Alle Tage wieder – let them swing! On the topicality of Margaret Raspé's films

In the 1970s, Margaret Raspé, a painter, performance artist and filmmaker, shot the now legendary "films with the camera helmet":

"… with a camera helmet on the head: painting and filming at the same time. The instrumentalized eye disintegrates the orientation… I am split: on the one hand physically relaxed, with my actionistically detached painting hand, on the other hand I am a rational and concentrated observer looking through the camera's viewfinder…" (MR). Raspé was influenced by the Action Art and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s and had close links to the Vienna avant-garde. However, the impetus for her unusual use of the camera came from elsewhere. It can (literally) be seen in connection to the political debates of the time on reproductive labour. Raspé's first film "with the camera helmet" – SCHWEINESCHNITZEL (FRG 1971) – shows the daily working procedure necessary to prepare this, from the perspective of the cook. Simultaneously cooking, washing up, gutting animals and whipping cream, and working in an artistic way: Raspé studied art from 1954 to 1957 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the Institute of Fine Arts in Berlin. "SCHWEINESCHNITZEL was made in 1971 after I had thought long and hard about aggression in the kitchen."