Isabelle Huppert once described herself as a canvas [Leinwand], which is then filled’, recalled Werner Schroeter in one of his final interviews, using a word that could mean either a surface for painting or a projection screen, ‘[t]his is how I see myself too’. Speaking, on another occasion, specifically of his film Deux (2002), he describes Huppert's roles, or possibly Huppert herself, as ‘a kind of alter-ego and … a transposition of everything I had in myself when I was creating the scenario and when I was filming this film with Isabelle’. But if the actress, in a seemingly dated and gendered cliché, is a blank slate to be inscribed with the auteur's fantasies and self-projections, here it is only because he recognises himself as equally empty of inscription, or at least as awaiting the transcription she makes available to him. This chapter proposes an interpretation of Huppert's work with Schroeter as a self-conscious staging and performance of such cinematic (mis)recognition.

Following the death of his muse, Magdalena Montezuma, and a five-year break from filmmaking, Schroeter ‘reemerged with a new star, Isabelle Huppert, with whom he made two films preoccupied with doubles’, James Quandt reminds us in Artforum. In the first, Malina (1991), Schroeter is tasked with bringing the divided self of Ingeborg Bachmann's enigmatic fiction to the screen, with Huppert incarnating the novel's unnamed narrator and Mathieu Carrière playing her most likely only imaginary other half. (‘You don't realise I’m double! Double!’ she cries at one point.) A decade later, in Deux, Huppert plays both parts, embodying the estranged twins Maria and Magdalena. (‘It's as if I were divided in two!’ explains the latter early on.) Deux thus offers Huppert the opportunity to play both halves of the same kind of split identity she could only hint at in Malina. But her approach here, as generally, is not to distinguish between these figures through any obvious visual cues, gestural or verbal tics, and indeed Schroeter's narratively challenging montage often leaves room for doubt about which double is which, upsetting any stable sense of self and other.