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On the Death of Brigitte Desalm

A cinematic voice has fallen silent. A voice which with its reliable, careful tone, and opinionated and diverse language, had become so familiar to us, that it is hard to suddenly have to continue without it. This voice had become a permanent companion on outings to the cinema. It led us to the cinema auditorium and right to the seat, turned out the light and switched on the imaginary projector which takes us to the cinematographic world of dreams. It did that through language alone. Through texts. It was a voice which brought us closer to the taste, the smell, the atmosphere, to all the irresistible nuances of a film experience. In short, a voice which seduced us to the cinema.
Brigitte Desalm is dead. And the loss will grow more apparent on a daily basis. We shall miss her cinematic island in the culture pages of Thursday's Cologne Stadtanzeiger newspaper, her film historic, biographic and analytical essays which ennoble complex film books, and her shy yet heartfelt presence in the cinematic landscape.

The first pre-requisite for understanding cinema, is to love it. One has to be in love with the means, the paths and the possibilities. Brigitte Desalm and cinema was a life long, passionate love story, a massive, ardent love, from which we, her readers, reaped the benefits. In exceptional work, she penned with great intensity and care, texts which proved both the passion of the author for the medium, and her enormous historical knowledge, her unrelenting feel for wrong tone, failed experiments and inconsistent attempts. Brigitte Desalm was on the lookout for enthusiastic, yet self-confident film, for subjective yet accessible cinema which remains true to its energy and doesn't put over-ambition in its own path - but which nevertheless, or even as a result, creates space for the audience to be carried along by their own imaginations.

For me, Brigitte Desalm was the Pauline Kael of German film criticism. Pauline Kael, the original American rock of relish-filled, analytical and simultaneously unrestrained subjective reviews, was possibly the decisive opinion-shaper of 70s and 80s American cinema. Desalm was certainly less of a celebrity than Kael, but her texts were often coloured with greater concentration and greater flexibility in her search. What connects her to Kael is an obsessive lust for film, in the unfolding of the medium, and the seamless transition to film narrative strategies in her texts. Some of her fans will most miss the tension, the thrill which she built up in her best texts. Small, condensed three-act essays, sometimes written as if they had opening and closing credits, musically pointed but never coquettish, self-obsessed or eclectic in their means. What she called for in film, she demanded of herself: care, dedication, precision and intensity.

As a person, she almost disappeared behind her written oeuvre. But a closer look reveals that much of her was "typical" critic: her reserved, sometimes almost quirky-seeming ways, her ability to make herself almost invisible in official contexts and of course, her relationship to cinema as an elixir of life, as a fascinating yet jungle-like territory, through which years of research work beat down a passionate path.

I met Brigitte Desalm a few times, and over the course of the years, our meetings sometimes turned into long evenings. At first, it seemed hard to get closer to her, because she always kept a shy distance, and was obviously trying hard not to stretch the relationship between critic and filmmaker. But then, after several cautious attempts on my part, she opened a door for conversation through which I gratefully strode. Once inside, it was possible to take long and detailed trips through film history; she was exceptionally full of relish and allowed sharp judgements, had unusual, eccentric preferences, defended some (mostly American) films, which I narrow-mindedly wanted to discount, until I was forced to admit that I hadn't been looking with enough curiosity. And of course, we would always meet again when I had made a new film myself. It became like a kind of ritual: her opinion meant a lot to me. If she liked something, I was especially proud, and when she complained, I was especially angry. I wanted her to like my work. Because I, like so many other filmmakers, felt that she played a part in my search, my detours, my breaks; and that she enjoyed some of my experiments just as much as she got annoyed about them.

The devotion, concentration and endless curiosity with which Brigitte Desalm dedicated her life to cinema, was unique, and made her the most complete film expert I have ever met.

How good it is that Marilyn played so many roles. How good it is that Hitchcock made so many films. How good it is that Brigitte Desalm wrote so many texts. It means they stay with us, these rocks of the most beautiful of all the arts.

(Published in Cologne Stadtanzeiger in December 2002)