AGE-C’S FINAL LECTURE FOR THE CORNELIA GOETHE COLLOQUIUM

Stephanie Glaser, Late Bloomers, 2006
Becoming Woman in One`s Heimat. Performance of Gender and Age in Bettina Oberli`s Late Bloomers and Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević`s Have You Seen This Woman?
In our joint lecture “Have You Seen These Women? Cultural Specificity and the (In)visibility of Old Age Across Film Cultures”, Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger and I looked for cultural specificities in performance and reading of old age in Have You Seen This Woman? (Dir. Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić, 2022) and Late Bloomers (Dir. Bettina Oberli, 2006). We assumed that there are codifications of age and gender which are immanent to the socio-political contexts from which these films originate and in which they find their primary audience. To make these codifications salient and legible we put them to the test in a cross-cultural analysis and the ensuing discussion. We were particularly interested in performative transgressions of socially imposed norms.
Within the first part of the joint lecture, I laid out the theoretical framework for our discussion and offered the analysis of Late Bloomers. Within the second part, Hediger responded by providing his notes on statistics and geography, followed-up by his analysis of Have You Seen This Woman?. The lecture concluded with the discussion around the initial sense of estrangement and alienation, which we had as we watched the films from each other’s area of origin.
My presentation made use of Kathleen Woodward’s understanding of “invisibility” and “hyper-visibility” of older women (2006), Margaret Gullette’s concepts “aged by culture” and “progress narrative” (2004), Judith Butler`s understanding of performativity of gender., Alexandra Ludwig’s insights into Heimat genre as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari`s notion of “becoming woman”.
Woodward’s understanding of an invisible, yet hyper-visible old woman was proven to be closely connected with her understanding of a cultural perception of the chronological and biological age. Along the same lines, Gullette`s notion “aged by culture” helped me to understand that the cultural assumptions and expectations, while being mapped on to biological, functional changes and the chronological passage of time, produce the decline narrative. And one of the attempts to move away from this dominant ideology is to focus on a concept such as “progress narrative”. Under the term, Gullette understands ageing as a form of survival, recovery, resilience and development, all the way up to collective resistance to decline forces. Another relevant concept for the discussion was performance of gender and performance of age as its analogy. For Judith Butler, gender is understood to be constructed, embodied and naturalised through performative acts of masculinity, femininity, queer and trans. If gender is perceived as the adoption of certain practices, which over time we take to be our own, age may as well be understood as the internalisation of norms that by time become ours. However, Woodward reminds that age could not be a mere assemblage of such conventions, because at certain point it performs us (2006). And Gullette points out that the body carried through time is the default body (2004).
Having the similarities and the distinction between the performance of gender and age in mind and knowing the problem of successful ageing in posing an adequate alternative to the decline narrative, what other options could one account for? Could the progress narrative offer an adequate response to the ruling decline view? Could contemporary cinema provide a narrative with an affirmative account of ageing, which does not engage in its denial.
A closer look at Late Bloomers made it possible for me to see it as an enactment of the progress narrative within the conventions of the Heimat genre, which throughout its history held the promises of rebirth, reinvention, integration of an individual within their community. As Alexandra Ludewig proposes, nostalgic or melancholic gaze immanent to the Heimat genre can be informed by the experience of ageing. The aesthetic of fairytale in Late Bloomers is pierced or intercut with the instances of realism, which is why I argued that the film comes across more as an enactment of progress narrative than successful ageing. These instances are the scenes and shots which remind us of the old age of protagonists and its accompanying frailty. The moments of hesitation, insecurity, forgetfulness and anxiety associated with old age. Desire to become-woman in Deleuzian sense is conveyed strongest in these instances, because we are exposed to the reality of old age, marked by the undeniable frailty of bodies in their materiality, but also by the sense of hope, dignity, desire to resist its inevitable decline forces and become something else. Becoming-woman is an inquiry into transforming and liberating the body and desire in multiple ways. And through the instances of realism within the fairytale aesthetic of the Heimat genre, this process is made a bit less obvious in Late Bloomers and a bit more pronounced in Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić`s film Have You Seen This Woman.
Vinzenz Hediger started his part of the lecture with a note on statistic visualization of the distribution of the population of a given country or region according to age cohort, the so-called “age pyramid”. Only in Africa, the age distribution is such that the lower realms are the most populous. The funding line of Volkswagen Stiftung the AGE-C project is in, Challenges for Europe – the Greying Continent, implies that the ageing population of Europe poses a problem by virtue of simply existing. An important background for concepts such as successful ageing is, in Hediger`s view, the discussion of age in statistical terms, as a potential for public policy. There is an ageing population, a population of people, who are no longer part of the workforce and no longer pay into the welfare system. And the concept of successful ageing should be understood against this background. As a strong normative content, Hediger agreed that it does, however, devalue all the forms of ageing that cannot be discussed under that rubric. Another important political context of the project is Europe, perceived as an oscillating, shifting term, similar as the Balkans, which as a mental map can be regarded as flexible and tangible at the same time, as Slavoj Zizek would argue. And the two analyzed films, in Hediger`s view, are non-European in a very strict political bureaucratic sense, and at the same time are profoundly European. If Late Bloomers is a Heimat film, Have You Seen This Woman? can be regarded as a radically modernist, highly disruptive, and challenging film. Three different stories feature the same actress, more or less the same setting, without clear urban markers. The first reference Hediger reflected upon was a 1954 novel Stiller written by Max Frisch. The novel follows a man who returns to Zürich from abroad and is identified by everyone in the city as the sculptor Stiller. He refuses this identification over and over again. And as Hediger suggested, the film, likewise, tells the same story three times in a row with three different roles. The film shows people and things, actions and locations that do not provide a fuzzy sense of happiness in a way, in which Late Bloomers does. Hediger asserted that the sense of decay, squalor and the depiction of homeless people living in public spaces that were designed for consumption, imply a history of economic failure. He also observed that the kind of intimacy, which emerges unsuspected between the protagonist and the character played by a woman less than half her age, in the scene set in the techno club, breaks with any kind of norm. If the key concept of our lecture is “becoming-woman”, then the protagonist`s refusal to become a certain type of woman in all three episodes of Have You Seen This Woman? is rather pronounced. The film engages with the visual and performative transgression by showing the character one would not usually see in a starring role, inhabiting the environments one would not normally go to. The consequential alterity of space and biographical trajectory is something that Hediger found deeply unsettling.
This observation had initiated the third part of our lecture, the discussion around the initial sense of alienation and estrangement which we had as we watched the film from our counterpart’s area of origin. What felt alienating and shocking for me was that all four characters of Late Bloomers, the fourth agers, were regarded within the diegesis as the economic burden. Their current living costs were openly discussed by their family members in front of them. And Hediger contextualized that by noticing that all the discourse on successful ageing and the age pyramid, the concern about the sustainability of the welfare state in the face of the changing age pyramid, is a classic example of bio-politics. Subsequently, in Northwestern European capitalist countries, poverty is perceived as a self-inflicted condition, whereas in the Orthodox realm, there is a dignity to poverty. And following-up on that observation, he maintained that Have You Seen This Woman? clearly shows that the directors love their character and that the film is not made at the expense of the character. They love their actress and give her a stage to do daring things. I agreed with this observation, and I also added that there is a humour which indeed becomes dark, and that there are traces of the carnivalesque mode of storytelling. Also, as the viewers, we are as surprised by the line of action as the protagonist is. The film is as indecisive about whether it is a mystery, fantasy or comedy as the viewers are. It tests out different grounds and registers. Hediger added that he did not see the film as an example of the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque is about the protest, the saturation of senses, the inversion of all social hierarchies. He agreed that the film has a certain element of protest, gears towards the protest, nevertheless refrains from it. He found interesting the work with a religious imagery at the end of the film with the Madonna-like portrait of Draginja, which could be perceived as kitschy but is not. In the last third of Have You Seen This Woman?, I saw the voyage of the protagonist, her passing through the different stations, as a way for her to reject the societal and gender roles imposed upon her. And the ending Madonna-like image may appear kitschy but by the simple fact of not lasting long enough is not. Hediger added that the stations could be regarded as the stations of suffering and concluded that the protagonist`s rejection of the various specific situations, has her transfigured into the celestial figure, if the film is to be read in the vein of the multilinear Christology.
Written by: Asja Makarević
Image credit: Late Bloomers (2006), directed by Bettina Oberli