German Film Festival - Janice Tong's Second 🎥Filmic Postcard - MONTE VERITA (StefanJäger, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, 2021) + THE LAST EXECUTION (Franziska Stünkel, Germany, 2021)

One of about 500 original photos of the Monte Verita community that have survived

It wasn’t until later, long after the lights have dimmed in the theatre, and definitely after I have driven home in the dark, and even after I went to bed that night; in fact, it wasn’t until the next morning as I was heading to work that I had a chance to think back on the Monte Verità community, and to that unique time just at the turn of the 20th century, that I came to a better appreciation of this film.    

The approach to unpacking Stefan Jäger’s film is not only about the intrigue or air of mystery that surrounded the Monte Verità community – rather affectionately known as the Monte Verità Vegetable Cooperative– but instead lies in a meticulous reinvention of a time, where, rather like Deleuze and Guattari geophilosophy, (and also much like my favourite ‘walkers’ John Rogers and Iain Sinclair’s geopsychology) gives us a view into a line of flight that Jäger so skillfully resurfaces from the past; where he connects imperceptible points that require further thought and further research.

 

Society at that point required a release from itself, an ejection or escape from its conventions – the Monte Verità community was, in a way, shaped by culture rather than simply taking on a stance of counterculture (and with it, this word’s literal meaning). It is a reset (like the fire in the film) from the norm; a line of flight that shoots off into a different direction and in so doing, opens up wide uncharted spaces – possibilities beyond society’s limit. Furthering this idea, Jäger introduces to this ready microcosm cum commune a new figure, that of photography, of appearances/disappearances, of a kind of co-temporal ghostliness. Jäger’s necessary invention here is to bring about a new thoughtline to the Monte Verità group. There were after all, 500 or so photographs that detailed the activities at that time, with photographer unknown, on which Jäger’s story makes its appearance.

Maresi Riegner as Hanna - is this the gaze of a fragile bourgeois housewife?
Or, the gaze where the face in the mirror is no longer familiar?

 

There are two beginnings: one where the film opens with a close-up of a woman’s face, half covered by a fan, which is fluttering rapidly to create a cooling breeze for its holder; the second beginning speaks to Jäger’s own visit to Monte Verità in 1989 with Cinema & Gioventù as a part of the Locarno Film Festival (Monte Verità is a stone’s throw away from Locarno) and was struck by the history of the place and how it still resonated with us even today: nature, conservation, women’s rights. It drew him into exploring more about the women behind the original movement. Let me further digress. There are actually three beginnings: the third is that ofHenri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann-Oedenkoven, her sister, Jenny Gräser and Lotte Hattemer (the daughter of the mayor of Berlin) who came together as the founding figures of the Monte Verità Vegetable Cooperative. This, to a certain extent, is also their story. 

 

Max Hubacher as Otto Gross, the resident hippie psychoanalyst

Let’s go back to the woman, whose incessant fanning necessarily generated her flight from fancy into the freedom of the commune. Hanna Leitner is a housewife, she suffers from a kind of breathlessness, where any show of emotion or agitation of the mind or spirit would render her faint. This loss of consciousness, no doubt, is her mind’s way of dealing with an insufferable way of life; stilted, conformed, and controlled by her unbearable husband. Her escape through the encouragement of her doctor and friend, the psychoanalyst Otto Gross (who is sometimes referred to as the father figure of counterculture, and yes, counterculture existed prior to the sixties; and yes, he was an advocate for free love and used drugs recreationally). 

 

Hanna (played by Maresi Riegner who was previously in the little seen but beautiful Egon Schiele: Tod und Mädchen) literally fled in the night to Monte Verità, arriving ill-prepared for what she was about to see, let alone experience. Here, she opened her mind and eyes to their adaptive way of living; Gross was there too, as was the dispirited Lotte whom she befriended. Soon, Hanna set up a project for herself, to be the official photographer of the commune (her husband was a photographer, as was Ida’s husband). Her photographs were more like projections from her own mind, reflecting transformation or transit of time; and unlike the typical daguerreotypes of the time, where you must restrict all movement for the camera, here, she captured the freedom of being simply alive; and with that, time and movement. 

 

Remember what Sontag said about photography, that it holds so much power in a modern society that we have come to rely on appearances rather than our own experiences of events. I would suggest the Monte Verità photos were able to not only sustain this notion, but also fuse it with a kind of mysticism, transporting the esprit of the place to us across time.  Perhaps that is what propelled Jäger to create some kind of authorship for these photographs. To some degree cinema also serves as a medium to create a kind of mimetic power. Like Monte Verità itself, the photographs became an agent of transformation for Hanna and also for the inhabitants there. 

The community with Julia Jentsch as Ida Hofman in the blue dress and Joel Basman as Hermann Hesse seated next to Hanna

 There’s almost too much history to unpack when you consider the region around Lake Maggiore at the bottom of Monte Verità, where on the western side of the lake, there are monasteries from the 1600s in honour of St Francis of Assisi. Over the years, philosophers, composers and writers like Nietzsche and Lou von Salome, as well as Fauré and Balzac before them.  Stendhal,Goethe, Tchaikovsky and Rossini all frequented that region. During the time of the Monte Verità commune,writer Herman Hesse and the American dancer Isadora Duncan were regular visitors.

 

The cast is superbly chosen. Julia Jentsch from the brilliant TV series Pagan Peak played the unassuming and ever-practical Ida Hofmann and Hannah Herzsprung from another stellar TV series, Babylon Berlin, gave us the elusive Lotte. Max Hubacher from The Captain (2017) was Gross. Also, try to listen out for the soundscape, as Jäger says that it has its own storyline: how breathing, or breath itself becomes a metaphor for freedom.

The inescapable palette of a dead man walking.
Lars Eidinger, The Last Execution

 

On the other hand, Franziska Stünkel’s The Last Execution did not leave me with the same kind of impression. The fact that it dealt with a difficult topic, as the title of the film implies, does little justice to what transpires in the story: how it is told and how it ebbs and flows. Based on the last few months of Werner Teske’s life, the last man to be executed in the former East Germany before the abolition of the death penalty in 1987. 

 

Lars Eidinger needs no introduction, he is now a familiar face in the New German Cinema scene (I’m quoting the German Film Festival site here, and not the actual New German Cinema movement from 1962 to 1982), made notable (for me at least) from Olivier Assayas’ very captivating Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), and later in Personal Shopper (2016); and of course, he carries an extensive filmography to his name (79 credits in 20 years), more notably the incredibly creative and avant-garde film Mack the Knife - Brecht's Threepenny Film (2018) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s beautiful ode to art and the artistic spirit, Never Look Away (2018), both of which I had the good fortune to see at the Sydney German Film Festival in 2019. Eidinger is Dr. Franz Walter, a rather dull play-it-by-the-book academic, who has a good streak of ambition, but seemed a tad too naive about the events that befall him. He was literally hauled off a plane and offered a professorship if he were to take on a new role in the GDR's foreign intelligence service in the interim. He and his girlfriend were given a new apartment with all the mod cons and a generous salary. How anyone would not think that they’ve just signed their life away (and with it, their loyalties, freedom as well as hopes and dreams) is beyond comprehension – once the paperwork is signed, the GDR owned you, clear and simple.

Devid Striesow as  handler Dirk Hartmann (back) with
Walter  (Lars Eidinger, front)

 

Dr Walter’s handler Dirk Hartmann is portrayed by Devid Striesow, a fine actor. I still remember his performance years ago in Tom Tykwer’s 3 (2010) where he played Sebastian Schipper’s lover, and you’ve got it, Schipper is the director of the single-take Victoria (2015) which was again showcased at the German Film Festival this year. 

 

The whole situation between the two men felt slightly too simplistic and perhaps the worst part is that the film under-utilises both men’s talents. This film is writer/director Franziska Stünkel’s second feature; and whilst we understand her intentions and navigation around a horrendous topic; some shots where the mise-en-scène was appropriately claustrophobic with a nausea affecting colour palette (perhaps aided by shooting at several original GDR locations such as the former ministry building of the State Security Service in Berlin-Lichtenberg and the prison of Hohenschönhausen) made watching uneasy. But I think perhaps Stünkel’s rather short shooting period of 25 days didn’t provide the time needed to fully flesh out his morbid piece of drama. Although one cannot help but see the significance in the visual rhyme of Stünkel with the German word dunkel, which means a blackness that is deeper than night, or a darkness like the abyss. 

 

#german film festivalwas at selected Palace cinemas around Australia. Franziska Stünkel was a guest of the festival.

 

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