Silke Schönfeld Ⓓ
NO MORE BUTTER SCENES

Silke Schönfeld’s video installation is about intimacy, consensus and transgression in the context of the acting profession. In the setting of a PR interview, the rules of an unwritten script are increasingly disregarded. At the same time, the verbal exchange is translated into a physical confrontation. Who is the aggressor, who is the victim?

NO MORE BUTTER SCENES (2024) examines the relationship between consent and intimacy in the context of the acting profession. In 2007, around 35 years after the premiere of “Tango in Paris” (1972), actress Maria Schneider spoke for the first time about the sexual abuse she experienced during the shooting of the infamous butter scene. Director Bernardo Bertolucci argued that it was only by not informing his leading actress in advance of how the scene with co-star Marlon Brando would take place that he was able to capture her authentic frustration and anger. Such a cruel style of directing may seem like a relic from some archaic past. But the #metoo movement along with recent revelations about abusive working conditions on film sets and theatre stages paint a different picture.

NO MORE BUTTER SCENES plays with the tension-laden space between the fiction we experience on the big screen and the staging of the actors as (supposedly) private individuals. In the film, the authenticity of the interviews is gradually deconstructed, while the protagonists increasingly disregard the rules set out in the invisible script. The verbal exchange of blows between them evolves on the physical level into a mixture of dance and combat. While we are being thrown back on our own prejudices, the roles of victim and perpetrator are constantly renegotiated between the actors. What role do the protagonists’ ambitions play? How high is the risk that one’s own ambitions will lead to complicity in the structural abuse of power?