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BLVR: To go back to what you say about art and poetry... There are scenes in your films when music, for example, is a moment of respite from the political struggle, and from other kinds of divisions. Christina and her host the priest unexpectedly find common ground over a cantata sung by Janet Baker.

MVT: Three of my films have music sung by Janet Baker. She was my favorite singer for a very long time. In Christina Klages there's the Bach cantata, in Sisters there's Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and in Die bleierne Zeit I put Handel's cantata "Lucrezia." I've always loved Baker's singing. For the first film, I couldn't get the rights... but I happened to meet Alfred Brendel at a dinner, he was friend of a friend, and I told him, "I would like so much to include this song in the film, but the reproduction rights are too expensive," and so on... He said, "write a letter to Janet Baker and I will give it to her." So I did, and she wrote me back a wonderful letter in long hand, beginning with "I am so honoured that you would like to include the song..." I made a copy of that letter, and sent it to the publisher and got the permission. I used this letter for the second and the third film as well. There are still two arias of hers that I wanted to put in my films. One is by Monteverdi, Ottavia's "Addio, Roma." The other one is a song by Mahler, this perhaps I'll put in my next film if I get the rights. (In my many moves I seem to have lost the letter!) It's one of the Rückert Lieder, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"—"I am lost to the world." Baker has the most wonderful piano. I was a singer myself and I know that to produce a wonderful piano you need great strength. And she has it. [sighs]

BLVR: In Christina Klages, at one point after her many adventures, Christina rents an empty room, where she's on her own. It's a tabula rasa; she has some freedom now, and is thinking how to proceed.

MVT: She also writes on the walls of the room: To understand, to wait.

BLVR: There's a similar scene with a woman in an empty room at the beginning of Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle. Your two films rhyme here. Were women then for the first time having rooms on their own?

MVT: In Virginia Woolf's sense? Maybe, maybe that could be about that... But when you create a work of art, you don't do everything consciously. So many things come up to you and then only afterwards you understand perhaps why you did it or you can find an interpretation. It's not good to have an interpretation before you start.

BLVR: To me it looked like: These are my feminist ancestors; this is them at crossroads, beginning a new life, thinking what to do.

MVT: And at the end of the film, the lady from the bank says to the police who have been looking for Christina, "This is not her" and saves her from prosecution. It's the beginning of women's solidarity.

BLVR: And yet in Sheer Madness, the opposite happens. The woman implicates her friend before the courts.

MVT: Ah, but the ending in Sheer Madness is not reality, it's character's fantasy. It's filmed in black and white, and through the film she's had these black and white dreams in which she's harming herself, always directing the violence against herself and this is the first time she's turning the anger to her husband. The final fantasy is again in black and white. In her final account of herself, she thanks Hannah Schygulla's character for being her one true friend. "I could not have done this without her."

BLVR: Phew. So we actually see her consciousness at work, rather than any actual court of law.

MVT: Yes. She's thanking her friend for helping her change.

BLVR: When the film first came out in '83, did anybody take offense at two women briefly kissing in one scene?

MVT: Oh yes, that caused an uproar. People thought that it was a lesbian film, which was not the case. I responded at that time that if I wanted to make a film with lesbian characters, I would have had lesbian characters. I think what actually caused the scandal was the possibility of a transformative relationship between two women. And when they are together, they are not competing over a man but talking about art... The two female characters lived in a dimension that the male critics weren't used to seeing.

BLVR: So maybe the potential of an erotic turn between two straight women was the most upsetting thing.

MVT: Back in those days, when we were friends, we kissed each other, we sometimes made love to each other, but that didn't immediately make us lesbians.

Some of the women did become lesbians, because for the first time they were free to do it and to discover their desires and bodies.

BLVR: And first accurate books about the female body started coming out around that time.

MVT: My early films are like a testimony of these times and of these longings for something else. I also felt that as a rare woman who had a chance to make films, I felt sort of a responsibility... I was a voice of so many others who did not have this possibility. I was, in a way, a representative.

IV. ATTACHMENTS

BLVR: Let me ask you about your film about Hildegard von Bingen, Vision. There you describe Hildegard's friendship with a young nun, which also based on historical records. So again we have two women in a close bond as a way of testing out utopia.

MVT: Hildegard became furious after Richardis von Stade was moved to another monastery and she did everything to bring her back. Hildegard herself was taken to a monastery as a child and could not rebel against her parents. She then builds a friendship with another nun who later dies—who leaves her in away, like her mother had left her. The young Richardis then comes in, and after they become close, she leaves, too. This time Hildegard can't handle losing a beloved person. She cries out in one scene, "But she was my daughter... and I was her daughter." Hildegard finally found her mother back in the figure of a daughter, in Richardis.

She wrote so many letters to try to get her back. She even wrote to the Pope about it.

BLVR: We get to observe irrational behavior of a great mind.

MVT: She was wise, a visionary, respected by the kings and the Pope, but when it comes to love, she reacted exactly like any other human would.

BVR: There's a scene in Rosa Luxemburg when a young comrade asks Rosa if he should get married or if marriage is a bourgeois institution and he shouldn't bother.

MVT: That's in one of her letters. She was very amused by it, and I was too, and I simply had to put it in.

BLVR: You have her respond in the film, "Oh why not try it." But this question returns later with a vengeance, in the arguments that Rosa has with her husband, who insisted she shouldn't have children.

MVT: Because, he says, "your ideas are your children."

BLVR: And "because a child will make you fearful."

MVT: She always wanted a child. She wanted everything. And that is for me very contemporary, and understandable.

BLVR: It's still unresolved for women, this question.

MVT: I also show this in Die bleierne Zeit, where Gudrun gives her child away to become a full-time activist. The child was suffering for that. He was put in a foster home... All that actually happened. Also the violence the child endured because people knew he was Gudrun's son. He was set on fire while in his hiding place. In real life, he was hurt even more seriously. In the film, you see the boy who is healed, but in reality all his facial scars remained.

BLVR: So, in theory, we can demand all, but actually once the child is there, we are a little bit more fearful, dependent... And you can't just drop a child on your sister, like Gudrun did.

MVT: I never judge, I just show. I am not saying, Do not do that. There are all these contradictions in people, created by politics and historical periods in a country... I show that. I want to understand. But not to judge.

Lydia Perović
believermag.com