Die Strände – Les plages

(Beaches, Astrid Johanna Ofner, Austria, 2019)

Faded Super-8 footage of days at the beach, with glimpses of family members at rest or play by the water: could there by any sweeter cue for nostalgia?

But a voice begins to tell us something very different: that holidays like this were hell for women, imposed by clueless, bossy husbands – a marker of social control.

Astrid Johanna Ofner has been making films since 1990; she also performed in Huillet-Straub’s Antigone (1991). Die Strände was preceded in her career by a feature adapted from a novel by Peter Weiss, Abschied von den Eltern (aka Farewell, Farewell to the Parents and Leavetaking, 2017), and followed by a 60-minute piece, Was soll man machen. – Vor Entzücken? (What Should One Do – In Delight?, 2024), based on the 1917-1918 correspondence between Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Liebknecht. All these works focus on the careful, stripped-down interplay of voice, text and image.

The soundtrack to Die Strände – a superbly performed recitation in German and French by Sylvie Rohrer – is a transcription from an interview with Marguerite Duras. In 10 minutes, Ofner raises the text from the status of ordinary speech to a veritable oratorio concerning the female pain behind everyday appearances.

© Adrian Martin 22 September 2019 (+ update)