Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture

[This page by Michael Wood]

Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture

At the height of his experimentation with theatrical form, Heiner Müller composed Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture in 1984. Although this piece is printed in block text form, and thus bears the ostensible traces of prose, it was primarily written for the stage, and has been performed regularly. The première took place within the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz, Austria, in 1985, directed by Müller’s then wife, Ginka Tscholakowa. In 1986, the text served as a prologue to American director Robert Wilson’s production of Euripides’s Alcestis, at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The text of Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture resulted from Müller’s encounter with an image drawn by Emilia Kolewa, a student of stage design in Sofia at the time. In his autobiography Krieg ohne Schlacht; War without Battle, Müller states that he found his interaction with the image so productive because the drawing is so imperfect, and filled with mistakes and uncertainties. On the surface, the image contains a woman, a man, (a) bird(s), a table and chairs, a tree, and more (see Heiner Müller Handbuch, p. 121 for a facsimile of the image).

The text is composed as a single sentence, spanning around eight pages, which is only punctuated by commas, colons, and semicolons. As Müller writes in a note at the end of the text, it is written in a dramatic structure, which is now long dead. The description of the picture begins by processing of the data in the image, as the describer’s eye moves around the image, from the top right hand corner, round, and to the centre. The describer can only conjecture about what is in the image, and questions what things are, and describes how they might appear. For example, are there three trees to the right of the image, or are they one, from the same root? The clouds in the sky appear to him to look more like rubber toys, which have torn themselves off their leash. As the describer reacts to the image, it is overlaid with more and more possible meanings, and takes the shape of a cycle of violence consisting of the man, the woman, and the bird. Furthermore, the describer places contrasting possibilities for the meaning of particular images next to each other, and uses ambiguous pronominal formulations to increase the uncertainty of the text. The result is that no totalising meaning can be attributed to the text, or any of the images within it.

Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture creates a nexus of intertextual references. A note at the end of the text describes it as an ‘overpainting’ of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the eleventh book of Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Euripides’s Alcestis. The describer bursts the spatial and temporal frames of the image, suggesting possible histories to the situation, and suggesting only the continuation of sexual violence. Has the woman risen from the dead again and again, only to be killed by being throttled to death or violently raped? The possibility for violence and harm is contained in almost all aspects of the image, from the tree whose fruit is perhaps poisonous, and the blood-encrusted claw of the woman in the foreground, to the chair: the text asks if perhaps the chair has been broken as a result of particularly violent sexual intercourse. The cycle of violence within the text may only be broken by a particular gap in time, rendered by blinking. Nonetheless, Bildbeschreibung; Description of a Picture culminates in the petrifaction of hope, as the storm of revolution freezes over, and, significantly, a full stop.

Further Reading

David Bathrick, ‘The Provocation of his Images’, New German Critique 73 (1998), 31-34

Herbert Grieshop, Rhetorik des Augenblicks. Studien zu Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Peter Handke und Botho Strauß (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998)

Matthew Griffin, ‘Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Müller’, Monatshefte 93:4 (2001), 426-50

Elinor Fuchs, Robert Wilson, Tom Kamm, John Conklin, Laurie Anderson, Suzushi Hanayagi, Mark Oshima, Heiner Müller, Diane D’Aquila, Paul Rudd, Hans Peter Kuhn, Jennifer Tiptor, Carl Weber, ‘The PAJ Casebook: Alcestis’, Performing Arts Journal 10:1 (1986), 79-115

Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi (eds.), Heiner Müller Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003)

Florian Vaßen, ‘Images become Text become Images: Heiner Müller’s Bildbeschreibung (Description of a Picture)’, in Gerhard Fischer (ed.), Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and HISTORY (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1995), pp. 165-87

Web Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqaqMvaK6eY

A short film in German based on the text of Bildbeschreibung