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La Paloma
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The Shadow of Daniel Schmid
Passion that takes such a stance – recognising
nothing as carnally exciting that has not in advance turned ambiguous, and is
not situated right at the intersection of the straight and the bent, at the
very spot where the insufficiency declares itself and the aversion sets in – is
directly linked to romantic irony,
which is similarly based on the clear perception of a limit and an
insufficiency, a pain immediately surmounted and transformed into the source of
new exaltation, like a wall against which the ball rebounds or the unforeseen
movement of the bull …
– Michel Leiris, “The
Bullfight as Mirror” (1937)
Romanticism always turns into decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster.
– Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:
Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Every certainty sleepwalks. (Sleepwalking is the primal image of every spiritual
certainty.)
– Robert Musil, Literature
and Politics (1930-1942)
Where is the reputation of Daniel Schmid (1941-2006)
today, 16 years after his death? And when will the totality of his work become
accessible to view in the best possible versions? For now, unfortunately, he
remains a man of cinema’s shadows. And he has been, over the years, beginning
in his lifetime, forcibly cast into a particular twin-shadow: as the
travelling-companion and sometime collaborator of both Werner Schroeter (1945-2010) and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (1945-1982). Thus, he is placed on the same, implicitly secondary level
of many such companions of the New German scene of the 1970s, such as Ulli
Lommel (1944-2017) or Walter Bockmayer (1948-2014).
But Schmid – known in Switzerland as “The Magician” –
deserves to be rescued from this shadowy, second-tier dungeon, and seen as a
master in his own right. Connoisseur-scholars of Swiss cinema (including Freddy
Buache and Vinzenz Hediger) have long viewed him this way. It’s time to catch
up with their clearer perception.
La Paloma was Schmid’s second feature
(after Tonight or Never in 1972), and
for many of his devotees it endures as his greatest. Only further, proper
research into the œuvre can verify that claim. Novelist-essayist Gary Indiana
has given it the type of fannish, Dennis Cooper/David Ehrenstein-ish slather of
praise (roughly: ‘We’ve all been there, hopelessly besotted by an illusion!’)
that wins it eternal, sophisticated assent among the Artforum crowd. And there’s something to be said for Indiana’s offhand
gesture toward the legacy of Romanticism, and how the wily Schmid fences with
it: “It’s a souvenir of the last [i.e., 19th] century, and not the
worst one”.
Schroeter’s own, oft-repeated tribute to La Paloma, however, goes directly to the
heart of its achievement. After praising the “triumph of kitsch” and relating
the film to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, Schroeter (in the excellent
2010 documentary on Schmid, Le chat qui
pense), adds this crucial proviso.
And then these elements transform themselves into something new, which
not only has ironic distance but also surmounts this distance again, in a kind
of somersault, thereby attaining new expressive force.
This is a somersault typical of the best cinema of the
1970s: what Leiris identified as Romantic irony becomes, almost miraculously, a
renewed form of sincerity and innocence. It is, in its way, the very lesson of
what has become a key text of modernity, Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the
Marionette Theatre” – central to, for example, Hélène Frappat’s 2001 book Jacques Rivette, secret compris.
It has become standard order to comment – as seemingly
all Schmid’s friends and collaborators do – on the director’s ‘alpine’ origins,
and how being an elevated ‘man of the mountains’ from birth granted him a
certain, airy sensibility (and
perhaps also some difficulty in accommodating himself to everyday flat land).
For the great Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi (whose superb essay “Daniel
Schmid or Interrupted Choreography” appeared in a 1999 Swiss book on Schmid),
the metaphor takes a further twist: being an artist at such heights, Schmid
naturally developed several literal ‘inclinations’ (inclines) – one toward the
German Romanticism of the avant-garde 1970s, and another toward Italian opera.
Vinzenz Hediger, in personal correspondence, expressed
to me the core of Hasumi’s analysis, and its powerful effect on Schmid himself.
Hasumi “studied composition features, particularly gender constellation and the
representation of female, and more particular mother, figures”. In this model,
women within the film move or direct (as it were) the mise en scène; while men are passive and manipulated. The world
moves around the women.
Furthermore, Hasumi “showed that Schmid’s
compositional preferences aligned with those of Kabuki theatre and Japanese
painting and art. He then discussed the fact that Schmid grew up without a
father figure and surrounded by multiple mother figures, i.e., much like your
average Japanese boy.” Hediger adds here: “That, by the way, is also the
explanation of why psychoanalysis has trouble finding traces of the Oedipus
complex in Japan”; he could have also added that this specific familial
configuration is often deployed to ‘explain’ the origin of gay artists –
Schroeter wields it as just one of many underlying mythic and/or psychoanalytic
templates in The Rose King (1986).
Hediger concludes: “Schmid loved that study, and
Hasumi’s work got him interested in Kabuki, which led to The Written Face (1995), his other great documentary about artists
together with Il Bacio di Tosca (1984),
his fantastic film about retired opera singers in Milan”. Good news: The Written Face, at least, has recently
been restored for presentation in the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.
Schmid once declared: “I believe people have a need
for mythical forms, mysterious images, atavistic fairy tales and magic symbols
that take them back to the hidden memories of their childhood and their
culture”. This resembles the creed of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg during his
breakthrough 1970s period, but without the loaded politics or ambiguous
nationalism. Schmid was always a more cosmopolitan figure, detached (once past
the 1960s) from sectarian lines.
La Paloma is the first Schmid film to
grasp the nettle of mythic form. That much is clear from the central role taken
by a phantasmic character identified as “The Force of Imagination”, a
poysexual/hermaphroditic angel played by Jérôme Nicolin (1947-2006), known as
the “Belle de Mai” (this actor also appeared in films by Rivette and Jean-Paul
Rappeneau).
In one of the best and most memorable scenes, New
German Cinema superstars Ingrid Caven (as Viola) and Peter Kern (as Isidor)
mime to an operatic duet, with a suitably Romantic landscape in the background
(it looks real, not a back projection); well into this spectacle, The Force
floats by, superimposed, horizontal as in Marc Chagall’s “Over the Town” (1918).
At the end of the film, this figure will turn a truly magical trick: staring
into the sad hero’s eyes, she will wind back time to the originary moment of
fatal temptation and seduction (Viola’s stage act), allowing the poor fellow to
look away and not be ensnared … Imagination’s Force has been demonstrated; it
need not (it seems) be repeated.
In Schmid’s universe, myth is impossible to separate
from popular culture. La paloma: the bird of love that flies, that cannot be
held for long in the hand. Viola, the Lady
of the Camellias-type heroine here, fated from the first to die, is in this
sense Lola Lola from The Blue Angel (1930): she marks that “domination by the beautiful personality” – especially
when projected in performance from a stage, no matter how homely or tawdry –
which (as Camille Paglia explains in her magnificent and now underrated Sexual Personae) is central to
Romanticism, “passing through Poe and Baudelaire to Wilde”.
In Spain, palomo is slang for a gay man; and effeminate people are sometimes described as
‘showing their feathers’. Fur, feathers, flowers: the total camp iconography is
on display in La Paloma. The very
idea of casting Bulle Ogier (at 35) as the mother of Kern (at 25) is the
definition of a camp joke. Especially as, in 1974, Ogier looks younger than 35
and Kern looks older than 25. I also detect a private in-joke here: Bulle did
indeed give birth to Pascale Ogier (1958-1984) when she was still a teenager.
But she was 19 at the time, not 10! This discrepancy is, in fact, the subject
of a fine reflection in Ogier’s 2019 autobiographical memoir, J’ai oublié (“I’ve forgotten”).
In La Paloma by my dear friend
Daniel Schmid, I play Ingrid Caven’s mother [AM:
she is misremembering] – which makes no sense, since we were born in the
same era, but Daniel never set out to make realist films. It was a one-scene
role [AM: actually three]. To signify
the difference in age, and lend myself a little majesty, I chose a fur, a cane
and a hat that cast a shadow on my face, preventing anyone from seeing that I
was just as old as Ingrid [AM: !!].
With these three elements, I felt completely at ease ruling and frightening my
world.
Far more than Schroeter, and in a manner quite
different to Fassbinder, Schmid is a filmmaker whose personal cinephilia
saturates his work on every level. La
Paloma revels in the special exoticism granted to cinema by certain sub-genres
and several key filmmakers, such as Josef von Sternberg in The Shanghai Gesture (1941 – and when is that masterpiece ever
going to get a proper restoration?). Schmid’s entire film is based on the
exaggeration of a familiar iconography of aristocratic ‘leisure time’ and its
lolling rituals: dining, travelling (by train, especially: supreme site of
movie artifice in Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch), grand
palaces and mansions (on a mountain side by the water, seen in a silent-movie
iris!), overripe flowers and plants (signs of withering, overpowering, entropic
nature), clubs, casinos, racing tracks (Schmid stages the most minimalistic
horse race ever) … We are not far here from the merry Orientalism and/or
colonial decadence of everything from Erich von Stroheim and Sternberg to
Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), a film clearly
influenced by La Paloma.
Leaning closer to Douglas Sirk (on whom Schmid made a
lovely documentary in 1983), there is the baroque clutter of multiple lit
candles – and the ubiquitous, giant mirrors. In another, specific prefiguration
of India Song, La Paloma highlights a choreography in which three characters (now
with Peter Chatel as Raoul as part of an Eternal Triangle) descend the stairs;
first, Viola stops at the bottom step, and looks at herself in the mirror in
order to deliver (by speaking aloud) a ‘secret’ message to Raoul; when she
exits the frame, Raoul stops at the same step and looks at himself too, as if
to ‘receive’ that message in the designated spot; and, finally, Isidor stops
above Raoul and looks into the mirror as well. Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1 evoked the filmmakers’s
“interiors divided in two by mirrors, with a minimum of reference points [i.e.,
in space] and a multiplication of points-of-view with no connection”.
Cristina Álvarez López pointed out to me La Paloma’s strong affinity with the
cinema of Luis Buñuel: Viola laid out holding a crucifix conjures Silvia Pinel
in Viridiana (1961); spectral
hauntings beyond the grave evoke the Wuthering
Heights adaptation Abismos de pasión (1954); and – last but far from least – the ultimate ‘rewind in time’ recalls
the structure of The Exterminating Angel (1962).
An ode to Ingrid Caven is in order. It has already
been written, and superbly so, by her husband, Jean-Jacques Schuhl (Ingrid Caven: A Novel, 2000, English
translation from City Lights in 2004 – see an extract here). In La Paloma,
her death-driven character is described as a “mask”, and that fits Caven’s
performance style to a tee: “Rainer [Werner Fassbinder] loved Brecht and
Chinese tradition”, she noted of her early, decisive influences. “Masks,
Kleist, puppets. Trying to appear ‘natural’ in front of a camera would have
seemed simply grotesque”. The ultimate Wildean, contra natura paradox: realistic acting is the thing that’s
grotesque, not all-out stylisation and artifice.
In La Paloma,
Caven is that special figure gliding between worlds: the sleepwalker. “Sleepwalking is the primal image of every spiritual certainty”.
Like Delphine Seyrig (from Alain Resnais to another beacon of German Queer
Cinema, Ulrike Ottinger), Caven gives a new brand of glamour and cool to states
of living-dead decay and abjection. Her sleepwalker strolls into the daemonic iconography of Late
Romanticism: figures of the witch, vampire and succubus form a crucial Gothic
element in that cultural constellation. Even several Philippe Garrel films, such as Frontier of Dawn (2008) inspired by the
tales of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), plug into this especially haunted and
melancholic tradition.
For a Man such as Isidor/Kern (and this was the
actor’s New German speciality, especially for Fassbinder), abjection is a
matter of infinite masochism, being bled dry of all money, savagely exploited
and regally ignored, always on the losing end of an asymmetrical relation – and
condemned, at the last (after a striking ellipse and backtrack in narrative
time), to forever tell his putrid tale, frozen in the position of narrator (a
similar, embedded storytelling structure appears in Rita Azevedo Gomes’ A Woman’s Revenge [2012]).
For the Woman, it’s a carefully controlled mise en scène of pills, medicines,
potions and poisons. Viola wastes away in the manner of Dumas’ Camille: “I had
a sort of hope I should kill myself by all these excesses”. Ultimately, she
even perverts, in magnificent fashion, the religious myth of the Resurrection, becoming
the Abject (and proto-Punk) Icon par excellence: the good-looking corpse!
The love-death complex of Late Romanticism (“what is
morbid in our Romantic inheritance”, as Victor
Perkins said of Lola Montès [1955)] reaches its apogee
when Isidor hacks up the (discreetly below-screen) corpse of Viola – in order
to fit her pieces into an absurdly small urn by sunset – and a laughter that
could be his or hers fills the soundtrack … at which point, Isidor’s eye is
caught by the gaze, from a balcony, of her at-last triumphant mother. Even the
vastly underrated Mommie Dearest (Frank
Perry, 1981) can’t do maternal abjection better!
Throughout it all, Schmid carves out his cinematic
style – a style comparable to those shadow-casters Schroeter and Fassbinder, but
also different to theirs, and unique. Hasumi insists that Schmid never shows
the interior of his characters; he deals not in dramatic stagings in this sense (i.e., psychological mise en scène), but rather dance choreographies.
Slowness of movement and gesture – sometimes to the
acute point of (almost) total (trembling) stillness, as in the filmed tableaux vivants of Duras, Schroeter, Raúl
Ruiz, Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (1982) or Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of
Ceylon (1985) – is the tactic that governs everything: the pause before and
after each line, the careful foley rendering of every single footstep, the
turning and looking, the stop-start layering of each component in the mix (that
blasted-out birdsong!), even the constant overstatement of the plainly obvious (“Mother”;
“I’m Viola”).
Slowness is central, too, to the particular agencement of actor and character,
persona and figure, that Schmid orchestrates. Deleuze again:
Schmid invents a slowness which makes possible the dividing in two of
characters, as if they were to one side of what they say and do, and chose from
among the external clichés the one that will embody them from the inside, in a
perpetual interchangeability of inside and outside.
Schmid opts for neither the generally static framings
of Schroeter nor the sinuous tracking shots of Fassbinder (and his
cinematographers); the slow panning shot is his thing, eliminating the need for
cuts between those who gaze across the space covered by the camera … And, after
all, remember that the film’s subtitle is ”the time of a look”: like in Serge
Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise”, love is that ecstasy which lasts only as long as a
song or a dance or an exchange of glances (fixed eternally in a panorama). All
the rest is Illusion – or Imagination.
Fittingly, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), too, is in the Schmid cinephilic mix. In the
glacial slowness, and the jewel-like colour scheme; but perhaps, above all, in
the conception of Viola’s character. Insofar as Vertigo is about a dream of resurrection or reincarnation – and
hence the impossible imperishability of the flesh – La Paloma literalises its deep logic one step further. And there is
certainly a touch of Kim Novak, at her most imperious, in Ingrid Caven!
Written up from lecture notes prepared for the Cinea 2022
Summer Film School in Antwerp, 14 July 2022.
© Adrian Martin July 2022 |
