Swiss director Daniel Schmid grew up in the family hotel =D1 now a=20 recurrent image in his films, writes TREVOR STEELE-TAYLOR
=D4I WAS The American Friend,=D3 Swiss film director Daniel Schmid told us=
over lunch in Johannesburg. =D2It was me that Bruno Ganz killed in the=20 subway.=D3 The film he referred to is Wim Wenders=D5 classic inversion of f=
noir, in which Dennis Hopper, playing a dealer in fake artworks, finds=20 friendship and loneliness in the dark paths of Hamburg. Schmid was=20 wrong. The American Friend was played by cult figure Nicholas Ray, but,=20 indeed, it was Schmid who was assassinated in the subway. Memory is a transient thing; what is true today need not have been true 15=
years ago. So it is with Schmid=D5s art. His films deal with memory as much=
as the nature of truth. Neither is absolute. Schmid, in South Africa for the screening of his films Hecate and Off=20 Season at the Swiss Film Festival, is an amiable man. Despite having lost=
half his vocal tract to cancer, he is philosophically unrepentant about the=
actions of the past. Putting my chain-smoking colleague at ease, he=20 remarked: =D2I do not regret any drug I have ever taken nor any cigarette I=
ever smoked.=D3 Regret, for Schmid, is a negation of experience. One has to=
forge ahead, adapting to the dictates of fate. Hecate, shot in Morocco in 1982, stars American model Lauren Hutton as a=20 woman with whom men become obsessed, leading them to destruction.=20 The men in question, her estranged husband and a young French diplomat,=20 are prisoners of their own intransigence. To escape his obsession, her=20 husband goes to fight on the Siberian front (the time is World War II),=20 while the Frenchman loses his sanity and his career in the pursuit of=20 mastering her. He does not learn from experience and is forever damned in=
a hell of his own making. When I handed Schmid my card, he returned the gesture with a pamphlet=20 for the hotel in which he grew up, the Hotel Schweizerhof, which has been=
in his family for three generations. When Schmid was growing up in the=20 Forties, the hotel would close for the winter. Suddenly an emptiness would=
descend on what had previously been a magical place of light, grand balls=
and magnificent meals. =D2There is nothing as empty as an empty hotel,=D3=
Schmid says; one thinks of the cinematic use that off-season hotels have=20 been put to by the likes of Stanley Kubrick in The Shining and Harry=20 Kumel in Daughters of Darkness. They are ports of call for the transient,=
stations of the cross even, a theme explored by Schmid in his 1992 film Off=
Shot in the hotel of his childhood, the film has a mammoth cast including=
Rainer Werner Fassbinder alumni Ingrid Caven and Ulli Lommel.=20 Schmid=D5s alter-ego is Valentin, who returns to the soon-to-be-demolished=
Alpine hotel where he spent his youth. As he wanders around the empty=20 rooms, the memories of the past come flooding back.=20 Apart from his film work and hotel maintenance, Schmid has acted for the=20 late Fassbinder (in The Merchant of Four Seasons), a relationship reversed=
when Fassbinder acted in Schmid=D5s Shadow of Angels. He is also kept=20 busy as an opera director.=20 This year he has directed Donizetti=D5s Linda di Chamounix for the=20 Zurich/Vienna Opera, as well as Bellini=D5s I Puritani for the Paris Opera;= a=20 new film, The Written Face, is due for release in October. A mystery, even to Schmid, is his popularity in Japan. The Written Face is=
a Japanese-financed production about the disappearing world of the geisha,=
starring female-impersonator Tamasaburo Bando. In Japan, Bando is as=20 popular as Michael Jackson, being swamped by admirers whenever he=20 appears in public.=20 Shrugging his shoulders, Schmid muses: =D2I don=D5t know why it is that I g=
backing from the Japanese to make this film, while Nagisa Oshima, who is=20 Japanese, has to struggle for years to convince backers to put money=20 behind his project=D3. Another of the dictates of fate, perhaps? Thoroughly disparaging of the colonisation of the world by American=20 culture =D1 and films, sitcoms and other media in particular =D1 Schmid=20 believes the South African film industry is at a very critical moment. =D2I=
could go either way,=D3 in his opinion =D1 the worst of the scenarios being=
total immersion in American product. But, =D2there is still time=D3. The Swiss Film Festival runs at the Labia Theatre until September 17