The basis for democracy is human contact, not calculating what will get votes. The way a hippie-style commune was turned into a fascist prison camp is a metaphor for modern society: “I want people to be alert and understand how oppressive powers work”.
Graham Douglas
He comes from a background in Punk and Viennese actionism, he worked on the first internet TV channel in 2000-2001, and in 2002 made his film “Foreigners out!”, which got him a reputation as a documentary film maker with sympathies for those who have been put in the role of victims, and also for perpetrators.
His new film “My talk with Florence”, shown at DocLisboa film festival this month, is a “staged interview”, originally made in 2008 and shown at an event called Ikon where he saw the power that intimate conversation can have in cinema. Florence was abused by her grandfather, and sent to an insane asylum by her family to silence her. She escaped and spent years living on the road with her young children in France, but became involved in the Friedrickshof Commune, where her children were abused by its leader, Otto Muehl.
The film is the first time she has told her story, and Paul Poet’s vehicle to illustrate the similarities he perceives between the fascist dictatorship of the commune and modern depersonalised life.
There is a long history of alternative lifestyles and communal living in Germany, going back to the Wandervogel and Lebensreform movements from the 1890s which became precursors of the Hippy lifestyle.
In 1933 the Nazis outlawed the Wandervogels in favour of the Hitler Youth, subverting their culture of freedom with obedience to Nazi ideology, and hatred of the Jews, homosexuals and left-wing politics.
Paul Poet uses the story of Friedrickshof to point to the need for vigilance. He talks to The Prisma.
You were probing difficult material. Weren’t you afraid Florence might lose control?
No, we were friends and we had planned and structured the interview together, it took a year for me to feel sure it would work in the cinema.
She was not in touch with her children so we had to wait until they were safe if the intimate details in the film were suddenly released to the press. And Otto Muehl was still alive and she was afraid of him.
Some of it was shown in 2013.
I was invited to an event called Ikon, and I picked some of this material and made an installation in the form of a dumb waiter, with a TV set inside, crowned with silicon penises, with Florence talking in this 2 hr long simulation of an interview.
And that was surrounded by posters of the original testimonials that Otto Muehl made at the police hearings for his trial, which is confidential, but Florence stole it, and I copied it as her counter-testimonial.
The event was full of Pop Art images, and yet people were fascinated by this small thing, they would sit for the whole 2 hours, you couldn’t move them away. People are not used to this kind of intense intimacy which the film transmitted, documentaries in cinemas are more constructed in propaganda terms.
How did you meet Florence?
She found me, because I’m known in Austria as a counter-cultural film-maker with sensibility for people in extreme situations. They get put into stereotypical categories – “you are this poor child, I’m going to nourish you” – it infantilises people. I just listen to people as human beings.
At the trial all the children, including Florence’s daughter, had to testify but they had been indoctrinated with the ‘good fairytale’. Florence told the police, and when her daughter realised that her own mother had reported her for false testimony, she broke down and told the real story, and Otto was sentenced to seven years.
But Florence was not heard?
She tried to get well-known journalists interested in the story, organising petitions – but nobody wanted to listen because it was too bizarre, and he was in jail anyway. There is still a lot of respect for Otto as a state artist, after 20 years I was the first one to say ‘yes’.
Florence talked about how wild and free her kids were – “it was me following them all over France”.
Yes, it was one of the symbolisms in the film. She had all this baggage of being raped by her grandfather and put into this insane asylum to shut her up, so that even being a prostitute and stealing made her free. Her life on the road was her escape.
What went wrong in the commune?
It started in 1972, with hippie counter-cultural ideals for the first 5 or 6 years, but they needed money, plus Otto saw Friedrickshof as his art project, people were supposed to implement the social formula he invented.
And they were working in a capitalist way, cold-calling people and selling them insurance policies, and fake shares.
The commune was good and the outside world was rubbish so that made it OK.
And Otto became successful as a state artist during the 80s, his work was bought by very rich buyers.
And it is still a sensitive issue about how many celebrities went to the commune to fuck the women and take drugs.
When Florence arrived it had already changed. Then she was separated from her kids, and became the woman who and washes everyone’s clothes. She saw her children every day but she wasn’t allowed to talk to them.
And she blamed herself and thought she had to suffer, so they could be educated by people who knew more than her.
So the film wasn’t about resolution, but about comparing different forms of abuse and showing how they are basic to the way these societies work, from the nuclear family with sexual abuse, to the counter-cultural community, and you get trodden under a power you don’t understand.
The art funding commission in Austria didn’t like the film.
Not at all, it’s a radical departure from films that have a lot of rich pop art imagery, it’s the bare essentials. There is no clear message, and the women on the committee didn’t like another woman talking about these dark and dirty things in her life.
It is bizarre to me that all these mainstream feminists go against Florence’s story.
Florence was very angry about the way the boys were treated in the commune.
Yes, and that’s what happened. I once organised a retrospective about Austrian women film directors, who did a lot of courageous work from silent movie times up to the 80s; but then you have these art-funded feminists who just want to get over certain messages, and they don’t deal with life.
They are only interested in themselves, not in equal rights and improving society: it’s counter-repression.
Next week: Part 2: Paul Poet talks about political hypnosis by the media and the issue of immigration in Europe.
(Photos supplied by the interviewee and authorised by the interviewee for publication)
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