Werner Schroeter's Malina (1991) is exclusively on MUBI on October 22, 2020 in MUBI's Rediscovered series.
Malina (1991), Werner Schroeter’s searing and serrated adaptation of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult novel, begins with a flurry of typing and the scratching of pen against paper. An anonymous woman writer (Isabelle Huppert), surrounded by papers, scrawls the letters of a feminine name not her own: Malina. Or as Humbert Humbert wrote of Lolita—Lo-lee-ta—Malina’s hypnotic chain of vowels guides “the tip of the tongue [on] a trip of three steps down the palate.” Ma-Lee.-Na. Flushed with the heat of obsession, she takes the word apart and rearranges its letters: Malina. Anima. Animal. Animus. The figure on the page—Malina (Mathieu Carrière), the woman’s housemate—then enters. Through the mirrors on the walls and doors, his figure becomes distorted and projected across every surface while the camera circles the maze-like estate.
Malina saves the woman, regularly overtaken by wailing fits of despair, from hot stoves and flooded bathtubs. He instructs her what to or what not to say in her public appearances, how to wear her hair. But Malina, helpful but never kind, is not the woman’s controlling lover but an imagined, supplementary conscience in the form of a towering man, meant to protect the woman from herself with his stern and relentless demand that she survive. The one-man duo engages in a mutual parasitism—he feeds from her torment, and she clings to the guarantee of his presence and continues to offer her blood, sweat, and tears so that he might stay. The suffering never ends, but it need only be endured until tomorrow.
The introduction of a new lover, Ivan (Can Togay), melts the woman’s body into boneless longing, sticky possessiveness. She walks into incoming traffic and prances after him; she tells him, “You can cure me.” The woman wants to give him every part of herself but faces what she herself describes, in a lecture on Ludwig Wittgenstein, as a limit on language. She cannot answer Ivan’s questions that she has not asked or answered herself. Why she would write such a macabre prospective novel, Todesarten (translated as “Deathstyles” or "Ways of Dying," it shares the title of Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished novel cycle). Why she flinches when he reaches for her and whether she was beaten as a child. The final inquiry ushers in the next chapter: the woman—joined by Malina, of course—pursues the truth of a third man, her father (Fritz Schediwy), who at once chases after her from the past.
Wittgenstein famously concluded that “what cannot be spoken be passed over in silence,” a sentence that Bachmann herself “never tired of citing.”1 The event that the woman cannot describe, and how it is expressed, marks the key difference between Bachmann’s source text and Schroeter’s adaptation (written by Elfriede Jelinek, author of The Piano Teacher). In an interview shortly before her death in 1973, Bachmann stated: “Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.” The linkage between fascism and misogyny afflicts the narrator of her novel (referred to as “I”) through each man’s cruelty against her. Schroeter’s Malina, by the filmmaker’s own admission and to the disdain of many radical feminist critics at the time of the film’s release, is “more interested in the problems of [the] “I” than in her difficulties with individual or generic men.”2. The resulting picture centralizes the woman’s self-inflicted harm as a continuation of men’s violence against her.
A psychosexually charged disquiet drenches the pastel-toned Vienna streets and bars, where sweat drips from every forehead and hunger sits in every stare that overstays its welcome. Again and again, the woman finds herself pressed against the locked door of her own house, barred access from where Malina lies. A spotlight always beams on her face, probing her like a bug as she wobbles through her own head, terrified of what she might find. In the introduction to their translation of Elfriede Jelinek’s screenplay (which Schroeter changed significantly), Brenda L. Bethman and Larson Powell write that feminist literary scholars declared both Jelinek and Schroeter to be murderers, Jelinek (also the name of the woman’s secretary in the film) being Schroeter’s accomplice. But though Malina’s credits refer to Huppert’s character as “the woman,” a name that allows both a literal reading and critique, an invisible title persists. The woman is a writer, and through her zeal for this name she wrestles—with lovers, with her father, with herself, and with words.
The exact second that the woman’s shell shatters occurs in response to a comment by Ivan, exasperated by her nervousness: “If you’re not happy, then you’ll never write or do anything good!” Intended to jolt her out of anxiety, the joke only arrives as a seal of confirmation: the woman is not happy, therefore she will never write or do anything good. Ivan’s affections are waning; he calls less often, averse to her attachment to him. The threat of losing that love, however, comes second to the possibility of being a failed writer. In Bachmann’s novel, Ivan asks that the woman write a “happy” book. With this unspoken request hanging heavy upon the distraught author, so begins a voluntary confrontation with the hell of memory, a psychical procedure that appears onscreen as a series of fragmented re-imaginings.
Scenes of the woman and her father hint at a sexual violation: In one, she points at him and screams, her hair tied in a girlish ponytail in a bright pink dress; in another, she holds hands with her child self (Lolita Chammah, Huppert’s daughter) as they pass her father sprawled across the floor as the centerpiece of an orgy. Ivan appears, dressed as a prince, and she as the entrapped princess that he will rescue from the king’s curse. These are fantasies, however much they might incidentally reveal, but the closer the woman gets to the truth beyond their staging, the greater the toll on her mind and body. Increasingly, she takes pills and drinks liquor to cope with the aches of remembrance. What seems a necessary move into the realm of the repressed soon becomes a subsuming fixation on tearing and digging into scar tissue until, as the woman exclaims, “Soon nothing will stir my memory.”
Malina “motivates the ‘I’ toward a clear expression of the self," writes Bachmann translator Peter Filkins. Because "what she discovers becomes the only life she knows, the only story she can write."3 In this dangerous process of rumination, the writer mistakes the rawness of confrontation and the ensuing nervous breakdown for the honesty required for a creative breakthrough. Desperately, she tries to churn her agony into something pure and good, but more importantly something that can be put to language. She purges the past until she reaches the bottom of the well, but even there the words remain far out of reach. The novel still incomplete, the woman sets fire to the stacks of papers lining her study, tossing them in bundles across empty rooms. She vows to stay in the house forever, fanning the flames that only she and Malina can see. And all the while he watches, picking at a plate of fruits and vegetables, observing her decay.
Because she cannot face the truth without a mediator, she invents Malina to wipe her face and hold her down in bed, and to assure her that the two can live on like this in their den of despair. The role of Malina might best be understood in the film's opening, a nightmare in which the woman’s father throws her off of a building. Against the woman’s wishes to stay and assuage her father's anger, Malina enters the scene and takes her home. The woman says to him: “You’ve always seemed to be in my life. […] Writing makes me bitterly aware of it.” In the woman's last days spent with Malina, however, he is neither refuge nor shield but the devil on her shoulder—the neglectful lover, the strict parent who lets her burn or else find her way out. Through his calm, she articulates a cruel detachment from her own cries for help.
In her overview of Bachmann's life, Merve Emre describes the masochism of the author's female characters as the articulation of a
[...] desire for justice, the opportunity to point the finger of blame without hesitation, becomes indistinguishable from a woman’s desire to see violence, real violence, done. Only then can it be punished. […] Women are made to crave victimhood, to court it. In its absence, they must resign themselves to less spectacular ways of dying.
A muted "deathstyle" concludes Schroeter's Malina: As in Bachmann's novel, the woman slips into a chasm in the wall. Schroeter places this image of an escaped woman in a hall of mirrors. A chain of reflections-within-reflections conceals the location of her body, she steps both nearer and further away until eventually, she has merged with the walls of the house. All of her bits and pieces have become one, leaving behind only Malina, unaffected by her disappearance and unscathed by the flames. Softly, the woman's voice calls out to an audience of witnesses, "It was murder." Dead at the hands of her creation, she relinquishes herself to sadness, to hatred, to the inexpressible, leaving behind the ashes of unfinished manuscripts and unsent letters.
1. Sara Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann, 2006, pp. 197.
2. Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters, pp. 67.
3. Peter Filkins, “The Murderer in Her Dreams,” 1991, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/03/nnp/bachman-malina.html.
3. Merve Emre, “The Meticulous One,” 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/22/ingeborg-bachmann-meticulous-one/.