In May 1911, Alma Mahler had just become the widow of the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler. She was an extremely cultured woman from Viennese high society who liked to surround herself with art and geniuses. She had learned to play the piano as a child and was a composer, but in her marriage to Mahler she had to take too long a place in her shadow as mother, housekeeper and helper. She until she had had enough and she sought refuge in the arms of the architect and founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius, one of her many lovers and, ultimately, her second husband.
However, the emergence of the young Oskar Kokoschka into her life, whom she meets when he comes to her house to make a death mask of Gustav for one of his many artistic projects, leads to a torrent of amorous passion as unbridled as it is toxic.
This is reflected by Alma Mahler, the passion, a film that hits the theaters today after passing through the BCN Film Fest and the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest. Directed by the Austrian Dieter Berner, who in his previous work already delved into the biography of another peculiar artist like Egon Schiele, the film delves into the complex relationship that Alma and Oskar had for four years.
The film begins in New York shortly before the death of Gustav Mahler, who has just learned of his wife’s infidelity with Gropius. “I am 31 years old. I want to live and he is young. You don’t even look at me anymore, I don’t exist for you. He believed in you, your music and your genius. I thought you understood my artistic ambitions. That’s why I loved you. But in this marriage there can only be one composer and it is you,” he reproaches her.
The script for the film was co-written by Berner again in collaboration with his partner, the former actress Hilde Berger, with “the intention of letting the public know what the woman behind the muse that inspired so many artists was really like” in addition to “investigating in his powerful sexuality. In her diary she wrote that if she knew a genius and needed her body, she had to offer it to him for the sake of art. “She felt a tremendous need to be desired by men and she was,” explains the director in conversation with this newspaper.
Without a doubt, Alma, played with conviction by Emily Cox, boosted the creativity of the artists she surrounded herself with and rebelled against the submission to which the patriarchal society of the time chained her. She “she didn’t like being married, but she did it three times. The last was the novelist Franz Werfel, with whom she was until his death,” the director continues.
“She was very pretty and provocative. She expressed her opinion on any topic, without caring about its repercussions,” adds Berger, who remembers that she, along with her mother and stepfather, lived in a unique environment where the most famous creators paraded. “Gustav Klimt gave her her first kiss when she was 16 years old. And when everyone was surrendering to Mahler’s music, she openly told him that she did not like her.
Despite everything, they ended up getting married after a quick courtship. ”She thought that this man 20 years her senior would help her in her goal of working as a composer, but in the marriage contract Mahler ordered her to abandon her professional concerns. Alma was already pregnant and those ten years together were very hard for her, that she even thought about suicide.” Once Gustav dies, the widow devotes herself to premiering her Ninth Symphony and looking for the perfect conductor.
And in those he encounters Kokoschka’s enfant terrible, whom he admires for his talent for creating risky performances and expressionist painting that cried out to make its way among the greats. Alma asks him to paint her and they end up devouring each other in a spiral of sex, art and letters. Until Oskar’s terrible jealousy ruins the relationship.
“Alma had never been with a man like that before. He depended on her and her obsession reaches such a point that he orders a life-size doll made with the physique of her beloved with whom he walked around Dresden for two years. “It was a kind of art therapy for him,” Berner says. After the breakup, the exchange of letters continued, now more sparsely. But they never saw each other again. A true ‘amour fou’.
