Ruth Mader
Interview with Ruth Mader
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Born in 1974 in Vienna, Ruth Mader studied directing at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. In 1999, the short feature Gfrasta" won her the German Max Ophüls Award in the short film category. Null Defizit", her next short, received an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, where it was shown in the Official Selection, Cinéfondation. Struggle", her first feature film, was again selected for the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival and had its premiere in 2003 in the Section Un Certain Regard.



Filmography

Struggle (2003)
Null Defizit (2001, short)
Gfrasta (1998, short)
Ready For What (1997, documentary)
Kilometer 123,5 (1994, short)
Endstation Obdachlos (1992, documentary)




Slaughterhouse Lives

Ruth Mader's Struggle for honest filmmaking
By Matthias Greuling

After directing the successful short films Gfraster and Null Defizit, Austrian filmmaker Ruth Mader premiered her first feature Struggle in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section. Struggle is the story of two people: a woman who travels to Austria in search of work, and a divorced man who frequents swingers' bars in Vienna's red-light district.

In this interview, Mader, a recent graduate of the film Academy of Vienna, discusses the process of creating Struggle, the dismal state of professional acting in Germany and Austria and the unwelcome comparisons to the Austrian filmmakers Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) and Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days).

Ruth Mader: I had seen an article in Profil [a weekly Austrian Magazine] about strawberry pickers that touched me deeply. It tells how people come to Austria [from Eastern Europe], live in containers for weeks, and receive only 25 cents per kilogram of picked berries. The second thread of the film, the story of the man, had been planned for several years as a short. I was not able to do this movie back then, because I got a lot of cancellations from actors. Nobody wanted to undress in front of the camera.

First of all deliver the raw material - very crazy, chaotic, and unfiltered. Which pictures arise in my mind, which film style, which stories? Getting more concrete: the red-light district, a woman, strawberry harvest, a broker, images of the West, shopping centers, and so on. Which visual styles, which locations interest me? I write together with Martin Leidenfrost, then we involve Barbara Albert, who connects our different ideas. Then, back to us. We add to it, and it goes back to Barbara, and so on. At the end the whole thing looks exactly like a script: chicken factory, inside, daytime, chickens are being gutted. ... Then I begin to draw storyboards.

I can't see that at all. Seidl distorts people in front of his camera, letting antlers grow out of their heads. I choose a matter-of-fact, sober way of portraying people. I do not want to make fun of them. The whole point is to feel the soul in people's faces. When you see the human beings in my movie who are working the streets, you see a respectful portrayal of their souls' conditions.

That is one of the most beautiful things about cinema: the possibility of telling a story through pictures and editing alone. This enables the audience to make many more associations, opening them up in a way that cannot be expressed in words. There is enough trash talk on TV all day long.

It happens rather often that mediocre Austrian men come to be with fantastic women because many of these women from the East happen to be in dire economic circumstances. This often results in bizarre relationships, even though they are only transitory. In regard to the male protagonist, I wanted the audience to relate to him with ambivalence. On one hand, one finds him disgusting, on the other hand he is a poor worm, caught in his disastrous desires. He represents the Western habits: he has money, but is an emotional wreck, on the brink of disaster.

That is a fact of the meat processing industry. I wanted to make this industry part of my movie, because traditionally many foreign laborers work in these kinds of jobs, as well as in the cleaning business, and as migrant farm workers.
All jobs where you never get to see the people who are actually doing them.
It is typical for Western society to make everything unpleasant invisible. Everything gets hidden away. Every place is assigned a function: There one goes to take a shower, there one dies, there one has sex, there the animals are being slaughtered. I have tried to represent this whole space - the Western world - in my film.

I grew up like that. I am the child of a cleaning woman and I know what it means to have little money, which is why these destinies touch me enormously. ... But the movie, of course, is a combination of personal experiences and made-up stories. Many movies have to do with the life one leads. However, one has to first find artistic form.

Many actors answered our newspaper ads. We also put up fliers, and talked to people on the street. For the scenes playing in the red-light district, we actually talked to people from there.

Many actors from German-speaking countries are already destroyed by TV. Many don't even know anymore how to ring a doorbell so that it looks normal and not artificial and over-the-top. I know many actors who are completely standing beside themselves, unable to feel what they are playing anymore. All they do is secrete texts.

Television industry has destroyed a lot. Its motto goes: Quick, quick, we'll do that somehow, that's okay the way it is. There are practically no rehearsals anymore; sentences are recited quickly and recorded right away. Quick into the airplane and to the next shoot, where they do the same all over again. This kind of acting is enough for what it is supposed to be: an industrial product. For a cinematic movie it won't do at all.


Matthias Greuling is editor-in-chief of Celluloid: the Austrian Film Magazine (www.celluloid.at). This interview © 2003 by Celluloid. Translated from the German by EuroTrans - Wolfgang Bliemel & Susan Skeele, July 2003.

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