Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Machorka-Muff (1963) is showing April 24 – May 23, 2019 on MUBI as part of the series A Straub-Huillet Retrospective.
Machorka-Muff (1963), the first film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, is an adaptation of "Bonn Diary," a short story by Heinrich Böll—a writer to whom the filmmakers would return in Not Reconciled (1965). Sharp and exacting as a keen-edged knife, the film follows the visit of Erich von Machorka-Muff (Erich Kuby), a former Nazi colonel, to the capital of West Germany. The main purpose of his trip is, as we shall discover, the inauguration of a Military Academy Memorial. Killing two birds with one stone, this event will also allow him to rehabilitate the name of Marshal Hürlanger-Hiss, in honor of whom the academy is named.
Those who approach Machorka-Muff casually, without previous information about its historical background, will undoubtedly be struck by a passage situated at the midpoint of the film. After a walk through the city, the protagonist enjoys an aperitif on a terrace and checks a newspaper. The soundtrack is suddenly assaulted by a somber organ musical piece that accompanies a two-minute montage consisting of an array of press clippings—the texts exhibited here range from "A military past imposes duties" to "Jesus recognized the need for soldiers. In the defense of justice a soldier must naturally kill."
This is the only time that the film refers explicitly to the larger context in which Machorka-Muff's visit to Bonn is embedded: the re-militarization of West Germany that took place in the mid 1950s. In an interview, Straub referred to this historical moment as his "first bout of political rage" and as "the story of a rape." As it unfolds, the film presents us with the maneuvering of different forces—government members, church representatives, the protagonist's nobility-bred lover, Inn (Renate Lang)—who connive in order to keep Nazism alive.
The caustic, satirical tone of Machorka-Muff is immediately evident, but successive viewings will reward spectators as they become more familiar with the nuances of Böll's text—to which the film owes a great deal of its incisiveness—and will be more able to appreciate the precise orchestration executed by Straub and Huillet of the relations between sound and image, of tensions between voice, gesture, tempo, and action. The film's opening—combining, in barely 48 seconds, extreme concision, lucid insight, and brutal parody—offers us an excellent example of this.
The two initial shots powerfully condense the anticipation that feeds Machorka-Muff's dreams: the first is a low angle of the man from the waist down, his hand suspended in doubt over a black telephone, then he turns and walks toward the window; the second is a slow point-of-view pan of the nocturnal city landscape. The voice-over—carefully arranged across these two shots—makes clear that this is the enactment of a renunciation ("I wanted to call Inn, but then decided not to"), counterbalanced by a substitution ("I'd arrived too late, so the view from my hotel window had to compensate"). A brief, oneiric passage composed by a clashing montage of seven shots follows. In this dream, Machorka-Muff encounters several rows of monuments, covered in white sheets; the fabrics fall, revealing that below is his own figure in a series, alive and in uniform; in the last two shots, he approaches one of these pedestals and caresses the inscription bearing his name.
"An abstract visual dream—not a story," announces a handwritten statement serving as a preface. Besides the passage I've just mentioned, there are, across the film, several choices that contribute to inflect a powerful sense of daydreaming: the consistent use of dissolves (creating a different continuity than that of clean cuts), the push-in and pull-out re-framings of the camera (similar to those we can find, for instance, in Fritz Lang), or the interaction between the voice-over musings and certain hypnotic city sounds (trams, bells). This is a film about the calm elation and controlled dizziness of Machorka-Muff's turn-on—an austere but sardonic dissection of the erotics of power (uniforms, insignias), the drive for supremacy (institutions, ranks), and dreams of permanence (plaques, monuments).
The 18 minutes of Machorka-Muff race by on screen and feel, in fact, much shorter. This is surprising, considering that certain scenes are completely devoted to meticulously capturing the most banal rituals and actions. This sense of brisk progression is an effect not so much of the film's pace as of its extremely tight plotting. Nothing is overburdened or wasted in Machorka-Muff. Every frame, cut, and duration is significant, and has a strict purpose.
Let's take, for instance, the early scene set at the hotel where Machorka-Muff is staying. He has two meetings: the first, rather minor, with his old comrade, Heffling; the second, much more crucial, with Murks-Maloche. The decisions taken by the filmmakers here regarding what is captured (and from which position), what bits of conversation are heard (or elided, or covered by voice-over thoughts), what actions are rendered uninterrupted (or broken by sudden insertions), obey a scrupulous examination of the power dynamics at play, and are dictated by the different rank, function, and usefulness of the characters involved.
On a global scale, a structural symmetry is pursued by the film: many ideas, moments, and scenes are answered, developed, or completed by others that mirror them—the four pans over city landscapes used across the film are a perfect example of this. Equally, the dream passage already discussed will find its double much later, when Machorka-Muff is promoted to the status of general. This moment is depicted via a jolting montage very similar to the one used in the earlier scene: an equal number of shots, quick rhythm, clashing of energies, as well as some of the same motifs. Here, we start with a close-up of the promotion document (mirroring the plaque's inscription in the dream sequence), and end with the camera's tilt down the official uniform hanging in a closet (a disclosure that functions as another wink to the previous scene). In the sequence that follows, Machorka-Muff delivers his inaugural speech, while the camera pays fastidious attention to every detail of that very same uniform.
A strong quality of Machorka-Muff is its taste for sudden, unexpected punches that feel like either like a slap in the face or a rap on the table. During his meeting with Murks-Maloche, Machorka-Muff is reassured that his dream about the Military Academy Memorial can be achieved within a democracy. "Will the public swallow it?", he asks his counterpart, as the camera, in a lateral shot, pushes in. A sudden cut introduces a frontal shot of Murks-Maloche: "The public swallows everything." From a new set-up, the camera frames both characters as they stand. The scene ends with their toast: a close-up—the background is out of focus—of the two glasses clinking "to the spirit of military memories."
These brutal cap-offs with which Straub and Huillet punctuate the film find a perfect ally in the musical extracts from François Louis's "Permutations," performed on a grand church organ. After the initial credits, this piece will be used, to great effect, on three other occasions. First, during the montage of newspaper clippings—signaling the political climate that allows Nazi values to pervade this society. Second, during the church scene—where the protagonist's proud declaration (Inn's "eighth [husband] will be a general") seals the alliance between the military and the nobility. Third, at the very end of the film.
The final scene of Machorka-Muff starts with the announcement of a commotion: some unexpected political opposition threatens to tarnish the general's plans. It's the only moment in the film in which his imperturbable façade crumbles—but the disturbance lasts barely a few seconds. Inn serves coffee and, following a brief silence, she pronounces calmly the ultimate words of the film: "Nobody's ever dared oppose our family." After this conclusive statement, Louis’s music rages again on the soundtrack, while the screen turns black. The well-oiled machine of Nazism is unstoppable.