Little Joe (2019) secured a place in the In Competition Section of the Festival de Cannes, and the director Jessica Hausner is one of the representatives of excellent female filmmakers. For the 3rd masterclass of the 10th Beijing International Film Festival (BJIFF), we are honored to have invited Jessica Hausner, who delivered a special recorded session of the Master Class from afar. During the one-hour session, Hausner reviewed her experiences of shooting short films and feature films as well as winning Cannes nominations. Elaborating on her consistent themes and aesthetic explorations, she was very generous about sharing her filmmaking techniques. From her own experiences, Hausner said, "I think films are about how people understand what is happening around them, what is reality and what lies behind a person or an event. But people get lost in the maze when they are refuting the facts and are confronted with several realities, which is reinforced by the aesthetics of cinematography."

　　Born in Vienna, Austria in 1972, Hausner grew up in a family of artists, laying a solid foundation for her career in filmmaking. While majoring in directing at the Film Academy Vienna, Hausner shot a number of short films, most of which were searching for the meaning of life and making visual presentations of women's inner world. For example, in the short film Inter-View, the host made surveys in the fields to randomly pick passers-by and ask them about the essence of life. Although the people and things she encountered were uncontrollable, she finally got the answer she wanted. In the short film Flora, Hausner revealed the inner world of an ignorant girl aged 17 in rich and delicate cinematic languages.

　　In 2001, Hausner shot her debut feature film Lovely Rita, shortlisted for the Un Certain Regard section at the 54th Festival de Cannes, and since then she has made regular appearance at the event. Speaking of the transformation from the short films to feature films, Hausner said, "I try to find out if there is a missing link to the truth that everyone believes in, and what lies behind the missing link? Maybe the truth we all believe is not the truth. So that is how I started working concerning the production of Lovely Rita, and that has been my first step in making a film."

　　For feature films, Hausner has been focusing on feminist issues as she did when shooting short films. Besides, Lovely Rita and Hotel (2004) witnessed the exploration of new cinematic languages. Lovely Rita presented the violence plaguing a rebellious teenage girl named Rita in her daily life. Despite the fact that the heroine looked clumsy and inarticulate on camera, it is the unvarnished acting of this nonprofessional person, accompanied by the family scenes shot by a HD digital video camera, that renders the fictional story really terrifying. The shooting of Hotel witnessed further efforts to create such terrifying atmospheres. To Hausner, it was the first time that she had adopted the specific genre as the basic structure of a film. "As the film ends, there are many questions for the audience, and many people have mixed feelings, because they don't find the answers. For me, as a filmmaker, it was a very important moment in my life, because I had to really think about this: the movie I wanted to shoot is about inconsistent truths, the missing links and unanswered questions. However, on the other hand, some of my audiences want answers. How to solve this problem has been the focal point of my thinking."

　　For this movie positioned to be anti-horror, Hausner reinterpreted the conventional horror film with the characteristic imagination of Grimm's fairy tales. Viewers are able to follow Irene as she searched for the missing waitress in a mysterious Austrian restaurant. With white light on both sides of the corridor, Hausner made the corridor longer, thus letting it seem endless visually. In the meantime, Hausner abandoned the typical eerie music of horror films, using sound to create an atmosphere. In the narrative structure, the director gave up the reasoning and analysis of suspense movies, relying on the minimalist static composition to present unconventional emotions. Besides, the director offered meticulous details about the heroine's inner world, while the audience could not see the full storyline. The waiting process, accompanied by the artistic arrangement of the confined space, added to the horror effect of Hotel.

　　Being a painter, Hausner’s father was considered a "supernatural realist" and "the first psychoanalytic painter." For her recent work, Hausner has straddled between reality and fantasy, and we can glimpse the shadow of her father's paintings concerning the aesthetic style.

　　Lourdes (2009), which won the FIPRESCI Prizes of the 66th Venice International Film Festival, attempted to explore religious and theological issues. When Hausner presented the "miracles" practiced by the heroine Christine, it was reminiscent of what Simón did in Simóndel desierto directed by Bu?uel, each movie having its strong merits despite their different techniques. For Lourdes, Hausner said, "In Lourdes, I tried to perfect my filmmaking style by telling a story of no affirmed truth, and in the end, we did not know which was right and which was wrong. But on the other hand, I have more confidence in my opinion that no one knows what is right and what is wrong, and there is no absolute truth. I'm trying to make this point very bluntly, so you can find some relevant dialogues in Lourdes, which was arguably the first film to make me fully realize that I was telling a story of contradictions. It was this awareness that allowed my film to show those contradictions in a straightforward way. I'm happy to see that it's possible to make films with contradictory or ambiguous truth, and it's also possible to find audience that understands them, because I believe these feelings are common to all of us, but we're just not used to seeing them in a film."

　　However, when dealing with the changes to characters, Hausner still turns to the usual style as before. Specifically, actors have no excessive expressions, acting more like models in paintings (the idea coincides with Bresson's concept of "model"). Besides, for the composition and set, the director draws a lot of inspiration from oil painting materials. Adept at making composition on a par with oil paintings, Hausner further proved herself in this regard in her third feature film Amour fou (2014). The hero and heroine ended up killing themselves for love, but their motive was not clarified throughout the film, which did not explain how the two established their relations. In a nutshell, Hausner is not interested at how to construct a story. What she is into and good at is to tell stories by means of exquisite aesthetic composition, while she relies on flat performance to explore the inner worlds of characters.

　　Generally speaking, female directors tend to do a better job when dealing with the inner worlds of their characters. They can use sensitive and exquisite techniques of expression to visually expand the reality and imagination. Besides, their choice of subjects will be more personal. For relevant works at early times, La coquilleet le clergyman (1928) by Germaine Dulac, a French pioneer, witnessed the depiction of priests' bizarre fantasies in a surreal manner; Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by the American director Maya Deren witnessed the depiction of a girl's inner world by visualization.

　　For Little Joe, Hausner admits to more abstract experiment in film aesthetics than her previous works. "How do you tell if your emotions are real? That is the question posed by Little Joe." The fantasy world inside the hero was converted into an artificial world. Despite the fact that the settings featured greenhouses, laboratories and other real places, Hausner created fairy-tale images completely different from the real world by using different proportions of mint green, red and white, Alice's red hair, exaggerated skirts and oversized suits. What Hausner is interested in is precisely some kind of transcendence based on realism and questioning the reality through her aesthetic framework, thus providing the audience with different perspectives. In her opinion, scenes outside the film frame are a kind of concealment for the audience, or an uncertainty to a certain extent. What is exactly behind the screen, the unspoken part, is the real charm of the film.