In Mutzenbacher, Viennese film-maker Ruth Beckermann’s latest hybrid documentary, a young man sitting on a tufted pink sofa set against a bare concrete wall explains why he threw caution to the wind to talk on camera about his sex life. “Because I trust you as a director,” he says with an apologetic smile.
“So if I told you take off your clothes and have sex with whomever, a tree, you would do it, because you trust me?” Beckermann prods. “Well,” the young man replies. “At least I’d think about it.”
Much of the appeal of Beckermann’s quietly extraordinary documentaries and essay films, already revered in German-speaking Europe and now available with English subtitles in their entirety for the first time via streaming platform True Story, relies on her talent for extracting confessions that she hasn’t had to ask for. “I think I’ve always had a certain talent for communication, or at least a lack of fear of human contact,” Beckermann says via video link from her book-lined study in Vienna. “When I meet a person and the camera is running, I can focus on that person to an incredible degree.”
For Return to Vienna, her 1983 portrait of the Jewish Austrian socialist Franz West, she prepared for the interview with a stack of index cards with questions. “Now I no longer write down questions at all,” says the director. “I am prepared, but in a broader sense. And directly before the interview, I try to think of nothing at all.”
Born in Vienna in 1952, Beckermann made her first documentary aged 25. Arena Squatted, about the occupation of a former abattoir turned arts centre in the Austrian capital, was the first of three short films she made about direct action and workers’ rights. In hindsight, she refers to that trilogy as flugblattfilme, “pamphlet films”.
“We wanted to change the world, and we believed that our films could play a part in that,” she says. “We wanted to influence people. Nowadays I am more interested in getting people to start debating or talking.”
Born to Jewish parents who were raised in the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire and who, in her mother’s case, only reluctantly moved to Austria after the end of the second world war, Beckmann has retained an outsider’s view on the republic where most of her films are set.
Jewish Austrians who, like her parents, decided to continue living in a nation that murdered their relatives are not just the subjects of Return to Vienna. They are also the focus of 1987’s Paper Bridge, an elegiac essay about the Bukovina region in what is now Romania and Ukraine; 2001’s Homemad(e), a series of interviews with the shop-owners and coffeehouse regulars on her street in Vienna; and 2016’s The Dreamed Ones, about the love affair between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann – he a Holocaust survivor, she the daughter of a Nazi party member.
The Waldheim Waltz (2018), Beckermann’s most stylistically conventional and internationally successful film, examines the 1986 election campaign of the former Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, and the ease with which his conservative Austrian People’s party slipped back into antisemitic campaigning after the World Jewish Congress had identified unexplained gaps in the politician’s wartime record. The young film-maker was one of the people who took to the street against Waldheim’s nomination at the time.
As personal as Beckermann’s subjects often are, the films that most bear her stamp are those in which her authorial presence is least discernible. The most remarkable remains East of War from 1996. Filmed over five weeks at an exhibition that showed for the first time photographs documenting war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht – many of them in the same Ukrainian cities currently devastated by another war – it consists only of conversations with ageing visitors who had themselves fought in the German army.
“Barely any of these men asked me who I was or whom I was making my film for,” Beckermann recalls. “That was fascinating. I think they needed someone to talk to in that moment. I barely had to ask any questions.”
Most of the former fighters are in active or passive denial: if they acknowledge that such atrocities took place, they insist they must have been committed by another division but not their own, in cities far from where they were stationed, at another point in the war. When they are challenged about their recollections, it is by other veterans who break into the frame to interrupt the interview.
“The difficult decisions for East of War wasn’t in the interviews but whether to show the photographs on display. I chose to keep them in the background. If I had shown them, I would have created a contrast between memory and history. I wanted to show the contradictions within people’s memories.”
In Mutzenbacher, which won one of the top prizes at this year’s Berlin film festival, Beckermann followed a similar approach. The 70-year-old placed an ad in the Austrian press inviting auditions from “men between the ages of 16 and 99, no screen experience necessary”. More than 150 responded, half of whom ended up sitting on her sofa in pairs, where they were asked to read extracts from the novel Josefine Mutzenbacher, or The Story of a Viennese Whore.
Published anonymously in 1906 and written (according to an increasingly disputed rumour spread by the satirist Karl Kraus) by Bambi creator Felix Salten, Josefine Mutzenbacher is less of an erotic novel than a straightforward pornographic one, and an uneasy contemporary read at that: its fictional underage heroine romps through explicit encounters with prepubescent boys and a host of older men including her priest, her teacher and, eventually, her own father.
Beckermann doesn’t throw the charge sheet at her interviewees, but allows them to endorse or distance themselves of their own accord from the century-old male fantasy of female lust. One man volunteers erotic fantasies of threesomes he appears not to yet have discussed with his spouse. Another does not hide his titillation at a description of incest. When toxic masculinity is interrogated, it is done by the other men on the sofa, not the film-maker.
“It’s not in my interest to lead people on or get them to say things they don’t want to say,” Beckermann says. “And I think people notice that. I am generally not that interested in what people say rather than how they say it, how they look while they say it, whether they lie or say the truth. It’s about more than statements.”
In keeping with its pornographic source material, Mutzenbacher ends on a climax. One elderly man starts his interview by stating he is unwilling to read a passage whose language he perceives as too crude, only to then perform an even more explicit extract, leaning into the breathless yelps of orgasmic delight.
“I thought he was about to leave, but then he stayed,” Beckermann says. “But of course making films has to do with seduction. You have to enjoy seducing people to join you on a different level.”