2. Politics, Aesthetics, and Patriarchy in the Confessions of Winifred Wagner

MARCIA LANDY1

2. POLITICS, AESTHETICS, AND PATRIARCHY IN THE CONFESSIONS OF WINIFRED WAGNER

In The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (1975), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg has made a contribution to the history of film form and theory in his conception and execution of the film essay. He has also made a contribution to a theoretical understanding of the politics of culture by invoking the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and patriarchy. Through a close examination of Winifred Wagner’s role as a woman and as a powerful public force in the German culture establishment, he elicits the common elements in the preservation and maintenance of the symbolic order in both the public and private dimensions of her life. Common to both spheres are the expressions of patriarchy as exemplified in the family, social roles, and artistic creation. The Confessions of Winifred Wagner poses formidable challenges for its audiences. A work that can be dismissed as visually uninteresting and politically mystifying to those who are accustomed to established types of nonfiction films or to more direct forms of political statement, the film is difficult to view and raises, even if it does not answer, complex questions about art and politics. Without giving any direct information or examples of Richard Wagner’s art, it taxes its audience to recollect, infer, and probe the role of that art and of Bayreuth as a dominant phenomenon in the perpetuation of German culture and, in particular, in the creation and triumph of Nazism. The audience is forced, moreover, to confront Winifred Wagner as an important agent in the preservation and transmission of that culture, and, through her, to confront the absent, though central, reality of Adolf Hitler and his influence on German art and politics from 1923 to 1945. The audience is required to work hard at materializing, recalling, and re-creating in its imagination the events and people alluded to by Winifred Wagner. If one’s expectations, derived from past cinematic treatments of German fascism, involve moral judgments, high rhetorical phrases, sentiment, visions of goose-stepping legions and extermination camps, one will be disoriented by the style of Winifred Wagner, which not only avoids documentation and affective treatment, but stresses the more personal, immediate, psycho-social and familiar aspects of German culture and character through this woman’s narration. Her political power is ascertained through her own words, and the audience must work at documentation through exercising its memory.

The film orchestrates its many and complex issues by focusing obsessively on the figure of Winifred Wagner. The camera holds her tightly in the frame, only varying from time to time by means of subtle adjustments in distance and perspective, by alternating medium and close-up, frontal and profile shots for punctuation and emphasis. Only at the end will the camera relinquish its hold somewhat. For most of the film, the audience is forced to situate itself with the interviewer, to make his questions its questions, and to struggle, as Syberberg must struggle, with his “subject.” The only relief from Winifred Wagner’s presence is through the connecting strips of black or white leader with their printed quotations, selected, it seems, to provoke a larger critical context for the interview. The quotations from critics such as Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Egon Friedell, as well as from Wagner, Hitler, Mahler, and members of the Wagner family, link segments of the interviews to each other, “document” some of Winifred’s observations, more often provide an alternative point of view to hers, and provide momentary retreat from the claustrophobia of the visual frame. The possibility of involvement and identification with Winifred is not a major problem in the film, since Syberberg’s interview format, his use of printed text, his camera work, and his inclusion of Winifred’s comments on the filming process consistently remind the audience of the concrete, immediate situation. The film style is thus at an opposite pole from a mythic, Romantic treatment. Syberberg permits Winifred to interrupt commentary and to utter banal statements such as having done enough for the day, and to express her personal concern about the public consequences of certain private revelations. He also demonstrates in the questions and length of time given to Winifred’s answers, how much latitude he gives her to elaborate, retrace, or retract. We are dimly aware through Winifred’s side-glances and comments in the direction of offscreen space that others are present on the sidelines, members of the family as well as the interviewer before her. The questions themselves are carefully “framed,” focusing mainly on Bayreuth, Hitler’s connections to the Wagner family, his support of Bayreuth, and Winifred’s role as director of Bayreuth. In the process of discussing these issues, Winifred comments on her personal loyalties, her politics, and her desire to dissociate art from politics. The alert members of the audience, with the help of the interviewer, can contemplate more theoretical questions of patriarchy, authoritarianism, the role of women, family, loyalty, conformity, and deviance. Thus Syberberg demonstrates that he was not interested in making a documentary in the conventional sense, nor was he interested in making a film biography of Winifred Wagner. Instead we have a film essay that uses the film interview, uses Winifred’s responses to questions as a means, not an end, to explore thorny problems of aesthetics and politics.2 In this respect, the film is roughly similar to Jean-Luc Godard’s Letter to Jane (1972), which asks questions of Jane Fonda’s photograph and of its audiences about the role film and photography play in determining political point of view. Winifred Wagner diverges from Letter to Jane, however, in its asking questions of the actual person while asking questions, at the same time, of the audience by indirection. In this manner, Syberberg is exonerated from objectifying