The Visceral Materialism of Birgit & Wilhelm Hein
On dour Englishmen, Viennese Aktionists, and the position of Continental Europeans in post-war avant-garde filmmaking.
Disclaimer for my dear Communist readers who are not movie freaks: The term “Materialism” is used throughout this piece in a film theory-specific way related to but not interchangeable with the conventional Marxist one, so if something sounds wrong and/or like bourgeois ideology please do not get stressed about it. I tried to illustrate what it means in this context well enough that other types of nerd (like yourselves) will be able to follow along but if you’re not satisfied click here to learn as much about it as you could possibly want.
I recently went through Edition Filmmuseum’s anthology DVD of Birgit & Wilhelm Hein’s films. The Heins seem to be relatively marginal figures today (it took me over a week to download the DVD image from its sole seeder on KG), so I figured I would write up a few thoughts on what I saw and the position it occupies within the history of mid-going-on-late-20th century “avant-garde” (for lack of a better term) filmmaking.
The basic narrative schema for the development of avant-garde, noncommercial filmmaking (as opposed to, i.e., Godard, and all the other radically-minded filmmakers who for better and for worse operated within the “film industry”) in this era, the one that you’ll learn in an entry-level class on the topic, is that it can be defined by a tension between two oppositional tendencies, a “poetic” one best represented by the New American Cinema movement on the one hand, and a “Materialist” one best represented by the work of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative on the other. From the standpoint of history, this is immense oversimplification, of course, but it’s not too far off, really, from how the situation would appear would-be avant-gardists “on the ground” at the time – film is expensive, publishing is expensive, and no one was making much money off this stuff, so prior to the 1970s there were very few people making the effort to find out what was going on in “underground film” outside their particular geographic region, resulting in radical formal and theoretical splits along geographic line. Furthermore, it’s a useful starting point because its Anglophonism indicates the somewhat awkward position of filmmakers not working in America or the UK vis-à-vis the historical record, prone to being aligned after the fact with one “side” or the other regardless of the actual context in which they were working. If one were to play this game of assignation with the Heins, as many have over the years, they would certainly be grouped with the LFMC – Edition Filmmuseum’s DVD is literally titled “Materialfilme”, after the newest of the films in the set, and covers a period from 1968 to 1976, the heyday of Materialist (or Structural, the terms are used interchangeably) film in the UK and elsewhere. It’s not that it’s wrong to group them together, really, there was certainly communication between LFMC filmmakers and the Heins (Birgit, who’s as much a film historian as a filmmaker, contributed an essay to Peter Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology, for example), but it’s important to recognize that their works were developed independently, in a sort of parallel evolution, meaning neither should be understood as formative of the other – both were creating Materialist/Structural cinema before what Birgit identifies as its first recognition as a “specific tendency of within the avant-garde”, by P. Adams Sitney in 1969.[1] Rather, fellow Continentals Peter Kubelka and Kurt Kren (more on them later), along with, to a lesser extent, Warhol and the Fluxus filmmakers, are the Heins’ actual major influences, laying a shared groundwork whose provocations would be taken up in distinct ways. As such, despite shared theoretical concerns and formal methodologies, grouping them too closely together with their Anglophone colleagues threatens to obscure what’s actually interesting about their Hein films, namely that they are grating and aggressive, suggestive of a comfort with the visceral and libidinal not commonly found in the works of their Anglophone colleagues.
Consider how Gidal, a leading theoretician of the LFMC cohort, describes the primary task of the Materialist film in his ice-cold definition-cum-manifesto on the subject:
In Structural/Materialist film, the in/film (not in/frame) and film/viewer material relations, and the relations of the film's structure, are primary to any representational content. The structuring aspects and the attempt to decipher the structure and anticipate/recorrect it, to clarify and analyse the production-process of the specific image at any specific moment. are the root concern of Structural/Materialist film.[2]
The piece continues in this register for some time. Now, compare this to how Birgit describes the genesis of her and Wilhelm’s cinematic output, later in the same anthology:
Since the beginning, our work in film was concentrated on the medium. Rohfilm was the first film where this concern was obviously expressed, although in a way of emotional explosion against the film-system and its narrow limits of expression.[3]
Three things should be immediately obvious from this: 1) Gidal and the Heins have an equally antagonistic relationship to cinema as an illusionistic process of suture, identification, etc. 2) Both arrived at the conclusion that the best way to explode these illusions is through treating film as nothing more or less than material ran through a projector. 3) They could scarcely disagree more on what the role of human feeling has in this project. Gidal, and I say this with great affection, is a classic dour English intellectual, doubly burdened with a taste for indigestible French theory (Althusser, Derrida, etc.); he embodies fully the, in retrospect, charmingly optimistic belief of many New Left artist-theorists that an empirically verifiable, fully non-fascist way of making art in the 20th century could be distilled via a rigorously joyless application of Marxist science. He’s a researcher trying to perfect a method through experimentation and analysis; anything instinctual, impulsive, emotional is suspicious to him at best, requiring verification via the detached application of theoretical principles to be accepted as worthwhile. To be fair, he does a better job at constructing a radical, functional system than most, but the fact that the Heins were able to arrive at the same basic ends via an “emotional explosion” speaks to the limits of such an effort. (Sidebar: the Gordian-knot-cutting insight guys like Gidal were never able to achieve, is that while it’s certainly possible to create wholly non-fascist art, then and now, the process of creating it will unavoidably involve at least a little fascism as long as we’re still living under something less than full Communism).
This is not to say, however, that the films of the Heins (those I’ve been able to see, at least) are joyful – anything but; they are cold, alien, difficult, abrasive, and in fact markedly less beautiful on the whole than most Materialist cinema of the period. But, at the same time, almost paradoxically, they are also intensely visceral experiences, and this is what separates them from their peers and makes their emotionally-charged impetus conceivable. The aforementioned influence of Kurt Kren is instructive here. Kren was certainly a Materialist filmmaker (by some accounts the very first Materialist filmmaker, even)[4], but he was also closely associated with the Viennese Aktionists – a movement whose ethos are about as far from the libidinal negation of Gidal & Co. as one can imagine. Granted, Kren’s films documenting their aktions, each a staccato whirlwind of foodstuffs and bodily fluids and naked bodies glimpsed in chaotic split-second fragments, are informed by but ultimately fairly distinct from his more rigorously Materialist work, but their very co-existence within the same corpus is striking; it’s a practical demonstration that libidinal intensities and anti-representational rigor can coexist in the same body of work – an “emotional explosion” can be Materialist.
There are five films on the Edition Filmmuseum DVD: Rohfilm (1968), Reproductions (1969), 625 (1969), Portraits (1970), and Materialfilme I/II (1976, presented in two parts but technically a single work). Each of them is derived from some sort of appropriated or non-cinematic (in the conventional sense) material: film leader, vacation pictures, things of that nature. The most radical of these is probably 625, which is more than half an hour of nothing but static filmed off a television screen, supplemented by a soundtrack of buzzing noise generated from the light levels of the imagery. Almost unprecedented in the ‘60s, it prefigures not only the widespread avant-garde experimentation with video technologies in the coming decades, but also noise music as a genre. Really, what’s most striking about it is its incredible, brutal emptiness; it really is nothing but wavering, pulsing static for its entire runtime, bar a title card. Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad had already demonstrated the actual limit points of film grammar by this point, of course, but Arnulf Rainer (1960) is basically a Duchampian joke and The Flicker (1966) is a headtrip prone to inducing genuine trance states, arguably the only truly psychedelic film ever made; neither is actually as “empty” as its form suggests. 625, on the other hand, is exactly that empty; it’s all surface, and that surface is blank, random noise – this is why it works, why it’s remarkable. It’s perhaps the clearest embodiment of the Heins’ approach, which is not naive, not thoughtless, but which produces works which are, works which sit on the screen like a slab of rock, blunt, indifferent, doing nothing but still too imposing to ignore.
Notable also is Rohfilm, not only for being the earliest of the set but also for setting the bracing tone of the set overall. Almost as long as 625, Rohfilm is constructed from “Hairs, ashes, bits of tobacco, shredded film-images scraps of paper, sprocket-holes, perforated splicing-tape etc. [which] are glued onto blank film and then re-filmed”, with that film also subjected to various “reproduction-processes”. The end result, in Birgit’s own words, is “an impression of destruction on a massive scale”.[5] It’s true: watching Rohfilm is like traveling through a netherworld where everything is gray and crumbling, filmstrips like great dead towers crashing down around you, corpses off in the distance, shrouded in shadow, performing strange dances. More than anything else I’ve seen, by the Heins or anyone else, it represents a true synthesis of the libidinal intensity and anti-representational rigor suggested by Kren’s work, a film built out of trash and detritus, never appearing to be anything other than that, yet somehow still traversing the same terrain of doomed, Bataillian excess as a Gunter Brus aktion.
Materialfilme I/II was made notably later than rest of the works in the set, but its inclusion makes sense, as it serves as a sort of coda. Rather like Rohfilm, it’s constructed from cast-off bits of film (leader, color tests, damaged frames, etc.), but the approach is markedly different. First, the film is presented in color, rather than black & white, and second, although still formally chaotic, it’s not overwhelming and apocalyptic the way Rohfilm is; rather, it operates as a disorganized study of cinematic ephemera, rather like what Morgan Fisher (in a more discursive mode) did with Standard Gauge (1984) some years later. Most striking of all is how, in its second half, in segues from a rapid-fire deluge of film junk into wide, vertical bands of color scrolling up the screen in near-silence and, eventually, vibrant, monochrome fields. The film is still covered in knicks and scratches, the transitions from one color to the next still harsh and abrupt, but for the first time in the Heins’ work the picture field is tranquil, orderly. There’s room to breathe and to think, and even to admire the beauty of these sublimely simple forms. The film still sits blunt and heavy on the screen, but now, for the first time, it doesn’t feel like you’re being crushed beneath its weight.
[1] Birgit Hein, “The Structural Film,” in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975, ed. Phillip Drummond (London: Hayward Gallery, 1979), 93.
[2] Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” in Structural Film Anthology, ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI, 1976), 1.
[3] Birgit Hein, “On Structural Studies,” in Structural Film Anthology, ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI, 1976), 114.
[4] Malcolm Le Grice, “Kurt Kren's Films,” in Structural Film Anthology, ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI, 1976), 61.
[5] Birgit Hein, “The Structural Film,” 98.