Florian Hopf: Which feelings are you talking about in the film?

Alexander Kluge: All of them. For example, the film begins with a man screwing in a screw. He says you can only do that with a lot of feeling. If it's screwed in too tight then it will take too much strain, but if it's left too loose then it will fall out and the nut will come off. That's something quite simple: without understanding a word of each other's language, a German mechanic and a Chinese mechanic can agree on whether the screw is screwed in properly or not. How much finesse that calls for is a very important distinction, it requires a faculty for distinguishing things, so to speak; here, the feelings are producers. Now, you can think of plenty of parallel situations: if you use your intellect to try to dance or make sense of music, you won't get very far. When you transfer this screwdriver image to the erotic domain, quite a few men and women could say: I would like the parts of my body to be handled with at least as much care as a screw, I don't want to be handled roughly or with a lack of skill. And so this distinction also applies to the simple feelings: right time, right firmness, right suppleness. You could actually then forget about all the remaining muddle of jealousy, passion, death and murder and reduce everything to these simple questions of labour. That's the stance taken in the film.

FH: A particular scientific line of thought would claim that what you call ‘feeling’ is basically a genetic predisposition […].

AK: Let's just say that we have inherited a lot. We've even been endowed with instinctive functions that rumble away under the surface, in the so-called reptilian brain. So we can always operate with the midbrain too and simply lash out. The only thing that sets feelings apart from our whole biological prehistory, from everything that cold-blooded creatures can do better than us anyway, is that they can put things off, they can defer them.