Narcisa Hirsch & El Grupo Goethe

There is an interesting book out, “No Mataras”, Thou Shalt Not Kill, by philosopher Óscar del Barco. He is now in his 80s, but he was fighting against the military in the 1960s before they came to power. He basically says ‘I plead guilty, I ask for forgiveness for having been a militant. Although I never killed anybody, I was willing to support the people who did and I think that nobody should kill anybody else.’ He is not saying ‘I was wrong in my ideology’. He is still as much on the left as he could be. This produced an avalanche of reactions.

JB: So Argentina now is in a phase of quite a complex Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past, the term used to describe Germany’s dealing with the Nazi regime) or Aufarbeitung?
NH: Yes, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is the issue now in Argentina.

JB: You and your five, six colleagues who were working in mainly experimental film were offered to use a room at the Goethe-Institut in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, where you could realize your work, exhibit it and screen new films. You later even took the name El Grupo Goethe based on this relationship. Tell us a bit about these screenings at that time, who attended them, how were they received?
NC: It was mostly a small audience, 20, 25, and we didn’t have that many shows. But the Goethe audience would come to see whatever was being shown. They were not very happy about what they were seeing from us!
I remember one of the first shows in the early 70s, perhaps a year before Videla, that was very successful: Someone, an artist, would present the films and act as an intermediary between filmmaker and public. There were lots of people who thought this was something new, something they hadn’t seen. I remember that was the only show people wanted to see again! My film COME OUT was in it. But soon they realized they really wanted to see something else.


JB: The artists who would form El Grupo Goethe came together as the military dictatorship began. And then with the beginning of the democratic system in Argentina, the group dissolved. Was this temporal coincidence or an irony that an entire art form and arts scene flourishing at a time of oppression and censorship?
NH: We actually did not split up for political reasons, we split up because the media changed! The early 80s were the end of super 8 film, which died a natural death when video came up. In our group nobody switched to video – Claudio Caldini, who was the main filmmaker in the group, made one or two videos, and then he said ‘No, this is not for me’ and went back when super 8 became available again much later.
JB: That discussion feels like time travel to me: I just spent a week in Berlin with young European filmmakers, all under 30, who are literally freaking out about the (renewed) death of super 8, which is THE medium they want to work in!
NH: Yes, young people are coming back to it for its strangeness and unfamiliarity.


JB: What role did the Goethe-Institut play for you at the time, and for that matter exposure to what was going on in the larger arts world, and what role did it play in your artistic development?
NH: The Goethe was the only institution that was giving us support. There were other institutions, the Alliance Francaise, there might have been the British Council. But they didn't do much for us. We were unseen, unheard, unknown. Especially unseen (laughs). The people from the Goethe-Institut paid attention to us, partly because Marie Louise Alemann –also German like me--, who was part of the group, worked for the Goethe-Institut. Goethe arts programmer Ute Kirchhelle was on her first job, she was very young and very much in favour of what we did. Director Wilhelm Siegler was also very good to us. It was surprising for us because nobody else was interested. And had we shown our films to Videla and the military ... well, they would not have sent us to jail immediately, but he certainly would not have approved because he would not have understood. Nor would the opposition – because they wanted political cinema. Our films were poetry, not narrative or mainstream or "commercial". And not politically outspoken. We were considered completely superfluous (laughs). Which is political too!

Once the Goethe-Institut had decided to pay attention to what we were doing, they developed programs for us. You know that approach from your own work at the Goethe. It wasn't just "let's do one evening and then it's over." Ute was very active in creating wider programs. They invited Werner Nekes from Germany, who came over with a soundman and made a film with our group. I’m sure he can tell you all about it still today.

And then there was Werner Schroeter. He came over not to do something specifically with us. Marie Louise also worked for the “Argentinisches Tagesblatt”, a German newspaper in Argentina. She went to the Berlin Film Festival to write about it, and there she met Schroeter. Once in Argentina, he caused a big scandal because – well, Werner Schroeter being who he was, he had to do something ... I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think he tried to film the military and the militantes, which obviously in a military regime was not possible. The Goethe-Institut received threats from the military saying if they supported Werner Schroeter they would bomb them or harm them, and he had to leave the country in Nacht und Nebel, in the middle of the night. That was Werner Schroeter, he was a bomb thrower. Nekes was much calmer. He was more interested in film. Schroeter was a man who needed controversy.

JB: What did it mean for your work that the members of El Grupo Goethe were in a way thrown together by circumstance in a collective? Did you partake in each other’s projects, how "interactive" was it?
NH: We were a very heterogeneous group, we did not come from the same cultural background. I had the chance to travel. The others were much poorer. They were younger, 24, 25, and they had a completely different background. Marie Louise Alemann and I were the same generation, married with a family, living very bourgeois lives. The others were young men, who were doing odd things, teach arts. They didn't speak English. Certainly they could not afford to travel and see the international arts scene. So we would help each other with equipment and I would bring prints from abroad like I brought home Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH from New York.

Because of that isolation, the filmmakers in El Grupo Goethe really invented their films out of their own lives. They didn’t copy anybody, it came from their own sources. As poets, we didn’t belong to society, or the establishment.


JB: Speaking of the larger arts world … Toronto audiences will be privileged to see and hear you in conversation with Michael Snow at TIFF, who you implicitly relate to very much, and we will hear about it at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Which artists and works in experimental German film do you find interesting?
NH: I have always liked Werner Nekes. I think he is a very interesting filmmaker. He is serious about his art.
JB: What about the New German Cinema that came up in the 70s, Fassbinder, Herzog…
NH: Yes, Herzog. Marie Louise fell in love with Herzog – one can say that. Not romantically, but she idealized the person and she followed him around when he was filming in the Amazon. They are still in touch. But I don’t think that he was interested in what we were doing or what she was doing. Nekes perhaps looked a little bit our way, but he also wasn’t entirely interested. There was no great exchange really.
Now, during my recent retrospective at the Viennale I met German filmmaker Klaus Wyborny, of Nekes’ generation, he showed interesting work. But I do not know enough about the current German scene.
JB: Muchas gracias Narcisa.
NH: Nos vemos.


A little appetizer menu bridging 40 years:

MARABUNTA (a 1967 filmed performance)

BORGES – EL ALEPH (2005) see photo ...

And the poetic mini biopic "Vidas de Pelicula: Narcisa Hirsch - Entre el Silencio y la Palabra"


See you at TIFF Free Screen.


by Jutta Brendemühl