When asked why he chose the notorious German Expressionist dancer Anita Berber as his film’s subject, Rosa von Praunheim said, “She was a symbol of the decadence, the perversity, the bisexuality, and the drugs of her time. I like these exaggerated figures.” In Anita: Dances of Vice (1987), he exaggerates her further. The real Berber died in 1928, at 29 years old (likely of tuberculosis, though rumors swirled of morphine and alcohol abuse). Praunheim resurrects her in present-day Berlin, casting 75-year-old Lotti Huber as Anita (or a woman claiming to be her). After a ribald public performance, she is immediately carted off to a mental institution as colorless as the modern city. Her fellow inmates do double duty, featuring as lovers, dance partners, audience voyeurs, and fellow degenerates of Weimar-era Berlin in Anita’s colorful “memories,” which feature Ina Blum as Anita. J. Hoberman describes these scenes as “ravishing visuals that suggest a flea-market Caligari, The Threepenny Opera, Reefer Madness, and the Ballet Russe.” I don’t think I can top him on that one.
Each memory is its own Brecht play, using the playwright’s alienation effect to charming results. They form a disjointed telling of Berber’s greatest scandals and performances, focusing heavily on her years with partner Sebastian Droste. Berber comes to life more vitally and vividly in her older incarnation, the younger Blum’s cartoonish debauchery and cold histrionics replaced by Huber’s warm, righteous anger and horny pawing. The constant swapping of a lithe, youthful body for an aged one repeatedly reminds us we’re watching a fiction, and Praunheim has a ball with it; Huber (and not Blum) playing four-year-old Anita reaches Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) levels of ridiculousness.
None of this comes at Huber’s expense. In fact, in another blurring of realities, Huber’s own life continues where Berber’s left off. After Huber was imprisoned in a concentration camp in her twenties, her parents managed to buy her release. With just a week to find a country to accept her, Huber landed a visa to Palestine as a student of Jerusalem’s Conservatory of Dance, Music, and Acting. Due to the language barrier, she developed her unique style of pantomime dancing and became a national celebrity, only to give it all up for love and move to England. Many adventures later, after her second husband’s death, Huber began acting again and became known as “Queen of the Extras.” Her first lead role was in Praunheim’s Our Corpses Are Still Alive (1981), and the two became friends and collaborators. With Anita, Huber energetically resumes a career interrupted half a century earlier by death and Nazis.
There’s an entire essay to be written (not by Sontag) on the transmutation of pathos into camp, how comic artifice crystalizes a thing, preserving it in brittle, sharper form that can act as a prism through which to view the world. The Czech choreographer Joe Jencik, Berber’s contemporary, said of Anita that “both men and women feared her creations, which showed the trash and extinction of bourgeois bedrooms and barbarous marriages. . . . The public never appreciated Anita's artistic expression, only her public transgressions in which she trespassed the untouchable line between the stage and the audience . . . She sacrificed her person to a self-vivisection of her life.” Praunheim’s films are as often angry as they are absurd, two means to jolt the audience out of its complacency. Anita isn’t vivisection, but a funhouse mirror held up to those watching.
The film loops back on itself, Anita escaping not one but two deaths, dancing down the street but likely ending up exactly where she started—as “Anita” repeats several times, “she ascends the steps of the gallows to fulfill her self-decreed doom,” perpetually fighting against and escaping from the supposedly liberal-minded, scandalized by rudeness, mistaking life’s earthiness for their worst horror—impropriety.
Anita: Dances of Vice screens tonight at Spectacle as part of the series “Our Bodies Are Still Alive: Six Films by Rose von Praunheim.”
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