“I grew up with her in a way,” German director Sabine Lidl observes of the revered Norwegian-American author Siri Hustvedt (whose life she focuses on in her new film, Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around The Self, screening in CPH:DOX Highlights following its Berlinale Panorama premiere).
Lidl was in her 20s when she first read Hustvedt’s early novel The Blindfold, and remembers being intrigued but troubled by its probing analysis of female identity in an overwhelmingly patriarchal world.
“I was one of those young ladies who thought I am not like my mother, I have no problems…it was clear that I would do my own work and live my own life,” Lidl says. “I thought I would be above the problem the character in Siri’s novel is suffering from…[but] maybe Siri was sending me something I was scared of. I found later that she was totally right and I was in the middle of it.”
The director has already made a film exploring the political and literary life of Hustvedt’s late husband, Paul Auster, the author of The New York Trilogy. Paul Auster, What If? (2018) was produced through Irene Höfer’s Berlin-based Medea Film Factory, with support from ARTE.
While making it, she vividly recalls an early meeting with Auster at his home in 2016 during which Hustvedt came downstairs and began to read them an essay she had just completed, A Walk With My Mother.
The Auster project, which was around 50 minutes long, was Lidl’s first film on a writer. “Literature in film, it’s not so easy for documentary…it’s not so easy just to watch someone writing,” she notes. Nonetheless, right after the Auster documentary was finished, ARTE asked if she would also be interested in making a film about Hustvedt.
Lidl was keen but wanted to do something complex and nuanced, at feature length, not a piece for the 54-minute TV slot that ARTE was offering. “I really wanted to bring this into the cinema. I think it was Covid that helped me to take the long breath…”
Lidl was working again with Medea’s Höfer. “For me, it helps when somebody knows you,” Lidl says of her producer. “Doing it with Irene, I know that when she trusted me it felt like, ‘ok, yes, we can handle this’…and I can call her and talk about my worries, about my thoughts – because documentary is a lonely business!”
At first, potential financiers, including leading broadcasters, were wary. They couldn’t accept that audiences would want to see a full-length non-fiction movie about an author. Lidl, though, was expanding the canvas. This wasn’t just going to be a film about Siri herself but would also be about her obsessions and inspirations – figures like Dadaist artist Baroness Elsa, whose work was ‘stolen’ by Marcel Duchamp; trailblazing Seventeenth Century English author Margaret Cavendish, and French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.
“Those women I would like to invite [into the documentary]. That was my first concept.”
The film has many other different layers. Lidl talks of “digging deep” into such matters as biology, neurology and psychiatry as well as into the life story of her subject.
“For me, the “embodied’ experience was very important, what she [Hustvedt] has written about in The Shaking Woman about her hypersensitivity, about her migraines, about the trembling episode…I took it as the centre of her work.”
The film has asides on hysteria, the so-called ‘female disease,’ and on Hustvedt’s affectionate but attritional relationship with her father, a professor who sometimes seemed to be very threatened by his daughter’s success.
“My editor Maxine Goedicke saved me…I had much more to tell and this was already 110 minutes,” the director says of the struggle to shoehorn so much material into a feature under two hours.
Hustvedt proved to be an open if very serious-minded subject. “She really gets into it – and she is also very precise, clear and sharp in her thinking…what she speaks is always the truth. She is not pretending…what I appreciate about her is that there is no bullshit. If you work with her, you can make mistakes. This is not a problem. But you have to tell the truth and share it. We had to be really clear with each other.”
The director further talks of a respect verging on awe for Hustvedt. “I always had the feeling that I had to really take care of what I was saying, especially in my not that precise English!”
Work started in the autumn of 2022. During the making of the documentary, Hustvedt and Auster faced various personal upheavals – deaths of loved ones and then Auster’s own illness. There were therefore “huge gaps” in the schedule. Lidl talks of her “step by step” approach, filming when it was possible and then waiting for further opportunities.
After Paul was diagnosed with cancer, shooting stopped. “The next time we filmed was September 2023, so there was one year in between.”
Auster wanted to be in the film. Lidl filmed her final interview with him only a few weeks before his death in April 2024. ”I flew over alone by myself with camera and sound. I stayed 10 days and, yes, I was very lucky that he felt good enough [to speak].”
The film stands as a testament to the enduring love between Hustvedt and Auster. They were married for over 40 years, living and working alongside one another. Lidl tells the story of their courtship and of how their careers seemed to blossom in tandem.
After Auster’s death, further filmmaking took place in Norway where Hustvedt had come to the remote town of Vardø, the site of notorious witch trials during the winter of 1662. Wim Wenders was also there, making his documentary about architect Peter Zumthor who, in collaboration with Louise Bourgeois, had created a “witch memorial.” Lidl and Wenders had to “share” Hustvedt for their respective films.
“This is not an easy journey, to come to Norway, to Vardø…it’s very far! But I think it was a kind of magical place there. We spent two days together, only the camerawoman Meret Madörin, Siri and me. We had two days of very long interviews, and we visited this weird place with the witches.”
After the trip to Norway, there was further filming in the house in New York. “The openness of Siri, it is a gift…it was really clear it meant something to Siri, to let a film team in. She was a grieving woman and she gave me a lot.”
The documentary had two cinematographers, Madörin (who was filming in Norway and Spain) and Filip Zumbrunn (who shot the New York and Minnesota sequence).
Hustvedt was in Berlin a few weeks ago for the world premiere, accompanied by her daughter, singer-songwriter Sophie Auster. “I was sitting between them both. For Sophie, it was her first time seeing the film. For Siri, it was the second time.”
The director was nervous about how the screening might go. After all, the documentary touches on the rawest, most intimate parts of her subject’s life.
“She [Hustvedt] could handle it. I was very relieved because that is not a given in a way,” Lidl says. “She liked it…we really could sit together, we trust each other. That’s my greatest gift. She was with me through all of it. There is not a sequence she said she didn’t like.”
The author was also delighted that Lidl had used her drawings in the movie. Quite apart from her work as a novelist, essayist and academic, Hustvedt is a prodigiously talented cartoonist. “She drew her whole life. She made these little sketches – and that is part of the story,” Lidl says.
Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around The Self was produced through Medea with co-production support from Swiss outfit, Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion. International sales are handled by Austrian outfit, Filmdelights. X Verleih is overseeing the German release which is set for early April when, by happy coincidence Hustvedt, will be coming to Europe to launch her new novel.
“I am surrounded by women,” the director says of the various partners who have helped her complete the documentary. “It’s not my choice. It has happened because, I don’t know, men aren’t believing in this film – except [director] Tom Tykwer! He was a great supporter, but usually it’s women…”
