29thSFF Tribute to Jessica Hausner

Tribute to Jessica Hausner 13-18/08/2023

Jessica Hausner was born in Vienna in 1972. She studied directing at the Film Academy of Vienna, where she made the award-winning short films FLORA (1996) and INTER-VIEW (1999). LOVELY RITA, her debut feature-length film, had its premiered at the Festival de Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section in 2001. Hausner returned to Un Certain Regard in 2004 with her second feature, HOTEL. In 2009, LOURDES was selected for the Competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize. AMOUR FOU (2014) premiere in Un Certain Regard and LITTLE JOE (2019), Hausner’s fifth feature-length film and her English-language debut, was selected for the Official Competition at Cannes, where Emily Beecham was named Best Actress. Hausner’s latest film, CLUB ZERO, premiered in the Competition at Cannes in 2023.

Tribute to Jessica Hausner

13-18/08/2023

Sunday, 13/08/2023

Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00

Lovely Rita

Austria, Germany, 2001, Colour, 79 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Barbara Osika, Christoph Bauer, Peter Fiala, Wolfgang Kostal, Karina Brandlmayer

Monday, 14/08/2023

Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00

Little Joe

Austria, United Kingdom, Germany, France, 2019, Colour, 105 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox, Kit Connor, David Wilmot, Phénix Brossard, Sebastian Hülk, Lindsay Duncan

Tuesday, 15/08/2023

Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00

Hotel

Austria, Germany, 2004, Colour, 82 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Franziska Weiss, Marlene Streeruwitz, Birgit Minichmayr, Rosa Waissnix

Wednesday, 16/08/2023

Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00

Lourdes

Austria, France, Germany, 2009, Colour, 99 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Sylvie Testud, Léa Seydoux, Bruno Todeschini, Elina Löwensohn, Gerhard Liebmann, Linde Prelog, Heidi Baratta, Hubsi Kramar, Helga Illich

Thursday, 17/08/2023

Meeting Point Cinema, 15:00

Amour Fou

Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, 2014, Colour, 96 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Birte Schnöink, Christian Friedel, Stephan Grossmann, Sandra Hüller, Holger Handtke, Barbara Schnitzler, Alissa Wilms, Paraschiva Dragus, Peter Jordan

Friday, 18/08/2023

Coca Cola Open Air Cinema, 20:30

Club Zero

Austria, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, Qatar, 2023, Colour, 110 min.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Amir El-Masry, Elsa Zylberstein, Mathieu Demy, Ksenia Devriendt, Luke Barker, Florence Baker, Samuel D Anderson, Gwen Currant

Publisher Sarajevo Film Festival

Editor-in-Chief Izeta Građević

Jessica Hausner:

‘I don’t show the exit, because there is none’

Interview by Dana Linssen

When reviewing the films of Jessica Hausner (born Vienna, 1972) in chronological order this summer, from her student film Flora (1995; the first film ‘she was satisfied with’) to her most recent feature CLUB ZERO (2023), two things struck me again. First of all, the use of the colour red – more on that later. But also, that, in retrospect, the title of her graduation film at the Film Academy in Vienna, INTER-VIEW (1999), contains a key or a hinge to her work. That is partly due to its remarkable spelling of course. At first glance, the title may refer to one of the topics and themes of her film, the short interviews with life questions that the male protagonist conducts throughout the film. But perhaps we should take it even more literally. INTER-VIEW is also an “in-between look”, a glimpse into an inter-zone, the interstitial realms between adolescence and adulthood, school and work, work and leisure, day and night, and manœuvring between the learned expectations that society imposes on (young) people (and they on themselves) and their dreams – even if they don’t quite know what those dreams are yet.

The episodic film consists of apparently loose observations; yet, nothing is superfluous. Dialogue is sparse, the motives of these passers-by in each others’ lives and that of the spectator even more scarce. We only get to know, or have the illusion of understanding them by watching them. And that makes them ideal mirrors for what happens to be going on in our own heads at that moment. Just like an unexpected, stealthy look in a real mirror, watching the film produces a sudden feeling of being caught.

Hausner’s films do not catch us with the intention of brutally exposing us. They are too multi-faceted, composed and thoughtful for that. They provoke with pinpricks. Her films can say both “yes” and “no” at the same time but mostly they say “if” or “but”; they ask, “Have you seen this?” or “Have you even thought about that?” Well, they don’t say it, they keep silent long enough for a viewer to hear their own inner voice, they wriggle open those in-between spaces where those uncertainties reside, because in this in-betweenness, human nature and human behaviour are mostly ambiguous, unmotivated, obscure, paradoxical, and sometimes downright incongruous.

Cinema is good with these in-between spaces. Not only through montage, but also through time, or rather duration. The longer a shot lasts, the more reality unravels, becomes unstable, volatile, evaporates. There are no certainties in Hausner’s films. Not because she upsets the sacred certainties of family (LOVELY RITA, 2001), religion (LOURDES, 2009), love (AMOUR FOU, 2014), and science (LITTLE JOE, 2019). No: she pulls away some carefully selected loose stones from those pillars of society, only causing them to waver perilously. That’s ominous and dangerous enough.

Because of their stylistic consistency (which is different from the fact that all her films

look alike), they are all unmistakably Hausner films in retrospect too. For this she works closely with her team: cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (with whom she founded the production company coop99); production designer Katharina Wöppermann; and her sister, costume designer Tanja Hausner. Together, they create uncanny spaces of unease: rationalised architectures, recognisable and yet artificial at the same time. The more tightly these psycho-landscapes, these mental geographies, are put together, the more room there is for the camera in long takes and deep focus to watch without interfering. A terrifying terrarium of human behaviour.

In that tightly choreographed confusion of performed modes and mores, emphasised by graphic lines and patterns, the spotlight suddenly falls on the female protagonists: Rita, who murders her parents; the disabled Christine, who goes to Lourdes in search of a miracle as if it were a diversion; Henriette Vogel, who is challenged by poet Heinrich von Kleist in Amour fou to accompany him in his self-chosen death; single mother Alice, who grows a lucky plant she names after her little son, Joe; and nutrition guru Ms. Novak, who, in CLUB ZERO, encourages a group of students (and their ambitious parents) to live a life of perfect asceticism. All figures who have fallen through a crack in reality, have tried to escape, or have been carelessly pushed through the boundaries and laws of society, because they do not fit in well enough among the building blocks of society that obscures the view of those in-between areas.

Hausner does not free these women; she only creates the space to look at them curiously, in their rigidity, their implosion, their longing for disappearance and a danger that looms on the horizon of their vision. Fear, repression, and desire go hand in hand. But only if you, as a spectator, take responsibility for that observation yourself.

Flora’s red suitcase, Rita’s red shoes, Christine’s red cap and the nuns’ red vests in Lourdes, the red flower that is supposed to bring good luck but exudes danger: everywhere there are warning signs, traffic lights, little wounds from which those pinpricks start to bleed. Watching is not without commitment or responsibility.

With these thoughts in mind, I had a conversation with Jessica Hausner. Via Zoom. We routinely waited for the connection to be established, only to conclude that it was not good enough to use our cameras. So, it became a conversation in which we had to rely only on wording, voice, and intonation, to talk about movies full of absurd humour and subtle irony.

My Zoom avatar consists of a photo of Anna Karina peeking through an LP cover in JeanLuc Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962). “Do you believe in freedom?” reads the subtitle. It seemed an excellent question. An interview about a filmmaker’s views is also not without obligation. An inter-vision on reality.

Dana Linssen

Let’s start with a walk through your work and look at how you became a filmmaker and how your career grew.

Beginnings are beginnings and yet, there are never fixed beginnings because our outlooks on life and work change as we develop and learn. You are a filmmaker and producer; I am a philosopher and a film critic; but I think we share a similar childhood history: you grew up in a family of artists, while I am the child of two stage actors. The more experience I have in my profession, the more I realise how much that kind of upbringing is itself an education and a formative element of one’s chosen profession. I wonder how growing up in a family of artists shaped you as a filmmaker? To what extent you relate to this experience – perhaps your upbringing prepared you for a career as a filmmaker?

Jessica Hausner Yes, that is in some way true, although you could also say my sister Tanja and I were pretty much left to our own resources, because our parents loved their work, and every minute they had was devoted to their art. When we saw them for dinner, all they talked about was art. In a way, this was very intense preparation for my becoming an artist, because the ability to be on your own and fill your own time with your own ideas is definitely part of my job now

I come from a classical family structure, my father being the patriarch and the main person in the room, my mother being his servant, and we children being sort of mute slaves. It was basically him talking about his art. When he had a bad day, he would talk about why things didn’t work out as he wanted, discuss very specific questions concerning his craft; on other evenings, he would speak more about art in general or about his colleagues, why he valued their work or hated it.

When I became a teenager, I remember appreciating the German artist Joseph Beuys very much. What I liked was that he said anything could be art, depending on the context, which I think is a very intelligent idea. My father hated that idea because his art came from craftmanship. He was a very skillful painter. And he detested the idea that anyone could be an artist without any form of technique. So, we had big fights about Joseph Beuys.

DL And your mother?

JH My mother was also a painter. She had been a student of my father; they met at the art academy. She never fully lived her life as an artist because we lived in this strict structure where everything revolved around my father. She worked a lot as his assistant, she helped with painting the foundations for his paintings, washed his brushes, and of course was there for us as children. The moment we left home, she started to devote more time to her own art.

Jessica Hausner on the set of CLUB ZERO

to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

Tanja and Jessica Hausner (personal archive)

DL When did film come into your life?

JH As a child, I wrote short stories and wanted to be a writer, but when I was sixteen, I had a boyfriend whose father worked in television and they had a video camera at home. This was not common at that time, in the 1980s. We borrowed the camera and made a little film out of one of my stories. I was the director and cinematographer, my friend acted, and I discovered something that was much more satisfying for me than writing. Making a film was creating reality, it was real action happening in front of me, in front of the camera.

DL Had you watched a lot of film or TV before? Did you have some sense of what cinema was?

JH Not at all. When I made that first film, I did not even know that in the editing you could combine different shots and camera positions. I just put the camera in front of the action and filmed it. And only when I started editing at home, using our video player, I realised that the transition from one scene to another must make sense, both visually and narratively. I didn’t know anything about shots and counter-shots, or starting a scene with an establishing shot. I discovered film by doing it. It was only after that that I started to watch films and television differently.

DL Can you remember the first film that made a real impression on you?

JH I remember seeing DERSU UZALA (1975) by Akira Kurosawa. It impressed me with its epic story. The end in particular was very touching.

The central idea is invisible in my films

DL After you discovered cinema, or re-invented it for yourself, and finding the power of the visual versus the verbal, did that change the way you wrote stories?

JH My stories were quite abstract, but after that first film my writing became more focused on writing scenes that express specific content through the action. I became very aware that film is told through people doing things, rather than thinking of things. Still, the notion of an abstract story has always remained very much present in the back of my mind. Although all my films have a story action on the surface, the main element is told between the lines. The central idea is invisible in my films, I would say.

DL Before we speak about your films in more detail, I was wondering whether, alongside writing, you were an avid reader as a child?

JH I was mostly into psychological books. I really loved reading Sigmund Freud. That came partly from my father, who loved psychology and connected a lot of ideas from Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Alfred Adler in his work. Their ideas were part of our discussions at the dinner table. I always thought, if I couldn’t make it as a filmmaker, I could be a psychologist.

DL Maybe we are a bit limited by the fact that we cannot see each other during this conversation – if we could, you would see a bit of an ironic sparkle in my eye, because psychology is not, perhaps, the first thing that comes to mind when I watch your films.

JH That’s true. Actually, I studied psychology for a year when I finished secondary school. But I hated it! All of a sudden, everything was reduced to finding an

overarching explanation for all individual differences. Psychology tries to sum things up, gather similarities, explain things that in my perception are inexplicable. For me, it didn’t make sense at all to learn generalising concepts about how the human psyche works. So, I decided to go in the opposite direction and make works that understand every individual as different and, in itself, incomprehensible.

DL That for sure speaks more for your films, which are more behaviourist in a way, observing Handlung, people’s actions, without learning much about motive, underlying causes, or how characters have become who they are. Are you in that sense more of a phenomenologist as a filmmaker?

JH I would even add that what I am trying to say is that you cannot explain certain things. I am still working on making myself very clear about that. It is not possible to explain a person’s actions in a way so that suddenly everything makes sense. There is no sense. Everyone sees things differently and there are either various explanations or none.

DL That is quite a bold statement, and I like that, although I am not sure whether I agree because, for instance, I often observe in myself the desire for an explanation, or a form of understanding, whether in life or in cinema – even if that thought process is often more gratifying than the result. Is this desire for understanding something that speaks to you? Or is the recognition that there are no explanations, and that everyone sees things differently, enough, or even comforting, for you?

JH I am a definitely a person who always looks for an explanation but, the more I look for it, the more confusing and contradictory it becomes. The more one investigates something, the blurrier it becomes and the more it blends and refracts into different aspects. For instance, when I work on a story for a film, I do a lot of research and interviews and I do try to understand why people are acting the way they do. But, in the end, I try to find a form where you can choose from different explanations. I wouldn’t say that there are no explanations at all in my films; I’d rather say that there are various and different possibilities in interpreting them.

DL Let’s speak more about this when we get to the way you do research. Before that, I am curious how this worked in at the Vienna Film Academy, where you studied in the mid-1990s. The predominant narrative structure taught in European film schools is still the Aristotelian three-act story construction about a protagonist with a certain goal, and this is further influenced by the Hollywood tendency to impose causality and resolution on the stories we tell. Did your specific outlook on life and stories, the inexplicability of it all, and the ways you wanted to translate that into cinema cause debates with your teachers?

JH Even if you subconsciously know these things, when you start as a filmmaker you are not yet very aware or articulate about them. I only understood that what I liked was not exactly what was expected of me. That was very confusing for me. The teacher who taught directing did not like my work. I even had to repeat a semester, which I found incredibly embarrassing. I had set out to be a good director and now I turned out to be a very bad one. When I look at it from my perspective now, I can really see the misunderstanding. Even back then, I was trying to do something completely different than what the teacher was trying to teach us. After that, I had another teacher who was more of a go-with-theflow type, who said, ‘If you like it, it is OK’, and that was when I got an opportunity to develop more ideas and styles of my own.

As a teacher, I try to find out what my students want to express

DL In film school, you met some of your future collaborators – directors and producers like Barbara Albert and Antonin Svoboda, and director of photography Martin Gschlacht, with whom you started the production Company coop99, and you have been working together with your sister Tanja on all your films since your student film FLORA (1995) and your graduation film, INTER-VIEW (1999).

JH Back then there was no real, let alone vivid or welcoming, film industry in Austria. There were a couple of old white men running their companies and producing their films. There also weren’t any international co-productions. The idea of starting our own company was born out of necessity; founding our own company helped us to produce our own films. The first film we made was LOVELY RITA in 2001, still as a co-production with one of those old Austrian companies, but also with French producer Philippe Bober, who has been attached to all my films since, and whom I had met when INTER-VIEW was selected for the Cinéfondation of the Festival de Cannes and won the Special Jury Prize there.

DL You are a teacher yourself at the Film Academy in Vienna now. What has changed since you were a student? What do you hope to bring into the classroom from your own experiences?

JH As a teacher, I try to find out what it is that the students want to express. My task is to ask questions rather than give advice. It is important for a young filmmaker to find the self-confidence to try out new things and to follow their own ideas. There is a lot of comparison between young filmmakers because they can see each other’s works through the internet. So, it is important nowadays to focus on what your personal view is and not to get distracted by what everyone else is telling you.

DL Your work has been compared with that of your fellow Austrians Michael Haneke, who made FUNNY GAMES in 1997 when you were in film school and Ulrich Seidl, whose DOG DAYS from 2001 brought him to a wide international audience in the same year you made LOVELY RITA. It is often written that you were their student, but I understand that is not true?

JH My teachers at film school were Axl Corti and Wolfgang Glück. When Haneke started to teach, I had practically finished my studies at film school. Seidl didn’t teach there.

DL Let’s speak about the importance of research for your work. LOVELY RITA is a portrait of a young girl consumed by teenage angst and awakening lust who ends up running away from home and committing a violent act. It is loosely based on a story you came across in a court file. Do you usually go looking for certain types of material or do you find them by chance?

JH I usually conduct the main part of my research after I have written down a first idea or a simple logline for a new film. After that, research becomes very important for me, because I find that the material I discover that is drawn from reality is very rich and detailed. And, as we discussed earlier, reality offers many different and even contradictory perspectives. There is not one true

to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

perspective. One person says this, another says quite the opposite, sometimes there is written material, then there is other evidence.

So, the most interesting thing about research for me is that I find that full kaleidoscope of contradicting perspectives I try to find the storyline that allows me to show the many different perspectives. In the case of LOVELY RITA, I was reading a story about a girl who was heavily psychoanalysed because she had murdered her parents. I had access to all the interviews conducted by psychiatrists with this girl. It was over a hundred pages, very detailed, super-interesting conversations, and all those interviews led nowhere.

In the end, no one could have said ‘this or that’ was the reason for her act of violence; there were a hundred little incidents that added up to something, but in themselves those events were mundane and normal for a teenager’s life. And, not all teenagers kill their parents. So, it was also a bit of a coincidence, a stupid accident. That was exactly what impressed me, that it was not fully explicable. The way I understood the story was that it showed a terrible lack of meaning, in the sense that it was not leading to some larger understanding of life or something. I liked the absurdity of it.

DL When you use the word ‘absurdity’ here, can you explain a bit more what it means for you? ‘Absurd’ in the sense of ‘incongruous’, which has a humorous element to it, or more in the philosophical sense?

JH Sometimes the absurdity is also funny. And sometimes not. I think the absurdity is that we take ourselves very seriously, we think everything what we do, what we want, what we feel, is very important. But, from a different perspective, it might not be important at all. From a more distant perspective, a lot of what we do is in vain, pointless, and ridiculous.

DL Is there always a form of tragedy in those absurd situations then?

JH Yes, I think so. It is for a reason we say comedy and tragedy are a couple. It is definitely about understanding that we as human beings are not as important as we think we are, and that we are doing a lot of things without having the slightest idea about the consequences that will arise or the reasons why, but because we think so much about them, we think they are significant and meaningful. That is already absurd about us, and I think that is a perspective that I am trying to find in my filmmaking. To think that in a split second, a bad coincidence, something might happen, and our life might just end while we are in the middle of something “important”. When I think of that, a lot of things become futile.

DL Is that insight also something that makes life more bearable? Is there comfort or solace in the notion that life is perhaps senseless?

JH Sometimes. I think in my film LOURDES (2009) [about a young woman who goes on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and experiences what may be or not be a miracle – DL] I was trying to find a comforting side in the fact that there is no justice and we all will die someday – the tone of the film is quite friendly. Most of the time, we do not think about dying, and I think we should think about it more. A lot of things in the world happen because people forget about their mortality. We all act as if we are immortal and banish the certainty of death from our conscious minds.

DL During this interview, we have discussed a lot of serious matters, but the tone of your voice is clear and cheerful, and every now and then I hear you laugh. I had the same experience while watching your latest film, CLUB ZERO (2023), which deals with behaviour control, education, perfectionism, and related mental disorders, in that the audience reaction was divided: some people (myself included) had to chuckle every now and then, whereas others seemed more absorbed by the grim austerity of what was being depicted. Are you in general a funny person? Do you have a joyful take on life?

JH Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can be a funny person. I like to make jokes, although they are the kind of jokes that you find in my films [laughs]. But that does not make me a joyful person. I enjoy humour, or absurd jokes, but I am also a quiet and introverted person who tends to overthink things. I am a worst-case-scenario kind of person.

Making a film means always anticipating what might go wrong. That is part of being a director, but it is also part of my character. Whenever I meet friends, or go somewhere, or hear a story, I always immediately imagine what tragedy could happen.

DL In some of your films, like your sophomore film Hotel (2004) and the more science-fiction minded Little Joe (2019) you seem to have an interest in genre. In fairy tales, in horror. Hotel can almost be described as a version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but with an invisible big bad wolf; Little Joe is derived from the delusion that someone has been taken over by another entity, a trope that has been employed in particular in the various versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; and you have said before that CLUB ZERO is inspired by the folk tale “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”.

JH After LOVELY RITA, HOTEL has a more abstract way of telling its story. For me, it is an experimental film in a way. I found it was very interesting to explore and dove more into visual ways of storytelling after my first few films. I was very much inspired by the films of the US avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. I love her film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), and I find that she created the surrealist atmosphere of the film not through tricks or special effects but only through editing. She employs a certain vision of the passing of time that is reminiscent of dreams. There are a lot of repetitions in her work, time is stretched and time is shortened, and I wanted to learn from that. Hotel was the first film in which I explored all that, to become sure about how that is done.

DL Can you give an example?

JH The hotel has a certain geography. There is a swimming pool, there is a staircase, and up the staircase there is a corridor that we see several times in the film. The corridor has one corner. And throughout the story there are moments when the main character, Irene, goes there. Some of them are real actions but sometimes she dreams of going there. She dreams of walking up the stairs and looking around the corner and seeing herself walking down the corridor and then we cut back to her face seeing herself, then we cut back to herself from behind, walking away. And then she follows herself

I am a worst-casescenario type of person, but I can be very funny, too

Tribute to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

HOTEL (2004) © coo99 coproduction office

HOTEL (2004) © coo99 coproduction office

HOTEL (2004) © coo99 coproduction office

HOTEL (2004) © coo99 coproduction office

though the corridor into the darkness. This is a very simple idea, but I wanted to explore the way you can create a surreal scene only through camera perspective and editing.

DL This is also a strong example of a type of visual storytelling that is hard to write into a screenplay but where the contributions of the visual team is key. Have you developed a certain methodology of working with them over the years?

JH The main tool I use to create my film language is the storyboard, and the principal question I ask myself when deciding upon the visual style is, How does the time pass? All my films have elements of real time and of edited time in the way I just described, when the editing sort of heightens the reality. The editing creates a sense of discomfort, of something uncanny, where the construction of a space becomes weird and disturbed. For instance, when a person looks in a certain corner of a room, and we see there is a door. And then the person looks there again, but now it is a different corner. That

is a very simple method of blurring and distorting reality with very basic tricks. Nothing is really visually muddled; it is only through the editing that you confuse the layout of a scene. This has a very strong impact on the subconscious of the viewer; sometimes they don’t even really notice it, they just experience this vague sense of discomfort. When I draw the storyboard, which I do alone, I create the time gaps, the disorientation, and the images of my films.

DL It is clear that you prefer mise-en-scène over plot to create tension between reality and other layers of experience, as well as between what you show and what we as viewers might expect. Can you speak a bit more about what you enjoy about making the découpage yourself as a part of the construction of the story?

JH Découpage is the alphabet of filmmaking. The shot list in filmmaking is like the sentence in literature. It tells the story visually, with all its seen and unseen layers. What occurs between the lines in a novel is comparable to what is out of frame in a film. I like to

draw the audience’s attention to what is outside the frame because that is where our hopes and fears lie.

DL So, in that sense there is a direct relationship between the architecture of the narrative and the architecture of the visual form, style, and location.

JH In my films, the set is like the psyche of the characters. Instead of giving psychological explanations, I give visual and geographical atmosphere. My characters are sometimes even stereotypical, but the rooms they are in tell something about their emotions and create the atmosphere of what is being told.

DL Does that mean you enter the field of symbolism when you translate the psychology of the characters or the situation into art direction and production design?

JH Not so much. For me, symbolism simplifies things too much. I prefer to think that I create iconic images that can be translated into different meanings.

to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

Red is definitely an interesting colour

DL And when it comes to the use of colour in your films? There are, for example, a lot of red elements that keep returning throughout your films. Or are these specific contributions from your sister Tanja that you simply trust to be effective?

JH I trust my sister a lot. Through the years, she and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht have become my most important creative collaborators. At the beginning of each new film project, Tanja reads the script and comes up with suggestions for the visuals. She collects a lot of images, photocopies from art books or fashion magazines, that she finds are connected to the story. We put them on the table, go through them, discuss them, some we keep, some we don’t. It is a mixture of intuition and deliberation. By doing that, we discover the right style and palette for the film.

Red is definitely an interesting colour. It is the colour of love as well as the colour of danger. Both interpretations are very strong in our culture, from red roses for a loved one to a red traffic light meaning stop. Some of my main characters have red hats or red coats or red bags and suitcases. LOVELY RITA wears red shoes. I don’t know if there is any real red in CLUB ZERO…?

DL Club Zero is a notable exception. From using a lot of primary colours in your other films, here you employ a lot of secondary and even tertiary colours: orange, brown, purple, green, all very saturated and faded so that the full palette of the film resembles the colour of vomit… JH Yes… that is interesting… In the case of CLUB ZERO, it also has to do with the location. The film takes place in a boarding school, but we wanted to stay away as far as possible from the Harry Potter vibe. The film was in no way intended as a comment on the British public school system. I wanted it to have a more European connotation. The place we found is designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen and has these brown wooden panels and typical 1960s colours. From there, we started to think what would be a good colour for the school uniform and that is how we landed at this interestingly mean yellowand-purple combination. Normally, the search for locations starts when the script is written, which, in the past, has caused some problems as well, because you never find the exact location you have in mind, and then you must combine different locations. Construct an imaginary geography. With CLUB ZERO, I tried to find the location a bit earlier, so I could implement it in the script, which worked quite well.

DL Speaking of architecture and locations, and how they inform the story, I am also interested in the dynamics between interiors and exteriors in your films. Maybe this allows us to go back to Lourdes, a film inspired by a real location. But it is also a good moment to speak more about your collaboration with Martin.

JH Lourdes grew out of the idea of making a film about a miracle and examining the notion of what a miracle is for us and why we seek them. When I started the research for the film, I investigated different miracles and stories, and places where it has been claimed that miracles have happened, like Medjugorje and Lourdes. I decided on Lourdes because it is so practical in a weird way. There is an office where you can register your miracle, there is a doctor who examines the miracle, and then there is a scientific bureau that decides if there are any possible natural causes. I travelled there several

times, did a lot of interviews, and followed some pilgrims and then I wrote the script.

DL In all your films until Lourdes, where it provides the primary context, Roman Catholicism is never far away. Were you raised Catholic? Did you feel that was something you had to deal with artistically?

JH My family was not Catholic but I spent eight years in a Catholic girls’ school. So, I think I experienced a weird contradiction between my school ideology (‘Believe in God’) and my family ideology (‘Believe in yourself’). The result of that might be that I became aware of the fact that every person has their beliefs, however specific or more common they might be – it is necessary in life to feel meaningful. Everyone has something he or she lives up to. Some idea that helps us make our choices, to distinguish right from wrong, to be part of some group that makes us feel safe.

DL Except Lourdes, which premiered in Venice, all your films opened in Cannes, three of them in the Un certain régard section, but your last two films LITTLE JOE and CLUB ZERO were selected for the main competition. How important are festivals for the recognition, distribution, and lifespan of your films?

JH For now I have the impression that, over the years, I built up my body of work and, the more films I have made, the more my ideas and visions have become acknowledged by an audience and been discussed by critics. Film festivals are an enormous help to make films visible to a larger audience and to film critics. This leads to more recognition and helps to distribute the film and to finance the next film.

DL Upon rewatching Lourdes, it struck me even more strongly than the first time that you present Christine, the protagonist, as someone who can be understood as much as a true believer in search of a miracle as a gentle fraud looking for care and attention. I know you will not disclose who and what she is, but if you want to leave me as a spectator with these types of questions, which I think is your intention…

JH Yes…

DL …How, in that case, do you anticipate the kinds of questions or responses people might have while you are making the film?

JH I do anticipate the main questions and I do, like all screenwriters and filmmakers, try to plant them well within the narrative structure. We do a lot of test screenings, but still, when the film is finished, I can be surprised at how the film is understood and received, and how many different interpretations there are. Philippe Bober, who not only co-produces but also sells my films, is always helping me to be ahead of the discussions my films can cause. Meanwhile, I know my films are open to different and even surprising interpretations, which I like.

DL In general, you are hesitant, not to say reluctant, to tell the audience what to think or feel, even in interviews?

Why is that?

JH Because that is what I do as a filmmaker: I show persons and situations from a distanced perspective. And, seen from that point of view, some things we think are important are not that important after all. And furthermore, what is good and right for one person might be wrong and bad for another person. When I think I have understood what you feel, I might be completely wrong. I show how contradictory and incoherent our world is.

DL The way you use music – not to underscore an emotion but to counter it – often creates even more contradictions and contrasts. Why is that?

DL Lourdes also is a bit of a turning point in your work: you become more openly interested in the institutions that represent the big systemic questions and traditions of our time. LOVELY RITA dealt with the power structures within the nuclear family, but with LOURDES, the focus is on religion and belief systems; in Amour fou (2014), it is the ideal of romantic love; Little Joe deals with scientific knowledge, beliefs, desires, and the question of whether we can engineer happiness; and CLUB ZERO tackles the educational system and pushes the idea of manufacturability even further. It seems you are taking on the pillars of our modern world. How intentional was that, bringing this idea about the inexplicability of many of our actions, to the level of the institutions that provide us on the one hand with answers but mostly with dogma, regimens, and life rules?

JH Lourdes helped me to understand that. After that, Tanja and I talked a lot about the use of uniforms. Uniforms determine to what class or level of society we belong – how we are classified. Clothes are instrumental in showing that. Through this insight about clothing, I also started to look differently at the characters in my scripts and realised they are seldom portrayed as true individuals, but often as people who play their role in life because they want to belong, conform, be part of a group, or be awarded with the prize for best pilgrim. After that, I started to envision my characters more explicitly as part of a certain system.

JH In my films, music is an independent tool. It is like another actor in the story, that adds another layer, aspect, or perspective and sometimes even a contradictory emotion. A sad scene becomes weirdly funny or a funny scene becomes absurd. Sometimes, the music adds to the humour, and sometimes adds a question mark: What exactly does this scene want me as a spectator to think or feel?

My films are political, but they don’t tell you what is good or bad

DL When does feminism come into play? Is that somewhere between LOURDES and AMOUR FOU, when you move from the big patriarchal system of religion to the dismantling of romantic love and exclusive, heteronormative relationships?

JH Feminism is a very important topic, but not in the sense that I treat it politically. My films are political, but not in the sense that they are trying to deliver a clear message or become propagandistic. My films don’t tell you what is good or bad. Good art never does. My films are trying to show the different facets of a given situation.

I show how contradictory and incoherent our world is

to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

Jessica Hausner (middle) at the world premiere of CLUB ZERO in Cannes 2023. Photograph: Loic Venance / AFP

Jessica Hausner and Martin Geschlacht in 2003

Jessica Hausner and Philippe Bober in Sarajevo in 2017

Jessica Hausner and Martin Geschlacht

Tribute to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

Martín and Amat Escalante during shooting of Heli photo by Kenny Johnston

For me personally, feminism is of course very important, because I have always felt like an unseen individual in a man’s world. This is the perspective I grew up with and ran around with for a very long time. And, in my life, the #MeToo movement was an incredibly important breakthrough that inspired a lot of change in the industry, but also changed a lot about my own perspective and my own perception of what I can expect from this life. You find these issues in all my films. Who is the boss and who is the servant? These are the questions that are being deliberated – not only from the feminist perspective, by the way, but also in an intersectional manner. I also address this from the perspectives of class and skin colour, for instance. These patterns are there. Power structures are shown repeatedly in my films. I always try to show how a system of power works. I had already started that with LOVELY RITA, which shows the family as the smallest power system contained within these larger systems.

DL If we speak about power systems per se, maybe we also need to speak about the way they are represented and sometimes perpetuated by audio-visual media. In LOVELY RITA, there is commentary on the media industry. Every time Rita has to serve her parents, the scene quite literally turns into a sort of soapy heightened reality. Is this criticism or this reflection on the power of images something we find in your other films too?

JH What I always tried, right from the beginning, was not to tell an individual story, not to speak about a certain incident in a certain place at a certain time, but to find the general meaning of a story. So, when I thought about Lovely Rita, I did not start from the real story, I started from the idea. The idea was to make a film about a girl who becomes a murderer. From there, I started to look for stories that would help me make that film. So, it is always that way round. I start from a general idea. And I think this is what you see in my films – that the whole aesthetic and style help to create the story on a more universal human level.

DL And the role of cinema itself in recreating or perpetuating certain behavioural patterns, is that something that concerns you?

JH The thing that concerns me most about filmmaking is that it is a big lie to think you can find simple answers to complicated things. That’s what I hate about most films because most films are like that. They try to satisfy us as an audience, which means they attempt to provide meaning.

That is like religion. It’s a similar concept. Religion also tries to comfort you with simple answers. I have never been convinced by any of these answers, neither in filmmaking nor in religion.

together. It happens regularly, but the stories are often very heavy and tragic, and they become very dense when you retell them. Then I read Kleist had asked several different people to commit suicide with him but none agreed – until he finally found Vogel, who agreed to die with him because she thought she was going to die of her illness very soon anyhow. Kleist’s pragmatism in finding his partner for suicide made me smile – I had found the tone for the story: the pact comes first and then you may call it love. Or not. The focus is not on the tragic event, but on the absurdity of it. There was probably not even an erotic or sexual relationship between Kleist and Vogel, although Vogel’s husband says at the end: ‘It was probably love after all.’ He may well be right about that. No one can know what they really felt in those last moments. I don’t think their farewell letters are unequivocal about that either. Or, at least let’s say it’s open to interpretation. But to Kleistians, of course, it was true love.

I find Kleist’s wish to find someone who loves him more than their own life rather narcissistic, and a bit childish. That idea of unconditional love, of course we all know that, and it sounds very nice. People can really be trapped in their ideas about true love. In Amour fou, I show that this love might not exist after all. Back in Kleist’s time, the concept of romantic love was created and it still is a powerful idea in our society. I want to show exactly that: that love is a concept, an idea. But it’s Kleist’s or Henriette Vogel’s truth. That fascinates me. How truth can be relative, historically or sociologically determined, and still the truth. For them.

DL After the role of Catholicism in your earlier films, there is the introduction of a certain aestheticism and ascetism in LITTLE JOE and CLUB ZERO that can be related to belief systems that are associated more with the detachment of Eastern philosophies. In LITTLE JOE through the music, and in CLUB ZERO quite literally through the introduction of the concept of prana (the Sanskrit word for “breath as a life force”). Is that a new turn for you?

JH No. In Little Joe the reason for using the music by the Japanese composer Teiji Ito was as a homage to Maya Deren, whose films he scored. As I said before, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON inspired me a lot, and he also wrote music for that film. LITTLE JOE is for me once again related to Deren’s films, in a similar way as HOTEL was related to her work. I found this other composition by him, called “Watermill”, that I used in the film. Since it was the first time I really used a score, I did not want to do it in a conventional way. To have that Western story about science alongside this Japanese music is once again a way to create a juxtaposition, a question mark, that both enhances and contradicts the story.

DL Little Joe revolves around the search for artificial happiness, and the invention of this anti-depressant plant maybe comes from noble intentions but the result is that people start behaving in a quite indifferent and detached manner. Once again, you don’t have to respond to this evaluation of the film, but I am curious how you work with actors, especially in a language that is not your tongue, to create a style of performance that is so open and lucid that it enables a variety of readings of the film.

DL Does that give them enough to work with? As a child of actors, listening to dinner table conversations, I learned a lot about transformation, embodiment. And a lot of time actors ask for motivations to translate into action.

JH Some actors understand very easily what I am trying to achieve, because they understand that we are never our authentic selves. I don’t know where the authentic self of any person is. What we do is play different roles in society.

When I am talking to you now, I am playing the filmmaker. I won’t talk to you about my motherhood or my love life. All of that is beyond the horizon of this conversation. We are playing our roles now and we would do very badly of all of a sudden, if I were to ask you a very personal question, or if you asked me a very personal question. Without being aware of it all the time, we are always playing a certain role, no matter the situation or who we are talking to. This is what I talk about with the actors.

If you dive into that, it is very rich inspiration for an actor. Because then you start to ask yourself: Who is the secret boss in the room? Who needs to please whom? Who wants to improve their place in the system, and how? Who is the loser, and why? Thus, I describe a specific power system.

There are some basic behaviours that we all apply in all situations of life. Because we want to survive. That is the level I am trying to find. Some actors get it immediately, others try to be more – I don’t know what – original. And then I tell them: don’t be original, just be archetypical, understand what it is that you are really doing in the scene.

Not to be embarrassed is a strong motivation for my characters

DL Do you really believe people are always displaying desirable behaviour? Maybe it would be extremely refreshing if I told you something unexpectedly personal?

JH All of this is personal. It is just agreeing on what is appropriate in order to survive within society. It would not be good for you to ask me about my sex life because people might not hire you as a interviewer anymore.

DL Maybe a question about your sex life would be pushing it, and I would probably feel too embarrassed to do that…

JH That is exactly what I am talking about. In my perception, not to be embarrassing and not to be embarrassed is the strongest motivation in our lives. Because it helps us to survive.

DL On the other hand, the unexpected can provoke something artistically satisfying. So, let’s use the concept of embarrassment in a professional context. Have you ever watched a film that made you feel embarrassed?

JH It’s not about feeling embarrassed as an audience but understanding that we do things in order not to be cast out of society.

DL AMOUR FOU is about the suicide pact the German romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist concluded in 1811 with the terminally ill Henriette Vogel.

JH It started with an interest in group suicide. I was curious about people;s motives for ending their lives

JH I ask the actors to behave like they would behave in reality, and in reality we normally try to be very polite, fit in, say the right things in the right moment. We are not very authentic in real life. Generally, we try to please other people. That is what I ask the actors to do, and that is the most realistic way of acting I can think of.

DL As a spectator, one often feels a certain form of vicarious shame. Is that what you want to make us feel?

JH Well, understanding our own weaknesses and our behavioral patterns can of course cause a feeling of shame or embarrassment in the spectator.

The focus is not on the tragic event, but on the absurdity of it

to Jessica Hausner / 29th Sarajevo Film Festival

DL Let me rephrase a bit. Your films deal with big emotions that are sometimes suppressed through social constructions and behavioural patterns…

JH Yes.

DL And then you leave it to the audience to make up their own minds about the situations you are creating.

JH No. What I leave to the audience is only the solution. My films are very clearly depicting us in our roles as human beings, but the films don’t offer any salvation. They don’t show the exit because there is none.

DL But control is not only a theme in your films; they are themselves created in a very calm and composed way. CLUB ZERO is all a about self-control, discipline, perfection. So, I was wondering how, in your filmmaking, you balance the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the restricted and the intuitive, in order to maintain a certain freedom as an artist?

JH That is a weird question. In CLUB ZERO there is a lot of Dionysian energy. I find for example the character of Ms. Novak highly irrational. And also, the character of Elsa, the young girl who eats her vomit – her behaviour clashes with everything she is supposed to do. That is a very wild and anarchic element in that film. the interesting thing about art is that tension, that contradiction between the feeling that this is the person I should be, and this is the person I also want to be. All my films talk about that tension and that contradiction. The technique I use to show that is showing the suppression of feelings, because that creates the tension. If you have someone who feels bad and cries out loud, OK, the tension is out. If, on the other hand, you show someone who is sad and swallows their tears, than you have a very intense scene.

DL This is, I think, a perfect ending for our conversation –but now I still have to ask you the Godardian question on my screen: Do you believe in freedom?

JH [Laughs] In small pieces, in specific times, places and moments, yes. In general, not so much.

Dana Linssen is a film critic, writer, philosopher, and freelance curator from the Netherlands. Since 1998, she has been a critic for the daily nationwide newspaper “NRC” and contributor to the film magazine “de Filmkrant”, where she was Editor-in-Chief and later also Publisher from 1998–2019. For the International Film Festival Rotterdam, she programs the Critics’ Choice section, which is known for its video essays produced for the big screen. Linssen is the founder of the Slow Criticism Project, a loose series of inventions and interventions to counterbalance the commodification of film criticism; she teaches at the Utrecht University of the Arts and the ArtEZ Theatre Academy in Amsterdam. In 2020, she was asked to write a strategic plan for the new Dutch talent incubator FilmForward, where she was a quarter master during the start-up phase and where she is currently the head of studies of the Vrijplaats talent residency for film and audio-visual creators. She sits on the selection committee of Berlinale Talents and is a longstanding mentor of Berlinale and Sarajevo Talents Press. When she is not writing about cinema, she develops texts for theatre and other performative practices. “Kroon”, her latest play, premiered in 2022 at Het Zuidelijk Toneel in the Netherlands. She has contributed to monographs about Chantal Akerman, Jem Cohen, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Sara Rajaei, Fiona Tan, Béla Tarr, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others. She is also a time traveller.