Amani Olu speaks with Tina Schula about “Ratline,” a series of color photographs that uses fiction and personal anecdotes to examine how a family negotiates its relationship to Nazi history. These tableaux serve as a metaphor for the global persistence, yet covert status of Nazi fundamentalism and consider larger family and identity issues. This is Part II of the conversation.
WW: The subjects in your work appear to be burdened by guilt and regret. What are we supposed to gain from this?
TS: The idea is that the characters in my constructed family pictures all manage very different levels of guilt, regret and also levels of rebellion and stoic conviction. I think this is exactly what goes on in a family that is burdened by a father or an aunt with a Nazi past. The family is divided between a wide range of emotions. Each generation is looking at history according to their knowledge and experiences. The younger generation either confronts the older one in an attempt to find out the truth or the children eventually take over their parent’s beliefs. Traces of both are suggested in “Ratline.” I only learned about the Nazi regime through books, films and stories I was told. But my grandmother was there. I can still see the fear in her eyes when she runs to the cabinet to show me her Arian pass after I questioned her about her secret Jewish ancestors.
WW: You were a filmmaker before making photographs. Besides working with actors, how else has filmmaking informed your photographic practice?
TS: Filmmaking has informed my photography in many ways. Right from the start I have applied whatever I learned from film to the still image. When I started I was drawn to making very slow films. I would work with dancers and capture tiny weird gestures inspired by Japanese Butho theatre, like someone’s foot twitching under a table. I also loved the pace of filmmakers like [Andrei] Tarkovsky and [Ingmar] Bergman. Tarkovsky invented a new way of experiencing time.
In a way many of my films were already lingering on single images, precursors to my later photography. When I took up photography it felt like I was continuing to make films but this time with only a single frame to work with. I think this limitation really helped me to better understand and strengthen what I was already developing with my filmmaking, paying attention to composition, lighting, set and gesture.
WW: A chronological narrative is absent in your work. Why is it important to employ a non-linear approach? What is the viewer supposed to get from this method?
TS: I chose a non-linear narrative approach because I did not want to construct a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. The fact that I’m breaking up the story also helps reveal the staged nature of my work and keeps it in line with [Bertolt] Brecht’s theatrical techniques of ‘Verfremdung’. These techniques of disruption are meant to pull the viewer out of the picture and force him/her to confront the wider socio-political content.
WW: How do you feel about criticism that you are casting a negative light on Austrians?
TS: Again, my work is not a critique on Austria and its role during the Nazi regime. My work addresses the continuing of Nazi beliefs everywhere. I think it would be false and too simplistic to say all Austrians or Germans were Nazis. That’s maybe an image that Hollywood filmmaking has set into the world. In fact, as we have learned from many case stories of Nazis in hiding, most of them had to take on new identities, religions and cultures to be able to re-establish themselves in foreign countries. This is what I find fascinating, how an ideology can be so strong that it survives under such conditions.
WW: What do you hope to resolve in your work?
TS: I want to make people aware of the complexity of history and how history is judged differently by every generation. History continues to shape and often burden our lives in the present.
