„Nothing, nothing could ever placate me.“

Rahel Varnhagen

„To feel like a thing that feels means first of all the emancipation from an instrumental conception of sexual excitement that naturally considers it directed toward the attainment of orgasm.“

Mario Perniola, Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

Black film. Techno-synth sound. Bam. Thunder. Bam. Production company credits (loop), three names (Angela Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek, Ursula Pürrer). A quiet whistling. The sound of a needle stuck on a record – we're still in the 20th century. Voiceover by a female narrator, deep, breathy:

„In the year 2700, the year of the toads, „Asche“ was a burnt-out city. Too big for its souls who banded together in dark cellars. It was an unrestrained wild animal, ready to piss in the face of death at any time. And its inhabitants were able to hold their own. The chances of a pure heart surviving were highly unlikely.“ ¹

Fade to a window in the night rain, a storm, curtains blowing, lightning and fragments of images in green and red; pan to „Spy“, one of the female protagonists (Susanna Heilmayr) at a desk. Loose white blouse (New Romance), quill pen, manic concentration on writing or drawing. Intercuts to fruit and blossoms (Les Fleurs du Mal); she opens her blouse, takes a swig from a bottle of booze and goes to the window. From outside, we see her close the window, wide-eyed (Cathy? Heathcliff?); cut to two pissing saints; lightning flashes. A branch bangs against the window. Scene change.

Perniola seamlessly connects these words to queer deconstructive subject theories and heteronormative criticism, and with him we can read the enigmatic aphoristic film poetry of Flaming Ears as a paradigmatic building block in a tradition of sexual avantgardes. With its staging of things, the film achieves a radial denaturalisation of sexuality, a denaturalisation that is essential for the queer avantgarde film and art movements post-Flaming Ears.

Aphorism

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an aphorism as a „pithy observation which contains a general truth.“ The Literary Devices website describes it asa „statement of truth or opinion expressed in a concise and witty manner. The term is often applied to philosophical, moral, and literary principles.“ According to the German-language Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens on-line, the aphorism is a „subject-specific form of short prose whose distinctiveness lies in the thought's particular method of delivery.“³ The Lexikon notes that the aphorism dates back to the time of Hippocrates, gathered speed with Erasmus von Rotterdam in the 16th century and reached its „masterful artistic apex“⁴ in 19th-century German philosophy, with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. No mention is made here of Rahel Varnhagen, that virtuoso of aphorisms, whose life was the focus of Hannah Arendt's very first book⁵ in 1933, one hundred years after Varnhagen's death. Varnhagen's (1771-1833) work consists entirely of letters and diaries – literary genres of women writers, which would only be recognised as equal to novel or poetic forms in the 1970s. Thus Arendt was an early appreciator of the remarkable woman whose language represented the essence of Romanticism. Here is an excerpt cited by Arendt in which Varnhagen told a correspondent about a dream:

„'Do you know mortification?' we asked each other, for instance. And if we had ever felt this particular form of suffering in our lives, we said: 'Yes! That I know!', with a loud cry of grief, and the particular form of suffering we were speaking of was rent from the heart, the pain multiplied a hundredfold: but then we were rid of it forever and felt wholly sound and light. The Mother of God was quiet all the while, only said Yes! to each question, and also wept. Bettina [Brentano] asked: 'Do you know the suffering of love?' Whimpering and almost howling, I exclaimed, while the tears streamed and I held a handkerchief over my face, a long, long Yes! […]“ ⁶

Streaming tears, whimpering, howling, cries of grief and things rent from the heart are all elements of Flaming Ears' diegesis. The characters could all have sprung from Varnhagen's world of verbal images, even if they don't share her aspiration of being close to life. As Arendt describes her, Varnhagen exposed herself to life so that it „poured down upon her like rain without an umbrella“⁷ („What do you do? Nothing. I let life rain upon me“⁸). And in the same way that Varnhagen pours out her knowledge of life in aphorisms, Flaming Ears develops its story using cinematic aphorisms, in short visual and auditory set pieces that represent parts of the whole and are linked closely together in a visual series.

[...]

From: Andrea B. Braidt, „Aphorismus und Avantgarde. Das Anorganische in Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche" (Aphorism and Avantgarde. The Inorganic in Flaming Ears)
in: „Noch Fragen“. Festschrift for Klemens Gruber, Aki Beckmann and David Krems (Hg.), Maske und Kothurn, 65th volume, issue 1-2, Vienna: Böhlau 2020, S. : 54-58

With the kind permission of Andrea B. Braidt

1 Flaming Ears (Rote Ohren Fetzen durch Asche), D: Ursula Pürrer, Dietmar Schipek, Angela Hans Scheirl, A 1991.
2 Mario Perniola, Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, New York/London, Continuum Books 2004, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, p. 3.
3 [Aphorism], ed. H. Schwitzgebel, Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens on-line,
4 ibid.
5 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. [First publication 1958, translated by Richard and Clara Winston]
6 Varnhagen ibid.
7 ibid.
8 ibid.