The Capacity for Adequate Anger (Vika Kirchenbauer, 2021) (Patreon)

German film artist Vika Kirchenbauer has been making work for awhile now, but it was her previous film, Untitled Sequence of Gaps (featured at Oberhausen and NYFF) that really solidified her place as a significant voice in avant-garde cinema. That work was a somewhat elliptical essay film about the visible spectrum. It described how there are multiple optic fields existing side by side, and none of them are any less real just because the human sensorium cannot perceive them. Her latest film, The Capacity for Adequate Anger, expands on this notion in a somewhat lateral way.

This is an autobiographical film in which Kirchenbauer takes stock of her own childhood, her development as an artist, and the often invisible forces of class stratification that have nevertheless affected her life in material ways. Kirchenbauer describes her early experiences as a queer child -- young kids teasing her about giving them AIDS, or her choice to emulate Freddie Mercury when posing for photos. But she frames those and other experiences in terms of her working-class background. Part of this means that she had to rely on popular images, both good and bad, to figure out her sexual identity.

While it's not exactly accurate to say that Kirchenbauer makes questions of identity secondary, she is most interested in her past and present class positions, and how they have generated internal conflict and ambivalence about her success as an artist. At the beginning of Adequate Anger, Kirchenbauer recounts a conversation with her grandmother, who had no frame of reference for understanding Vika's career as an artist. Thinking that her granddaughter wanted to work in television, she eventually concludes that Vika is "working for museums," an amorphous concept that neither women really grasped.

Describing her present situation, Kirchenbauer remarks on the cognitive dissonance that comes with, for example, having museum workers install her show to her exact specifications, or taking part in an artists' roundtable. She likens this to the actions of Marie Antoinette who, following French fashions of the Ancien Régime, made a fetish out of the peasantry by having her own art-workers build a shabby country house and populate it with hired peasants. These individuals were playing themselves, but were also forced to serve as representations of their social gest. (This can be compared with the persistence in arthouse cinema to generate scenarios in which non-professional actors are living objets trouvé.)

The Capacity for Adequate Anger is a strange hybrid of personal essay and artist's statement, in that Kirchenbauer made the film in response to the specific circumstances of mounting a single show. Since the 1970s a host of artists have reversed the gaze in order to examine the political structure of art and its institutions. This film, however, goes further by allowing the artist to interrogate her own position, resulting in a form of self-criticism that implicates the viewer as well.