Zechmeister (1981) by Angela Summereder - Review

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by Angela Summereder

grade: 7.5

Who is the victim and who is the executioner, at the end of the day, in this singular version of events staged by Angela Summereder? Regardless of how things really turned out, no one is really innocent in Zechmeister. And, at the end of the day, the finger is pointed above all at a hypocritical and perbenist society, ready to accuse anyone it comes across, just to see from afar what consequences will arise from certain actions.

Guilty or innocent?

An essential feature film in the history of Austrian cinema, Zechmeister. Made by Angela Summereder in 1981 – and screened again at the Viennale 2020, as part of the retrospective Austrian Auteurs curated by the Filmarchiv Austria – this singular work is set in an era in which many authors (many of them from foreign countries such as the Iranian Mansur Madavi and the Canadian John Cook), wishing to break away from the canons that had prevailed in Austrian cinema for years, began to experiment with a new way of relating to the seventh art itself, resulting in a series of films, each of them innovative in its own way.

In this respect, Zechmeister immediately stands out for its hybrid form, halfway between documentary and feature film, inspired directly by real events. We find ourselves, then, in 1949. Maria Zechmeister is sentenced to life imprisonment, accused of having poisoned her husband Anton. But what evidence is there for this? Apparently, apart from constant gossip from the victim’s relatives, neighbours and household servants of the Zechmeister family, there is nothing that can, in fact, prove the guilt of the woman, who was later released from prison after seventeen years.

In order to stage this singular story and attempting, unpretentiously, to shed light on the facts, then, Angela Summereder made use of numerous testimonies and reports from forensic doctors and from the police – the texts of which have been kept, here, almost in their entirety – to make a quite singular film in its form. We immediately hear Maria Zechmeister’s voice: she took part directly in the making of the film, recounting her own version of events. Similarly, many of the people who appear in the surreal trial scene set in the open countryside are non-professional actors who lived in the Zechmeisters’ village. And if, at the same time, the figures of two detectives trying to prove that the victim was poisoned by his wife are portrayed in a rather bizarre and comic way, then, immediately, unnaturally static characters as judges who do nothing but stand under a tree – with a strong wind in the background – immediately bring us back to Federico Fellini’s cinema and to that deep, disturbing sense of death that is perfectly depicted in some of his most famous scenes.

But Fellini, in fact, is not Summereder’s only source of inspiration. Given, in fact, her unique directorial approach, we think more of the unforgettable Chantal Ackerman and her way of bringing places and objects to life through simple voice-overs.

While a seemingly detached voice describes step by step the autopsy on the corpse of Anton Zechmeister, the camera focuses on a watercourse. And immediately, the facts are observed with greater detachment, inspired in every way by the philosophy of Heraclitus. Everything flows and no matter how dramatic an event may be, things, slowly, are destined to return as before. As if nothing had happened. And just as the constant noise of a thunderstorm that we hear for several minutes after the end of the credits further emphasises, while the screen remains totally black.

Who is the victim and who is the executioner, at the end of the day, in this singular version of events staged by Angela Summereder? Regardless of how things really turned out, no one is really innocent in Zechmeister. And, in the end, the finger is pointed above all at a hypocritical and perbenist society, ready to accuse anyone it comes across, just to see from afar what consequences will arise from certain actions. And this strong criticism of society itself will, over the years, become almost a sort of leitmotif within Austrian cinema, as well as a recurring theme for numerous subsequently established authors. But that, of course, is another story.