Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.
The screenplay – a dramolette written by Walser in 1901, translated by Daniele Pantano and James Reidel as Snow White – is a Freudian sequel to the eponymous fairy tale. ‘I’m very much dead,’ the heroine (played by Stacy Martin) announces early on, annoyed at having been revived. Then, rather than condemning her stepmother, Snow White asks for her forgiveness. The Queen (Julie Christie) assumes this is ‘just a joke, isn’t that right?’ The Hunter (Hanns Zischler) believes no crime has been committed: ‘The poison apple isn’t true./The lie that says so is poison.’ The Prince (Toby Jones) is torn between his frigid bride and the older woman, who rejects him: ‘Such love, ah, that doesn’t suit me.’ The dialogue is punctuated by peals of thunder, with static crackling in the background (the sound design is by Joshua Bonnetta).
As well as the tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, the story evokes another German fable, ‘Der Freischütz’, adapted for the stage in 1990 by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs as The Black Rider. The Gothic horrors – snow, violence, madness – are all present in Walser’s plot, but there is enough comedy in it to make the scary funny.
If the screening was a joke, not everyone got it. When the lights came on, one man rushed out of the auditorium, muttering: ‘Such rubbish!’ Most of us, however, stayed for the Q&A. We learned that the film (with cinematography by Sean Price Williams) is a ‘shot-for-shot remake’ of João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000). (That wasn’t the first time Walser’s play was performed: there were theatre productions in the 1970s and an opera by Heinz Holliger in 1998.) Schtinter described his work as an ‘Americanisation’ of Monteiro’s, in which ‘the sky is bluer, the black is blacker’.
One viewer asked whether using 35mm film meant that the black could have been made blacker still. A discussion ensued, leading to the conclusion that ‘black is a lie.’ Another member of the audience wondered if the degradation of the film – missing frames, scratches – was deliberate. This prompted comparisons between digital media and analogue ‘living matter’.
Someone began his question: ‘I wasn’t sure if you were having me on …’ Many of us felt the same way, but scepticism gave way to laughter when Schtinter suggested that Schneewittchen could spell the end of filmmaking ‘in this hyper-capitalised culture’. His appearance in the opening sequence was nothing to do with the ‘death of the author’ and everything to do with the production being ‘less low-budget than anti-budget’. The film ‘will never be available for home viewing, streaming or download’, but it will be shown in cinemas in the UK, US and Europe over the coming weeks.
In the programme notes Schtinter talks of ‘the banality and self-service of visual kultur’. A prankster and provocateur, he draws on various avant-garde traditions to create his own art brand (complete with merch; a ‘snow shirt’ costs €50). He hasn’t yet published a manifesto, though a few years ago he produced Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children), audio recordings of 86 texts including The Communist Manifesto, Auto-Destructive Art, Wear Sunscreen and two Dada manifestos.
Viewers can make their own minds up how seriously to take Schneewittchen. We are also free to choose our own light-to-darkness ratio. In that we could be guided by Walser, who wrote in his essay ‘The Theatre, a Dream’ (1907, translated by Susan Bernofsky): ‘We are so glad in dark, meditative holes.’
