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More often than not, his subjects, German or no, look like warriors with �arms in their hands.� But instead of literal weapons, they use the arsenal of their personalities. They do not fend off being looked at, but they fend off being known. And Teller shoots them like a warrior: full front, straight on, without nuance, un manicured, as if they were alien creatures who stumbled out from between the trees into the bristling forest of his mind.


And there�s a share of German romanticism in Teller�s pictures, too. His paganism is not separate from schmaltz, teardrops at the sound of Nico singing �Deutschland �ber alles.� Last year Teller shot a series of ads starring

himself and actress Charlotte Rampling for the fashion designer Marc Jacobs.One ad in particular struck a chord: Rampling, in a bed that late-style Fassbinder could not have imagined, is cradling Teller, whose head we do not see. But we see his backside again. Rampling looks toward us, the camera, with the admixture of emotion that has become her stock in trade as a film performer.


Of course, the actress became known to American audiences through her star turn in the 1974 film The Night Porter. In it she played a Holocaust survivor who engages in an s/m affair with her former Nazi oppressor. In the ads for the film, Rampling was topless, save for aspects of Nazi costumes (officer�s hat, suspenders, gloves): Nazism as a form of fashion. And she was perfect in the part. For Rampling has always been a butch self creation who lures men into false sense of self-assurance before obligating with her contempt and her half smile.


What makes the picture in Louis XV especially powerful is Teller�s willingness to show how artist�s can not only compete with their muses but be defeated by them.

Rampling defeats Teller�s need to be seen by taking as much notice of that need as she would a Nazi in her bedroom. And what makes the picture emotionally naked is Teller�s unmitigated � read German � interest in authority. What makes Rampling fantastic, authoritative, he cannot do: she is a Prussian figure, cool and distant. What form does Teller�s Germanness take? Just prancing around the forest?



When Walter Abish asked, how German is it? Was he not also asking, Does being German mean having an interest in authority, wherein for emotion to be �true�, it must be expressed truthfully? Certainly, Teller has an interest in the authority of the star and the ridiculousness of his kitschy German self in relation to that authority. Teller makes the hotel space � and the ridiculous luxury it affords � a bog space, the kind of Germanness one recognizes in D�rer�s woodcuts of his countrymen wearing loincloths or nothing at all. For all the surrounding splendor, Teller gives himself over to his nature, which is German, while perverting the German ideal of being naked in nature by being naked in luxury you can buy.

Hilton Als is a writer based in New York.