Sissi, the Young (Ostrich) Empress

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Sissi, the Young (Ostrich) Empress* 

"Can one say that Sissi ignored the fear of seeing clearly? Certainly not. She speaks of the 'inner masquerade' to which she must constrain herself, or again of the 'comedy of our illusions' that we must constantly address. She postulates the illusion, like all those who won't kill themselves, even though they have seen through to the nothingness of life, this 'malady,' as she calls it."

— I find these lines remarkable, she said, setting down the book. Who wrote them?

— You cannot know him, dear Archduchess. He is a certain Cioran, a Romanian who has always loved Sissi.

— Me too, I loved her, said Archduchess Sophie. This must seem strange to you, no? I suppose you've seen those films where they cast me as the villain.

— Your Majesty, I've seen them, and I consider them first-rate hogwash.

— Well, please consider, continued the reassured Archduchess, that if I hadn't devoted myself to shouldering the only negative role, there would have been nothing to tell and nothing to film — no film, no Sissi, nothing. The screenwriters had no ideas.

I was pleased to receive the Archduchess Sophie, the only bearable character in the awful Sissi series. I like they way that she, alone, seemed exasperated by the tons of caramelised emotion and opulent sentimentality which, in the mid-fifties, had swamped Western Europe. Corseted in a series of blue dresses, with the sharp eye and sarcasm of an Austro-Hungarian Darrieux, she was, in 1956, the only one to escape — already! — the soft consensus. Later, I would still be upset with the vile trilogy to have given such a deliberately dumb image of a character as extraordinary as Elisabeth of Bavaria.

— I suffered, believe me, continued the Archduchess. Suffered to have acted (very badly) the stuck up mother-in-law who likes neither beer, nor the Hungarians, nor sauerkraut, and who can think of nothing better to do than kidnap her daughter-in-law's child in the name of raison d'Etat! Suffered from this Austrian production with its old UFA veterans, worn down to the bone by Viennese operetta and Nazi comedy.

— Archduchess! The film dates from 1956!

— You are not actually thinking, dear friend, replied Sophie with an icy look, that the aesthetic of Sissi: The Young Empress is any different in nature than those Tyrolean comedies of the late Nazi cinema, with chalets, Agfacolor, modern ingenues, and blond Aryan ski instructors?

— I'll grant you there is a servile way of filming power, in constipated counter-angle shots, and a paternalistic way of filming ordinary people as bumpkins of another race. An aesthetic of the courtier, if you like.

— Nazi, I tell you.

— Archduchess, you are too Godardian!

— Very well, I'll be quiet, said the Archduchess, plunging back into her reading of Cioran.

But watching again this cartload of nonsense left me with a retrospective unease. I was thinking that it was with these idiotic Sissis that the Austria of the post-war period had managed to sneak back in among respectable nations, and I wondered what Waldheim had thought of this at the time. I was thinking of poor Romy Schneider, forced to go through Visconti in order to cancel Ernst Marischka, before having, like the the true Sissi, a dark destiny. I was thinking of the good people of France who had never had the courage to tell us that they had liked the German films under the Occupation, and who, later, had made of Romy, daughter of Magda, their repressed Teuton. I was thinking of those old Germans who, in the early eighties, were taking advantage of the Berlin Festival, to watch again in secret (it was at the Astor cinema) the pretty Nazi films of their youth.

I was starting to understand, little by little, why the syrupy stiffness of this Sissi: The Young Empress still repelled me so much**. Certain films repel less on account of their intrinsic worthlessness than because we have the enduring feeling that at the very moment they shower us with their nirvana of vignettes, something truly vile continues to take place. There are images — those of the Sissi films, for example — that exist only to render others unimaginable. Images to distract the gaze.

And yet, Cioran: "Can one say that Sissi ignored the fear of seeing clearly? Certainly not."

* Translator's note: The French title of the article is "Sissi Impérautruche", a pun on the French title of the film Sissi Impératrice, literally:"Sissi, Empressostrich."

** This chronicle was written as a direct reaction to an article published in Libération celebrating the film in some sort of ironic "second degree". There is no second degree, except in mathematical equations.  

 First published in Libération on December 29th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.