In film history, there is one sentence that is for me irrefutably true: the not-filmed criticises that which is filmed. A variant of this assertion can be found in Angelopoulos’ To Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), in which a Greek director (played by Harvey Keitel) comes back from the USA to Europe and goes in search of undeveloped rolls of film by the Manakis brothers from 1905. This film is about the question of tradition, about the contradictions between the past and the present historical moments. Angelopoulos tells a story about Greece while directing his gaze to other countries. Rainer Werner Fassbinder told me once that he really loved American cinema, but that he understood himself primarily as a German filmmaker. It was the issues of his homeland, the conflicts of his origin that he wanted to deal with in his films. Angelopoulos’ last project was to be dedicated to the Greek crisis. He was a patriot of film history; he wanted to tell the history of his country through the medium of film art.

For me, the theme of the Odyssey-film is a fundamental beginning: every ambitious director searches for missing rolls of film. This is an ambition that authors of moving images carry within themselves. We are archaeologists, predators of the past, spinning threads of time through the centuries. Our model is Arachne. A similar principle in literature: the Library of Alexandria burnt down but we refabricate its texts with the novels, plays and poems of today.

Angelopoulos’ technique is the protest. His films are realistic because they refer to a reality in which people try to orientate themselves. This connects them with the wanderings of the Odyssey. The opposite of unfamiliarity is trust: the places around me, the objects in my field of vision, the people that I touch. Trust is a category of intimacy and openness. We are currently witnessing that in many countries around the world: people are losing collective confidence in and sympathy for their governments. Angelopoulos would have accompanied these developments with his own eyes.

On the Method of Depiction

Klaus Eder: Klaus Wildenhahn has set off a debate on the documentary film with a polemical essay entitled ‘Industrial Landscape with Petty Traders'.

Alexander Kluge: I see this essay as an invitation to start a debate on theories of the documentary film, on the concept of realism; but it also invites a stocktaking, a critique of all filmic products as such.

KE: For a start, one can take from this essay an understanding of documentarism, to which Klaus Wildenhahn himself feels committed. He talks about ‘art's function of depiction', about the ‘work principle of copying'. For instance, he emphasises in Zola and Dickens ‘the precisely observed and experienced material of their social world, which is initially sketched and then subjected to a poetic condensation process'. Drawing on Kracauer, he refers to ‘film's affinity to the physical detail'. You have to expose yourself to reality, subordinate yourself to it. - Does a depiction of reality describe reality adequately?

AK: I believe that Klaus Wildenhahn is right. If the category of context (Zusammenhang) and the category of radicality (which means going down to the roots) are included in this function of depiction, then stenography, the simple act of copying, is the fundamental form, the fundamental position […]

KE: Günther Hörmann said in our conversation about the dramaturgies of Ulm that it's not reality that is depicted, but the film-maker's relationship to it.

AK: That amounts to the same thing, in effect, since I can't describe reality any other way than subjectively-objectively. There is no direct depiction. Depicting, copying, stenographing, applying authentic method: these labels are all synonymous, and what they signify is the element that film works with. One cannot go beyond this element subjectively and arbitrarily. This copying doesn't occur in a direct and mechanical fashion, however; what the camera records isn't yet a copy. Something like a set-up for the experiment is needed in the first place. If a good film can be understood as an attempt, as a measurable result, then it is an attempt that takes place with living people. This requires caution, reserve, discipline, method. That is indisputable. On this point I happen to agree with Wildenhahn's attitude, his partisan attitude in film.

It's a convention, so I've been told, that whoever gets the Fontane Prize for literature says something about Fontane. And it should be in the form of an address that should be in some way festive. I have in consequence ventured upon the title: ‘What Fontane says to us for example'. In doing so I wanted to stick to the ‘for example'.

The consequence of this for me was that I first had to read Fontane thoroughly. It would certainly be easier for me if I were allowed to speak about Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Döblin, Joyce, Arno Schmidt, or about Marx. Marx, for example, in literary and linguistic terms would be a great practitioner of the montage work of art. His apparently esoteric theory contains a startling number of narratives and stories. If you resolved the theory into the experiences and the stories it contains, you would very quickly notice, as soon as you told it in the form of stories and narratives, that the theory has nothing to do with orthodoxy.

Back to Fontane. What occurs to me is that Fontane is often quoted but that these quotations do not fully grasp him. He shows a notable indirectness in everything that he writes; that is the conversational tone. And for that reason I don't want to try today to present you with a collection of quotations; instead, I want to argue roughly with the attitude (Haltung) taken by this realist who is so rare in Germany. Everything he writes corresponds to a certain attitude.

This fact has to do with celebratory hours like the present one, with the celebratory as such, and with all forms of address. Fontane would say: ‘That situation will never turn into a dialogue'. It's unnatural. My mother, who is also sitting in this hall and who always argues very practically, says: ‘Help yourself by keeping it short'. Fontane, it must be said, would have been indifferently sarcastic. He was, by the way, secretary for three months of the then Academy of Arts - that was still the Royal one. A biographical note states, ‘Once again his friends found a civil-service post for him: at the age of fifty-six he became secretary of the Academy of Arts.

Numbers and vibrations will be the way humanity communicates in the future, says Jeff Mills. With UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE, he created in Detroit, New York, Berlin and Chicago one of the most experimental techno arsenals: AXIS SPIDERFORM/ But what's best in the world of techno emerges, Jeff Mills says, during a set and is unrepeatable.

AK: You said once that no new note is ever new in humanity's melody; there are only ever new sequences.

JM: You can't really say that something is totally new and has never existed before. That means that something new only goes as far back as I can remember.

AK: If you hadn't been a musician, you once said you would have been a lawyer or an architect.

JM: Probably. My father was an engineer, and there was this pressure to follow in his footsteps.

AK: There's a piece, X 102, that has to do with the rings of Saturn.

JM: We tried to describe in music what every single ring expresses, what it's made of. And as you approach Saturn on a journey, you pass through the individual rings and learn how each of them sounds.

AK: The same way a musical instrument is constructed?

JM: We analysed the structure of the most important rings. Some consist mostly of gas, others of ice or other particles, and we put these structures in relation to sounds and made an equation between the sounds and this material. So that means that on the path through the rings, which corresponds to the needle's path over the record, you hear from track to track how each ring could sound. That's all hypothetical, of course, because each track would have to be hundreds of thousands of miles wide if you make the analogy with the rings of Saturn.

AK: In another interview you talk about flying to Mars and say that you're inspired in these compositions by gravity, by acceleration, by everything you need to make it to Mars.

JM: With the progress of technology you would really have to be put in the position of feeling what it means to travel so far, feeling all kinds of impressions that we can't feel yet. I mean, I'm using music as a kind of vehicle to get to particular buildings and particular times, to travel through time and space.

Reporter: So you took off after breakfast?

Anderson: That's right. Ham and eggs, and coffee.

R: Well then, according to routine you started from combat airfields in the south of England?

A: The Podington 92nd, the Chelveston 305th, the Thurleigh 306th, the Polebrook 351st, the Deenethorpe 401st and the Glatton 457th.

R: Instead of just listing the squadrons, can you tell me what it was like?

Anderson could not give a clear picture of the squadrons’ take-off. He stood behind one of the pilots, saw meadows and airport hangars go by and then was pressed against the back wall when the plane gathered speed. The teletype told him that the other squadrons took off at the same time. In each of the planes there are twelve to eighteen men, some of them just waiting, others carrying out specific technical jobs. The entire fleet meets over the coast where some of the squadrons go into a holding pattern.

R: Then a flight over the northern coast of France?

A: Of course. We acted as if we were flying towards Nürnberg or Schweinfurt.

R: Did you have a sense of pride when you looked over a bomber formation of 300 airplanes?

A: I couldn't see it. My Mosquito, a fast wooden bomber, flew a different route - over the Netherlands, Rhine, Weser, Northern Harz, etc.

R: Then German air surveillance had only to determine the direction of this pathfinder plane to see through the ruse of the bombers flying south easterly.

A: Sure. To the extent that they were still operative, they realised that.

R: South of Fulda a change in course?

A: Towards the north-east.

R: As planned?

A: Everything was planned.

R: The squadron commanders had no say in that?

A: The lead planes flew up front, but didn't determine the flight pattern.

R: What was the purpose of that?

A: I don't know. I can only describe the methods of attack. They were all pros. First of all they had to locate the city, to ‘see’ it. When we arrived in the Mosquitos, we saw the squadrons of bombers coming in from the south.

AK: On the one hand you have a tractor as an invention, a caterpillar tread and machinery for hauling, it can travel cross-country and level out ditches and it can do things with the earth in a specific fashion, and secondly, you have a firing platform, an artillery emplacement that can move around, and thirdly a tank. If you take the components of a tank, what interests you there?

HM: Why I'm so fascinated by that is a question I ask myself. Why am I fascinated by the word armour, armour-plating?

AK: And also the workers that make it.

HM: It must have something to do with a need for armour, a subjective need for armour-plating. That's also why it's a dream image, the tank.

AK: The dream image is getting heavier. The first tanks are light.

HM: The other important factor is speed, though these days it's no longer that, of course. But in World War II it was still an image of speed.

AK: Sixty, eighty kilometres an hour they could travel.

HM: I myself didn't actually have anything to do with them directly. I did military training, but the war was nearing its end and we only once had contact with the enemy. That was with Soviet tanks. Actually it started when we were already on the way into American activity. Our officers, understandably, preferred to be captured by the Americans rather than the Russians, so we were marching from Wismar in the direction of Schwerin. We had anti-tank grenade launchers and relatively old rifles, they were Norwegian front-loaders.

AK: Could you fire an anti-tank grenade?

HM: I was taught to do that, yes.

AK: What is an anti-tank grenade-launcher?

HM: If only I knew now. I've repressed it so much, that's the strange thing. I was given the complete ‘werewolf’ training, and we practised with anti-tank grenade launchers. They were relatively easy to handle, but I can't describe it for you.

AK: Did you fire them?

HM: Only practice shots.

[…]

AK: What does a tank mean? Speed? A racing car is speedy.

HM: There are perhaps three things: speed, protection and imprisonment. You probably know what the soldiers say about tanks. From the beginning they were human canned food in there, always with the prospect of being fried. There were three things: speed, protection, but at the same time imprisonment.

GIACOMO PUCCINI'S TOSCA IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPACT OPERAS/ THE PLOT TAKES PLACE ON A SINGLE DAY IN ROME IN 1800/ALL THE PROTAGONISTS - THE BEAUTIFUL TOSCA, HER LOVER CAVARADOSSI AND THE POLICE CHIEF SCARPIA - DIE/ESSAY ON THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IN MELODRAMA

JV: Tosca is introduced through her fama, the reputation and fame of her voice [···]

AK: The most beautiful singer in Rome.

JV: The most beautiful singer in Rome, the embodiment of what might be called a violence of song, a centre of excitation spanning the gamut of all emotional registers, from tenderness and devotion through to passionate outburst, in jealousy for example. And with that she also shows off a spectrum of political noises, prompting the question: What does a voice do? How does it intervene in the business of politics, in the drama of political intrigues and machinations?

AK: She's a force to be reckoned with. If she appealed to the Queen in Naples, she would be cleared. She therefore embodies a spiritual power, whereas the police chief Scarpia has real po wer, he has his sbirri.

JV: And that also makes her a peculiar object of desire. She stands at the crossroads of politics and desire, and makes clear that the institution, the operation of wish machines is at stake in politics, too.

AK: But politics is lacking something there, the glamour of music. Politics is unmusical.

JV: Maybe politics isn't really unmusical, it has its own tonal register, but in opera, at least, politics is understood in such a way that it's translated into acoustic irritations and dissonances. There's a famous example where politics and dissonance actually coincide, the scream released under torture by the male lead, the painter, Tosca's lover, where musicality is confronted with its end, with cacophony or noise.

AK: While outside a magnificent cantata is being sung, here there's this scream.

JV: And that's why I would say that politics doesn't appear as something genuinely unmusical, but offers problematic acoustic situations and introduces frictions, jarring chromaticisms, dissonances, cascades of noise and so on into music, including this somewhat lascivious operatic music. And politics encounters in Tosca a representative of harmonic power, an attraction that mobilises all the forces of desire.

It must be possible to present reality as the historical fiction that it is. Its impact on the individual is real, is fate. But it is not fate, but made by the labour of generations of men who the whole time actually wanted and want something completely different. In this sense it is in various respects simultaneously real and unreal. Real and unreal in every one of its individual aspects: collective wishes of men, labour power, relations of production, persecution of witches, history of wars, life histories of individuals. Each of these aspects themselves and all together have an antagonistic quality: they are a crazy fiction and they have a real impact.

This makes for rigidity. Frozen coldness. Men die as a result, are pulled apart, are subjected to bombing raids, are dead while alive, are placed in asylums as mad, etc. Reality is real in that it really oppresses men. It is unreal in that every oppression only displaces energies. They disappear from sight but they continue to work underground. The repressed is the source of all labour underneath the terror of the real.

A so-called love scene is for example such a real fiction. We are all accustomed to measure such a scene in a film - or in reality - by ‘realistic criteria', which are supposedly contained in this scene itself. The love scene, however, is only realistic if for example the future abortion is also built into it. But also the history of all earlier abortions. The same applies to a love scene in reality whether or not the pair think of abortion, whether or not this is relevant for the concrete case. All previous experience, also that excluded by contraception, also that of parents and grandparents and of all other love scenes, is present in the concrete scene. The conflict between tenderness and the untender consequences, the excessive expectation and how much of it is fulfilled, precisely this is the real content. All other perceptions are measured against the sharpness of this conflict. Isolated, reduced to the ‘present', the love scene becomes ideological. The scene also becomes ideological if all the illusions are cast out. It could not take place.

The history of whole generations and of all its consequences stamps the capacity or the incapacity for love, all forms of expression in the scene, all contact, all hesitation, the spontaneity.

Narrative Cinema

I wouldn't be making films if it weren't for the cinema of the 1920s, the silent era. Since I have been making films it has been in reference to this classical tradition. Telling stories, this is precisely my conception of narrative cinema; and what else is the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories.

Montage-Film

This means montage. There can be no doubt that the narrative of an individual fate, unfolded in ninety minutes, can convey historical material only at the price of dramaturgical incest. The fictional threat displaces experience from the film. In the history of film, montage is the ‘morphology of relations’ ('die Formenweli des Zusammenhangs’). Then there is also the artificial opposition of documentary and mise-en-scene. Mere documentation cuts off relations: nothing exists objectively without the emotions, actions and desires, that is, without the eyes and the senses of the people involved. I have never understood why the depiction of such acts (most of which have to be staged) is called fiction, fiction-film. But it is equally ideological to assume that individuals could determine history. Therefore, no narrative succeeds without a certain proportion of authentic material, i.e. documentation. Such use of documentation establishes a point of reference for the eyes and senses: real conditions clear the view for the action.

Auteur Film-Cooperative Film

I have always believed in the auteur film, in the continuation of early film history: Dovshenko, Griffith, Dreyer, Rosselini, Godard (if you like, Costard), Schroeter, and others. I find myself in good company among them. With delight I discover that Woody Allen (MANHATTAN) and Frank Coppola - representatives of a completely different cinematic tradition - take recourse to the same vigorous principles; their editing style is associative, they appeal to film history, it is never a risk to make personal films, or to make compact films: ‘You got to rely on people.'

For the auteur there is no way back to the ready-made film (Konfektions-film). Nor can auteur cinema remain in its present state. It can not incessantly deliver single works, each of which individually reinvent film history. Cinema is a programme that is a relationship of production - if for no other reason than that this relationship exists in the experiences of the spectators which constantly recreate the cinema's experiential horizon.

Curiosity is My Profession: A Scientific Manager

In the rooms of the five-star hotel in Munich, where the conference halls are still adorned with the rounded arches and bulky curtains familiar from German films of the early 1960s, with Spanish trellises breaking up the view, a swell of voices reveals a wealth of languages and lively, acute intelligence at work. There is no mental labour in the absence of pressure. The pressure here comes from the fact that in just a few hours, the lobbyists will have to impart new ideas into the cooperative minds of the decision makers in attendance, new in view of the situation, the change in all matters of US strategy that has come about with President Bush's new administration. This is the primary reason for the electrified buzz of conversation which fills the room all the way up to the chandeliers, fuelled by coffee.

On the median strip in front of the hotel: a small group of freezing people. They hold signs protesting the National Missile Defence (NMD) project and cautioning against a new arms race. One of the activists, Berthold G., has managed to make his way into the hotel; he is dressed as a waiter, and blends in with the others who are serving small cups of coffee to the security-conference delegates. A triumph over the security forces. Exploiting the fact that the hotel is so large that individual employees do not necessarily know one another. Berthold G. could set out flyers or start a critical dialogue with someone. But with whom? Starting such a conversation would blow his cover. Who among the thinkers here would listen to him, the critical intellectual?