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Die Filme der Jessica Hausner. Referenzen, Kontexte, Muster by Sabrina Gärtner

2021; German Studies Association; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2021.0062

2164-8646

Marco Abel,

European history and politics

Reviewed by: Die Filme der Jessica Hausner. Referenzen, Kontexte, Muster by Sabrina Gärtner Marco Abel Die Filme der Jessica Hausner. Referenzen, Kontexte, Muster. By Sabrina Gärtner. Marburg: Büchner, 2020. Pp. 536. Paper €26.00. ISBN 978-0253038036. It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that one can count monographs on female film directors on two hands. For example, the two most prominent series in the Anglophone publishing world—Wallflower Press's Directors' Cuts and University of Illinois Press's Contemporary Film Directors—have published more than one hundred monographs combined on auteurs from across the globe; yet less than ten percent of them concern [End Page 433] women, and none of these publications focus on female German-language filmmakers. One therefore cannot emphasize enough the significance of Sabrina Gärtner's pioneering work on Jessica Hausner, who is arguably the best known of the directors associated with the so-called Nouvelle Vague Viennoise, which Gärtner discusses in the second part of her comprehensive, information-packed study on the director of films such as Lovely Rita (2001), Hotel (2004), Lourdes (2009), Amour Fou (2014), and Little Joe (2019). The book is divided into three main parts. Part 1, "Das filmische Œuvre der Jessica Hausner," consists of ten sections that chronologically cover Hausner's work from her first of five short films, Flora (1997), to Little Joe. Each of these sections is, in turn, divided into five subsections, which, one film at a time, summarize the films' content, discuss their production circumstances, report on their festival presence and awards, and provide detailed box office numbers and television Einschaltquoten, before offering a range of critical approaches. The second and shortest part, "Verortungsversuch," situates Hausner's films in the context of both the New Austrian Wave and the Berlin School, which emerged north of the border during the same years that Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidel, Barbara Albert, Ruth Mader, and of course Hausner gradually established themselves as a loosely connected, yet manifesto-less film movement that drew the attention of a coterie of cinephiles and eventually, in some cases, of a larger audience. "Eine märchenhafte Welt," the book's third part, is a veritable book-within-a-book. Like part 1, it is divided into one section per film, but unlike part 1, this final main section—comprising about a third of the primary text's 400 heavily footnoted pages—engages each of Hausner's films through the framework of Grimms' fairy tales, demonstrating how each film is based on, or in conversation with, well-known Märchen such as "Rotkäppchen" (Inter-View, 1999), "Rapunzel" (Hotel, 2004), or "Die Gänsemagd" (Rufus, 2006), using tropes and narrative devices such as animal commentary, spatial isolation, the quest-motif, and magical objects (e.g., Schneewittchen's mirror) that commonly found in these tales. In so doing, Gärtner compellingly describes the "märchenhafte Ästhetik und Stilistik" (426) permeating Hausner's work. The three main parts are framed by a brief introductory Vorspann and an Abspann that concludes this exhaustively detailed study by looking ahead to Hausner's film projects-in-progress, supplemented by both an extensive bibliography and an appendix that includes an original interview Gärtner conducted with Hausner in 2016. The impressive Fleißarbeit exuding from these pages is almost overwhelming. There is simply no question that this book will remain the go-to study on Hausner's oeuvre for years to come, for it seems that there is no source that Gärtner has not consulted—including reviews of Hausner's films and interviews with her, scholarly and feuilletonistische discussions on contemporary Austrian cinema, scholarship on topics ranging from Grimms' Märchen to the Berlin School to the history of tableaux [End Page 434] vivants (which Gärtner productively inflects with her notion of bewegte Stillbilder as a key stylistic aspect of Hausner's films) to Dialektologie—to name but a few of the many topics addressed in these pages. In this regard, Die Filme der Jessica Hausner resoundingly succeeds in being the "nötige erste Schritt" (13) on route to establishing Hausner, one of the most lauded directors in contemporary global cinema, as a subject...