Alma - The Film

Part 2: The Bride of the Wind

After Mahler’s death, ALMA’s second marriage, in 1915, is to Walter Gropius. During all the years in which he is forming the Bauhaus movement and revolutionizing the world of design, she remaines at his side.
Yet neither does this liaison endure. After she has availed herself of his »precious Aryan seed«, from which the beautiful, short–lived Manon is born – a pure angel, to whom Alban Berg created a memorial with his Violin Concerto – the once so passionate relationship ends in agony and alienation.

This relationship is however already overshadowed by ALMA’s excessive relationship with the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene, the young painter Oskar Kokoschka. In the seething cultural environment of Vienna before the
First World War, Kokoschka arouses a furious sensation both through the ncompromising nature of his painting and also as the author of two theatre plays about sex and violence. In 1912 he begins a passionate affair with ALMA Mahler which lasts for three years. The two live and travel together, and when they are not making love, Kokoschka paints her. In 1913, Kokoschka creates an allegorical representation of their love affair, »The Bride of the Wind«, a vivid image in which the two lovers are whirling around the space. Even on ALMA’s birthday, Kokoschka refers to his immortal loved one as a »wild creature« and is convinced that they are »united in the ‘Bride of the Wind’ forever«.

Kokoschka is the ace of hearts among ALMA’s four trump cards. Nevertheless she sees herself forced to break up with him since Kokoschka comes more dangerously close to her inner being than any of her men before, or indeed after; until the end of life she will refuse to see him again. Apart from the countless paintings and drawings which testify to this anguished relationship, there is also a saucy life–size doll, a faithful reproduction of ALMA down to the most intimate details, which Kokoschka makes in 1915 in order to console himself for the loss of his loved one. The doll is destroyed in an extravagant orgy in Dresden, in 1919.

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