Smrt Marie Malibranové

The way in which body is treated in contemporary cinema is something very new. Look at the kisses, the faces, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the teeth in a film like Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran, To call that sadism seems to me completely false, except through the detour of a vague psychoanalysis involving a partial object, a body in pieces, the vagina dentata. It's a rather vulgar Freudianism that reduces to sadism this way of celebrating the body and its wonders. What Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, an expression of the eyes has nothing to do with sadism. It's a question of the multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exaltation, in some way autonomous, of its least parts, of the least possibilities of a body fragment. There is an anarchizing of the body, in which hierarchies, localizations and designations, organicity if you like, is being undone. Whereas in sadism it's very much the organ as such that is relentlessly targeted. You have an eye that looks, I tear it from you. You have a tongue that I have taken between my lips and bitten, I'm going to cut it off. With these eyes you will no longer be able to see, with this tongue you will no longer be able to eat or speak. The body in Sade is still strongly organic, anchored in this hierarchy—the difference being, of course, that the hierarchy is not organized, as in the old fable, from the head but from sex. Whereas in some contemporary films, the way of making the body escape itself is of a completely different type. The goal is to dismantle this organicity: this is no longer a tongue but something completely different that comes out of the mouth. It's not the organ of a mouth that has been soiled and meant for someone else's pleasure. It's an "unnameable," "unusual" thing, outside of all programs of desire. It's the body made entirely malleable by pleasure: something that opens itself, tightens, palpitates, beats, gapes. In The Death of Maria Malibran, the way in which the two women kiss each other, what is it? Sand dunes, a desert caravan, a voracious flower that advances, insect mandibles, a grassy crevice. All that is antisadism. The cruel science of desire has nothing to do with these unformed pseudopods, which are the slow movements of pleasure/pain. (Sade : Sergeant of sex, Michel Foucault in Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984) (05.04.2012)

Je to trochu lesbické travesti. Nic proti - z toho stylu roste i dramaturgie leckterého Fassbindera a Ulrike Ottinger. Je to bohužel ještě nespojité - otevřená forma. A tedy jsou to spíš takové jak kdyby živé obrazy, feérie, v horších momentech revue. Občas i bizarně pokleslá - Schroeter miloval operu, velké líčení, velké kašírované city, grimasy a gesta. Pokud ale otvírá ústa zrovna nějaká přelíčená ochechule mimo záznam zpěv, projevuje se naplno povrchnost režisérovy exaltované diskošky. Estétství toho druhu znám z Paradžanovových Kyjevských fresek, občas z nějakého Passoliniho, v tom filmovém Genetovi to taky bylo - v jeho vlastním filmu o věznici s milenci přes zeď. Má to i Chytilová v Ovoce stromů... Tam je to ale vtipnější a dynamičtější - i když scénář děravej. A dalo by se jmenovat dál. Durasová, ale i Warhol. Ta statičnost a nefilmovost patří k trendu té doby. Fluxus. Schroeter byl v tomhle radikálnější než Fassbinder, inklinuje to spíš k nějakému podivnému dokumentu o tvářích, snad k performativnímu dokumentu, k Akermanové, nevím. Vychází to taky hodně z němého filmu. Záživné ani silné to už dnes až na nějaké konkrétní minuty fakt není. (31.07.2020)