Meteor, Star, Galaxy, Caven

LARB presents a new essay by Erika Balsom, excerpted from Fireflies Press’s edited collection “Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction,” publishing this September.

By Erika BalsomAugust 31, 2024

• Biography & Autobiography

• Film

SEARCH FOR INGRID CAVEN’S name in the credits of the first feature film in which she appears, and disappointment will be in store: it is nowhere to be found. Her role in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) is too small. A little over 20 minutes into the film, Bruno (Ulli Lommel) is trawling through the inky Munich night, looking for a sex worker named Joanna (Hanna Schygulla) in the hope of then tracking down her pimp (Fassbinder). Caven emerges out of the darkness as if from nowhere. She stands alone in the frame, her exsanguinous face piercing the obscurity. The petty criminal addresses her from offscreen:

— I’m looking for a girl called Joanna.

— Why Joanna? Why not me?

— Because she’s the one I have to find.

— Joanna, Joanna … I saw her just now, in a yellow dress.

After this exchange, lasting but some 20 seconds, Caven turns away and vanishes into the void. She is never seen again. The film moves on without her, establishing a pattern that repeats many times throughout the actress’s extraordinary career, whether in works by Fassbinder or others: in appearances as captivating as they are brief, she streaks through films like a meteor in the sky. She is fragile and formidable, worldly and wounded. She is there and then gone, unforgettable.

Change a few letters in Caven’s first line in Love Is Colder Than Death and her questions slip out of the fictional universe and into the thorny thicket of offscreen relations: “Why Hanna? Why not me?” It was Schygulla that Fassbinder deemed “the key to everything” in that early film, Schygulla that he went on to make his star, Schygulla that he placed atop his 1981 list of the 10 best actresses of contemporary West German cinema. (Caven is there, too, but in last place.) It is as if Caven’s inaugural appearance in a feature film already confronts the fact that she would rarely perform principal roles.

This suggestion might seem far-fetched were it not that Love Is Colder Than Death emanates from a milieu in which art and work and life were caught together in an inescapable swirl—and were the gesture not repeated in a later Fassbinder film. In Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)—a piece of metacinema loosely based on the shooting of Whity (1971) just months before—it is the blonde Schygulla, dressed in a white romper, who plays the lead in the film within the film. The black-clad, redheaded Caven has just a few lines as a married tourist who sits at the hotel bar, asking for employment as an extra. Fassbinder’s then-wife again plays a character positioned on the margins, seeking inclusion; the film is again looking for, looking at, someone else. (In a letter to Peter Berling, Caven recounted the declarations Fassbinder made while the newlyweds were driving to the Sorrento set of Beware of a Holy Whore: “My wife is no actress!,” “My wife puts on a hat, takes a book and goes out to lie in the sun.”) Even though Caven appeared in so many of the director’s films, as she put it in a 1977 interview, “I don’t correspond to the kind of women that Rainer wants to show. In his films, my roles are always characters who are a little outside, a little far away.”

This is all to say that it is Schygulla who would more easily lend herself to the critical approach variously called “acteurism” or “la politique des actrices,” which seeks to counter the dominance of the (male) director as authorial figure by exploring how (female) performance figures as a crucial site of skill and significance across a body of work. (How ironic it is that this latter term, today deployed in feminist contexts, was first proposed in Luc Moullet’s blisteringly misogynist review of Paul Henreid’s 1958 noir Girls on the Loose, published in Cahiers du cinéma in August of the same year.) But the easiest path is rarely the most interesting. Never forget what the anamorphic skull of Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors teaches: the point of greatest fascination does not always lie where we are most obviously directed to look. A crucial part of the star persona of the woman born Ingrid Schmidt (Saarbrücken, Germany, 1938) is that she is not, in any traditional sense at least, the star of most of the films in which she appears. Even when she does take center stage—as in Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma (1974) or in her singing career, documented so well in Bertrand Bonello’s Ingrid Caven: Music and Voice (2012)—this aura of being “a little outside, a little far away” clings to her like the sillage of a good perfume. When she sings, she gets referred to as an actress (Le Monde, on her 1978 show at Pigall’s: “Ingrid Caven, avant tout, est comédienne”); when she acts, her relation to music is underlined (The A to Z of German Cinema: “Caven gained little notice for her film career. Her recognition has come as a singer”). In multiple ways, her allure is entangled with the sense that she somehow comes from another place or time. Casting doubt on the desirability of belonging and puncturing the boredom of the norm, she intrudes with the promise of something less ordinary. Nothing like the banal, “relatable” celebrities of today, Ingrid Caven is a celestial creature of glorious artifice and terrible glamour: a rupture, a fantasy, a visitant.

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“La politique des actrices” positions itself most explicitly against the gendered denial of collective labor that undergirds the lionization of auteurs, but it also takes a second, related target in its crosshairs: the archetype of the muse, which simultaneously exalts and debases the feminine, framing women as inspirational handmaidens to masculine creation. It would be easy to say that Caven has played the muse across multiple mediums given that her name is frequently uttered in the same breath as that of men for whom she has been of signal importance. In addition to directors such as Fassbinder, Schmid, and Werner Schroeter, one cannot go without mentioning Jean-Jacques Schuhl in literature, Yves Saint Laurent in fashion, and Peer Raben in music. Schuhl’s partner for many years, she is the subject of his 2000 Prix Goncourt–winning novel Ingrid Caven, in which, among other things, he details how Saint Laurent cut a gown directly on her body; for Raben, best known as the composer of music for Fassbinder’s films, she was not only an actress in his films but the most celebrated performer of his songs as well. Yet Caven does not merely inspire others; she is also a collaborator and an artist in her own right. In Schroeter’s memoirs—for which Caven supplied the seductive title, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy—he names her as Schmid’s muse while simultaneously pointing to the insufficiency of that paradigm. For the director of La Paloma, he writes, she “was the ultimate diva and central female figure, his muse in his art and in real life his best woman friend and comrade in battle.”

As much as Caven’s star persona is shot through with the mystery and power of the outsider, her working life is inextricable from these deep bonds of friendship. Hints of this aspect of her relationship with Fassbinder find their way onto the screen, especially in those moments when fiction mingles with reality. In Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus’s underground satire 1 Berlin-Harlem (1974), she is there at his side with a flower in her hair. The chummy pair make a double cameo as themselves, approaching African American protagonist John (Conrad Jennings) outside the Zoo Palast cinema with the hope of casting him in a film. She is the one Fassbinder telephones to announce the Stammheim deaths of the Red Army Faction leaders in his contribution to the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978), a work the critic Ian Penman has described as possessing “a pervasive sense of complete and uncensored intimacy.”

But perhaps the most moving depiction of Caven as friend comes in In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). Widely acknowledged to be one of Fassbinder’s most personal projects, it was made in the aftermath of the suicide of his lover Armin Meier, the one who dials Caven’s number in Germany in Autumn. “Hardly any other film is so much tied up with his life,” writes the critic Wilhelm Roth. Dressed in a more contemporary style than usual, wearing jeans and a powder-blue satin bomber liberally trimmed with fur, midriff bare, Caven plays Rote Zora, plucky friend to troubled, transgender protagonist Elvira (Volker Spengler). Although Zora is so much smaller than Elvira, she still calls her “Kleines,” little one. She is there to help Elvira up off the street when she is knocked down by her ex-lover’s car; when Elvira seeks out the truth of her childhood at an orphanage, Zora goes with her, cries for her, holds her. Among all this—and even if betrayal comes by the end—there is one sequence that stands out as a devastating image of companionship as a bulwark against cruelty: Zora and Elvira walking through an abattoir, as the latter, formerly trained as a butcher, relays the story of her life in voiceover. Fassbinder’s camera frequently strays from the pair to take inventory of the carnage around them, indulging a quasi-Surrealist fascination with the habitual brutality of the slaughterhouse. Zora and Elvira lean on one another, teetering in heels across a wet floor strewn with blood. Caven’s character listens, witnesses, accompanies. She stands together with her friend, two against the world.

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A muse, a friend, a comrade—-and “the ultimate diva.” Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran (1972) is a parliament of stars. There is Schroeter’s supernova Magdalena Montezuma; there is Warholian darling Candy Darling. And there is Caven. With her movements slowed to near-stillness, drawn-on eyebrows, rutilant glow, and distant gaze, within this cavalcade she “stands for mannered acting and Marlene Dietrich–esque distinction,” as scholar Marc Siegel puts it. His words don't just hold true for Schroeter’s experimental evocation of the 19th-century opera singer but speak to Caven’s performance style more generally. The Dietrich comparison is often made, and not without good reason—especially given how frequently Caven appears on film as the cabaret singer that she is, and how often her sartorial and musical styles evoke the period of the thirties to fifties. Yet even more than Josef von Sternberg’s favorite actress, Caven’s body is emptied out and filled with an extravagant indulgence in falsity. Her meticulously controlled gestures are executed as if placed inside quotation marks. She occupies a different historical moment from Dietrich and that changes everything. At a time when American cinema was flooded by claims to authenticity and deep emotion, advanced by acolytes of Method acting, Caven was an integral part of an altogether different paradigm of performance. “To pretend to be natural before a camera, it’s too grotesque,” she has said. Down with psychologism, all hail the surface! How many pleasures there are to be found in the subdued inhumanity of the marionette, the wonders of the mask, the exquisite calculations of the untouchable vamp who exists nowhere except on-screen and in the imagination. Brecht might have died in 1956 but in some sense he lived on through the seventies, in decadent films that combined elements of his avant-gardism with a queer taste for irony, citation, and aestheticism.

Case in point: Schmid’s deliciously glacial La Paloma, with Caven taking a rare turn as the lead. She plays the titular character, a nightclub singer named Viola who first appears doing a spotlit rendition of “Shanghai,” full of exoticism and amorous reverie. To patron Isidor (Peter Kern), this demimondaine is the perfect image of desire. On the wall in her dressing room hangs a poster of the 1947 Carmine Gallone adaptation of the 1848 story The Lady of the Camellias—a hint at both the film’s campy love of outmoded cultural forms and the saga of obsession, illness, sequestration, betrayal, and death to come. Suffering from tuberculosis, Viola submits to Isidor despite her complete indifference. Miraculously, she becomes well; predictably, she becomes bored. After having an affair, she slowly poisons herself to death at his Swiss estate. It’s all very 19th-century, as replayed second- or even thirdhand through the faded flickers of Hollywood and UFA, dosed with a heavy tranquilizer to dull the sting of all that had happened in the world since the time of Alexandre Dumas fils.

This was not the first time Caven incarnated a self-poisoning adulteress for Schmid. In his debut feature Tonight or Never (1972) she appears as an actress who, among other vignettes, plays the role of Emma Bovary for an audience of servants-turned-masters. Once a year in this grand manor house, hierarchies flip upside down and a troupe arrives to provide entertainment, offering up a fragmentary mishmash of cultural references and forms. Never in that narcotized film does Caven look as animated as when she is in her Flaubertian death throes. In Schmid’s topsy-turvy world, deceleration reigns. There is life in death and death in life—a quality he carries forward to La Paloma. In her last testament, Viola insists that she be exhumed three years after burial and moved to the family crypt, but when this happens, there is no mark of decay on her porcelain flesh. While alive, she seems already stricken by rigor mortis, and when dead, she possesses a vital freshness. It falls to Isidor to chop up her corpse so that it can fit in an urn. He climbs into her grave to begin the gruesome task; her Medusan laugh mocks him from the beyond.

La Paloma feels like a filmic confirmation of a remark of Schuhl’s: “I think that beauty, which sometimes makes us forget death, also has complicitous relationships with it; they walk together.” This attitude, which Schuhl attributes to his “German Romanticist side,” is present in the film’s narrative as well as in the somnambulistic movements of its performers, Caven foremost among them. La Paloma and its star are the apotheosis of “Todchic,” to invoke a term Schuhl sprinkles throughout his body of work, typically in close proximity to Dietrich. Nothing like the English idiom “drop-dead gorgeous,” which brings to mind a healthy voluptuousness, this German conjunction of “death” and “chic” names a cold, stiffened elegance. It partakes of the gothic love of the spectral; it involves listening to the call of the abyss and becoming aware of the skeleton beneath the skin. In other words: Caven.

Schmid creates a universe out of time, marked by a taste for highly stylized anachronism. The entwinement of death and beauty occurs also in this regard, as he resurrects cultural forms that were once vibrant but are now largely discarded: opera, melodrama, cabaret. Scholar and film director Jean-Paul Török offers a compelling description of the gesture: “La Paloma’s roots are buried, and much deeper than in mere nostalgia. In it, the past is literally exhumed—watching the film confirms that this is not an empty word—with an indecent, necrophilic passion, in the way that a haruspex inspects entrails in search of omens.” Caven’s Todchic is integral to this operation, as she becomes the vessel of Schmid’s cultural necrophilia. When, in Tonight or Never, she performs the Schlager hit “Capri Fischer”—a song Peer Raben described as “epitomizing [German] longing of the 1950s”—a trivial artifact of popular culture returns transformed, not with a condescending wink but with a shameless claim on the affective power of inauthenticity. Better the truth of the false than the lies of the supposedly genuine.

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It was Caven’s appearance in La Paloma that led to her being cast in Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves (1974), a film based on elements of the director’s own boyhood. Caven looks tired and gorgeous as a woman who calls her young son back from his grandmother’s to live with her in Narbonne, only to then display little interest in having him around. Eustache’s real mother was French; he insisted on having Caven for the role not despite but because of her foreignness. A cold wind blows west from Munich, gusting into an altogether different cinema, with Caven’s makeup and her Germanness staking out a sharp difference from the naturalistic inhabitants of the French countryside that otherwise populate the story. (“‘Makeup,’ she thinks. ‘In German, it’s Maske,’” writes Schuhl in Ingrid Caven.) Caven plays a woman who reluctantly plays the role of a mother, a person tasked with executing maternal actions but seemingly devoid of the caring instincts that are so often (and so wrongly) assumed to be the innate province of women. This character muddles the value-laden dualism found in the title of Eustache’s 1973 film The Mother and the Whore: she is both. Although no relationship to promiscuity is ever made explicit, she never ceases to give off a whiff of loose sexuality and thus cannot be fully assimilated into the position demanded of her.

Caven the whore is a more familiar sight than Caven the mother. Cabaret singer and sex worker: At once desired and reviled by the straitlaced world, these are the two occupations that her characters take up more than any other, to the point that making a comprehensive list of examples would entail reproducing almost her entire filmography. Her characters tend not to be good girls. As a wife, she cheats (La Paloma; The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1972; Satan’s Brew, 1976). More than once, she has incarnated malevolent fairies (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, 1972; Sleeping Beauty, 2016) and madwomen (Fear of Fear, 1975; Violanta, 1977). In Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria (2018), she is a witch. A touch of sorcerous enchantment seems to have also permeated the reception of her music, with an audience member of a 1992 performance in New York telling a reporter, “She has the face of a witch playing a clown—or is it a clown playing a witch?”

Caven’s most memorable characters break with normative notions of feminine obedience and modesty. They are women of experience who step out of line to challenge the repressive reign of respectability and reason—something that involves risk and tends to have consequences. And yet perhaps owing to the distinctly queer sensibility that colors most of her filmography, her characters are not typically pathologized or punished for their transgressions, even if they do sometimes suffer and even if they are often tinged with melancholy. Schuhl again, now describing the singer’s crafted stage presence and the audience it attracted:

She insisted on her weakness, she reconstructed herself around a wound to show that one can make a virtue of it, that one should never be afraid of the little cracks in oneself or seek to mend them. Homosexuals, of course, and certain women as well as many others in their wake were grateful to her, saluted her.

And so it is in her cinema: her broken, aberrant, excessive women become sites of identification and devotion. Such is the logic of diva worship. Take, for instance, Jacques Baratier’s delightfully pulpy The Satin Spider (1985), in which Caven plays the director of a girls’ boarding school rife with lesbianism, drugs, madness, and death. She is a perverse predator, sure, but the film, co-written by Catherine Breillat, loves her all the more for it.

A notable exception to this general rule is found in Jeanine Meerapfel’s semi-autobiographical Malou (1981). Caven once again plays a singer, the titular Malou, who lived from 1905 to 1967 and now haunts the psyche of her adult daughter Hannah (Grischa Huber), who is struggling to figure out her own life. Malou exists only as a specter conjured in imagined flashbacks—and not with much generosity. Above all, Hannah’s desire is to “not end up like [her] mother,” the untamable showgirl-turned-drunkard who died far from home, in Argentina, after marrying a wealthy Jewish businessman and fleeing the Nazis with him, only to be left for another woman. Rather than empathizing with Malou as a victim of history and circumstance, Hannah—whose dowdy plainness could not be farther from the chiseled charm of La Caven—sees her mother as a negative example. By the end of the film, Hannah has worked through her issues and seems mostly reconciled to her conventional life and patronizing husband. She chooses security. In Caven’s oeuvre, it is the one instance of a film turning decisively against the spirit of freedom, vulnerability, and extravagance she so powerfully and pleasurably embodies—a spirit wonderfully captured in the words she utters to her niece Joséphine (Mati Diop) in another film with a dead mother, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008): “Sometimes it seems the whole world is scared of suffering. Everyone wants either total stress or great calm in their happy little lives. But not us, not us!”

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In Malou, as is so often the case, Caven opens a portal to history. Her Dietrichesque glamour and love of la musique de variété connect her to the midcentury, bending time. This continues in Schmid’s Off Season (1992), a film in which the middle-aged Valentin (Sami Frey) returns to the grand hotel in which he grew up just as it is about to be demolished and finds himself overcome with memories of the vanished world of his childhood. In these reminiscences, Caven appears as Lilo, one half of the “legendary duo” of the hotel bar. Year after year, despite their own efforts to secure a better position, she and Max (Dieter Meier) return to the Alpina Palace, where they “audaciously fought against the upheavals in musical taste.”

Along with other songs from the past, Caven reprises “Capri Fischer,” now with a quieter, throatier voice. Temporal layers accumulate: in 1992, an actress performs a song she sang in a film by the same director 20 years before, a song that was a hit during the Federal Republic’s economic miracle, but which was written in the heat of war, in 1943.

Off Season looks back to the fifties. Yet especially through Caven’s participation, the period of the seventies additionally haunts the film. In 1972, Schmid shot Tonight or Never in his family’s hotel; in 1992, he makes a film about the closure of that same establishment, one that is altogether more conventional than his early features and which indeed exemplifies how much had changed in the decades since their making. Days of twilight and nights of frenzy can only be lived for so long. Fassbinder and Eustache left far too young, within a year of each other in 1981–82. There were also larger epochal shifts underway, as the Autorenfilm came face to face with VHS, advertising, big business, and blockbusters. The celebrity definitively displaced the star, all that mystery dispelled in the whiteout glare of the mass media. In this new era, Caven’s ability to channel the memory and feeling of the past takes on an altered guise: in cameo roles, she becomes a synecdoche for the whole galaxy to which she belonged in the seventies and the idea of cinema it embodied, one which had waned significantly by the time the medium was reaching its centenary.

The cameo role takes its name from the vocabulary of jewelry, with its original meaning referring to a precious stone with a figure or scene carved in relief, set against a background of a different color. One important variety of cameo is the portrait, binding this category of object to notions of memory and identity, and accounting for the migration of the term into the domain of literature, where it came to designate “a small character part that stands out from the other minor parts” around the middle of the 19th century. When it later travels into the field of cinema, the cameo gains a crucial further quality: it names a breach of the threshold between story world and real world, depending as it does on the viewer’s recognition of the performer’s off-screen identity. Sometimes, cameos involve people playing themselves, like Caven and Fassbinder in 1 Berlin-Harlem. But even when this is not the case and the actor steps into a fictional role, for a cameo to be a cameo, the actor must never leave their real identity entirely behind. A star persona is always a matter of a myth built up over multiple performances; the cameo role presses this into service.

In Love Is Colder Than Death and many other early Fassbinder films, Caven appears in but a single scene. Such roles are not cameos per se, since she had not at that point achieved the requisite recognizability for them to qualify as such. She was part of an ensemble. By the nineties, however, a different relationship to intertextual reference and cinephilic knowledge was at stake. Consider André Téchiné’s My Favorite Season (1993). The film is a family drama of great naturalism and psychological complexity, featuring Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil as siblings who must confront their aging mother’s failing health. It is, in other words, marked by none of the mannerist penchant for artifice with which Caven is associated. Yet there she is, appearing out of the blue 80 minutes in as the vehicle of a brief yet important break with verisimilitude. At a bustling café, she begins to sing, causing the crowd to fall silent and turn to look. The film abruptly grinds to a halt. Dressed modestly in a flowered scarf and red cardigan, Caven sits at a table and quietly performs “La la la”—lyrics by Schuhl, music by Raben. It is a musical vanitas. Its title invokes forgotten words, while its other lyrics confront death and disappearance: “Le temps passera / tout ça s’effacera / l’histoire coulera / je ne serai plus là.” In slightly decelerated motion and with the noise of the room made unnaturally quiet, Caven is escorted out of the bar by a man in a white overcoat, perhaps a hospital orderly. The camera comes to rest on Auteuil, who seems to snap out of a trance as sound and image return to normal. In this cameo, Téchiné draws out his themes of senescence and finitude not only by calling upon Caven’s reputation as a singer but also by mobilizing her affiliation with a cinema that accords little importance to the reflection of reality.

Caven sings “La la la” again in Rita Azevedo Gomes’s The Portuguese Woman (2018). Speaking different languages (French and German) from the rest of the cast and wearing an anachronistic black gown that further distinguishes her from them, she exists outside the story world as a witchy choric observer. The film’s credits describe her as a “passageira,” or wanderer; even when she occupies the same frame as others, they seem not to acknowledge that she is there. The Portuguese Woman distributes Caven’s presence across its entirety—its first and last images are of her—and yet the logic of the cameo remains in force. Lurking on the margins yet claiming attention, she is the opposite of an actress who disappears into her role. She persists as herself no matter where she goes, seemingly only more so as the years pass. Denis sums it up when commenting on the actress’s “participation exceptionnelle” in 35 Shots of Rum: “Ingrid Caven is Ingrid Caven, no?”

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This is an excerpt from the monograph Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction (for US readers, available here), which will be published on September 1 by Fireflies Press.

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Featured image: Ingrid Caven with Karl Scheydt and Michael Ballhaus in a production still from The American Soldier (1970). Photo by Peter Gauhe, courtesy Ingrid Caven’s personal archive.