war. He doesn't say that the online environment is a breeding ground for sexual exploitation and indifference. He manages to say virtually nothing.
"Women's bodies have become political battlegrounds" is a poetic and irresponsible statement if left shrouded in ambiguity. Because in this dangerous and historyless time that is nonetheless moving backwards, words have lost their power. Metaphors have no surface to reflect upon. When the collective subconscious is emptied of illusion, symbolism, and allegories, this ensures the absolute, stupefying transparency and the slow desertification of inner worlds.
At the centre of my trilogy lies a woman's naked body. She lies on her stomach, her face hidden under a mop of hair. Who is she? What has she been through?
Time rolls backwards. I prepare my first feature film M; Marilyn Monroe, sex, and death. An esoteric nightmare comprised of many beginnings and endings. M is a woman who gets lost in Limbo. She wanders naked from darkness to darkness. Her voice is heard only through the telephone. She is eavesdropped on. She is observed. She is hypnotised. She is embalmed. She attempts suicide by wrapping a plastic bag around her head, while repeating the words of her teacher Lee Strasberg: The only thing between an actress and suicide is concentration. Concentration prevents her from falling into the crack.
The fifties and Marilyn Monroe. The fun, intelligent, gentle, and sensitive woman who exudes joy and carnality, humour and pleasure. Her stunning presence is not cool and aloof, but approachable in a neighbourly, unpretentious way. Despite all her radiant power, inside her lives a dark and punishing doppelgänger, a double who fears loneliness, darkness, and mental illness. A creature who pops pills and gambles with death. It takes up more and more space, until Marilyn is finally forced to buy a house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Hollywood. The house is chosen by Marilyn's own Dr. Charcot, psychiatrist Ralph Greenson.
MM has already gone through one transformation from a mistreated orphan to the celebrated comedienne and world's most desired woman. By the 1960s, Marilyn is already weary, but attempts yet another metamorphosis. She gets rid of her famous curves, starts wearing pants, makes new plans, and dreams of a serious part in a film.
She tries to drift freely in the new era, an era of constant crises and the threat of atomic war.
In the meantime, her radiance intensifies, becomes supernatural. She sleeps with both President Kennedy and his brother, Robert. She places her white-powdered body as a target at the centre of a looming political scandal. But she dies. She dies twice before her body is found. She lives and dies thousands of times, at our pleasure.
Now, Norma Jean, it is time to step into the dressing room of death.
Rest in peace Norma Jean
under the white sheet.
Death is but a wet dream.
Rest in peace Norma Jean
under the white sheet
when quietly, oh so quietly in the night
rings a Cold War lullaby...
(Arto Melleri)
In the spring when M is released, the world is shaken by #MeToo. Many see it as a revolution. In my opinion, it is only a politically correct compromise, much like most revolutions of our time. #MeToo indeed kidnaps my film for a moment but soon lets it go: Wrong kind of fuel. M is in every way unsuitable, a difficult woman. The film is hard to place in any cinematic continuum. The feminism put forth in it is disturbing and dark. M does not empower. Instead, it screams hysterically and brings up one taboo after another.
I soon understand that if M remains a one-time, isolated work of art, it will be considered a freak of nature. An accidental child. A hysteric waiting to be thrust aside. That must not happen. So, I decide to make a trilogy...
And it indeed is a miraculous thing that these three sisters saw the light of day... That they are now drifting alongside their creator on an ice floe, headed nowhere – but nonetheless saved. That, my friends, is a revolution.
Anna