Reading Frieda Grafe

Six Moments

When Frieda Grafe was asked for her profession, she used to reply: “Film critic and translator.” Enno Patalas, her husband, confidante, and closest collaborator in both film critical work and translating from French, reminds us of this detail in his postscript to the impressive twelve volumes of Grafe’s selected writings that he published between 2002 and 2008.1 I regard these two professions (in German, Beruf and Berufung – profession and vocation – share the same origin), as equally important activities, or maybe even synonyms for Grafe. What she engaged in between 1962, the moment of her first published article, and her death in July 2002, was translating from one medium and artform to the other by writing, and from one language to the other by making important film books and theory accessible in German. In both cases, she paid scrupulous attention to the specificities of the original context as well as to the acoustic and semantic particularities of the target language.

Given this background, translating Frieda Grafe must be a pleasure and a challenge at the same time. At the risk of sounding trivial: my impression is that the character of Frieda Grafe’s writing resides so much in the sound and syncopation of her sentences that it is difficult to isolate her thinking from the crystalline and elegant condensation of the German phrases and words. The stakes are high. In fact, since I write these lines in English (not my first language), I too find myself faced with the impossible task of having to translate Grafe.

In a “Note on the selection and translation” in the German edition of Godard’s film criticism from the 1950s and ’60s, Grafe argues that Godard’s critical writing requires readers who hardly exist yet – readers “who read with their ears, and with their memory.”2 To read with one’s ear: this means to refuse the traditional dichotomy of “form” versus “content” and to reflect about the possibilities and deficits, the chances and limits of language; to be alert to the materiality of letters, words, punctuation. And it introduces an intermedia component that Grafe was always sensitive to. “Quite certainly, the translator is not a transparent medium,”3 she maintains.

In what follows, I will single out some passages from Frieda Grafe’s writing that have stuck in my ears and in my memory. Paying homage to a text of hers entitled “New Look: 13 filmische Momente,”4 I recall six “Frieda Grafe moments” – instances and sentences which reveal some of the many qualities of her writing and thinking.

I.
Film/Education – “Most intense educational experience: the encounter of the universities as the most significant breeding ground of patriarchal thinking.”5 This is taken from a short autobiographical sketch, written for the one hundredth issue of the journal Filmkritik in 1965. Grafe was thirty years old. She had been writing exclusively for the monthly magazine since 1962 and had recently become one of its regular contributors. The scepticism and critique of West-German higher education that Grafe expresses here not only points to the conservative, reactionary character of many institutions at this time. It also highlights the fact that cinema and film did not have a place in the curriculum – a snobbish resentment typical of German “Bildungsbürgertum” and its idea of high culture that persisted in German academia for a long time. Sophisticated thinking about film remained alien to universities until well into the 1970s. The vacuum was (partly) filled by film clubs and cinephile journals. Founded in 1957 and following the Cahiers du Cinéma example, Filmkritik, under the direction of Enno Patalas, set out to reconnect with the critical tradition of the Weimar Republic, with thinkers like Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin; later, and partly thanks to Grafe, it paved the way for the French theory of Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and others. In Grafe’s biographical note, Paris and its cinephilia offer an antidote to German academia: “First serious contact [“contact” is a poor English approximation; she writes “Berührung,” “touch”] with the cinema in Paris where, at the Sorbonne, I was advised to study Murnau to better understand German expressionism.”6 It is a well-known trope of cinephilia that the movie theatre replaces the school as the primary site of instruction. The Henri Langlois figures, those who expose us to film history, are the real teachers. Frieda Grafe kept her distance from academia throughout her life. She abandoned a PhD project on Heinrich Mann and established an independent position of para-academic thinking, using the tools and resources of journalism without giving in to journalism’s ideals of easy accessibility and service. The Nouvelle Vague and their co-presence of film-historical ambition and sense of rupture left an imprint on Grafe. “Forty years with the Nouvelle Vague” is the subtitle of volume 3 of her Schriften – the one called “Nur das Kino” – “Seul le cinéma,” quoting Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma.

II. 
JLG – Throughout her life, from one of her very first Filmkritik articles, a review of Vivre sa vie (1962), to the early 2000s, Godard remained a constant preoccupation in Grafe’s writing. Discovering his early films meant being disrupted, having to deal with disintegrated elements – particles of reality, quotations, shards of film history – which resisted closure. Among the filmmakers of European modernism (and of neorealism which Grafe experienced at the same time), Godard was the most radical in constantly re-inventing and changing course.

In the mid-1960s, an argument among the writers and editors of Filmkritik took place. How should one deal with the films by Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais or Godard? How could film criticism react adequately to this unprecedented, new experience? In an all too simple historiography of German film criticism, this dispute became known as a confrontation between the “political” and the “aesthetic” Left within Filmkritik. In her contribution to the debate, Grafe, the only female writer far and wide, sided with those who were convinced that the formal novelty of the films needed to find an equivalent in the writing. “Now there are films in which unformed parts of reality enter. The position of the critic and the spectator in front of them is not essentially different from that of the director who shoots them. In front of our eyes, things organize themselves independently from what we can think. [...] In front of these new films the point is to think unthought reality. It is the critic’s task to find first linguistic expressions for this. No scholarly apparatus, as organized as it may be, could provide this.”7 The writing subject, in other words, does not stand on firm ground, there’s no recipe for dealing with films. A permanent reinvention is needed to do justice to the fleeting subject of film. With cinema, Grafe sensed, something entirely new had entered the world. Not just a seventh art, but a powerful tool that fundamentally unsettles our relation to categories like reality, time, and history. At one point, she claims that “with the technically produced images, the coordinates of time and space were displaced, the perception of the human body and its surrounding space disarticulated itself under the camera gaze and was then reassembled in the editing room.”8 Under the conditions of photography and cinema, the hierarchies between subject and object need to be rethought.

III.
Filmtips/SZ: Grafe was a master of the small form. Between 1970 and 1986, she wrote 477 episodes of the “Filmtip” for the Munich section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. An art of condensation; on August 6, 1971, she writes on a series of Jerry Lewis films: “It makes no sense to break down the films by realistic standards. With Jerry Lewis, reality is not the goal of representation, but only the starting point for abstractions. Abstractions are phantasies that take off from life, says Lenin. Oh, Mama!”9 Lewis and Lenin – a clash of US-mainstream comedy and hardcore politics.

In principle, the “Filmtips” were a genre of quotidian topicality, limited length and meant as a pragmatic advice for the readers which films they should watch. In Frieda Grafe’s typewriter, however, they transformed into a literary form, playfully appropriating elements of the aphorism, the advertising slogan, the short prose poem. And they could also provide a space for re-evaluating an earlier position: “Two films in colour: Le bonheur and Pierrot le fou – not just colour films. Two crucial contributions of the Nouvelle Vague to the problem of colour. When they were released, our attention was too absorbed by the content. The time since then makes it more evident: Colour not as an addition, to amplify expression, but as an autonomous carrier of meaning.”10

IV.
Süddeutsche Zeitung – The newspaper page as canvas – “My relationship with written language, with texts, has changed fundamentally by being exposed to the images of films.”11 This is a basic premise for Grafe’s thinking: cinema as a cultural act and film as the medium of the moving image have left their indelible mark on thinking and writing. Writing – and maybe the history of logocentrism in general – is severely questioned by this new form of embedded thinking which articulates itself in image, movement, light, words and sounds. The relation between text and image, according to Grafe, is characterized by a number of forces. The photographs are, as she claims, “something that salutarily interrupts the flow of written language,”12 they carry the potential “to render language crazy,”13 and they can serve “to release the blockages of one’s own medium”14 – a powerful catalyst to unleash emotional, intellectual, and poetical forces.

For the weekend edition of the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Grafe had carte blanche to design an entire page every few months. “To me, the ideal way of expressing oneself about films, is the newspaper page, providing that it is available in its entirety.”15 The mise en page – arranging the text, selecting the photographs, juxtaposing words and images, deciding on subheadings and their placement, having an idea for the title – was an integral part of the argument. It is worth listing the titles of the “SZ-Filmseiten,” beautifully reproduced in volume 7 of her writings, since it shows her predilections and cinematic taste: “Directed by John Ford” (1972); “The Von-effect. Erich von Stroheim’s films at the Filmpodium Zürich” (1973); “How to orient oneself in Ozu’s films” (1973); “Clerical men and natural women. The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer” (1974); “An Ascetic’s Excesses. Robert Bresson and his films” (1975); “In Kansas, the Chicken have Beautiful Legs. After the films with W.C. Fields at the Munich Stadtmuseum” (1976); “Not to Mention all these Women. Postscript to a Conversation with Ingmar Bergman” (1977); “Hello America, What’s up? Films by Preston Sturges” (1977); “Images from a Land that Writes with the Paintbrush. Films by Kenji Mizoguchi in London and Munich” (1978); “Spoken aloud and seen from afar. Max Ophüls’ films in the Munich Stadtmuseum” (1978); “The Most Unlikely. At the Occasion of Douglas Sirk’s 80th birthday.” (1980); “The Management has not Shied away from Costs and Troubles. A Mitchell Leisen retrospective on TV” (1981); “For the Midinettes. Jacques Prévert – Poems, Collages, Films, Photos” (1982); “Not just for the Eye. Luis Buñuel’s Complete Works – a Retrospective at the Munich Film Museum” (1983); “American Laokoon or The Howard-Hawks-Story. A Retrospective at the Munich Film Museum” (1985); “A Viennese from New York at Hollywood’s Assembly Line. The Josef von Sternberg Retrospective at the Munich Film Museum” (1987). This last “Filmseite,” the one on Josef von Sternberg, one of her favourite directors, led to a confrontation with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. For the first time, the editorial department rejected Grafe’s design; even if a few more “Filmseiten” appeared, Grafe no longer had the “final cut,” and the working relation with the newspaper practically terminated.

V.
Film/Color – In 1971, in one of her early Filmtips, Grafe states: “Writing about colour film – more than fifty years after its invention – still has to be invented.”16 Film colour (and colour film) remained a favourite topic of her writing, and she kept inventing ways of writing about it. For a retrospective called “Farbfilmfest,” screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988, she curated twelve exemplary film programs that included a wide range of films from Veit Harlan’s Opfergang (1942–44) via Jean Renoir’s The River (1949–51), Boris Barnet/Konstantin Judin’s Borez I Kloun (1957), to Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960), Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra (1961), and Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981). About Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957), she writes: “The tertium comparationis between film and colour is no longer painting. It is the new images of mass media with their instant colours, with the colours of the applied arts. The next step was done by the pop-artists and hyperrealists who got their house paints from the department store.”17 In a film like Tashlin’s, art history and consumer culture come together, the frivolous and vulgar are married to aesthetic progress, entertainment and the avant-garde merge. Colour, like comedy, has the power to de-center human agency.18

Colour is a subversive force; in film history and film criticism, it was constantly neglected, dismissed, suppressed. “It is an experience that is not absorbed in functionality. It doesn’t let itself be reduced to information.”19 Thinking about colour was essential for Grafe since it was part and parcel of her other interests: in fashion, in set design, in film architecture. She was a partisan of colour.

VI. 
Japan – If this essay conveys the idea that Grafe’s canon primarily consisted of European high modernism after World War II and US-American studio cinema – “vulgar modernism,” as she dubbed it, picking up a term coined by J. Hoberman – this is a misconception that needs to be corrected. The Weimar cinema of Lubitsch, von Sternberg, von Stroheim and Fritz Lang – “Licht aus Berlin,” in her beautiful phrase – was equally important; and so was Gertrude Stein’s writing or the advent of French structuralism in the 1960s, which she helped to import to German language.20 Let alone her passion for cooking.

Time and again, she also turned to Japanese cinema and indulged in her fascination for the stark differences in the notions of space, identification, and culture that could be experienced in the films of Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujirō. In their films, our conventional concepts of realism and illusion did not apply. “The gestures, the dresses, the spaces began to talk. And it became perfectly clear that far away in Japan, on an equal footing with language, other codes of communication exist, no less sophisticated and subtle, of big social effectiveness.”21

*

For too long, and exceptions notwithstanding,22 Frieda Grafe’s thinking was only accessible to those who read (and hear) German. Only recently, her articles and essays have started to be translated into English and other languages. It will be exciting to see what happens when new readers encounter her thoughts. Some things will be lost in translation, other aspects will come to the fore. Different sounds and rhythms will meet different ears. It’s always a risk, but a risk worth taking. Nobody would have understood this better than Frieda Grafe, the critic and translator.

• 1Enno Patalas, “Nachbemerkung des Herausgebers,” in Frieda Grafe, Register, vol. 12 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose 2008), n.p. As Sissi Tax reminds me, Patalas might be the only husband who has so selflessly dedicated himself to making his wife’s work known and public. Patalas’ own writing still remains to be edited and republished.
• 2Frieda Grafe, “Anmerkungen zur Auswahl und zur Übersetzung,” in Godard/Kritiker. Ausgewählte Kritiken und Aufsätze über Film (1950–1970) (München: Hanser 1971), 189.
• 3Ibid.
• 4Frieda Grafe: “New Look: 13 filmische Momente,” in Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 1993), 365–90. Parts of this text appear across several volumes of the edition of Grafe’s Schriften.
• 5Frieda Grafe, “Autoportrait mit 30” [1965], in Frieda Grafe, Aus dem Off. Zum Kino in den Sechzigern, vol. 4 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose 2003), 9. The title was added by the editor for republication in the Schriften.
• 6Ibid.
• 7Frieda Grafe, “Zum Selbstverständnis der Filmkritik” [1966], in Frieda Grafe, Aus dem Off. Zum Kino in den Sechzigern, vol. 4 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose 2003), 12.
• 8Frieda Grafe, “In Medias Res. Notizen zur Vulgärmoderne” [1995], in Frieda Grafe, Filmfarben, mit Die Geister, die man nicht loswird, vol. 1 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2002), 8.
• 9Frieda Grafe, Ins Kino! Münchner Filmtips 1970–1986, vol. 11 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2007), 13.
• 10Ibid., 93.
• 11Frieda Grafe, “Das Bild: der Text. Bilder illustrieren” [1987], in Frieda Grafe, Film/Geschichte. Wie Film Geschichte anders schreibt, vol. 5 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2004), 55.
• 12Ibid., 56.
• 13Ibid.
• 14Ibid., 57.
• 15Ibid., 55.
• 16Grafe, Ins Kino! Münchner Filmtips 1970–1986, 20.
• 17Frieda Grafe, “Farbfilmfest. Eine Retrospektive der Berliner Filmfestspiele” [1988], in Grafe, Filmfarben, 24.
• 18A side note: Grafe often evokes the parallel trajectories of psychoanalysis and cinema – both of them engaged in dethroning the rational, self-confident subject by mining the terrain of the unconscious.
• 19Frieda Grafe, “Licht im Auge – Farbe im Kopf. Farbfilmreihe im Münchner Filmmuseum” [1988], in Grafe, Filmfarben, 40.
• 20 Another inspiring book length piece of experimental writing indicating that the notion “film critic” is much too narrow to grasp Grafe’s achievements is Frieda Grafe, Zwei Jahre aus meinem Leben mit Gertrude Stein, vol. 6 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2004), first published in 1978 as volumes 18–26 of Uwe Nettelbeck’s journal Die Republik.
• 21Frieda Grafe, “Wie sich in Ozu-Filmen orientieren” [1973], in Frieda Grafe, In Großaufnahme. Autorenpolitik und jenseits, vol. 7 of Schriften (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2005), 25.
• 22An early example is the book with selected Italian translations edited by Mariann Lewinsky and Enno Patalas in 2002: Frieda Grafe, Luce negli occhi colori nella mente, Scritti di cinema 1961-2000 (Genova: Le Mani Microart S, 2002). (Thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo for pointing me to it). Since January 2020, the Belgian online journal Sabzian has regularly been publishing selections of Grafe’s texts in Dutch and English. Also in 2020, the Berlin based Harun Farocki Institut published one of its bilingual booklets with three of Grafe’s essays and a eulogy written by Farocki. During her lifetime, Grafe’s wonderful essay on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) was published in English translation as a book in the “BFI Film Classics” series. A substantial selection of Grafe’s essays in English translation is currently being prepared by Annett Busch and Sissi Tax in collaboration with the Berlin based publisher Archive Books.