Published

in: TEXTE ZUR KUNST, no. 87, pp. 176-181, Berlin 2012

THE REALISM IN SURREALISM

On the filmic work of Peter Weiss
INTRO:
For the first time, part of Peter Weisss cinematographic work is available on DVD.
The film selection is accompanied by two documentaries by German filmmaker
Harun Farocki, a booklet containing interviews, and a filmography.
Although presented as a single portrait of the hidden oeuvre of an international
author, it seems more a double portrait of two documentarians of their time. The DVD
may not only illuminate their historical and intellectual backgrounds, but also
contribute to the analysis of current social and political issues by discussing hybrid
forms of fiction and document and debating the relation of individual and collective
history.
After Peter Weisss first retrospective at the Cinmatheque Franaise in 1958, it took
almost 30 years until the Stockholm-based author of the three-volume novel The
Aesthetics of Resistance (197581) and Marat/Sade (1964) was eventually
acknowledged as a filmmaker in Germany as well. His complete cinematographic
work was presented for the first time in 1986 at the Nordic Film Days in Lbeck,
which additionally published a thoroughly researched catalogue on all his 18 films.
The current DVD, released by filmedition suhrkamp, offers half of them and is based
on a selection that was originally presented at the 1980 Biennale Forum in Berlin and
then used by Harun Farocki for his subsequent film essay on Weiss one year later.
This essay complements the films gathered in the anthology, along with another
Farocki film from 1979: In an interview he talks with the author about the working
progress of The Aesthetics of Resistance and Weiss explains how his cinematic and
literary practices are interrelated. In this interview and in two others from 1980 and
1981, which are included in the accompanying booklet, Weiss also comments on his
two feature films, neither of which, unfortunately, is offered on the DVD.
Weisss engagement in the film medium started with his return from warravaged Berlin in 1947. He did several reports on Germany for the Swedish press

after so-called year zero. On this trip he also got the chance to watch Wolfgang
Staudtes film Murderers Among Us (Die Mrder sind unter uns, 1946) and
Helmut Kutners In Those Days (In jenen Tagen, 1947). He commented on them
for the film magazine Biografbladet: Subject matter for filmmaking you may find on
every German street. Infinite matter of human destiny is waiting for its design. Here, a
poet of images may have an inexhaustible stock of painfully realistic, oddly dreamlike
and surreal, shocking, accusatory, and thought-provoking visions of this world. (1)
This statement may be considered as programmatic for Weisss own film work and
his subsequent literary work as well, as it clearly reveals its recurring dichotomy
Surrealism meets realism, dream vision meets document.
Weisss first films are his five surrealist Studies (195255). Filmed on 16mm in
black and white, they resemble collages he started to make during his time in Paris,
either showing compositions of fragmented bodies celebrating an obscure and yet
rescue promising eroticism, or telling the story of an isolated ego that tries to escape
from the dark of the night, from an intrinsic trauma or from surrounding alienation.
Like tableaux vivants, two of the films are based on precise enactments of Weisss
drawings, thereby trying to leave behind the static vision of the artist enabling him
as a film poet () to represent the infinite composite character of an experience. (2)
The Studies have titles such as Awakening, Hallucinations, Liberation,
Interplay (3), which also refer to a biographical context: Weiss had more than just a
theoretical interest in psychoanalytic literature, as one can recognize in his ingenuous
letters to Henriette Itta Blumenthal in 1940 (4) or the description of his multiple inner
crises in his autobiographical report Vanishing Point (Fluchtpunkt, 1962). Max
Hodann, the German sexologist and member of the International Brigades, who like
Weiss had emigrated to Sweden, had introduced him to psychoanalysis and was later
portrayed in The Aesthetics of Resistance. This novel also introduces us to the poet
and Weisss fictitious close friend Karin Boye (Weiss met her only once briefly
before she committed suicide in 1941), whose work was strongly influenced by
Surrealism and radical socialist ideas and whose psychoanalyst Weiss also consulted.
As an emigrant, he could understand and shared feelings of deracination and
extraneousness with her, and as an artist he tried to find a language by which a

Published in: TEXTE ZUR KUNST, no. 87, pp. 176-181, Berlin 2012
deeply deformed reality (5) might be described. One resource for that language,
according to Weisss alter ego in The Aesthetics of Resistance, lies in the surreal
world of the dream, because only a dream gives you insight into the specifity of the
preserved and communicates to us the dimensions of everything that we can take an
interest in. (6) However, this mnemonic and utopian quality of dreams lacks ethical
quality, because we remain insentient facing the agonies with our dreaming eyes.
(7) Therefore the second resource should be a detailed reconstruction of reality as
leaning out to the outer reality outside resembles the exploring the dream as in either
case we are looking from one world into a completely different one. (8)
Therefore, even if Weiss himself tended to be overcritical on his own
cinematographic work, his early Studies should not be considered as mere stylistic
exercises of the later documentary and feature filmmaker. On the contrary, he already
understood the concept and process of dream work in close and necessary
proximity to the documentary process as dream matter and reality matter are both
needed to reconstruct and understand historical processes and the current situation one
is living in, however fragmented and confusing it appears. Over time, these ideas
were refined and eventually, as Farocki learns in his conversation with Weiss, turned
into the closed blocky structure of The Aesthetics of Resistance, which like the
Studies also begin with a description of fragmented bodies and their paradigmatic
attempt at liberation, the Arab spring of Pergamon.
As a result, the first documentary Faces in the Shadows (Ansikten i skugga,
1956), shortly following the experimental Studies, may be considered an attempt at
self-liberation by opening the studio door toward a critical art practice embedded in
the neighboring social environment. The film poet Peter Weiss left the studio with
his artist friends (e.g. yvind Fahlstrm, Carlo Derkert, Pontus Hultn) and
discovered, as previously announced, the subject matter for his films on every street
that would surpass any surrealist vision. Faces in the Shadows drastically details the
daily life of destitute old men who were populating the streets and backyards of
Weisss studio neighborhood. These men represent a lost generation of the emerging
postwar Swedish society; they resemble the outcasts and the forgotten of Las
Hurdes (1933) by Luis Buuel, to whom Weiss gives key importance in his book

Avantgarde Film. (9) However, compared to Las Hurdes where according to

Weiss each face has the effect of a blow: dull, animal-like faces, faces paralyzed by
unutterable pain, faces of cripples, cretins and freaks (10) the old men of Weisss
Faces in the Shadows, sitting in beer halls, sleeping in night shelters and mingling
around the streets, appear pathetic rather than grotesque. Even though the filmmakers
empathy becomes visible, the maximization of the documentary-real loses its power
due to a distant (hidden) camera and more atmospheric but purposeful shots of the
protagonists.
Maximizing the documentary-real transforms reality into the surreal-grotesque. This
strategy may be recognized more clearly in Weisss subsequent film about the daily
life in a juvenile prison that is also included in the anthology. The film In the Name
of the Law (Enligt lag, 1957) succeeds in maximizing the documentary by
meticulously highlighting specific details and noises, by its clear presentation of the
surrounding and omni-regulatory architecture, and finally by the fragmentizing
representation of the inmates whose body image is reduced to a torso, due to an
official directive that no face of a prisoner was to be shown. Here, reality seems
unreal by its seclusiveness, but it appears normal to those who are inside for months
or years, Weiss says. (11) In his next film, however, a social report titled What
shall we do now? (Vad ska vi gra nu d?, 1958), normal reality signifies a
prison that the young people are trying to get out of. The filmic report was
commissioned by the Swedish Youth League as an educational film about juvenile
drug addiction and unemployment experienced by protagonists of three different
social contexts: a worker, an employee, and a grammar-school pupil. Based on
previous extensive field research, this time Weiss was working with young amateur
actors who performed their own lives and thereby produced a feature film that looks
like a documentary or the other way round. While Farocki mentions this process to
be reminiscent of ric Rohmer and Maurice Pialat, one may also think of Peter
Watkins.
Fringe groups and peripheral areas, individual or social isolation in the urban context
seem to be the preferred matters of reality for the films of Peter Weiss. This may
also be recognized in Behind the Facades (Bag de ens facader, 1961), a

Published in: TEXTE ZUR KUNST, no. 87, pp. 176-181, Berlin 2012
documentary on a dormitory suburb of Copenhagen, as well as in a film project on
outsiders that Weiss started with Staffan Lamm, his last collaborator in the
cinematographic field, but that could only be carried out in form of four fragments,
one about the artist yvind Fahlstrm. However, neither Behind the Facades nor
the four fragments of the unfinished outsider project are included in filmedition
suhrkamps DVD selection even though they would have greatly enhanced the
understanding of the provided films. Also, Weisss two feature films were
unfortunately ruled out: Swedish girls in Paris (Svenska flickor in Paris, 1961), a
story about three Swedish students trying to survive in bohemian Paris (12) as well as
The Mirage (Hgringen, 1959). This is all the more regrettable, as on this film
project Weiss spent most of his time and energy and it would have added yet another
very good example of how he combines surreal and documentary vision. The film is
based on his early novel Document I (1949) which illustrates his dreamlike and
traumatic experience of emigration (13) and combines the introspective vision of the
Studies with the descriptive attitude of the documentaries about the juvenile
prisoners or the old men: For instance one long sequence showing a huge and almost
unbearably noisy construction site in the center of Stockholm is filmed and audiorecorded like a battlefield of modern urbanism. War doesnt seem over, and
extraneousness continues.
Lamm, who later collaborated with Weiss in The Mirage, Swedish girls in Paris
and in the outsider project, also made a feature length documentary on Weisss films
(Strange ways in and through and out, 1986). In contrast to Farocki, the Swedish
documentarian compares selected film excerpts with his own experiences during the
shooting, with self-portraits and paintings of suburban settings by Weiss, filmed in
their current repositories: in private homes such as that of Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss
or Lajos Szkely, collector and psychoanalyst of the young artist Weiss. Privileged by
his direct testimony, Lamms documentary makes more visible how Weisss
cinematographic work is related to his other art practices and life circumstances than
Farockis film essay does.
Doubtlessly the film selection now published by filmedition suhrkamp will contribute
to a better understanding of Weisss work by a German audience. However, Swedish

language skills are occasionally needed as only one documentary is subtitled and nonGerman speakers will be excluded from understanding the interviews. It seems
surprising that the publisher should not have given one of its most renowned authors a
little more internationality and context.
ANDREAS WUTZ
Peter Weiss Filme. Vorgestellt von Harun Farocki, filmedition suhrkamp 2012.
--------------------

Andreas Wutz is an artist and film curator living in Barcelona. Since 2003 he has
presented the cinematographic work of Peter Weiss. In 2012 he organized a
retrospective of the Zimbabwean filmmaker Michael Raeburn (Filmmuseum
Mnchen) and currently is working on a film project about an agricultural zone in the
suburbs of Barcelona.

--------------------

Notes
(1)

Peter Weiss, Swedish Original, in: Biografbladet, 3, 1947. German translation

by Jan Christer Bengtsson: Peter Weiss ber Film und Filmemachen, in: Peter
Weiss und der Film, exh. cat. Nordische Filmtage Lbeck, 1986. English
translation by Andreas Wutz.

(2)

Booklet accompanying the DVD Peter Weiss Filme. Vorgestellt von Harun
Farocki, Berlin 2012, p. 5.

(3)

Original Swedish (German) titles: Uppvaknandet (Das Aufwachen),

Hallucinationer (Halluzinationen), Frigrelse (Befreiung), Vxelspel
(Wechselspiel). See booklet Peter Weiss Filme, op. cit., pp. 3435.

(4)

Peter Weiss, Briefe an Henriette Itta Blumenthal (194143), Berlin 2011.

Published in: TEXTE ZUR KUNST, no. 87, pp. 176-181, Berlin 2012
(5)

Peter Weiss, Die sthetik des Widerstands, Vol. III, p. 37, Frankfurt/M. 1981.
English edition: Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Vol. I only),
Durham, North Carolina, 2005.

(6)

Ibid., pp. 206, 208.

(7)

Ibid.

(8)

Ibid., pp. 208-209.

(9)

Peter Weiss, Avantgardefilm, Stockholm 1956; translated into German by Beat

Mazenauer; Peter Weiss, Avantgarde Film, Frankfurt/M., 1995. Weisss book
has been considered for long the only publication in this field (Hans Scheugl/
Ernst Schmidt jr., Eine Subgeschichte des Films, Frankfurt/M., 1974). Besides
chapters on Luis Buuel, Jean Vigo, and Sergei Eisenstein it offers essays on
film music and the city.

(10) Ibid., p. 55.

(11) Booklet Peter Weiss Filme, op. cit., p. 11.
(12) Although Weiss repudiated the final editing his authorship can still be
recognized in the selected locations, the composition of images and
incorporation of own documentary footage like a sculpture parade by Jean
Tinguely that the actors spontaneously participated in.
(13) Booklet Peter Weiss Filme, op. cit., p. 21.