Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  In “Heroes”, Bowie makes a final declaration: there’s no more heroes, long live the heroes! Yet, his character, the new, bodiless, endlessly androgynous, sexless figure, has still some miasmas, he’s yearning: “I can remember standing by the wall/ and the guns shot above our heads/ and we kissed, as though nothing could fall/ and the shame, was on the other side.” is this purely the obligatory anti-communism? There’s more: “Heroes” and Low are psychogeo-graphical albums, where he takes us on various trips to places charged with history, various stops around Berlin, Neukölln, the Wall; then Warszawa, Japan, China, yearning for the East. And it is the easterners who shoot, who perpetrate the terror, it’s true: it was the choice of the DDR government to erect the Wall, as between the establishing of the republic in 1948 and 1961 their population was growingly defecting to the West. This was the ideological failure of the East, who had to lock their citizens to convince them they live in the best of the worlds. The children of Bahnhof Zoo don’t understand this Drang nach Osten, but why else do they’d stick to the DDR-owned and operated Zoo Station, the filthiest, most brutalized part of West Berlin? And next to it: the bling of the Ku’damm, along which they walk searching for drugs and soliciting for clients. Just like characters in Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons, they look at the shop window displays as at the promise of a life they will never have.

  Five hours away from that city was another one which was also levelled to the ground, but by Germans. ‘Warszawa’, Bowie’s most sinister and mysterious track, appears in the film in the grimmest moments, when they first take heroin. It was also full of young, emaciated people. Perhaps the boredom the Polish youth felt at the time was the result of that isolation. Warsaw didn’t have the Wall, but the lives of its people gravitated no less around what happened with this piece of concrete. In 1981, the year Christiane F was screened, it was invaded by its own tanks. Bowie was a tourist, who left Warsaw a postcard, and then left. They couldn’t, continuing to be trapped with their lives. For young people of the declining late 70s, Bowie - an endlessly enigmatic hero for one day, less real than celluloid, replaced their politicians, parents, institutions, their god. But how to stake your whole life on something that does not exist?

  The Drinker, the heroine of Ulrike Ottinger’s Bildnis Nach Trinkerin, shot at the same time in 1979, is played by the splendidly dressed Tabea Blumenschein, Ottinger’s lover and muse, as a beautiful mysterious millionaire, landing at Tegel airport, who chooses Berlin as the scene of her destruction, with alcohol as the drug. She’s always wearing splendid clothes, inspired by early Dior or Balenciaga, with the rule: dress well for your death. To make it funnier, Ottinger accompanies her with a choir of three women, dressed in identical uniforms: Social Question, Accurate Statistics and Common Sense, who comment and cheer her on. She drinks in the bars until she’s unconscious, meeting various weirdos, cross-dressers, punks and transes on her way. Her only friend is a homeless woman. She goes around degenerate Berlin, full of trash, which, together with homeless Lutze, they gather in a supermarket trolley (Ottinger was friends with Wolf Vostell, artist of destruction, who appears briefly in the film). She picks a random from the bar and takes him on a Berlin night derive without end. She does a lot of pointless things: one sees her balancing on a tightrope in a ridiculous ballerina dress, against the towers of Gropiusstadt, after she joins a circus troupe, a regular Ottingeresque bunch of weirdos, of society’s marginals, who take a dim view of her circus art. After several attempts, when she manages to degrade herself completely, she goes to the Zoo station, as if looking for a way out. Yet, she’s is overrun by the careful, punctual German middle classes, hurrying to work. The film’s alternative title is Ticket With No Return.

  2.4 Meeting with the idol

  Christiane F. is a weird kind of a zombie movie, where the action takes place only at night. When we first see Christiane going to a night club, it resembles hell. Gradually, all characters, as the habit develops, start to look more and more like ghosts, or rather zombies. Director Uli Edel is too literal when he throws Christiane into a nightclub projection of The Night of the Living Dead, we can soon see that from their disintegrating faces, changing expression only upon the sight or possibility of getting the drug. Everything becomes clear during the ravishing sequence of the Bowie concert. If they’re zombies, Bowie is their zombie-king. As Christiane looks her all-prepared, artificial idol in the face, then at his absolute artistic heyday, we start to believe he’s not only the sun they need to exist; tragically, in a horrific vision he, or rather his persona, becomes identical with the drug, the reason for their degeneration. What follows is the naked horror of addiction: physical and mental degradation and prostitution of these 14-year old kids, while their bodies waste away. Larry Clark’s 1994 Kids is a version of this, post-AIDS.

  Berlin is there a hard-edged, harsh city with no mercy, ruthless, easily claiming lives, once ascending city of modernity, where their dreams have died. We are in the realm of “joy division”: their passionless sex, their un-joy, resignation, their absolute nihilism. Punk was dead. West Berlin was full of pale, lifeless, sleepwalking young people (Hitler called Germany a “nation of sleepwalkers”). The real Christiane F (Felscherinow) was offered a career as “tell us our story”. She recorded hours of material that then became the famous book, and then the film. When her story broke, it caused a wave of outrage and self-accusations over the ‘health of the nation’ on the part of a nation still living in the shadow of its Nazi guilt. It seemed like the post-war optimism was finally over and the children of the hippie generation had been submerged by the nihilist punk wave. Christiane wasn’t abused, didn’t lack education, didn’t grow up in poverty or worse yet – she wasn’t an East German - but she was alienated and she was from a broken home. She was raised in the personal freedoms promised by liberalism, that in the process became meaningless.

  I read the book at 13, a greasy copy that we were passing between us girls in the state school I attended in a working class tower block estate in Warsaw. We were so bored and craved boys and experience, that despite the grimness, the filth and horror of the addiction, for weeks me and a friend lived only on dreams of putting ourselves into the frame of the story. I was looking at the attractive, too-soon mature face of Christiane and I envied her so much that I’d gladly sleep on the floor of the Zoo station, just to be there, see the Ku’damm, see David Bowie. On my first trip there, in 2000, when I was 17, the Warsaw-Berlin Express landed me at the Zoo, but nothing of the legend was left anymore. The story leaves us with the track of corpses under the wall, with the sinister towers looming everywhere.

  Mauerszene

  ‘A film about a woman who fucks an octopus’ – that was the way Andrzej Żuławski pitched his 1980 film Possession to the producer, fresh after the success of his French film L’important c’est d’aimer, about a fallen actress, played by a sad-eyed Romy Schneider, who is made to act in pornographic movies, surrounded by other failed artists, including an unusually melancholic, tender performance from Klaus Kinski. He was also right after the fiasco of his three hour long monumental metaphysical SF On a Silver Globe (1978), an adaptation of a fin de siecle futurological novel by his great uncle, Jerzy Żuławski, pulled before completion by the hostile communist authorities and shelved until 1987, when Żuławski was given the chance to “finish” the film. Around that time, he was abandoned by his wife Małgorzata Braunek, actress in his Third part of the night and The Devil, due to his famously domineering and possessive personality as a partner and a director. Left in shock and depression, he started plotting a misogynist fairy tale about a monster….

  The sleep of reason produces demons, and one of them materialized, when Anna, living in West Berlin with her nice functionary husband and child in a neat, 3 storey block estate, realized she despised her husband. She confesses that to him. The rest is what happens after that confession.

  Possession was made in the golden era of exploitation cinema, and it must be due to the communa
l genius that things conceived as forgettable schlock to this day shine with a magnificent mixture of the visceral and the metaphysical, with cinematography, colors, costumes and set design taken from a masterpiece. Argento and the lesser gialli creators, Jean Rollin with his erotic horror, the expansion of an intellectual SF, inspiring Tarkovsky, all paved the way for Possession, a still unrivalled study of a marital break-up, thrown in the middle of political turmoil in divided Cold War Berlin. Still, Possession had a special “career” in the UK, if by career we understand horrible reception, extremely negative reviews and eventually putting it on the ‘video nasties’ list of banned films. It was deemed ‘too arty for the flea pits and too trashy for the art house’.

  Today few people can imagine what it was like to live in a city surrounded by barbed wire and under the constant look of armed guards. When we first see Anna, played by a disturbingly pale, un-Holy Mary-like Isabelle Adjani and Mark (Sam Neill), we instantly see something is terribly wrong: their windows are under constant scrutiny, and surrounded by wire – the symbol of political oppression just as of the marital prison, of conventional life. Mark’s job is not what it seems – he has completed a secret government mission, which he wants nothing to do with anymore. Meeting with mysterious grey-suited men, it’s clear he’s involved in high rank espionage. Anna can’t explain what is driving her towards the mysterious lover. She wears her deep blue, up-to-neck gown of a nineteenth century governess, which walks her through all kinds of atrocities as if untouched, as if it’s a secret armor.

  The Berlin U-Bahn is a character in its own right, the scene of her neurotic commutes to the fatal flat on another end of Kreuzberg, again, by the Wall, with screaming dramatic graffiti: FREIE WEST and MAUER MUST GO (despite its location in the east of the city, Kreuzberg was on the West side of the Wall), and in its underpasses is the most terrifying scene of her possession, where she issues green-yellow gunk among terminal gargles. In all this there’s a place for comic relief: the whole character of lusty Margie, played by one of RW Fassbinder’s iconic actresses Margrit Carstensen and her comical enormous leg in plaster, with her failed courtship of Mark; in one of Żuławski’s turns of surreal genius, when a stupor-ridden Adjani is on the tube, she’s robbed of a bunch of bananas by a homeless man, who takes one and gently puts the rest back to her bag. Luxury goods were an issue in the East, mind you.

  The demon can be many things: her anxieties, her neuroses that take the shape of an evil monster. The monster can be also simply a misogynistic punishment for the unfaithful Żuławski’s wife. A chronically decaying demon, built out of corpses, can also be the sum of the traumas his generation had to go through. It is common to say of JG Ballard that everything he ever wrote bore the shadow of the scenes he saw in a concentration camp in war-ridden Shanghai. Similarly, it is generally believed of Roman Polanski, that all his films, revolving around pain, trauma, sickly sexuality and claustrophobia, reveal the daily atrocities he saw as a child in the Krakow ghetto. There’s no doubt Żuławski also went through a traumatic childhood experience, motifs which he obsessively came back to throughout all his career: war, isolation, madness relishing in taboo eroticism, violence, evisceration, Polish romanticisme fou and our tragic history. Born in Lviv, Ukraine (then in Poland) in 1940, he barely survived the war, once nearly hit by a bomb, witnessing the destruction of the city and his family at a very early age. In Possession, as in all of Żuławski’s films, we observe from a claustrophobic space the decay of the family, of the city, and of the world.

  2.5 Children of Ulrike Meinhof on the road to perdition.

  2.6 Afterlife of Christiane F as a chanteuse. The cover of her 1982 maxisingle Final Church produced by members of Einsturzende Neubauten

  Most of Żuławski’s and many of Polanski’s films, like Repulsion, Cul de Sac or The Tenant, all associate eroticism with perversion, anomaly, and fetishism in a genuinely surrealist way. Sex is creepy, sex involves an exchange of ugly secretions, preceding our inevitable decay; in fact, sex is a delight in revulsion, in turning to rot, to a corpse, an acceptance not only of dying, but also of dying disgustingly. Also, due to the amusing, pretty-ugly soundtrack of Andrzej Korzynski (re-released recently, characteristically by English aficionados Finders Keepers), the tale gains the feel of deceit and malice and of a childish game all at once: here music is at the same time parodic and deadly serious. Korzynski had a longstanding relation with two Polish directors: the great Andrzej Wajda and Żuławski, which can be compared to the greatest director-composer couples in cinema: Leone-Morricone, Argento-Goblin/Morricone, Fellini and Rota. In Third Part of the Night it was more art and free rock and prog - a bricoleur, it’s clear he was taking from wherever he could. Some of his musique concrete experiments may owe a lot to the seminal activity of early electronic pioneers like the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and Wlodzimierz Kotoński. In Possession, he takes typically romantic styles like tango or waltz, and turns them upside down; similarly, he takes a children’s ditty motif, played on a broken harpsichord, and twists it with sardonic, scary undertones, like a parody of a cheap Hollywood film noir. Every romantic illusion, every fantasy of a nice, unproblematic life, must in the end collapse and rear its disgusting head to us. The motifs come back on a loop, signifying the hopeless routine, in which the life of Mark and Anna has hung, and how terrible the way out of it must be.

  Anna’s ‘nymphomania’ can be also explained by her lack of orgasm. The whole film revolves around her lack of pleasure, or in general, woman’s incapability to get an orgasm from the men who surround her. Her craving for the beast is a typical Freudian case of women’s narcissism growing out of imprisonment and solitude (much like the aristocrat in Borowczyk’s Beast, who also craved a monster as a source of unbelievable ecstasy). ‘Almost’ we hear from Anna each time she has sex with her husband, with a tragic facial expression, typically, almost feeling sorry for him, not for herself. Woman blames herself for the lack of orgasm, never her lover. Neill is in his role often disarmingly, charmingly naive: he’s chasing his wife, this woman, whom he doesn’t understand a bit, always several steps behind her, disoriented. I’m sure this way Żuławski wanted to suggest who is in fact the vulnerable sex, cheated by the deceitful womanhood. As a proof of that, we have also Anna’s double, their son’s teacher, like in many other films (Third Part of the Night), replacing the (dead) Anna, who’s less demanding in bed.

  Anna is disintegrating, gradually possessed by demons: with her body becoming like a lifeless marionette, sleepwalking through the besieged city, with uncontrollable self-harm, shaken by one shock after another, obsessed with bodily mutilation (never before has an electric knife and kitchen automat meant so much in the marital drama). She’s breeding her monster on her neurosis, guilt and repulsion (like Catherine Deneuve keeping a dead rabbit in the fridge in Polanski’s Repulsion). I always actually thought the monster is primarily an idea, Anna’s punishment, her thoughts turned into flesh. A housewife and mother who has fallen from grace, living on sex like a vampire lives on blood, driven to madness by the increasingly mad Berlin, Anna falls out of her previous gender roles, challenges all the clichés of a woman of her class or position and mocks this spectacle. The only healthy products she keeps in her fridge now are the macabre heads and body-parts of her victims. It’s a story of a woman who stops controlling herself: stops controlling her libido (then of course she must fail as a mother), stops controlling her mind (madness ensues), then stops controlling her body – and then her fluids start to flow freely regardless of decorum: a dress is torn, a woman fucks an octopus, a woman expels vomit, yellow prenatal waters and finally the foetus, shaken, in a shocking scene, through all her orifices.

  And then there’s the characteristic claustrophobia of all the interiors, as if the closeness of the eastern border and the restriction by the wall, especially felt in Kreuzberg district, caused a specific Island Fever mentality (Insellkoller). Polanski’s Tenant (together with Last Tango in Paris and Possession forming a great
film trilogy about the madness induced by the claustrophobic bourgeois tenements), tells a story of a man slowly assuming the identity of the previous female tenant, who killed herself (it also casts Adjani against type as an unattractive, bespectacled woman who grows friendly with Polanski’s character). Similarly, Anna’s monster belongs to the insalubrious, skanky place of their love, feeding on the negative aura surrounding the place, just like on the blood and the headless bodies she brings him. Żuławski had a proper budget behind him, so it is funny and telling that the beast was made by the special FX specialist Carlo Rambaldi, known mostly for his outstanding work on Ridley Scott’s Alien (as well as Argento’s Profondo Rosso; he also amazingly went on to model the little body of E.T.) and it would be tempting to compare Alien and Possession’s main females. The glass-blue eyes of Isabelle Adjani seem to tell the truth beyond recognition, beyond understanding…She knows that the only way through the Cold War of Europe and of her own marriage is to live it, become like them: crazy.