The Beauty and the Terror, The Italian Renaissance

 

When I came to write The Beauty and the Terror, my alternative history of the Italian Renaissance, one of the questions I wanted to explore was: why is it that the big names of Renaissance art are all men? Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael... women scarcely get a look in.

 In his The Lives of the Artists, which established the canon of Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari devoted only one chapter to a female artist. That was the Bolognese sculptor Properzia de' Rossi, whose chapter also had to accommodate his comments on Plautilla Nelli and Sofonisba Anguissola as well as a brief mention of the much lesser-known Madonna Lucrezia.

 The question of how far women had a Renaissance (in the cultural sense) has long prompted debate. There were clearly individual exceptions, like the patron Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, who purchased and commissioned numerous works from writers and artists. Yet as the evidence is reconsidered, it's become apparent that women were active not only in the visual arts but also in the world of literature.

 One barrier to the participation of women in the art world was access to training. That accounts for the large proportion of them who came from artistic families, among them the Bolognese portraitist Lavinia Fontana and, in the seventeenth century, Elisabetta Sirani.

 Sofonisba Anguissola was an exception to that rule. The daughter of a nobleman from Cremona, near Milan, she was educated from the age of about 14 in the house of a local painter, Bernardino Campi. The portrait of her sister as a nun, painted in 1551 when the artist was just 16, shows her early promise.

 She benefited from the patronage of the elderly Michelangelo who showed her 'honourable and thoughtful affection', praising her work. Her images of domestic warmth and informality were novel, and she went on to serve as a lady-in-waiting at the Spanish court, where she continued to work as a portraitist.

 Numerous women were active in the literary world of sixteenth-century Italy, even in the face of sexism and oppression. Vittoria Colonna, member of a prominent noble family, was a poet who broke new stylistic ground, writing eloquently of the traumas of war. Yet even while praising her achievement in 'equalling the most widely esteemed and wisest men', her contemporary Paolo Giovio felt the need to add a detailed paragraph on her 'most delicate cleavage' and breasts 'swelling with heavenly nectar'.

 

That was the polite version. An anonymous satirist claimed that after her husband's death in the Italian Wars had turned to religion only because she couldn't find a lover (or, as the writer put it, 'a pestle to grind her mortar'). As if that wasn't bad enough, her interest in religious reform attracted the notice of the Inquisition (these were the early years of the Reformation), and she was under investigation for heresy when she died in 1547.

 The ferment of religious change in the mid-sixteenth century combined with long-running wars to shake up gender roles as many men went off to war, leaving women to manage at home.

 The climate favoured experimentation. Chiara Matraini saw family members imprisoned and executed after a rebellion in 1533; widowed in her 20s, she embarked on a scandalous affair with a married poet and wrote extensively on that most masculine of topics: war, making the case for the superiority of learning over the military arts.

 Matraini was only one of the women writers of these years whose personal relationships fell outside the conventions of marriage. Tullia d'Aragona, bastard daughter of a cardinal, was mistress to the richest man in Florence, Filippo Strozzi, and author of Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, a radical defence of women's sexual and spiritual desires. She was exempted from a ban on prostitutes wearing luxury clothing thanks to her 'rare knowledge of poetry and philosophy'.

 Another of Strozzi's mistresses, however, gave an insight into the reality of such relationships when she complained that Strozzi expected her to sleep with his friends and had made her an 'object of contempt'. Veronica Franco, who also combined the careers of courtesan and writer, warned that the life of a courtesan 'always results in misery'.

 Yet for all the trauma of war, widowhood and exploitation faced by these authors and poets, they had their triumphs too. In 1556 the distinguished writer Cassandra Fedele, then aged 91, was invited to give a public oration to welcome the queen of Poland to Venice, praising the Queen's 'admirable mind amid the winds of war'.

 The year 1559 saw the publication of Europe's first collection of women's poetry, featuring 53 authors. Across the arts, there was much more to the later Renaissance than simply 'Great Men'.

 The beauty and the terror: an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. By Catherine Fletcher.

Art UK , March 18, 2020.

The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020) is a new history of a familiar era. Focusing on the years 1492-1571, it covers topics including developments in art and literature, the early years of European colonialism, the Italian Wars of 1494-1559, and the impact of the Reformation and religious change. It suggests that the Italian Renaissance was far stranger and darker than many of us realise, and that sex and sexuality played an important role in this unsavoury side of the sixteenth century.

 NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about?

 Fletcher: I’m trying to do two things with the book. One is to give people who come across the work of the ‘famous names’ of the later Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael or Machiavelli—some context. The other is to bring together a series of narratives that are often treated separately: the Reformations, the rise of European empires, later Renaissance culture and the Italian Wars of 1494-1559.

 NOTCHES: How do we know about sex and sexuality in Renaissance Italy? Are there any problems with/ limits to the surviving sources?

 Fletcher: We have a good range of sources, from law and trial records to letters, literary sources (including plenty of satire), and visual culture. These are often mediated via government officials or elite writers: we don’t hear so much from lower-ranking people or from women.

 NOTCHES: Many people will associate the Italian Renaissance with salacious stories of high-class courtesans and papal ‘nephews’- but is that an accurate representation of how things really were?

 Fletcher: There’s definitely a ‘courtesan culture’ in sixteenth-century Italy and examples of women like Tullia d’Aragona who combined that role with a career as a writer. You have the tale of Pope Julius III (r. 1550-1555) making his lover a cardinal, and plenty of noblemen had mistresses and illegitimate children. But that’s only part of the bigger picture: it’s a bit like focusing only on the expensive end of escorting in a study of the sex industry today. There was also a great deal of official harassment: for example, prostitutes were often required to wear a symbol of their status, such as a yellow scarf.

 NOTCHES: We also associate this period with nude paintings. Was there a lot of sex/ nudity in Renaissance literature and art, and if so did this reflect changing attitudes/ behaviours?

 Fletcher: There’s certainly nudity in Renaissance art and literature, though not always in sexual contexts: it’s a notable element of religious painting too. In her book on the Italian Renaissance Nude Jill Burke has explored the rise of the female nude in the context of changing attitudes towards beauty. As printing became more widespread with it came printed pornography, including the notorious I Modi, published and banned in the 1520s, which depicted a series of sixteen sexual positions without a classical gloss to give them respectability. Series showing the Loves of the Gods were more acceptable, and the decoration of the Palazzo Te in Mantua, the summer palace of the city’s rulers, likewise drawing on ancient myth, is explicitly sexual.

 NOTCHES: Some of the stories in your book suggest that Renaissance sexual attitudes benefitted men (especially powerful men) far more than women. Would it be fair to say that the Renaissance (or at least this aspect of it) was more fun for men than woman?

 Fletcher: In short, yes. Women’s honour was focused very much around their chastity and to ignore that risked severe social censure. Men had a great deal more sexual freedom. On the other hand we do hear of women who broke the rules, like the writer Chiara Matraini, who as a widow had a very public affair with a married poet.

 NOTCHES: You mention that sex between men was extremely common in parts of Italy during this period. Why was this, and was everyone happy about it?

 Fletcher: The attitudes towards sex between men were contradictory. From a Christian point of view sodomy (a term that incorporated all sorts of non-procreative sex) was a sin. On the other hand certain types of sexual relationship between men could be socially acceptable, especially where these were between older/higher status active partners and younger/lower status passive ones. Gary Ferguson’s recent book on Same Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome deals with the case of a group of migrant men who had sex with men, and raises important questions about the greater risk of persecution facing marginalised communities.

 NOTCHES: How much impact did syphilis have on Renaissance Italy?

 Fletcher: The ‘pox’, often identified as syphilis, was first noted in Italy shortly after the French invasion of 1494, hence the name ‘French disease’. In its initial phase it seems to have been particularly pernicious and was exacerbated by poor harvests, a severe winter and the presence of troops (which put further pressure on supplies); it was often seen as God’s punishment for ill-living. Numerous well-known figures fell ill, including the duke of Ferrara and the future pope Julius II. Good personal care, which wasn’t available to all, helped the wealthy survive: the marquis of Mantua lived for twenty-three years after his initial symptoms.

 NOTCHES: Did you find anything that particularly surprised you? And/or did you come across anything particularly interesting which you had to leave out of the book?

 Fletcher: As I went through the biographies of the leading military commanders, I was struck by just how many of them were also accused of domestic violence or rape. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise given that we know that rape was widespread in the Italian Wars, but it’s a part of the story that hasn’t featured in the literature. I would have liked to dig down more but decided that would have to wait for an article.

NOTCHES: How (if at all) are Renaissance ideas about, and experiences of, sex relevant today?

 Fletcher: Those issues around interpersonal violence and military violence, and rape as a weapon of war, are still very present in conflicts today. Some of the arguments about clerical celibacy that came to the fore with the Reformation are still going on in the Catholic Church. And I’m interested in the parallel between the fairly routine acceptance of same-sex relationships in some Renaissance circles and how young people are thinking about sex now.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

Fletcher: Immediately after my first degree (which wasn’t in History) I was elected convenor of what was then the National Union of Students Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campaign. I learnt a lot informally about the history of sexuality in that role, and although it’s never been a primary focus of my academic research I do keep coming back to it in different contexts.

 NOTCHES: What are you working on now that this book is published?

Fletcher: At the risk of becoming a “Sex and Violence” cliché, I’m close to finishing a couple of articles that build on the book’s discussion of gun culture, and have more work still to come on aspects of the Italian Wars.

 The Beauty and the Terror. Notches, March 6 , 2020. 

History Hack discusses The Beauty and the Terror with author Catherine Fletcher.  HistoryHack, April 10, 2020

The historian Catherine Fletcher has a well-deserved reputation as a specialist in 16th-century skulduggery and intrigue. In Our Man in Rome (2012) her subject was Gregorio Casali, a wily Italian fixer who served as Henry VIII’s ambassador at the papal court during the crisis of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In The Black Prince of Florence (2017) she recounted the brief and lurid career of Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of a Medici duke and a Moorish maidservant, who jockeyed to power as the first hereditary ruler of Florence, married a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was murdered in the course of an adulterous liaison at the age of 26.

 These are lively, well-researched books built round an interestingly dodgy central character. Her latest offering, The Beauty and the Terror, has a much larger canvas, covering a whole sweep of 16th-century Italian political and cultural history. She begins in the 1490s – an exciting but deeply turbulent decade: the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the French invasion of Lombardy, Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper in Milan, the election of the libertine Borgia pope, Alexander VI.

 The decades that followed were ones of almost continuous warfare. External military threats – French, Spanish, Ottoman – were counterpointed by endless internal squabbles among the principalities and city-states of the peninsula. Fletcher tracks through a complex and dismal story of alliances, betrayals, sacks, sieges, famines, assassinations and gruesomely ingenious tortures.

 The conquest of the Romagna by the pope’s warlord son, Cesare Borgia, was swift and vicious. It was closely observed by a Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, who made it a case study in his book The Prince, written about 1512 and published posthumously 20 years later. This laconic breviary of amoral realpolitik – memorably described by Bertrand Russell as a “handbook for gangsters” – is the keynote text of these wartorn years. The impact of the Lutheran Reformation and the retrenchment of the Counter-Reformation add further dimensions of religious ideology to the conflicts.

Fletcher navigates this difficult terrain with great skill. She creates atmosphere and drama without any surrendering of clarity. Those with only a vague knowledge of the League of Cambrai or the Council of Trent will find them crisply explained and contextualised. She also has some trenchant chapters on the sexual politics of the era – as evidenced in the enforced seclusion of women in convents, and the glorification of rape in the pornographic poetry of Pietro Aretino and his followers.

 This is a powerful book, but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory. The argument is signalled by Fletcher’s ambitious subtitle, which promises us an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. The orthodoxy she challenges is the view of the Renaissance as an unbroken vista of exquisite art and aspirational inventiveness: a new dawn that flooded the superstitious murk of medievalism with the bright light of reason. As she points out, this somewhat utopian view was essentially a 19th-century invention, formulated in works such as Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and endorsed by eloquent Victorian aesthetes such as Walter Pater. For the majority of those who actually lived and worked in this supposed golden age, the reality was grim: they knew it as a time of terror more than beauty. In his Art of War (1521) Machiavelli argued that the cultivation of courtly art was a weakness. Looking back to the first French invasion of 1494, he criticised the complacency – the “splendour and deceit” – of the Italian princes. “They were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever assaulted them,” he wrote, and from this arose “great terrors, sudden flights and miraculous losses”.

 Burckhardt’s idealistic view of the Renaissance has long since been challenged – the Marxist historian Arnold Hauser dismissed it is an anachronistic attempt to “provide a genealogy” for 19th-century liberalism – but in Fletcher’s view it remains entrenched as a convenient cliche, and a whole lorryload of guidebooks to Italy could be cited to confirm she is right.

 So the argument of her “alternative history” is that this celebratory rhetoric “masks the brutal realities” of war, corruption, oppression and misogyny that are the facts of life in Renaissance Italy. So far, so good. But is it also true, as she asserts, that the great artistic achievements of the period are in themselves complicit in these brutalities and injustices? Her key example, heavily flagged up in the publisher’s promotion, concerns that most iconic of Renaissance artworks, The Mona Lisa. Here is the pitch: the woman portrayed in the painting, Lisa Gherardini, “was married to a slave trader”.

 This “backstory”, she believes, puts a new and very negative perspective “on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile”. Given the apparent gravity of this charge against Lisa’s husband, the silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, it is as well to state the facts behind it. Fletcher’s source is a recent discovery published in Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti’s Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting (2017). It shows that the archives of Florence cathedral record 11 baptisms sponsored by Francesco between 1487 and 1500. It is indeed likely that these people – 10 females and one 12-year-old boy – were slaves, being brought to the baptistry to be converted to Christianity: three of the women are described as “Moors” and another has an African-sounding name, Cumba. It is certainly significant that well-to-do households in Renaissance Italy had trafficked Africans among their servants; and it’s regrettable that Leonardo did not vet the moral purity of his clients more carefully. But to call Francesco a “slave trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite than a genuine argument.

In a similar vein she discusses the possibility that the Venetian courtesan Angela del Moro, AKA “La Zaffetta”, was the model for the languidly reclining nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino of c1534. She had earlier been the victim of a gang-rape, an episode lubriciously described in a poem by Lorenzo Venier, “Il Trentuno della Zaffetta” (1531). Thus, the argument might run: Titian’s Venus is implicated in the endemic sexual violence of the era, though as the identification of La Zaffetta as the model is highly speculative, this is once again a kind of special pleading. These notes of 21st-century disapproval – however justified – run counter to the clarity of historical vision that is otherwise a feature of this fine book.

 The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher review – the dark side of the Italian Renaissance

By Charles Nicholl. The Guardian,  March 12, 2020.

We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

 As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.

 The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?

 Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.

 Fletcher is particularly good, for example, on the initially surprising fact that women were more likely to wield political influence in princely states than in republics (think of the formidable figures of Lucrezia Borgia or Isabella d’Este). Elections in republics reflected classical prototypes that gave no public role to women. Elective rule typically produced a whole cohort of male leaders, in contrast to the princely state where a ruler’s spouse was expected to pick up the reins when her husband was away at war. Princely and aristocratic wives who ran their husband’s domain in their absence or after their death constitute a formidable cohort of influential rulers.

 More broadly, the opportunities offered by war are a major theme in Fletcher’s narrative: we learn a great deal about the developments in military technology that changed the face of conflict in Italy over the period covered by this book. Fletcher traces very skilfully the way in which the creation of more sophisticated firearms for soldiers encouraged greater pay differentials, which placed some strain on small Italian states heavily dependent on mercenary troops for their perennial conflicts over territorial advantage and dynastic security.

 This, in its turn, increased the attractions for Italian states of searching for powerful foreign allies who could afford standing armies of their own and were only too eager to go in search of power and profit in Italy. One of the most important shifts in Italian politics between the relatively peaceful situation in the mid-15th century and the blood-soaked chaos of the first half of the 16th, is the scale of foreign intervention. This began with the French attempt to secure the throne of Naples in the mid 1490s, when the ruler of Milan and the Pope encouraged the French king (Charles VIII) to supplant a Neapolitan monarch to whom they were hostile. It was a fateful start to decades of opportunistic foreign involvement in local Italian conflicts.

 Italy’s political history in the Middle Ages had seen a fair amount of this already, especially in the conflict between pro-papal states or groups and the supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, but the emergence of strong local dynasties in many Italian cities had stabilised things somewhat in the 1400s. By 1500, however, the stage was set for the peninsula to become a battlefield for European powers (especially France and Spain) to conduct their struggles, at an enormous cost to lives and resources.

 This cost was intensified by new technology; it is poignant to read about contemporary campaigns (and even legislation in some Italian states) to limit the production and use of new varieties of firearms, and laments at their evil effects in warfare. The Spanish were noted for their reliance on firepower, and although it is possible to exaggerate the role of firearms in the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, some Italians – and others like the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne – were not backward in characterising the Spanish campaigns there as barbaric, precisely in their use of overwhelming firepower against underequipped opponents.

 Against such a background, it is not surprising to learn that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in demand for their services as military engineers no less than as artists. Both were involved in large-scale projects, and da Vinci famously left designs for assorted weaponry, including what is often described as a machine gun. It was certainly the case that artists were expected to have a good basic grasp of engineering, and that the boundaries between art, architecture and engineering were very fluid.

 The stereotype of the “renaissance man” is accurate to the extent that the culture of the age characteristically did not favour specialisation, but the record of actual achievement is patchy. Some of da Vinci’s military designs were more or less feasible, others were not; the elegance and flair of his sketches should not mislead us into thinking that all these projects represented some visionary anticipation of modern machinery, and it is better to see them as brilliant thought experiments in solving engineering problems rather than exact designs.

 

****

 All this underlines the immense power of the Renaissance myth: from the 16th century onwards, the image of the tormented multifaceted genius, soaring ahead of the conventions of the age, has left us with a rather lopsided view of figures such as da Vinci. Giorgio Vasari’s famous Lives of the Artists (which first appeared in 1550) helped to fix the image of the inspired creative spirit – and to create a story in which Italy (and especially Florence) is the epicentre of all that is noble and truly humane in the rebirth of civilisation after centuries of barbarity. It was Vasari’s narrative that was embraced so eagerly by 19th-century European cultural historians.

 It continues to mould our understanding not only of the history of the period but our sense of what an artist and a genius really should be, and it would have been good to have in this book a slightly fuller account of how Vasari shaped the cultural “soft power” of the Italian Renaissance across the centuries – as described by Fletcher in an insightful final chapter. The Renaissance model of genius becomes a kind of witness to the sublime nature of Western civilisation as a whole; 16th-century Italy joins Periclean Athens or Marcus Aurelius’s Rome as a paradigm of timeless and universal human excellence.

 The force of Fletcher’s narrative is not so much in offering a radical new evaluation of Italian Renaissance civilisation as in insisting that we see it as a cluster of cultural strategies and techniques within an exceptionally turbulent political milieu. This does not mean for a moment that we relegate da Vinci or Michelangelo to some dramatically inferior position, but it might prompt us to greater caution about the way in which the Renaissance myth has served a rather dubious geopolitical agenda.

 Fletcher spells out at many points the role of Renaissance Italy in the great drama and tragedy of the age: the beginnings of the subjugation and enslavement of indigenous peoples on both sides of the Atlantic – through finance, seafaring expertise and, not least, by way of the legitimation given by the Papacy to various aspects of the colonial enterprise. As her final paragraph puts it, we need to be aware of where the great works of the period come from, and how their initial reception was “curated” by figures like Vasari.

 Recognising artistic excellence is not an excuse for failing to see the political and economic factors that make it practically possible – and this is bound to be shot through with a degree of moral shadow, where those factors include slavery and exploitation. A great achievement is not necessarily a timeless ideal; we can admire and even be astonished by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without using it or its designer as a universal measure of human creativity.

 If we demythologise the Renaissance a little, we may learn to do more justice to what preceded it. Professor Fletcher has a brief discussion of scientific advances in the mid 16th century, especially in anatomy, navigational skills and botany – the latter two spurred on by the fresh stimulus of colonial travel and discovery. But the fact that this treatment is relatively brief and relates to a period rather later than the “high Renaissance” should give us pause if we are inclined to think of this as an epoch of spectacular scientific progress.

 Many scholars have pointed out that the 15th and early 16th centuries are a rather stagnant period in many areas of natural science compared with some parts of the Middle Ages, when astronomy, mechanics and logic made substantial advances. The great 16th-century exception, Copernicus’s treatise of 1543 on the circulation of planets around the sun, was not a dramatic and total rejection of earlier astronomical method based on new scientific evidence, but a refinement designed to clear up the mathematics of charting the heavenly bodies. It was received with interest and some enthusiasm at the time, but was clearly not seen as a radical departure from the principles of Aristotle. Only with slightly later figures like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) did actual observation of the heavens play a decisive part in the argument.

 The uncomfortable truth is that the age of the Renaissance contributed very little to innovation in science. This was largely because the revival of classical learning and languages concentrated attention on what was called humanitas – literary and rhetorical accomplishment (hence our designation of some academic subjects as “humanities”) – rather than on empirical observation or technical skill in logic and mathematics.

 Later medieval philosophy had become achingly technical, and the recovery of classical literature offered a welcome relief. The writings of the medievals were mocked for their stylistic awfulness; and the exhilaration and enthusiasm for the Platonic tradition that arose in the later 15th century was, as much as anything, an enthusiasm for a philosophy that more obviously promised moral and spiritual insight, rather than the virtuoso analysis of concepts. So might a 20th-century student have felt on reading Jean-Paul Sartre after an unbroken diet of logical positivism in undergraduate philosophy.

 ****

 For good and ill, the Renaissance as an intellectual phenomenon was not a revolt in the name of “reason” or “liberty” or any such Enlightenment motive. It was an excited recovery of the ideals of formal elegance and proportion in writing and building. It was also the flowering of a sort of New Age fascination with ancient and hidden wisdom. The great strength of Professor Fletcher’s book is that it helps us keep the Renaissance in proportion, rather than seeing it as either the decisive foundation for Western modernity (it was in many ways backward-looking, its energy linked to models of revival and recovery rather than advance), or a melodrama of Olympian geniuses and (literally) Machiavellian villains.

 To learn that Lucrezia Borgia owned a mozzarella factory is somehow a useful corrective to the melodrama; to know that some of da Vinci’s supposed inventions were Heath Robinson fantasies balances the myth of universal genius.

 Reading this engaging book helps us to appreciate the undoubted exuberance of the period without signing up to a distinctly shopworn narrative of some triumphant awakening from dogmatic slumbers, destined to change the face of global humanity – whether global humanity liked it or not.

Breaking the Renaissance myth :  Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so too did slavery and warfare. By Rowan Williams. New Statesman, May 27,   2020

 

As Catherine Fletcher notes at the outset of her new book, The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, millions of tourists flock to Florence every year to gaze at the architecture and art of the Renaissance jewel box. They photograph the Duomo topped by Brunelleschi’s dome, wait in long lines to see Michelangelo’s David, fight their way across the Ponte Vecchio, and savor gelato. Such is the “beauty” of the title. Yet there is also “terror” shadowing these beauties, which Fletcher aims to bring to light in order to provide a richer account of the Italian Renaissance. In her introductory chapter, she highlights three examples: the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader; one possible model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a famous Venetian courtesan, was gang-raped; and the Florentine Republic symbolized by Michelangelo’s David came to an end in 1530 with the sack of the city and ensuing slaughter of thousands. The beauty and the terror.

 In addition to informing admirers of the artistic and other familiar achievements of the Italian Renaissance of the often less-than-beautiful political and social context in which they were produced, Fletcher wants to contextualize the history of Italy during the period within larger trends across Europe and indeed the world, as indicated in her book’s subtitle. The Italian Renaissance has frequently been characterized — or caricatured — as the birthplace of modern Western civilization, or rather the rebirth (renaissance) of this civilization with the rediscovery of classical learning and art. In this interpretation, Italy is the source of the literary, artistic, and scientific movements that then spread throughout Europe and ultimately across “the West.” While she recounts the achievements of the Italian Renaissance and their influence, Fletcher puts as much emphasis on how the larger European and international context shaped the political, social, religious, economic, artistic, and intellectual currents in Italy during the period.

 Fletcher’s introduction — titled simply “1492” — provides a good illustration of her goal. That year witnessed three events that would have greater ramifications than those who lived through them could have appreciated. First, there was the death of Lorenzo “The Magnificent,” the head of the Medici family that effectively ruled Florence for the previous 60 years and an important patron of learning and art. In retrospect, Lorenzo’s death destabilized not only Florentine politics, for just two years later his heir would flee the city and the republic would be restored, but also the delicate balance of power in the Italian peninsula, opening the door for foreign armies to invade Italy and make it the battleground of Europe for the next 40 years.

 The second event of 1492 was the final reconquest of Spain with the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, followed in short order by the flight of the Jews. Apart from the dislocations caused by the event itself, the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella was representative of the formation of what would become the modern state in Spain, France, and elsewhere, a development that made Italy vulnerable to invasion and plunder, with its own unification having to wait nearly four more centuries. The third event was the discovery of the New World in October of that year, by a Genoese captain sponsored by their most Catholic majesties of Spain, to be followed a few years later by, among others, a Florentine merchant and navigator who lent his name to these newly discovered lands: Amerigo Vespucci. Soldiers, priests, and other adventurers followed, seeking the gold that soon flooded Europe, leaving behind smallpox while bringing back such unknown items as tomatoes and corn, without which Italian cuisine would be unrecognizable today.

 In short, as Fletcher shows in this chapter, the direction of influence between Italy and Europe (and the world) ran in both directions. Fletcher persuasively illustrates that understanding the Italian Renaissance requires understanding the larger context of the early modern world, and vice versa.

Beginning in 1492, with some glances backward to consequential incidents such as the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Fletcher ends her account with the defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Her reasons for choosing this end date are unclear. But it has the effect of extending the usual treatment of the “High Renaissance” beyond the customary terminus point of the end of the Italian Wars with the sack of Rome in 1527 or the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530. In terms of art, this makes some sense, lengthening the account through the first part of the “Late Renaissance” period. After all, Michelangelo would live for another 30 years after the fall of Florence (whose fortifications he oversaw), spending most of the rest of his life in Rome executing such projects as painting The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and overseeing the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. The dating choice makes less obvious sense otherwise. As Fletcher herself notes, the later period saw a decline in Italy’s fortunes as, paradoxically, the relative peace that succeeded the Italian Wars also effectively sidelined the peninsula politically and militarily.

As an overview of Italian Renaissance history in the continental and international context from 1492 to 1571, Fletcher’s book is largely successful. The 26 chapters are generally thematic, most being devoted to political or military events in Italy across the period, giving the book a coherence dictated by chronology. Other chapters, interspersed within this framework, take up such subjects as literary or artistic figures and movements, the discovery of the New World, women’s role in society, the Reformation, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Inquisition. Fletcher’s coverage of political, military, social, intellectual, and artistic issues is impressive, and she generally does an admirable job tying together these diverse subjects. The sheer number of people and events she covers is sometimes dizzying. Such coverage has a few drawbacks, however. Fletcher seems to want to tell a good story when she has one, and while I enjoyed many of the anecdotes she relates, sometimes they felt forcibly inserted into the narrative. There is also considerable repetition, and while it is useful to be reminded who someone is upon their most recent appearance, I did not need to be told over and over that Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este were sisters-in-law or reminded four times that Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, murdered Cardinal Alidosi. At any rate, as someone fairly well versed in this history, I did not have difficulty keeping up with all the people, places, and events, but I did wonder how someone less familiar with the subject would fare.

 Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance. Moreover, to recur to the three examples she gives of terror lurking behind beauty in her introductory chapter, I am not clear on how my view of the Italian Renaissance should be affected. The first example is the alleged fact that the subject of the Mona Lisa, Lisa Gherardini, was married to a slave trader. When we finally get to the story, we learn that he was a merchant involved at some small remove from the transatlantic trade, and that he had several enslaved people baptized in Florence, which does look suspicious. More surprisingly, given Fletcher’s initial statement and the marketing materials for the book, we are informed that he was “very likely” a slave trader. This is not the smoking gun we had been promised. (Incidentally, I believe Mona Lisa was Lorenzo del Giocondo’s third wife, not his second.)

The second example Fletcher gives is that a potential model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the courtesan Angela Zaffetta, was gang-raped by 31 men (a ritual punishment for courtesans). This time Fletcher only claims the woman is a “possible” model for the painting, but while I learned more about the poor treatment of courtesans, I do not know how my view of the painting itself, much less Renaissance art, should be affected by this possibility. The third example is the fact that the Florentine Republic came to an end in 1530 with “a sack of ‘unheard-of cruelty.’” Yet that is not what happened. Florence surrendered after a year-long siege, and while the protracted fighting throughout the Florentine territories cost perhaps 10,000 lives, the surrender of the city itself was remarkably bloodless. The usual suspects among the republican leadership were rounded up — a few were executed, some tortured, others exiled ­— but otherwise it was a miraculously mild transition of power for the time. Indeed, perplexingly, Fletcher’s account of the events within her larger narrative is consistent with these facts. Her description in the introductory chapter sounds more like the 1527 sack of Rome.

 Finally, I caught a disturbing number of errors or omissions, and although I would not call any of them consequential for Fletcher’s larger aims, they did begin to undermine my faith in the details of her story. I restrict my attention to Machiavelli, since that is a subject I know something about. Writing of the French invasion of 1494 and the flight of the Medici from Florence, Fletcher characterizes Machiavelli as among the opponents of the Medici at that time. We have no evidence for such a claim, however, especially since the first extant letter we have from Machiavelli is from 1498 and also because we also know that his relationship with the family over time was rather more complicated. Later, Fletcher states that Machiavelli was released from prison due to influential friends, but his release was actually due to a general amnesty granted with the election of Giovanni de Medici as Pope Leo X. She also relays the often repeated but now discredited idea that Machiavelli was exiled from Florence during this same period. In fact, Machiavelli was in something of a “reverse exile” for he was ordered not to leave Florence and its territories for one year. Having been relieved of his official positions, he was only prohibited from entering his former workplace, the Palazzo della Signoria, and during this “exile” Machiavelli frequented the city and was even asked a number of times to return to the Palazzo to help wrap up unfinished business. Finally, Fletcher states that Michelangelo worked with Machiavelli on a 1503 plan to divert the Arno during Florence’s long siege of Pisa, whereas it was Leonardo da Vinci who did so. There are numerous readily available sources she could have consulted on this episode; the source she does cite in fact makes the same mistake with regard to Michelangelo, and itself cites as a source a mid-19th-century book (as Fletcher notes). Oddly enough, this book has nothing to say about the episode at all, in part because it occurred five years after the subject of the biography, Savonarola, had died. In turn, in her bibliography Fletcher mistakenly cites as the source a different book by the same author — a biography of Machiavelli. This is more promising, for Pasquale Villari does discuss the plan to divert the Arno — but with no reference to Leonardo, much less to Michelangelo.

These are the mistakes I caught only with regard to Machiavelli, but I fear there are more lurking in the volume. Even if they are not themselves particularly consequential, such errors are unfortunate and unnecessary, marring what would otherwise be an interesting and informative book.

 A Darker View of the Renaissance. By John T. Scott. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2020.

Catherine Fletcher  website

In Memoriam : Gustav Deutsch, Juggler of Found Footage

Starting in the late 1970s, Austrian filmmaker, photographer, and architect Gustav Deutsch began appropriating and recontextualizing found footage to create nearly a hundred works in the tradition of such artists as Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner. In 2013, his filmography took a surprising turn when, working with his partner, the artist Hanna Schimek, he directed Shirley: Visions of Reality, a fictional feature that vividly recreates thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper to tell the story of an American actress from the 1930s through the early ’60s. This past weekend, following a brief and sudden illness, Deutsch passed away at the age of sixty-seven.

There’s hardly an artistic discipline that Deutsch didn’t at least dabble in after graduating from the Vienna University of Technology. He staged actionist performances, worked with music and sound, presented research projects and installations with Schimek in Morocco, cofounded the Aegina Academy with her in Athens, and as part of the group of artists known as Der blaue Kompressor, designed a park in Luxembourg. But Deutsch will be remembered for his films, and in particular for the Film ist. trilogy. As scholar Tom Gunning has pointed out, these films can be seen as a reply to the question posed by the title of the collection of essays by André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Gunning recalls that he “initially read Deutsch’s title as an act of predication: ‘Film is . . .’ followed by a succession of possible, non-exclusive, definitions: an instrument; material; magic; conquest, etc. However, he pointed out to me the power of the period following the ‘ist.’ The title is not an incomplete definition, but a complete reflexive statement: ‘Film is.’”

Gunning revisited the trilogy in an essay published in Gustav Deutsch, a collection published in 2009 on the occasion of a retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum. In Film ist. 1–6 (1998), an assembly incorporating material from science and education films, Deutsch “stripped these films of the explanations of physiology or psychology that originally accompanied them,” writes Gunning. “Without these reassuring explanations, much of the footage seems strange, dream-like, horrifying or amusing, grotesque. Instead of being processed for the information they hold, these images confront us in all their oddness.”

Film ist. 7–12 (2002) focuses on the first three decades of cinema, exploring the new medium and art form less as a technological innovation and more as a spectacle. Writing for the Village Voice in 2003, Ed Halter noted that this second installment “sets decaying, hand-tinted images of ancient modernity against droning, staticky electronic soundscapes by Christian Fennesz and Martin Siewert. The result is a hypnotic drift of relentless disjunctions: lions invade the sitting room of mauve decade aristocrats; a decapitated, haloed saint recovers her severed head; a black-cloaked apparition rises from a time-scratched sea.”

The title of Film ist. a Girl & a Gun (2009) references a quote attributed to D. W. Griffith and famously revived by Jean-Luc Godard: “All you need to make a movie . . .” Tackling nothing less than the story of all creation, Deutsch’s film is comprised of five movements: Genesis, Paradise, Eros, Thanatos, and Symposium. “Deutsch recombines shards of archival footage—vintage nature docs, silent melodramas, old newsreels, and ancient porn—to explosive effect,” wrote J. Hoberman in the Voice in 2009. “By the end, sex and violence, love and death, are virtually interchangeable. Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun is not subtle, but its literalism—which refines the avant-primitivism of older Viennese artists—is its strength. Deutsch has a sense of motion pictures as a form of sex magic.”

In 2004, on the occasion of a film series curated by Todd Haynes for the Tate Modern, Observer critic Philip French wrote about the love affair between cinema and Edward Hopper. French spotted Hopper’s influence in the work of directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock and Wim Wenders, but no homage is nearly as literal as Shirley: Visions of Reality. The film was met with mixed reviews but also with Austrian Film Awards for cinematography (Jerzy Palacz), costume design (Julia Cepp), and production design (Deutsch and Schimek). “In my previous work,” Deutsch told Karin Schiefer in an interview, “I established a connection between the images of diverse films. Through montage, I managed to create meaning contexts by attempting to unearth something that was not the original intention of the filmmakers.” With Shirley, he “intended to narrate thirty years of American history, the same time period that coincides with the creation of the pictures . . . The tableau vivant is a precursor of cinematography. It was a popular social pastime to re-enact famous paintings, and film in its early stages also assumed this form of entertainment. My main idea was to ‘vivify’ the pictures.”

At the time of his death, Deutsch was working with Schimek and the Austrian Film Museum on a research project, on the margins: the city, which brings screenings and exhibitions to various neighborhoods in Vienna. The next program will proceed as planned from November 14 through 22. Over the weekend, Schimek and the Museum released a statement noting that Gustav Deutsch “believed that aesthetic excellence could be combined with an uncompromising commitment to the social impact of art, but above all that, he was a gracious and generous person.”

Gustav Deutsch : Film Ist. By David Hudson.   Criterion , November 4, 2019.

                            Film Ist 11 Gefuehl und Leidenschaft

Er sagte lieber zwei Sätze zu wenig als einen zu viel, aber sein hintergründiges Lächeln signalisierte stets Wertschätzung, die Herzlichkeit, mit der er seinem Umfeld begegnete. Man mag die gelassene, eher wortkarge Erscheinung des Künstlers Gustav Deutsch auch als Merkmal seiner Arbeit nehmen: Die Wirkungsmacht seiner Operationen am bewegten Bild ergab sich nicht nur aus dem sicheren Wissen, seine Forschungsfelder in aller Ruhe und Genauigkeit ausgelotet zu haben, sondern auch aus dem Wunsch, sich selbst und die Welt, die sich in seinen Werken eröffnete, nicht ernster zu nehmen als unbedingt nötig.

Gustav Deutsch, geboren 1952 und initiiert im politisierten Umfeld der Wiener Medienwerkstatt um 1980, gehörte seit den 1990er-Jahren zu den Größen der internationalen Found-Footage-Szene. Indem er Filmfundstücke auf unerwartete Weise gegeneinander setzte, sie neu komponierte und rekontextualisierte, konnte er demonstrieren, wie weit die Strahl- und Schlagkraft eines Mediums reichte, das sich im Geschichtenerzählen und bloßen Dokumentieren nicht erschöpfte: Er konfrontierte Szenen aus wissenschaftlichen Filmen mit handverlesenen Splittern aus Amateur- und Spielfilmen, förderte aus den Archiven nie gesehene Bilder aus den ersten Jahrzehnten des Kinos zutage; er feierte die sinnliche Attraktion fotografischer Verfallszustände, indem er zerkratzte, bekritzelte Kader, schadhafte Kopien und schmelzende Filmbilder zeigte.

Als Arbeiter am Kino war Deutsch ein Reisender zwischen den Zeiten: Er bildete, um ihre Schönheit für die Zukunft zu bewahren, die Gegenwartszustände seiner von der Vergangenheit zeugenden Bildobjekte ab. Die lebenden Toten der Filmgeschichte, die fragilen Lichtgestalten des frühen Kinos, die anonymen Urlaubsfilmhelden und Zufallspassanten faszinierten ihn. Das Ideologische seines Mediums verlor er dabei nicht aus den Augen. Denn die Laufbilder vermitteln vor allem eines: Weltanschauung. Filmemachen ist eine Frage des Blicks.

Der Found-footage-Jongleur war indes nur eine seiner vielen Identitäten: Gustav Deutsch arbeitete auch als Architekt, Konzept- und Installationskünstler, seine Projektpalette umfasste Foto- und Videoarbeiten, Vortragsserien, Performances und Ausstellungen für den musealen Raum, multimediale Migrationsstudien und interkulturelle Kunstvermittlungsunternehmungen. Aber das Kino war der Knotenpunkt seines Schaffens. Seine entscheidenden Fragen lauteten: Was hat uns das Kino mitzuteilen, wenn man es aus seinen alten Funktionszusammenhängen reißt? Was signalisieren die Zeit- und Gebrauchsspuren in seinen Oberflächen? Welche geheimen Botschaften sind in den Filmfragmenten gespeichert?

Mit der seriellen Urlaubsfilmmontage „Adria“ fand er 1990 zu seinem Zentralthema. Von den Dokumentarkonventionen seiner frühen Filme emanzipierte er sich damit nachhaltig. „Adria“ versammelt Amateuraufnahmen vom Strandurlaub. Dabei legte Deutsch eine kollektive Ästhetik des Hobbyfilms bloß. Danach begann er, gemeinsam mit seiner Partnerin Hanna Schimek, in Archiven, Kinematheken und Filmsammlungen nach verschütteten Bildern für seine Kino-Assemblagen zu fahnden. Es gehe ihm darum, „unbeachtete und ungeliebte Filme vor dem Vergessen zu retten“, erläuterte er trocken. Aber Kino-Archäologie allein genügte ihm nicht. Er zielte aufs Wesentliche.

In der zwischen 1998 und 2009 veröffentlichten „Film ist.“-Serie untersuchte er sein Medium spielerisch-systematisch. Das Mathematische und das Magische, zwei Grundbedingungen des Kinos, bildeten in seiner Filmarbeit nicht einfach deren Pole, sondern den Mittelpunkt seines Schaffens. Naturgewalten, Sonnenlichtspiele, Mondphasen, Gewitter und Sternenfunkeln betrachtete er als vorfilmische Phänomene, er sprach vom „Projektionsraum Himmel“.

Gustav Deutsch wusste, dass die Mysterien der zwischen Evidenz und Phantasma changierenden Bewegtbildkunst nicht endgültig zu klären waren. So bemühte er sich – Antworten zwangsläufig schuldig bleibend – um die Präzisierung seiner Fragen, um lustvolle künstlerische Zuspitzung der tausend Finten eines Mediums, dem wir uns sehlüstern und gutgläubig immer wieder anvertrauen. Deutsch schloss in seiner Arbeit nichts aus, keine Bildersorte hatte bei ihm Vorrang – und alles, auch das scheinbar „Wertlose“, Anspruch auf kritische Durchleuchtung: zufällig Gefundenes und selbst Inszeniertes, laienhafte und professionelle Darstellungen, early cinema und spätes Filmtheater, Fernsehen und Kino, „Kunst“ und „Kitsch“.

Für sein Spielfilmexperiment „Shirley – Visionen der Realität“ (2013) erkundete er die stilisierten Bildräume des Malers Edward Hopper. Die Idee, 13 der berühmten Ölgemälde des Amerikaners im Studio aufwändig nachzubauen, mit einem Schauspielteam (angeführt von der Tänzerin und Performance-Künstlerin Stephanie Cumming) zu besetzen und zu einer Art Erzählung zu verketten, mutete im Zeitalter der digitalen Abkürzungen ausgesprochen altmodisch an. Auch deshalb führte er Ungeahntes, Denkwürdiges vor. „Shirley“ sei ein Film, den nur ein Architekt, eine Tänzerin und eine Malerin machen konnten, sagt Deutsch damals – denn es brauchte, um die Arbeit zu konzipieren, nicht nur jenes Verständnis für Räume und Gebäude, das der Architekt Deutsch mitbrachte, sondern eben auch das Zutun einer choreografisch versierten Darstellerin und die Hilfe einer für die Hintergrundmalerei zuständigen Künstlerin, die mit Hanna Schimek zur Verfügung stand. Sein Film sei „auch der Studiogeschichte Hollywoods verhaftet“, erklärte Deutsch, „schon deshalb wollte ich diese Räume bauen, den Reiz der Materialität spüren. Und genau wie das klassische Kino, das seine Künstlichkeit ja auch stets ausgestellt hat, weiß Hopper zu berühren, obwohl man sehen kann, wie konstruiert, wie falsch das alles gebaut ist.“

                                                        Shirley:Visions of Reality (trailer)

Mit seinem letzten großen Film „So leben wir. Botschaften an die Familie“ (2017) drang er sich noch einmal in das utopische Universum alter Amateurfilme ein, in denen die Menschen das Positive ihres jeweiligen Lebensentwurfs für die ferne Rest- und Nachwelt festzuhalten suchten. Um das Leben in der Fremde ging es da, um Filme als Notizbücher, als visuelle Postkarten: eine letzte jener alternativen Geschichten des Kinos according to Gustav Deutsch. Bis zuletzt war er in alter Leidenschaft kreativ: Vor wenigen Wochen noch arbeitete er, wie gewohnt an der Seite Hanna Schimeks und in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Österreichischen Filmmuseum, an einem Projekt zur Darstellung Wiens in Hobby- und Amateurfilmen bis hin zu Handyvideos. Das Unternehmen kann er nun nicht mehr selbst vollenden. Am 2. November erlag Gustav Deutsch 67-jährig seiner Krebserkrankung.

Gustav Deutsch: Jäger der verlorenen Schätze.  Von Stefan Grissemann.  Profil , November 5, 2019.

More on the film : 'Shirley: Visions of Reality" 

Film Director Gustav Deutsch Brings the World of Edward Hopper to Life.  By Eric David. Yatzer, May 15, 2016.

In the course of the European Cultural Project Light/Image/Reality, a camera obscura was built on the Greek Island of Aegina in 2003. Those responsible were Gustav Deutsch (idea/concept), Franz Berzl (architecture) and Gavrilos Michalis (realization). It is a cylindrical building with twelve small openings evenly allocated on its perimeter. When they are opened, the light from the surroundings is reflected in the building onto twelve screens, which are suspended from the ceiling in a circle. These natural projections result in a twelve-part panoramic view of the surroundings, mirror-inverted and upside down. The building was erected on the foundation of a German anti-aircraft gun emplacement from World War II and is a steel construction with wooden paneling. It is the first camera obscura building in Greece and the first in the world to project a panoramic view. Matthias Boeckl writes: "The upside-down world, as well as the ritual entrance through a chute or gateway from the outside world, gives you the feeling of 'another' world, which is actually still our own."

The "other" world, which is actually still our own, also finds its way into the cinema. What is seen there has, however, passed through more than one dark room. We may consider the camera obscura a lost utopia of the medium of film; a room that is simultaneously a camera, a laboratory and a cinema; a room where filming, development, printing and projection take place simultaneously—at the speed of light. On the other hand (and inspired by Bazin), we may also consider the film medium the historically last and most advanced of those recording or representational systems, which are still linked with reality through physical contact, such as the camera obscura—real gateways to the outside world. That is, systems of representation, in which reality doesn't just appear in quotation marks.

The work of the artist, filmmaker and camera obscura designer Gustav Deutsch deals with such systems and gateways; the zones of contact between two "worlds" or realities, which should by no means be played against each other or separated entirely from one another. "Our" world takes a deep interest in the "other" and vice versa; each of them is a part of the other. Deutsch's preferred term for the "other" world (which is nevertheless still ours) is film. In the titles of three of his works, he uses the formulation Film is. and puts a dot in place of the numerous historical, contemporary or future definitions (or "reductions") of the medium of film. The dot, or the period, comprises several meanings or movements in one small space. Firstly, a full stop, or the decision that film exists—independent of the individual definitions and uses that humanity makes of it. "There is 'another' world." Secondly, a valuation, which lies in the reverent brevity of the formulation, the pathos of evidence: "It is a wonderful world." Thirdly, an explosive opening up in all directions, the paradoxical counterpart to the first movement. The dot is infinite. It provides its own gateway, a resistance to be overcome, to be flooded by all the experiences, expectations and potential that the word "film" (and the fact of the actual, extra-linguistic existence of film) has released. "Film is infinite, and infinitely meaningful. Film speaks many languages. Film is more than film."

It is that "more than" which suggests some of Gustav Deutsch's major interests, as well as the characteristic convergence of scholarly and artistic processes in his work; scholarly work that is conscious of its aesthetic and poetic elements, and art that strives to be seen as explanatory, enlightening and clarifying.

The "more than" is, for example, that of the psychoanalyst or poet, who recombines the fragmentary material available to him or her in a new manner, or discovers a new rhythm and sound in it. Deutsch's found footage films are all related to such activities. Images, which seemingly have nothing or little to do with each other (in terms of origin), or "don't belong together," are compared, interlaced and considered related. There are often external correlations, formal correspondences, or hidden connections, which lead to such sequencing. Only then is a third (or sixth) sense recognizable, like in a dream or a rebus. For example in the night verses of Film ist. 2.2, which are accompanied by a barking dog: shadow figures made by hands; the moon behind the passing clouds; a spotlight illuminating a storm-stricken town; a full-frame shot of the moon; moths in a light; space—the final frontier; a lunar eclipse; a human eye—the pupil responding to light and dark; and finally, a circular accumulation of bacteria around a pool of light. All of life, inside and outside of the cinema, is based on "phototactic behavior."

Gustav Deutsch's "more than" is also the primary motivation behind a certain tendency in cultural studies, investigating historical artifacts in order to decipher the forces, potentials, and power relations at work in a given society—and make them useful for the present. A further example from Film ist. illustrates how larger structures can be recognized in small, seemingly arbitrary finds of film footage. The dirty, trashy piece of film, which appears in chapter 4 of Film ist., was acquired by Deutsch at a flea market in Brazil. A test strip damaged by cleaning agents, it contains two frames each from all scenes of a movie or TV melodrama. At some later point in time, a cleaning lady had used this old film strip to clean floors with, as a practical means of recycling materials. Here a psychoanalytical perspective goes hand in hand with the sociological reading. The test strip still carries within itself the narrative neurosis and ideological preoccupations of the dominant film industry, but it also exemplifies an opposing force. In artistic terms, it is an experimental film, which—as each scene is reduced to two frames—ridicules the ideological essence of its origin and gives birth to a different, dynamic beauty. And it is an "experimental film" in practical terms, which—due to the specific material properties of the emulsion coating—brings to light its own surprising cleansing effect in the hands of a cleaning person. This naturally also ruined it. The fact that the cleaning lady, who used it, was also—potentially—part of the mass audience that watched the original soap opera, makes the whole story even more scintillating.

"Macht kaputt, was Euch kaputt macht" ("Destroy whatever is destroying you") was the title of a rebellious 1969 song by the German band Ton Steine Scherben. If one assumes (like many people did in 1969) that film and TV melodramas are "destroying" their audiences by turning them into "passive victims" of the dominant ideology, then the Brazilian cleaning lady represents the concept of an emancipatory counterstrike. Even if one believes (as do many contemporary scholars of film and cultural studies) that the audiences of such soap operas have access to various strategies of subversion and revaluation, and should not only be seen as victims, the film as a cleaning article represents a nice allegory of such a revaluation strategy. This proves more difficult, however, when we speculate about the results of the cleaning process in question. Is the floor perfectly clean, does the home sparkle when the owner comes back from her daily shopping spree? Her gem of a cleaning lady has bettered her own record. At the very least, she deserves an extra tip, or at friendly pat on the shoulder. Did the filmstrip, therefore, serve to stabilize the social system for a second time around? Did the cleaning lady outdo herself with the help of the strip, or did she do herself in—in the belief she could do better work? First, when she dreamt of "another world" while watching the original film on the screen, and then when she used the material residue of that film to improve her own work, maintaining the master and servant relationship in the process? Or could it be a lot less sophisticated? Didn’t the filmstrip simply contribute to helping a person with high professional standards master a particularly difficult task—giving herself a real degree of satisfaction?

It's not a coincidence that at the end of such a chain of thoughts, more questions have come to light than answers. The clarifying and enlightening aspects of Gustav Deutsch's artistic practice should not be confused with solutions, answers or conclusions. What his work results in are insights into the multi-faceted relationship between "our" and the "other" world. History is engraved into the reality of the images and objects that surround us, just like in the case of the camera obscura on Aegina, built on the foundation of an old German anti-aircraft gun emplacement. "Our history" and "our lives" are also depicted in film images, and inscribed on the filmstrip itself, but in order to illuminate all of their contradictions and social dimensions (no matter whether it be for an artistic or a scholarly purpose), working methods are required other than the currently widespread surfing, downloading and revamping of the supposedly "unlimited" reservoir of images available in the digital world. What is needed, for example, is a premeditated approach that slows down the work, makes it more arduous and limits its scope—in order to create situations, where the "resistance of objects" (Helmut Lethen) manifests itself and the objects themselves become articulate.

Deutsch's "visits to the archives"—since the beginning of his work on Film ist.—not only serve to reclaim hundreds and thousands of stored filmstrips and images from earlier times, but also to recapture these kinds of situations. His repeated trips from film archive to film archive, his communication with the archivists about their potential and actual holdings, his long viewing sessions at the editing tables on site, his vast notes or visual transcriptions of these viewing sessions (mostly in the form of sketches made together with Hanna Schimek) and the retranslation of those notes into a first draft of the film—all these activities are attempts to measure and experience the "inherent weight" of the original film footage, in order not to make things simpler (for himself) than they are in the context of their genesis and their meaning. Corresponding working methods can be traced way back to Deutsch and Schimek's artistic biography, at least until the 1980s: performative research in the desert; the five-year project of "Planning a public garden in keeping with artistic and usability criteria;" projects entitled The Art of Traveling, etc.

The dual evidence of film lies in its function as a vehicle for the photographic images captured in it, as well as its inherent function as a "material witness," which carries with it the history of its use. At first it would appear completely logical that this dual function can be better recognized and studied in an archive (on the editing table, in one's hands or under a magnifying glass) than in a museum (in an exhibition, in the cinema, during projection). According to this logic, Deutsch's visits to the archives are a mark of progress, e.g. in contrast to the well-known notion of the artist, who goes to a museum exhibition to find inspiration in the masterpieces of the past. Such an artist will mainly adhere to the surface of these images, their perception and their aesthetic traditions. In an archive, assisted by the restorers, researchers and cataloguers, he or she would find out much more about the material and contextual history (the "verso side") of the works in question. In addition, museums usually exhibit "museum pieces," meaning a relatively narrow, "outstanding" part of the complete inventory—that which correlates with the aesthetic and art-historical premises which are prevalent at a given time. In the archives, on the other hand, there is always more—"more than" the canon, more than can be found hanging on the walls or than is regularly screened in cinemas or film museums. This is also where the proverbial "revenge of the archive" comes in—not only in that trivial sense, in which a journalist sometimes exposes someone's lies or schemes to the public by confronting them with contradictory or incriminating images or statements from the archives. The return of long-forgotten, cobweb-ridden, non-canonical artifacts can also be characterized in a more positive sense—as the potency of artifacts to be uncovered as alternatives. Their "different" or "foreign" shape, which derives from their former, now historical—or "outdated"—normalcy, naturally contradicts the current "normalcy" and thus also the custom of passing off the current state of a society as inevitable and unalterable, as a natural state.

In order to actually set free the potency of the artifacts, to enable them to reappear as alternatives, it is advisable to follow up the arduous archival work with another "step of progress"—the step towards a genuine re-presentation of the recaptured images, offering a new view of them on the basis of the experiences made in the archives, on the editing table. It is a step back into the public sphere, to a new work of art, or simply to an exhibition, to the cinema or the museum—with the difference that the "double-sidedness," the dual evidence of the film now tends to be exhibited, too. In addition to the generally accepted connection with reality that the filmic or photographic images have, the "hidden" weight of the original film footage will now also become evident, the unique history of the materials used and the historicity of the medium as a whole.

Gustav Deutsch's works, particularly those beginning with the phrase Film ist., take such a step with ease and confidence—even in places where they create new clusters of meaning (with the help of newly composed music, for instance). They can neither be reduced to closed narratives, nor to the function of "historical proof" (a common practice whenever archival material is being used on TV). As demonstrated by the structure of Deutsch's film Welt Spiegel Kino, there is always another or more-than-one other image behind each image, and this will also never be the definitive or final one. Chapter 9 of Film ist., for instance, reaches beyond the sort of dry evidence that its subtitle—Conquest—would seem to promise at first glance. It offers a cultural and social-historical outline of the expansionist ideas which characterize Western bourgeois society in the late 19th and early 20th century, and demonstrates how film accompanied, reflected and supported these ideas—from claiming territory by various new means of visual and material transport (train, cinema, airplane) to the more or less "peaceful" incorporation, measuring and exhibition of what is deemed "savage," and the violent conquest of land through war. In decisive moments, however, these passages invite a different reading. When lions suddenly leap out of fireplaces into middle-class living rooms, or a python snakes out of a night table, one can sense the fear of the bourgeois that the savages might invade the innermost hearth of civilization. From the perspective of the latter, of course, this means the colonial system is finally beginning to tip. The European peoples' arrogance and lack of humanity have become obvious during the passages which show how indigenous peoples were measured and "documented"’ by means of medicine and cinematography. But in Deutsch’s utopian selection of images, the counter-attack of the ‘savages’ is even stronger: They are sending us their full register of animalistic revenge, via our fireplaces and night tables, into the bedrooms of our bad conscience. At the end of the sequence, the python creeps over a magnificently ornamented carpet that is going up in flames.

The proverbial "cussedness of things" would be a good metaphor for this and many other examples from the Film ist. series. With innumerable archival finds, and with his sparse and gentle manipulations of the footage (slow motion, reverse motion), Deutsch demonstrates how strong the "alternative" potential of cinematic artifacts is. It only takes a nudge and the ideas and objects recorded on film begin to work against their apparent purpose—including the filmstrip itself, as the example of the Brazilian cleaning lady has shown. Chapter 7.1 celebrates a whole series of "cussed objects" (doors, ladders, bicycles, hoses); 7.4 proposes the reversal of time, of sexual difference, and of all the destruction wrought by man and woman; and chapter 8 (Magic) is entirely devoted to the suspension of everyday logic—most beautifully in the case of 8.2, with its "resurrections" and its invitation to roam freely between life and death or Heaven and Earth.

In the Film ist. project, Deutsch never makes a secret of the various inscriptions the archival footage carries, that is the extremely varying textures, the grades of color or black and white, and the degree of damage accumulated on the film. On the contrary, he exhibits them—and encourages the viewer to ponder this "hidden weight" of the film artifacts. It is a sort of counter weight to all the representational capacities of film, to the "real world" references that we’ve come to expect from film images. Whoever exhibits these inscriptions, opens the floodgate for one of the most beautiful dreams of film, which is usually suppressed: the dream of someday being able to tell its own story, not just the stories of the people depicted. The dream sequence in chapter 8.3 of Film ist. refers to this very set of circumstances. A sleeping woman is tossing around in her dreams. A paper-mâché cave appears to her and to us, in the middle of which the image threatens to disappear. At the time when the original piece of nitrate film was preserved in the archive, the footage had obviously already disintegrated to a good degree—exactly at this spot. The flickering damage in the frames worsens from second to second, and the damage itself takes on the place of the image. It is an exciting image that wasn't premeditated, an image the film footage produced "by itself" in the course of its history, that is to say blindly. Some film archivists call these images the "flowers of evil." At the climax of the shot, and at the center of the image where the damage is now in full bloom, the paper-mâché cave turns into the horrifying maw of the devil—as if both aspects of the medium, its recto and its verso side so to speak, were now communicating with each other, as if the images captured one hundred years ago and the damage accumulating over one hundred years were aware of each other's most intimate secrets. The floodgate enabling these two worlds to be in contact with each other would seem both allegorical and tangible, right in front of our eyes. And in-between, we keep on watching the sleeping woman, whose dream—assisted by more devil's maws, superimpositions and ghostly apparitions—turns into a fantasy of flying and (sexual) escape; a contradictory narrative of (self-) empowerment through forcible interventions by a "dream savage." He tears the woman out of her bourgeois existence and flings her upwards, into space, where she experiences the wonder and the glory of floating free. At this point in Gustav Deutsch's production, the woman is playing the role of the film.

"The rest is history," is what we usually say when everything that matters seems to have been said. However, it has never all been said, and the rest is not only infinite and never-ending—"to be continued," as indicated in the endings of several films by Gustav Deutsch—but also another (hi)story. It is that, which has not yet been entirely illuminated and exposed or "demystified" by scholarly practices. It doesn't yet have a name. It will only be exhibited in the museums of the future—or may already be found in the utopian, poetical, polemical "museums" of some contemporary artists.

As cultural techniques, which stem in almost equal parts from scholarly work (the need for demystification and knowledge) and showmanship (the need for entertainment and remystification), the media of film and the museum can be considered closely related. Both of them are simultaneously sites of research and cabinets of curiosities; systems for storing images of the world, and systems in which these images are displayed, promoted and interpreted. Both employ forms of mise-en-scène through which the public can experience history. And since they both came into being in a capitalist society, they both tend towards a "proprietary" view of the collected evidence of the past. The utopian, poetical, polemical "museums" created by some filmmakers may be seen as an alternative model. Amongst them—that is alongside the multi-faceted work of Chris Marker, the short films by Bruce Conner, Dziga Vertov's "laboratory" of cinema, the Histoire(s) du cinéma by Jean-Luc Godard, the unique television programs produced by Alexander Kluge, or Peter Kubelka's practice which includes filmmaking, teaching and the creation of an actual museum—the films and film-related works by Gustav Deutsch have increasingly secured their own special place. The individual "Cinemas of History" built by these artists are greatly varying constructions, and are sometimes even critically opposed to each other. The archives they make use of, and the manner in which they do so in order to create their own collections, vary just as greatly. They often invoke similar philosophies of history, yet also quite different ones, in part. They sometimes do so explicitly and sometimes only implicitly. Sometimes they investigate what remains of the great names, but many of them tend towards the rest, to that which has been excluded, since "verses are fostered by waste" (Anna Akhmatova), and not in showcases. All of their "museums" are processes of transcription in the public eye. They are neither blind mirrors (as archives tend to be), nor are they too highly polished ones (the way museums often function). They are "living mirrors of a new world," as Tom Gunning wrote in reference to Deutsch's Welt Spiegel Kino, “revealing the cinema as a play of reflections that stretch across modern life.”

Some of them, such as Godard, produce obituaries for the cinema or describe how film came to be at fault in the face of real historical challenges. For example, how it became clear in 1945 that the cinema of the spectacle had failed, whereas "the poor cinema of newsreels" now "has to wash clean of all suspicion / the blood and tears / just as the pavement is swept / when it’s already too late / and the army has opened fire on the crowd." Others, like Gustav Deutsch, show that the "poor" cinema of newsreels, home movies, educational films, and half-disintegrated "prehistoric" films is just as helpless and at fault, as its wealthy counterpart which lays claim to the name of "film history." And that, vice versa, the poor relatives are certainly as suited for revitalization as their canonical cousins are; that is, for a "reverse-engineering" of history to the point where the things and ideas that have ‘survived’ in our minds are joined by those that have not.

Walter Benjamin writes: "It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless." This may also be applied to the textual construction at hand. It is tempting, because it is easier, to deal with famous works and names. Yet since then, partially as a result of Benjamin's continued presence, we have seen far more artistic and scholarly projects taking the "arduous path" than he would have anticipated when writing these last words in the year 1940.

In Film ist. 12—Memory and Document, there is a single shot by which an anonymous man immortalized himself in a fashion reminding us of the famous ones. The goal of this textual construction is to honor him—and to also honor the man, Gustav Deutsch, who was the first to pay tribute to him in Film ist. by means of painstaking work in archives, museums and art. The anonymous man is standing with a camera and a tripod in the center aisle of a moving train car. He is filming. No one else is filming him, so the only reason why we can see him at all is that he's filming the large mirror in front of himself on the door to the next train car. The landscape flies by in the left-hand window—the "mobilized gaze" from the train, which is today considered an important forerunner of the "cinematic gaze." But the world outside is much too bright. We cannot make out any details in the pictures framed by the train window, all the more so because the filmmaker then swings the camera around to the center, directing it at himself in the mirror. In the course of this pan, he captures a third and forth type of image in his film. To the right of the door, beside the mirror, there are two gauges, instruments for the purpose of recording reality, the characteristics of which—temperature, air humidity or speed—are being translated into the movements of indicators and into the figures they indicate, that is, into geometrical, abstract and scientifically based "moving images." To the left of the door, beside the mirror, there is an easily recognizable landscape painting, which takes the place of the real landscape rolling past the train window. Due to the light conditions in the car, the "real image" is "overexposed" and can only be perceived indirectly—as flickering reflections of light on the "artificial" surface of the painting: on the screen.

As a whole, it is a perfect and completely open film image of film—a sort of allegorical self-portrait of the medium. It is also the self-portrait of an individual, and while it does not attribute a name to the anonymous man, it gives him a continued existence and a concrete place in time. His is the smallest and one of the most beautiful of all "museums" that filmmakers have yet created.

Originally published as "Cinéma(s) de l'histoire: Dark Rooms, Speaking Objects, More than Film: Gustav Deutsch as a Museum Maker" (2009). Translated from the German by Renée von Paschen. The essay was first published in the book Gustav Deutsch, edited by Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg and Michael Loebenstein, FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Vienna 2009.

Dark Rooms, Speaking Objects, More than Film: Gustav Deutsch as a Museum Maker. By  Alexander Horwath. Mubi , November 6, 2019. 

Austrian film director Gustav Deutsch introduced the audience to the secrets of his sui generis cinema in an open discussion which took place on Monday, March 4th 2019 at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, as part of the 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and in the presence of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival Artistic Director, Mr Orestis Andreadakis. This year’s TDF edition pays tribute to Gustav Deutsch’s work by screening seven of his signature films.

Gustav Deutsch, a restless and wild spirit, switched from architecture to cinema at the late 1980s, adopting a unique filmmaking style which defies the rules and transforms archival material into fascinating cinematic reality. The artist was introduced by Mr Andreadakis, who noted among other things that “his presence here is a great honour for the TDF”.

In the course of the discussion, moderated by TIFF’s head of international program Yorgos Krassakopoulos, Gustav Deutsch talked about what he considers to be true magic in cinema, made comments on technological developments in cinema and revealed the secrets of his art.

Austrian director denied that he forms part of the so-called experimental cinema. “I personally feel that I’m just making cinema. I possibly deviate from the typical definition of cinema, since as a filmmaker I’m tiptoeing to the edge of genres, but the truth is I cannot find differences between fiction and documentary”. As he said, the element of surprise is crucial for the audience to connect with his work, and with cinema in the wider sense. Every artist has to move in a different way each time. “If an artist does not pursue constant restlessness and movement, I believe the whole thing becomes unimportant. I started as an architect, but went to Bauhaus School, where all arts were brought together. As an artist, I have to say that architecture is a great starting point for any form of artistic creation. I am impressed, of course, by the fact that many cinematographers have started from architecture. Its relationship with cinema is close. In both arts you have to think about the steps you will make, and you have plenty of time, about 3-4 years, to complete your next project. At the same time, you have to collaborate with many people, so team spirit is necessary. You also have to encourage your crew members, cooperate closely with them and inspire trust in every step of the creative process”.

As to his target audience, the director noted: “I want my audience to be curious and willing to detect something in the films like I do. In fact, if they see something completely different than what I detected, I get even more satisfied. As a viewer and at the same time as an artist, Gustav Deutsch repeated his opinion that surprise must be cinema’s main ingredient: “For me, every film must contain that element. Every director must believe that their work speaks for itself, and know that it won’t be perceived the same way by all audiences. So they have to be open to various alternative readings, and certainly not try to be didactic”. 

As to his films’ ingredients, which more often than not are archival material, Gustav Deutsch replied that cinema was not born in one day and has two structural bases: the investigative-informative, and the entertaining. “Especially for my Film Ist. Project, I looked for footings dating back to the early days of cinema. Later, I started to collect cinematographers’ quotings on what cinema is, in order to understand them. The film shows that cinema has enormous potential. Films move through time, light, darkness. They present to us people on the move”, he said.

Gustav Deutsch called his short films “pocket films” and explained his way of thinking during filming: “I place the camera in a crossroad, press the “On” button and a little while later I see what was recorded. This process always contains surprises, often by people passing by and stopping to take a peek at what’s happening. So first I observe the image and then what I call microdrama, meaning the thing that is happening. During observation, I notice what the image’s subject is”.

As a film director, though, he focuses on cooperation, which is critical for making a film: “Cooperation is necessary, so it’s necessary to trust your partners, even if they are file clerks. Partners are the ones who will help you find what you’re looking, with their visual memory. Take for example my wife, Hanna Simek, who has seen hundreds of films and helps me each time in my research”. Gustav Deutsch noted that cinema does not lose its magic even if you watch films all the time. On the contrary, through constant research, one can change their perception of things. As he said: “It’s not easy to watch films all the time. You always have to be concentrated and careful. However, each time there is a scene, a moment, which appears before you in a different way, in a way that you have never seen before”.

Asked about the future of cinema, the film director said that cinema has not changed in fact, but has to be innovative and daring. However, the film industry tries to intervene in order to wipe out these elements. “For me, cinema is an art, not an industry”, the director noted, adding that he focuses more not on technical means, but on education and aesthetics: “Our work has the power to influence. I feel that it’s tragic to have knowledge of so many technical issues, but not caring at all about the power of image”.

Gustav Deutsch said he never makes the distinction between fiction and documentary. As he said, “As you know, there are film directors even in documentaries. So, it’s rather a pseudo-distinction”. In his opinion, every image can be considered interesting, each one in its own way: “I don’t believe there are boring films. You can look and find something interesting inside, even if there was no such intention by its director”.

The Austrian filmmaker is particularly interested in home movies: “I’m not interested in them as a glimpse on people’s private life, but as a piece of History as it is composed by many personal stories. In previous times we did not give special attention to such material; this changed in the last few years, since this kind of footage is much more original than the professional”. Mr Deutsch also stressed out that constant research for amateur audiovisual material teaches cinematographers a lot. “When someone shoots something, they automatically adopt a particular view on things. In home movies there are no professional rules, such as the ones learnt in film schools. Every shot is particularly important for the one who takes it. Of course, technology and access to photography and video-producing devices is impressive nowadays. However, this results in decreasing quality”, the director said. And added: “In previous times you had a film and had to honor it. Nowadays, we have plenty of recording devices, but we lost quality. People take so many pictures, more than they have ever taken in all previous stages in the history of photography. I think that in the future, the current situation will be described as middle ages”.

Open discussion with Gustav Deutsch.   Thessaloniki Documentary Festival , March  5, 2019. 

For the last 25 years, Gustav Deutsch has been one of the most prominent artists in an Austrian moving image scene characterized by an exploration of the physical properties of film, and an interest in recontextualising a century of footage. His best-known work remains his 180-minute epic Film Ist (Film Is…), parts 1-6 of which were completed in 1998, parts 7-12 in 2002. Composed entirely from archival material and divided into themes such as ‘Magic’ and ‘Movement and Time’, it is a potted history and wry commentary on the evolution of cinema’s visual language, with familiar tropes (melodramatic heroines swooning at their male lovers, for example, or the white filmmaker’s gaze at an exoticized colonial subject) reiterated to the point of absurdity. Spanning from the 1890s to the 1930s, when sound became ubiquitous in cinema, the film positions itself between documentary and the avant-garde. Deutsch’s rigorous editing and use of music by Austrian experimental composers such as Fennesz and Burkhard Stangl set Film Ist apart from conventional works about the provenance of film, and even Jean-Luc Godard’s oblique Histoire(s) du cinema (Histories of Cinema, 1988-98), which retained voice-over as a tool of audience instruction.

Last month, Index – the DVD wing of Sixpack, co-founded by Peter Tscherkassky to distribute films by Austrian (and other central European) artists – released several of Deutsch’s less well-known works as Not Home: Picturing the Foreign, in order to chart the development of his signature style and display his talents as a cinematographer and archivist. The collection places several of his earliest 16mm works alongside the 31 ‘pocket films’ shot on digital video between 2005 (when his feature-length Welt Spiegel Kino came out) and 2015, offering a rare glimpse of footage that Deutsch shot himself, rather than material that he has collated and edited.

The opening film, Adria – Holiday Films 1954-68 (School of Seeing II) dates from 1990, and is made up of Super-8 footage shot when such casual documentation as home movie-making became economically feasible. Deutsch sourced the reels from friends and flea markets, and by placing a newspaper advert, editing it together and blowing it up to 16mm. Like Film Ist, this is split into parts, although these are untitled and their boundaries feel porous. What unites the images of waves, boats, beaches, street signs, children and families is the way that their amateur captors have imbibed the idioms of ‘professional’ photography and film-making – for example, the vast majority of the tracking shots from moving vehicles go from left to right. This formal language makes it easier for Deutsch to arrange the parts by theme, and find some humour, particularly when he compiles footage of children, such as the boy who chases a crab with a tennis racket, unaware or unconcerned that the creature could hurt him. Deutsch never sneers at these tourists: rather the uncritical presentation of their footage recaptures some of the wonder they may have felt as they pioneered both home movie-making and mass international travel – a sense now reinforced by the nostalgic feel of Super-8 as a medium.

The silence of Super-8 makes it harder to locate the people filmed, leaving the question of who or what is ‘foreign’ unresolved. The lack of any soundtrack makes Adria feel a little slow, or perhaps slightly too long, but even if it does not match the dynamism of his later works, it is skilfully cut, with Deutsch’s montage shifting sharply from black and white to colour, and swiftly back again, to striking effect. Poetry and social commentary merge: as we watch the post-war generation step into strange new places, we understand that most of the buildings will have survived, but not all of the nation-states – the Yugoslav flag that appears early on feels particularly foreboding – and, of course, the people themselves are transitory.

The second film, Eyewitnesses in Foreign Countries (1993) was made with Moroccan director Mostafa Tabbou, according to Oulipo-style formal constraints. It consists of 600 shots lasting three seconds each, split into groups of 10 or 20 per motif, with scenes lasting from 30 to 60 seconds. 300 of those shots were taken by Deutsch in Figuig, Morocco, and 300 by Tabbou in Vienna. This this might make the film sound disjointed, but the regularity of its form and the symmetry of its content mean that it soon settles into a surprisingly steady rhythm. Although Deutsch was, by then, a ‘professional’ filmmaker working with an amateur (Tabbou only released one other work, again with Deutsch, the five-minute short White Marriage in 1996), there is real rigour to both the composition and juxtaposition of their material. Many aspects of life in Morocco have parallels in Vienna, with Deutsch capturing the way in which the North African climate influences the pace of life without descending into Orientalist cliché, and Tabbou giving an intriguing insight into how Austria looks to him: ordered, bureaucratic and cold, both emotionally and physically.

The centrepiece is Deutsch’s most recent major work, Notes and Sketches I (2005-15), a series of ‘pocket films’ made across Europe with a Canon camera and a mobile phone, lasting one hour in total. Deutsch uses digital technology to revisit the methods of the 19th century cinematic pioneers, especially the Lumière brothers, who would take single shots of something of interest and present them as documentaries. Unlike their works, with their duration set by the reel of film, Deutsch’s Notes and Sketches are of various lengths, tending to focus on the minutiae of 21st-century life. Only rarely do they feel too long – a scene in Venice where workmen cut down trees struggles to justify its eight minutes – and the series works best when it delivers a joke or some wry social comment, for example, where the slow movement of tourists through an airport is billed as a ‘mini-drama’.

Immediate, accessible, characterized by their gentleness, these pieces reminded me of Guy Sherwin’s ‘Short Film Series' (which I reviewed for frieze last year). But unlike Sherwin, Deutsch adds layers of signs for those who share his obsession with the history of cinema. A shot of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, nods to Derek Jarman’s Super-8 films, notably A Journey To Avebury (1971), filmed nearby; the ‘panorama’ in a segment entitled ‘Vip Harbor Seafood Restaurant, Los Angeles, 3.4.2010’ reveals the diners to be Deutsch, Tom Gunning, Erkki Huhtamo, Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs – all scholars involved with the early history of cinema, or important filmmakers from the post-war US underground.

Unlike fellow Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, who remains dedicated to 35mm film, Deutsch embraces digital media and finds amusement in its ubiquity. The moment where gallery visitors capture Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) on their camera phones works on several levels: the reification of the image first onto their screens, using technology that is frequently blamed for inducing the levels of loneliness depicted in Hopper’s painting, and then Deutsch’s; and the reference to his own feature film Shirley – Visions of Reality (2013), in which Deutsch reconstructed classic Hopper artworks and used them to explain several decades of American history.

Film Ist remains the best place to start with Gustav Deutsch, being such an intelligent study of the language of cinema, but this collection demonstrates his understanding of the way that language imparts itself on its viewers, and moves into the vernacular of everyday life. The positioning of his early works with his most recent makes it clear that this will be a constant process, that evolves with technology: whatever the format, and whichever possibilities it raises, filmmakers and viewers will continue to inform each other, and erode the boundaries between creator and consumer until they become obsolete.

Not Home. By Juliet Jacques. Frieze, July 29, 2016.

Between montage and movement, overlapping views and resurgences, Gustav Deutsch's monumental project, Film ist., attempts to write the history of cinema through its own material, at the intersection of early cinema, avant-garde films of the 1920s, and contemporary experimental cinema. In his book Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon Gustav Deutsch (Film ist. Visual thinking according to Gustav Deutsch), Livio Belloï seeks to better understand the magnum opus of an artist who defies categorisation.

While Gustav Deutsch caused a sensation at the 2013 Berlinale with his film Shirley, which transposes  Edward Hopper's paintings to film, he was also attracting attention in the realm of film theory as the subject of a new book by Livio Belloï, Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon Gustav Deutsch(1). Gustav Deutsch has already been the subject of other, mostly generalist books. However Livio Belloï's book is the first to focus on Film ist., or rather one part of it. Deutsch's original cinematic oeuvre is composed of 13 chapters (1-6, 7-12, 13), and lasts 4 hours in total. Livio Belloï’s 300-page book focuses only on the central part (7-12). According to the researcher, the reason is simple: “it appears fairly obvious that the central part is the most relevant to Deutsch’s creation of a hypothetical definition of cinema itself; this is where his visual thinking reaches its pinnacle, where his artistry in harvesting film extracts and piecing them together crystallises into veritable analytical proposals."

In homage to Deutsch's film, Livio Belloï's book has the same structure and each chapter focuses on a series of questions about what we are watching. Seeing: this is one of the main themes of Deutsch's work. In this sense, Chapter 7 (and the first chapter of the film), is one of the most evocative: in segment 7.2, a man leans down to look through a keyhole, and the film shows us "the other side" through alternating countershots. Deutsch's choice is not insignificant: the lock shaped a series of early films in many ways, establishing a logic of continuity in the infancy of what would become cinematographic language. One example is Par le trou de la serrure, a 1901 Pathé production that serves as an archetype of  how early cinema tried to represent subjective vision. In the film, a room attendant observes, not-so-subtly, the eccentric behaviour of clients in their rooms. It’s a form of experimentation, of course, but it represents above all the scopic drive, this need to see what we can't normally see. The discourse is well known, but it nevertheless rings true: cinema is the art of voyeurism. This is exactly what Deutsch wants to point out: the filmmaker puts the viewer is the same position as the voyeur while playing on our perception of the world (and cinematographic language) by breaking the sacrosanct rule of continuity: images of a boat at sea, a North African landscape, the portrait of a young Asian woman, and a frightened actress being attacked by a snake succeed one another in no logical order, and with nothing in common other than their critical status as "objects of our gaze", "just" images.

In his work on the history of the gaze, Carl Havelange describes an "ancient order" and a "new order", with the latter based on a "third element" which mediates between the naked eye and the world. For more than a hundred years, the cinematograph has been such a mediator, this "third element": the images filmed by the Lumière brothers served no other purpose than to capture the essence of the world and offer it up for our entertainment. The beauty of found footage lies precisely in its ability to divert the logic of the gaze, as Livio Belloï reminds us: "the particularity of found footage is that it produces a film that is the sum of the gazes produced by others. Film ist. is not so much a film as an optical device." Much like the first filmmakers the Lumière brothers, Deutsch offers the viewer images of the world. He does this by eschewing oral commentary and verbal remarks, as he is not trying to describe "his" history of cinema (as did Jean-Luc Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma) nor even a "history of silent film, but rather a silent history of cinema", as Livio Belloï explains at the end of his book.

As filmmaker Samuel Fuller once said, film is “in one word, emotions!" Fuller’s definition is well known among cinephiles, and Livio Belloï believes that it reaches its fullest expression in Film ist. Throughout his film, Deutsch questions images, brings the reader along in his reflection without ignoring emotional impact: curiosity, strangeness, outrage, but also humour and tenderness, etc. The artist is on a veritable quest for visual expression, much like the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s. At certain times, as when he plays with variations in the speed of the image, Deutsch seems to follow in the footsteps of those early filmmakers. Deutsch's relationship with these avant-gardists vacillates between homage and continued reflection.  However, there is an ironic element: the researcher mentions Chapter 10.1, a surprising segment in which intertitles succeed each other in the complete absence of any image. In René Clair and Germaine Dulac's vision of "pure cinema", film should eschew any form of writing to focus solely on images, visual composition, and rhythm: a film without words. Deutsch, somewhat derisively, took the opposing view and made a film that could be considered "impure": a series of texts in the absence of a diegetic world; in short, a film without images. A bit of clever humour that is actually quite pertinent.

Given that it is structured in chapters that correspond to those in the film, Livio Belloï's book cannot be summarised in just a few words given how many themes and ideas are covered. As with Deutsch's film, each paragraph addresses a main topic that is the subject of a lengthy and thorough analysis, all while creating connections to other chapters. This is also the case with the relationship between Film ist. and contemporary experimental cinema, as connections are scattered throughout the book, offering a relatively broad overview of this 'other' cinema. Let us simply point out that Deutsch, who was born in Vienna in 1952, is part of a generation of Austrian experimental filmmakers who treated the image as both a historic and aesthetic subject. Martin Arnold is one example, but Livio Belloï focuses on Peter Tscherkassky, analysing how he and Deutsch address the question of dreams in cinema. For example, in Dream work (2001), Tscherkassky utilises endogenesis, or more simply an internal construction: in Tscherkassky's work, dreams are represented as multiple layers within the same image, since the filmmaker manipulates the original filmic material. Deutsch, in contrast, uses exogenesis: dreams exist only in the shot of young woman sleeping, and serve as a rallying point to connect various images. This is just one of the many comparisons Livio Belloï makes between Deutsch and other experimental filmmakers, whether Austrian (Tscherkassky) or not (Bill Morrisson, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi). Deutsch and those artists share the same belief in the image as a narrative tool, and have the same need to shape it in a different direction, using a principle of exploration and montage that goes beyond the concept of the image as a singular object. For Deutsch, the image is above all one cell in the larger body of the film.

Visual Thinking according to Gustav Deutsch ends with a summary table and like Film ist., provides us with an opening: in seeking to create a history of cinema using its own images, Gustav Deutsch has perhaps come close to the Mnemosyne Atlas that Aby Warburg worked on until his death, in which he attempted to create a comprehensive figurative grammar of art history. In Deutsch’s work, we begin to question chase films, ethnographic films, and the development of cinematographic language thanks to a clever montage that is designed to go beyond simple questions of definition and encourage us to question our own gaze. Deutsch, who admire Warburg, may have brought an unsuspected encyclopaedic dimension to cinema, the impact of which will only become apparent once the project (Film ist.) is finished. As the work of a lifetime, driven by the intelligence and humour of an extraordinary artist, Film ist. may be one of the most evocative histories of cinema to date.

The visual thinking of Gustav Deutsch according to Livio Belloï. By Bastien Martin. Reflexions, University of Liège,   December 28, 2013.

Film/speaks/many/languages (1995), an early one-minute piece by Gustav Deutsch made from bits of a Bollywood musical, might at first seem to merely advertise a multicultural message typical to its era: that cinema has always been a global phenomenon. But its construction says more. Deutsch embeds the words of the title as near-subliminal flashes, and the original footage has been reprinted to display not only the entire frame, with dust and scratches intact, but the optical sound track and sprocket holes as well, reminiscent of George Landow’s structural loop Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965–66). The physical material of the celluloid itself, Deutsch suggests, bears its own levels of significance, even as this sixty-second fragment evokes other narratives: not just the sugary love story that must have surrounded it but the low-budget industry implied by its very existence, as well as the place and time of its production, now visible as inadvertently documentary aspects of the image.

Working exclusively with appropriated footage for over a decade, Deutsch has become one of the major living practitioners of a tradition in avant-garde cinema stretching back to the works of Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell. A major retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum properly situates Deutsch in the materialist vein of fellow Viennese filmmakers like Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, and Peter Tscherkassky. What distinguishes Deutsch from his forebears is his historical place at the tail end of celluloid’s reign: His practice thereby intersects with the increased role of archives in greater film culture, both conceptually and practically. This investigative aspect is most overtly allegorized in World Mirror Cinema (2005), which analyzes actualities shot outside of movie houses in early twentieth-century Austria, Indonesia, and Portugal, digitally zooming in on faces in each crowd, then linking them with fanciful doppelgängers discovered elsewhere in the archives. The cinema, Deutsch suggests, constitutes an uncannily preserved looking glass of the past, resiliently tangible yet inevitably slipping into the unreal.

Deutsch’s opus Film ist. 1–12, a symphonic meditation on the medium, was similarly produced out of footage acquired from a range of international archives. The first section, parts 1–6 (1998), looks at cinema as a scientific medium, reworking films from the technology’s beginnings to the 1970s, sussing out an unexpected poetry from various optical means of epistemological inquiry. In contrast, Film ist. 7–12 (2002) focuses exclusively on cinema’s first three decades, offering color-tinted sequences from ethnographic films and parlor fantasies chosen for their dreamlike, irrational qualities and set to staticky minimalist scores by Christian Fennesz, Martin Siewert, and others. His latest installment of the series, Film ist. a girl & a gun (2009), takes its title from a D. W. Griffith maxim (famously revived by Godard), stating that all a director needs are these two elements. Deutsch uses the concept as a jumping-off point for an exploration of Thanatos and Eros, infusing narrative, medical, and pornographic sources with mythic symbolism. As Deutsch reveals metonymic visual links between the genres—joining, for example, images of copulation, dancing, and knife fights—the boundaries between fiction and documentary grow both indiscernible and irrelevant.

Footage Fetish. By Ed Halter. Art Forum , February 19, 2009.

Film Ist a Girl & a Gun (trailer)

 Film Ist a Girl & a Gun (fragment)

Gustav Deutsch :  February 19 to 26, 2009

Gustav Deutsch, born in Vienna in 1952, is a leading figure of international found-footage cinema. In his extravagant "remixes" of film history, every genre imaginable has its place: fiction and document, magic fables and newsreels, amateur and scientific films. Although his works are highly playful and often humorous, he is not concerned with ironic effects when choosing and editing his found materials. Essentially, Deutsch’s filmmaking looks for a “sensual comprehension” of the medium, and for an understanding of the ways in which cinema, history and individual lives are intertwined. The title of one of his major works sums up this perspective: Welt Spiegel Kino (World Mirror Cinema).

In Deutsch’s case, however, the multiply fragmented "mirror" that stands between "world" and "cinema" becomes a veritable hall of mirrors. The Retrospective devoted to his oeuvre is meant to lead audiences to precisely this place. It opens with the première of Gustav Deutsch’s most recent endeavour, Film ist. a girl & a gun, which mixes images of warfare, pornography and the cinema of romance. Some of the original materials used in the making of this film will be presented afterwards, as the visual element in a live “film concert” performed by regular Deutsch collaborators Christian Fennesz, Martin Siewert and Burkhard Stangl.

Deutsch began working with moving images around 1980, when he became associated with the Vienna Media Workshop Medienwerkstatt. During the 80s, he gradually moved from documentary video works into conceptual filmmaking and found his central theme and methods with Adria (1990), a quirky and mock-scientific collage of 1950s and 60s home movies. With few exceptions (such as the magnificent “experiment in ethnography”, Augenzeugen der Fremde, 1993), he has explored the mode of found-footage film ever since. Together with Hanna Schimek, his partner in work and life, he combs film archives throughout the world for neglected or forgotten material and creates intricate and poetic “re-readings” of these archival treasures. What began in 1995/96 with several 1-minute masterpieces such as Film Speaks Many Languages soon grew into a monumental work in progress: In his ongoing series Film Is. Deutsch investigates the endless wealth, unfoldings, and functional mechanisms of the medium. Cinema’s two “birthplaces”, the scientific laboratory and the fairground, are of special interest to him.

The ‘juggler of found footage’ is only one of several artistic roles which Gustav Deutsch has taken on during the past three decades. He is an architect by training and a visual artist (his recent installation is currently on show at the Vienna Kunsthalle, in the exhibition Western Motel); his palette comprises photographic works and multimedia projects, lecture series and performances. Most of these facets will also be on view in the Film Museum programme; there will be a lecture by him and Hanna Schimek on the elements of literature in his new work, and a rare opportunity to witness Deutsch’s "interactive performance" Taschenkino (1995). Nevertheless, film remains at the core of his creative output. Deutsch asks: What does cinema tell us when it is removed from all its functional contexts? What secret messages are stored in film fragments? What if we see them more as traces of time, social use and ideology rather than as contained fictions? By tirelessly to reanimate and recontextualize the cinematic heritage, Gustav Deutsch works towards nothing less than the future of film.

Coinciding with this Retrospective, a new Film Museum publication will be released. Gustav Deutsch, edited by Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg and Michael Loebenstein, is the first comprehensive (and abundantly illustrated) book on the artist; it includes essays by Nico de Klerk, Stefan Grissemann, Tom Gunning, Beate Hofstadler, Alexander Horwath, Wolfgang Kos, Scott MacDonald, and Burkhard Stangl, as well as visual contributions by Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek.

Austrian Film Museum.

Film Ist   Ein Spiegel (fragment)

Film Ist  Ein Augenblick (fragment)