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The Long Summer of Theory
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Watching this film, I had the strange sensation of watching an update – somewhat more politicised – of the Australian film Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) two decades on. The Aussie film had cameos from a couple of people (film critics Paul Harris plus, ahem, me) more or less playing themselves in a story of university students – focused mainly on three young women. There were flighty, hip references to cult cinema, weighty theory, heavy literature, cool music. It was all about (in fine teen movie fashion) the challenges of moving on into the adult world beyond the precarious capsule of hedonistic student life – versus the temptation to somehow stay right there. Like in an early Richard Linklater movie, the final emblem of freedom is a group fun-frolic captured on grainy Super-8. The German film includes interviews with an intimidating list of European art-philosophy-theatre-sociology-feminist-theory stars (Boris Groys, Jutta Allmendinger, Carl Hegemann, Lilly Kent & Andrea Truman) encountered in a range of slightly stilted settings (Rahel Jaeggi looks especially bemused to be crouching on a rooftop in order to summarise her 417-page opus Critique of Forms of Life). The makers of Love and Other Catastrophes briefly considered somehow publishing a real book from the spectre of the fake one I brandish on screen (titled Feral Cinema); the DVD of The Long Summer of Theory gets a step closer to that dream by including as an extra the unexpurgated hours of these celebrity interviews merely sampled in the movie itself. Just as a character in Love and Other had the opportunity to utter deep aphorisms by soliloquising reflectively into his handy cassette recorder, the female trio in Long Summer – Nola (Julia Zange), Katja (Weilandt) and Martina (Schöne-Radunski) – are all drawn into the first-listed’s ongoing film project about … the future, the possibility and definition of happiness, and the fate of Theory in the digital age. A bit like Le joli mai (1963): reportage on the state of the nation … or, more particularly, the city of Berlin. The women are no longer students; they are mostly frustrated in their pursuit of artistic careers (acting, music, art, cinema). They dislike being exploited as gendered-stereotypes by ‘the system’ … but they need to be paid by it in order to eat. This proves to be, as for every generation, an enduring problem. The precarious bubble inhabited by these women is well-conjured and embodied by writer-director Irene von Alberti: it’s basically a spacious squat from which they are soon to be evicted. Martina – who is guitarist and singer in the all-girl band Cuntroaches – sums up the mood when she sprays on the wall in well-placed paint bursts the letters: K O M A. It’s a Zombie World out there in 2017, as they say. Marked by the difference and gap between what was once a culture of fanatical reading and a new culture of fanatical (electronic) writing … that is not always read. As our characters frequently ask, in their gazes-to-camera, deploying a Leninist turn of phrase: what to do? (Or, depending on the subtitler: what is to be done?) It’s not a Mumblecore-type job. It’s all very cleanly and clearly done and organised – sometimes drawing upon that very easy vein of superior satire on ‘pretentious young intellectuals’ gabbing away as they lounge around in louche postures on and off the grimy sofa (anyone can invent that stuff based on very little familiarity with young intellectuals of any era!). The ‘reflexivity’ is rather pat, rather blah. But there’s also a faint touch of Claire Denis’ Friday Night (2002) in the magic-realist filigree of the premise, which lifts the tone: our trio imagine themselves to be in one lifestyle or another (high bourgeois, drab office workaday, art decadence) and instantly find themselves transported there; good-looking men who no longer amuse them and have no useful further purpose get turned into good-looking decorative lamps. (Alert: this is a film that waves around the Bechdel Test as a yardstick of value.) Von Alberti has evidently continued her gender theme (with a comedy and fantasy lining) in Protected Men (2024). The central inspiration comes from a fascinating, compulsively readable book by German cultural historian Philipp Felsch, The Summer of Theory (or should it now be a winter of theory?, asks Nola) as it appeared in English translation from Polity Press in 2022 (for some unfathomable reason, the adjective long was cut). Felsch gets the first interview in the movie, strolling around a leafy park. (There’s a heck of a lot of walking around various Berlin sites and zones.) The book, subtitled History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990, is essentially about the reception of ‘edgy French theory’ in Germany in the period after hardline philosophical ‘critical theory’ Marxism (Frankfurt School, etc.) went a bit stale, and before the moment that the heady provocations of Lyotard, Deleuze & Guattari et al became … well, just another commodity in tertiary classrooms and on the hipster fashion market. The necessary spirit of rebellion: how to re-find it in a confused, post-post-modern 21st century? How to stop talking about airy ideas, and start acting in and on the real world? Von Alberti never quite gets beyond that kind of reductive, journalistic trendspotting and sloganeering (which Feslch’s book transcends), but her project ticks along OK. And where does this one end? Not with a Super-8 flare-out (oh, for the days when our hearts were ablaze!), but with a drone camera sailing off into the sky … and surveying the city. Cue upbeat music and stylish end credits. This machine-eye searches: there has to be a future somewhere on that horizon … © Adrian Martin 16 November 2025 |
