The Simultaneity of Cinema & Life




                                                                                                                   

Stealing Light

In the late winter of 1981, the filmmakers Birgit and Wilhelm Hein (who I will refer to from now on as B&WH) travelled to New York City on a grant from the Goethe Institute. The couple had been invited to make a film for the opening of a new museum in Brooklyn, a part of that vast city few tourists would have visited in the early 1980s. Despite showing their films throughout Europe, performing in festivals and fairs, screening their so-called “movie shows” in the darkened back rooms of beer halls and pubs, when B&WH arrived in New York in 1981, they had no idea what they were going to film. They took to moving around the city, which reminded them of a war zone. They filmed small scenes in their apartment, conversations, arguments, piles of rubbish and dust in the corner of their rooms. Outside they filmed buildings at dawn and at sunset, the view from elevated trains, endless tracts of demolished housing, homeless men lying in the street and the graffiti that was everywhere. A week into their visit B&WH were attacked on the subway.  Wilhelm was badly beaten and was left unconscious, bleeding from the head. Birgit screamed and fought back. The muggers escaped with the small Bolex film camera B&WH had brought with them from Germany.

Recently, I have wondered what the thieves might have done with that camera. Whether it was pawned or exchanged for drugs and alcohol. Whether, for whatever reason, the film was developed, or if a way was found to project the images, to hold the frames up to the light, to share the silent footage with friends or with strangers having nothing better to do in the spring of 1981. I wondered if B&WH had somehow managed to record the muggers beating Wilhelm. Whether the thieves looked for evidence of themselves, for images linking them to the crime. Whether they immediately burned what they had seen or whether they took some pride or fascination, even, in a film that they had had some hand in making.  








I once read of a Brooklyn thief, who, in 1870, confronted a man walking alone in the newly opened Prospect Park. When the well-dressed pedestrian refused to give up his belongings the thief hit him so hard he was killed on the spot. After he had lifted the man’s pocketbook the thief took a knife and cut out his eyes. This was common practice in the years after the invention of photography. Thieves and murderers feared the eyes of the dead had somehow recorded the face of the last person they had seen alive. What isn’t known is what the thief then did with the dead man’s eyes once they had been cut from his head. Did he take them with him, like some trophy, or emblem, wrapped in paper or cloth? Perhaps somehow the eyeballs went on living, observing the world from a new vantage unencumbered by a body or a mind, perhaps they travelled over long distances supported by unlikely devices, at noon in the brightness of day, or at midnight, out of range of the dawn, registering information when the light was lowest, thrown away in the grass or into a river, to be nibbled by perch or pecked at by crows, or into a passing cart to travel along canals, or roadways, unable to sleep, seeing continuously in filthy fragments, in a wash of dust and dirt and rain until they were stood on, or kicked by animals or by children running in packs, prodded with sticks, dashed at a wall.

Exploded. Swallowed. Crushed. 

Bodies

When I went to visit Birgit Hein in 2007 she did not mention the robbery in New York in 1981. Instead, I learned of it in a book of writings collected together in the wake of her death at the beginning of this year (2023). Yet looking back the images she recorded in the desolate wastelands of New York City seem to have some bearing on our brief meeting in Berlin when Birgit was sixty-five years old and I was twenty-nine. It’s only now that I’m older and many of the people I met during that time are dead or close to dying that our gap in age has become significant. At the time, I had been employed by a university to interview a community of artists who had made obscure films, many of which had disappeared or were on the brink of disappearing, in cities across the world at a time before I was born. 

On most occasions, when I met with those I had been sent to see, I had no idea what I was doing there. I had notes, questions, a plan marking out the (many) gaps in what I knew, which I hoped our conversations might go some way to fill. But in the company of a real person, not a set of photographs, or paragraphs from journals or books, my mind would empty and my heart would fall flat.  It was as if the presence of real bodies—mine included—had an unspoken bearing on what it was possible to communicate, on what it was that might (or might not) be handed on. Now, as each of those bodies disappear to be replaced with pictures and words (not to mention tape-recordings, videos and films), returning as it were to that previous state (but changed somehow), I can’t help but be reminded of how close each of us is to becoming a ghost. 

When I interviewed Birgit, in Berlin in 2007, she told me about a film she had seen when she was twenty years old. A film, she said, that changed her life. I’m not sure why, but I can find no record of what that film was called. I did not write it down. The tape recording from the afternoon is lost. Yet, it wasn’t the film (I did note) with its images, or its silent flicker of light and dark, of ‘livid dust’ (that was the phrase Birgit used), that had made such an impact on her, so much as the experience of the film. When I saw the film in Switzerland in 1964, Birgit said, people whistled or shouted, waved their hands in front of the projector bulb. It was as if I was seeing a film that hadn’t existed before that time. A film made from the bodies of the people who were there with me that day watching (or not watching) the light move over surfaces that also moved. Not simply a blank screen hosting information unthinkingly, but surfaces that moved within the film’s trajectories as if nothing could be certain, not now, not then. Of course, that film, the one I saw in Lausanne, Birgit said, has gone. Just like the previous versions of our bodies, those younger selves we carry some residue of around with us. Each of the bodies caught in the light that day, like the films we made together at that moment in time, films that have no name that cannot be recalled or re-seen. They—we—are never coming back. 





_{Rohfilm / Raw Film
20 min, Black & White, 16 mm;
a 1968 film directed by Birgit & Wilhelm Hein.}

Time Travel

Perhaps because I have misplaced my notes from the time, I attempted to travel back, as it were, to Birgit’s apartment in Berlin using Google Maps in the hope that it might jog my memory. I wasn’t sure if I would recognise the front door. But there it was, looking at me, the way it had looked at me then. A tall imposing doorway, one of what seemed to be hundreds of identical doors lining the length of Mittenwalder Strasse. I must have stood there for some time wondering if I had the right number, as if it was a game and life was made up of one bad choice after another. Looking back (or forward?) at the image on the computer screen I was reminded of a friend’s father who was an architect and who had throughout his life collected photographs of front doors—hundreds of pictures from countries all over the world, which he had developed or printed and kept in albums and which my friend discovered only after his father’s death. Put together, the images seemed to separate themselves from journeys made over the course of half a century taking on another mode of transit, a set of imaginary jumps in time and space, a set of alternatives, an endless game of hide and seek. My friend told me he took comfort in those pictures. He could look at them for hours on end, turning the pages slowly, one way and then the next. I wondered if this had been his father’s intention, his parting gift, and whether an aging architect’s fantasy of photographic time travel has since come true.  It is after all possible now to tour the roadways of the world through photographs. Streetview’s tapestry of images that have no edge updates continuously, so that passing along a road it is possible to move through seasons, even years, depending on when the latest pictures were uploaded by people and robots driving mobile cameras through streets, avenues and alleyways, devices for freezing the continuity and simultaneity of human life, not unlike Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera, except that the cities in these pale images, oddly warped in their transitions, are deadened likenesses of real city streets populated by replicants glimpsed accidentally on pavements or in doorways, in windows or on bicycles, their faces fogged out, flickering, as it were, at the edges of those places where the living are known to have been.

Anti-memory

I recall few details of Birgit’s actual apartment in Berlin, other than the dark stairwell where many bicycles were kept, leading to the first or second floor and the two tall windows of the main room overlooking the street. I also remember a painting hanging in the gap between the windows as if the windows had been set into the walls in order to match the painting’s dimensions rather than the other way around. If I try to see the painting now, in my mind’s eye, it is formed of vague abstractions, of gloomy blacks, cloudy whites and chalky greys. But that is more likely to be the effort of memory itself, inventing a picture from a composite of fragments, detritus of things I have seen and all but forgotten, flotsam of dreams, rather than any accurate recollection of facts. I do recall that Birgit said it was one of Wilhelm’s works, which struck me as odd. The painting may have reminded me (the half-recalled version I now have in mind certainly does) of one of the first films B&WH made together in the mid-1960s. Rohfilm was assembled from raw stock, pieces of film material cut together in random patterns so that glimpses of footage can be made out within the frenetic passages of the film strip moving through the projector apparently on the brink of breaking down, melting, tearing or fading to dust. Birgit had long since abandoned that kind of filmmaking and I wondered if Wilhelm’s painting was there as a reminder of a world she had no interest in returning to, the way trauma victims, make secret pacts with things they refuse to forget.

During that time, I had begun to think about ‘materialist filmmaking’ (a period spanning roughly from 1966 to 1978) as a form of memory.  Yet, sifting through the many documents—magazine articles, critical essays, books, journals, letters, diaries, scrapbooks—relating to that time there are few, if any, references to memory.  It is as if film, and specifically in this case, film concerned with itself as film was already a technology for the cancellation of the past, a kind of anti-memory.  In one of his books on the films of Andy Warhol, for example, Pietre Gidel, an American filmmaker who would live for most of his life in London, writes: ‘Proust’s A la Recherché du Temps Perdu (variously translated as In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past, 1913-27) is not about time regained but time lost. In Search of … means not that you find it but that you don’t.‘ 

It was as if memory at its best was a construction; at its worst, a wiping away. Perhaps this is why when I watch Gidel’s film Epilogue, (a farewell to structural film?) made in 1978 (the year in which I was born, and which it is possible (currently) to find on the internet) it looks to me now (in the autumn of 2023) like a computer failing to remember.

When I mentioned Pietre Gidel to Birgit Hein in 2007, she swore. Then she said, ‘Did you know that Pietre Gidel was CIA?’ (Given my lack of notes, I cannot be sure now of Birgit’s exact words). When he took his films to America in 1971, she said, Gidel, if that’s his real name, would leave them unattended in a backroom of Anthology Archives in New York. An operative posing as a hippy would enter the room through another door and play the film in reverse. Gidel’s immensely boring structural materialist films, Birgit said, in fact showed classified plans and documents photographed in certain residences and offices across London, Dusseldorf, Cologne and Berlin. I was quite taken aback. Birgit went to get another beer. The worse thing about it was, Birgit said. Everybody knew. That is, everybody except us (B&WH).  For all those years we would host him on his trips to Germany we had no idea he was working for the American Secret Service.   

It is important, I think, to reiterate the unreliability of this type of report. I often think of the interview—perhaps because of its association with police interrogation, with procedural questioning or witness statements—as a form of truth telling, of recovering otherwise unspoken events in the lives of those who write books or make films or paint pictures as if they might reveal hidden sources for their work, to fill the gaps, as it were, between art, history and life. Yet it is difficult to tell, once the tape recorder is switched on, and the first question is asked, if what the interviewee remembers is in any way distinct from how they wish to be remembered. To distinguish what has been said from what has not been said, to disentangle fiction from fact. As such, I can only report, as impersonally as possible, on what I think I might have heard; on the sounds and images that come back to me from that other time; not simply of what was or wasn’t true, but of the possibility of what might have been true.

Strangers /
Ghosts Meeting Ghosts

Before I left Birgit’s apartment in Berlin she gave me a copy of Love Stinks, the last film she made with Wilhelm Hein in the long months before their marriage ended. Watching the film again after I had heard of Birgit’s death, it may be that Love Stinks has now crossed in my mind with the camera stolen on the subway in New York. I can’t help but wonder if B&WH had somehow recovered the film that was stolen from them, if they had issued notice of a reward for its return.  If the thieves had taken it upon themselves to give the film up to the police, or pushed it under somebody’s door. Whether the bodies of unseen others who had passed the material from one set of hands to the next had become in some way part of the film. 

As well as the endless pile of rubble and junk that seemed to make up that urban landscape, the graffiti and the homeless, Love Stinks includes graphic footage of B&WH making love on a mattress on their apartment floor. Exposed in this way, their bodies, writhing silently in the lamplight, seem to have combined into a single multi-limbed organism caught in a trap. Watching the traces of those bodies now, one of which is lost forever, I cannot help wondering to what extent Love Stinks, the film eventually finished in New York in 1981 and shown at the opening of the new museum in Brooklyn, had in fact been altered or added to by unnamed strangers, the way ghosts might pass messages, or attempt to seek us out after they are gone, re-assembled into an incoherent register of unknown lives; whether that would have been the only way in the end to film what B&WH couldn’t bring themselves to film: a shared life splitting into two.  Or perhaps there is another film. Perhaps the film stolen on the subway has remained lost, circulating invisibly in a city that in 2023 no longer exists. 

Postscript / Proviso

Looking back, there was very little connection between Birgit Hein and myself.  We met once (maybe twice).  We exchanged a handful of messages. I have watched her films. An interview was published in which she and others found some use. Yet I couldn’t help but be moved when I discovered only this morning (Friday November 3rd 2023, bright sunshine, mild) that Birgit Hein was born on August 6th 1942. As far as I am aware, this date is factually correct. *

*         On the morning of what would have been her third
birthday, the American military exploded an atomic bomb
over the city of Hiroshima killing 140,000 people.

Duncan White is the author of A Certain Slant of Light (see here), an extract of which was originally published in volume III of Hotel, ℅ the `‘Paper Hotel’ series (for ‘After the Crash (on John Latham,’ see here). Alongside Hotel, White’s work has appeared in Black Box Manifold, ETZ and the Journal of Visual Culture. He co-edited and co-authored the publication Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film (Tate Publishing, 2011). His recent work, ‘The Experimental Cinema of Georges Perec, or, A History of Dreams’ was included in The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024). ‘O-O-O or Interviews with the Dead’ appeared in Malarkey (see here). ‘A Visit to Berlin’ is extracted from a longer work called ‘Nowhere in Time,’ which someone recently described as a ‘B-Movie version of literary film theory.’