Ruth Beckermann's Mutzenbacher is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting February 16, 2023, in the series Festival Focus: Berlinale.
Men and sex. Male sexuality. What do men really want? Do men speak about sex? And if so, how? Those were the questions on my mind when I started the Mutzenbacher project. How could I find answers to these questions? Not by speaking to one or two or even ten men, but by starting a kind of field experiment with a random sample of dozens of men engaging in a dialogue about sex.
To achieve this we put out a casting call: “Looking for men between ages 16 and 99 for a documentary about Josefine Mutzenbacher.” 150 men applied!
It was a running gag of my professional career. Whenever we were stuck in the editing room or I didn’t know how to continue shooting I shouted, “Next time I will make a film about Mutzenbacher!” I never thought it would actually happen.
But then the pandemic came and made it happen. With one project in Africa canceled and another being filmed in a school delayed, this project finally came to life, since shooting in one location in Vienna made it easy to have everybody tested and stay safe. Well, at least that’s the practical reason for getting back to that old porn book.
Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore is one of the most famous pornographic literary pieces and certainly part of Viennese culture. Before the arrival of the Internet, the sexually curious had to search in books for information about the most interesting subjects. So the Mutzenbacher book was kind of educational in this way, and everybody read it.
The excerpts of the old book served as a trigger for men of today to speak about themselves. The experiment worked.
As a child in Vienna, I stumbled upon the story of Josefine Mutzenbacher relatively early. Like many others, I read it as an introduction to the practice of the art of love. You could find pirated editions in your parents’ nightstand, or under the counter at a bookstore, and finally, in the 1970s, as a paperback available everywhere. It fit right into the zeitgeist of the so-called sexual revolution, and yet it wasn’t even that modern.
After all, the novel’s protagonist, a 50-year-old woman, recalls her childhood and youth toward the end of the 19th century. She tells of cramped living conditions in the Vienna suburbs, and of craftsmen and workers. Above all, it was her language, her Viennese peppered with countless expressions in dialect for sexual organs, indeed for the whole of sexuality itself, that were hardly in use anymore among my generation. And yet, in the Vienna of the 1960s, you could still feel the atmosphere of the novel in the jostle around the communal water tap, or in the unwanted intimacy of the other tenants in the apartment blocks, where the toilets were in the hallway. I especially remember the heat and confinement of the trams that in the summer brought us to the Old Danube, but also the freedom that we children had, while our parents busied themselves with reconstructing and achieving prosperity. And of course, all those expressions that you picked up here and there weren’t inhibited by any sense of shame or correctness.
Today, sex is in all media. At the same time, sex isn’t an issue. How can this be? From where does the Western world’s way of dealing with sex originate? In the 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault examined the West’s relationship to sexuality and came to the conclusion “that what is peculiar to modern societies is not that they confined sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” The secret to be confessed in the confessional box, admitted before the policeman, and shared in confidence with the doctor. The priest, the pope, the judge, the physician, and the media. With this film, I have tried, among other things, to break up—for a moment—this hegemony.