Brown Coins

Brown Coins is an online magazine based in Berlin for art, film, and magic.

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FLAWS ARE WHERE THE BEAUTY ARISES - AUSLANDSREISE BY TED FENDT

A conversation with Berlin-based filmmaker Ted Fendt about his work, and particularly his latest - and fourth - feature film "Auslandsreise" which premiered at Berlinale Forum this year. The interview is accompanied by behind the scenes stills of the shoot.

We are sitting in Café Marameo at Chamissoplatz in Berlin. This café is also a location in your latest film, "Auslandsreise". A guy is sitting in the café reading a book and he’s meeting a woman. When she leaves, he stays in the café alone and keeps reading. What book was that?

He has in his hands the Italian edition of "Il porto di Toledo" — "The Port of Toledo", "Der Hafen von Toledo" in German — by Anna Maria Ortese. It was published in the mid-70s, a kind of memoir, but in a fantastical vein, inspired by the imagery of El Greco's paintings. It recounts the teenage years of the author — including the death of her brother, her discovery of writing as a form of therapy, her first success publishing, and her first love interest with a fascist that is also described at the beginning of the film.

I looked up the author, Ortese, after watching the film, as I didn't know her before. It sounded like she might be a challenging read.

„Iguana" is a better starting point than „The Port of Toledo“. It has a clearer narrative and characterization. It gets a bit fantastical towards the end, but not in a way where you lose track of what's happening. It's not modernist literature in the sense where it's difficult to know what's going on. It's someone who's filtering 19th century and earlier influences through her own contemporary perspective.

The book we included in the film was, in a way, there by chance — there were other books that were contenders. But "Iguana" came out this past January in a new revised translation by the original translator, who appears in the film. It seemed initially like the new publication would come out during the filming, but then it kept being delayed and delayed and delayed. That became a kind of inadvertent fictional element built into the film — the characters talk about the new translation at certain points, but it didn't actually come out until a month before the film.

Was it clear to you from the start that you wanted to feature books by this specific writer?

I had the desire to make a film and had been working on something else before, which I just felt lost in — a project that didn't make any sense. I was thinking of making a film in France. I speak French and lived there fifteen years ago. But after trying to develop something for several months, it just seemed like I didn't know what I was doing.

So a friend said: you have this system of making self-financed films little by little, with people you know — it worked in the past, why not try it again? That was the impetus. And then I thought, what can I do locally and affordably? What would sustain my interest?

I thought: I'll do it in my neighborhood, with people who live nearby, and I'll film over about a year — that way I can work a lot, save up money for two, three or four rolls of film, shoot for a day or two, and in the meantime write. Writing is cheap.

Then I thought: I know some people I could cast. I asked people living around here who I thought could be interesting in a film, without yet knowing what would hold it together. I had made another film with books as a kind of center, but that was with much older literature and more classical interests. I thought maybe I could do something with books again, something somewhat more contemporary.

With that vague idea, I kept walking around the neighborhood, picking up different books, reading different things — and eventually saw that there was a first German translation of "Iguana" by Ortese. I knew it was an important book in her body of work, bought it, started reading, and thought: this is the book for the film.

The actress — Leoni — who is visiting the German translator of the book in the your and who is also credited as co-writer — is she completely acting, or did she actually read the book and had a „real“ conversation about it? This is something I've wondered about in your other films too — the way people talk about academic subjects feels so authentic.

When I'm working with non-professional actors, the idea is to cast someone because something in them corresponds to what I'm interested in exploring. Then you isolate that element of the personality and magnify it to create the fictional character.

Leoni I've known for about ten years. Over the years, whenever we've seen each other, books always came up. So I knew she was someone who reads a lot and writes poetry and prose. She was the first person I thought of when I started thinking of a project involving books. I knew I could give her the books to read, and that she would have interesting thoughts of her own. I thought: I can provide the foundation, I can have my own thoughts, but they need to be made more-dimensional by someone else's complementary or contrasting ideas.

For the book scenes — where the characters sit around talking about the books — I would write a version of the scene based on a conversation Leoni and I had had. Then I would give that to her, and she would correct my German, make changes, improvements, suggestions. Previously I would sometimes rely even more on other people's experiences and points of view — I would say, "remember three months ago you told me about that piece of music or that poetry reading?" and kind of have them re-enact that, as a way to indirectly talk about myself. This time, for a couple of different reasons, I wanted to start more from my own words and then bring other people's perspectives in.

You mentioned approaching the making of the film in blocks — you'd have some money, shoot a day or more, then write in-between. Did you have a complete outline before? With films that have this kind of openness or floating quality, I imagine it’s not easy to be sure to have what holds them together before you make them.

It's kind of crazy because it's a way of making a film that is no longer fundable. You can't say to someone: here are my previous films made in this way, it worked, I'm going to do it again — that doesn't provide enough insurance. So it's a process arising from financial constraints, and hopefully in the end it's in harmony. It's a nice way to work, because there's some structure but a lot of freedom within it. When we started, I had the first two sequences written and that was it. The main character is this guy, there's a book, and at some point there will be a reading group. That was it.

Then I wrote the next sequence. A lot of that material was cut, because I was still finding the tone and most of it didn't really fit. Seeing that footage and starting to edit, I had a clearer idea of where the rest of the film was going and I wrote an outline. At that point I also realized I had somewhat overestimated how much money I had. So I asked my producer friend to get involved, and we had some conversations about funding and even applied for money, which required us to write a kind of fake script. Based on the outline I wrote a fake script with fake dialogue — that didn't pan out, but I think the sequence of scenes in that document, probably reflects roughly where we ended up. I don't think I ever opened that document again. But the dialogue was always written in the weeks just before filming.

There’s not much improvisation?

No, it's all written — usually to some degree based on conversations I've had. Sometimes it's based on my own experiences. The scene with Sigrid, the translator, for example: Leoni and I had both met her — once alone, once together — and based on those conversations we wrote that sequence. Sigrid then made adjustments to the text and memorized the whole thing. Florian, another actor, was always printing out the text, cutting it up and making a kind of collage-book to help him memorize it. Everyone was committed, sometimes on shorter notice. Part of why I wanted to do this was knowing they would be serious and dedicated over the course of a year.

What about the decision to shoot on film? You also work as a projectionist, so you must have a special connection to the material.

I've always tried to shoot on film and I've always been convinced the quality is better. I'm probably crazy for still holding this opinion, but I remain convinced that analog projection is aesthetically superior. Right now I'm setting aside thousands of euros to make the 16mm prints of this film, which I hope to premiere in the fall.

During the Berlinale I got asked at every Q&A: aren't you thinking the whole time about how much it costs, about the limitations? I would say: no, not really. Anyone making anything has limitations. Even a cinematographer working with Steven Spielberg has to deal with time constraints and the number of setups per day — there are always limitations. The question is just how you deal with them creatively.

We shot the whole film without any artificial light, even interiors — just working out where the sunlight was and how to use it. There are some shots that are maybe a little flat because of that, but that's what we committed to. With film, sometimes technical imperfections that arise from limitations — the way light falls unexpectedly in a scene — look a certain way on a digital camera that isn't so nice, but on film it has an inadvertent beauty to it. The flaws are where the beauty arises, if you're open to what the environment presents.

The environment plays a big role in your films but there are other recurring elements: academia, people who are somewhat lost or in transitional phases, moving between places, trying to make connections. In "Auslandsreise" the book club seems to be a way to connect as well. In your film "Classical Period“ the protagonist wants to address a personal issue and her friend shields himself with an intellectual response. There's something similar in your new film, where they discuss how Ortense’s personal letter to her editor gets a „pedagogic“ reply.

On the one hand, there's the fascinating thing about human beings — how people try and fail to connect, the difficulties involved — and I think that mirrors my own feelings in some magnified form. Then of course, being deeply knowledgeable about something, being really into books can be a way to connect with people, but it can also be a way to shield yourself. It can be a connection that only goes so far because you just want to show off your knowledge. There are people who can read theory and engage with theory, but their personal behavior doesn't really reflect someone who has actually engaged with any of it — maybe they're just reading it because of how it makes them look.

That raises the question of the character in "Classical Period": if someone has such a magnified need to display their knowledge, what does that say about their actual engagement with the work? Is it a deep engagement or a superficial one — a way to get attention or validation? It’s kind of hard to avoid when you set out to explore your interest in literature and books in a film. Those kinds of characters come with it.

Your films have a particular length, they are shorter than most features. I found myself thinking of the novella form in literature: a short novel, usually turning on one central moment. In your films I find these subtle moments where the core question of the film seems to crystallize — like in "Auslandsreise", the close-up of Leoni while Florian is talking about the book he can’t quite connect to. Is the shorter form a conscious choice?

In part it's something I can do because I'm not financing the film conventionally. I'm writing something with someone else right now in a more conventional form, and in that form you establish a situation and characters, complicate it in the middle, resolve it at the end — and I'm not obliged to follow that structure here, with a classical middle section in which things develop further. It's more: establish the situation, go deeper into the subtleties of character interaction, and find a point where the film doesn't need to continue anymore. You've established and shown what you wanted to show. That could perhaps be sustained over two hours — I haven't tried — but in these films it's always felt sufficient. Economically, it's also a comfortable length in terms of post-production costs.

I had to think of Erin Rohmer’s films, because of their floating quality — characters running into each other, meeting and leaving.

Interestingly there's a very classical structure underneath his films, almost 18th or 19th century French theatre. There's a really interesting dialectic. And some of them, the way the characters speak, have a more elevated register. I love Rohmer. I discovered him when I was a teenager, actually — some of his films were coming out on DVD in the US and my father for some reason bought them for me. Then I was in Paris studying in 2009–10, when Rohmer died in January 2010, so there were a lot of screenings. When I got back to New York there was a retrospective. I saw a lot of his films in that period and have always loved them.

Could you relate to them as a teenager?

I think what really inspired me at the time was just that they were made for so little money, with such small means. That was also when I was discovering American independent films of the 70s — "Killer of Sheep" was re-released in theaters when I was 17 or 18. It was made on weekends over a long period of time, essentially a one-man crew. To see that the same thing was happening in Europe at roughly the same time — I remember reading that on one of the early Moral Tales, Rohmer didn't have the money to print the dailies in color. He had so little film stock that he would let the scene start before he started rolling the camera. He cooked for the crew. People wore their own everyday clothes. To some degree they also helped write the dialogue. Shooting on location, using available light — but doing remarkable things with it.

Rohmer also has an interesting trajectory: he builds up through the 60s into the early 70s, then makes a kind of historical epic on 35mm, a film in Germany — and then in the 80s he decides to go back to 16mm, shooting in the street with a crew that largely consisted of film students. That kind of arc is very unusual.

Was the Berlin School something you related to?

I wasn't really aware of the Berlin stuff until around 2018 or 2019. The MoMA did a Berlin School retrospective in 2012, but I only saw one film in the whole series, so it wasn't an eye-opening moment. My direction is more towards silent film and early sound film — in Germany but also globally. That transition period where the technology is super primitive and people are restrained in certain ways but liberated in others, still trying to use a silent vocabulary within a sound idiom. I find that endlessly fascinating. That's probably what I've seen the most of, and I always want to see more.

What are you watching right now?

Currently I'm going through Jack Turner — things I haven't seen or haven't seen in many years. Low-budget Hollywood genre films, but really well-made even with limited resources. In cinemas I'm watching a Harald Reinl retrospective. He was a popular German cinema director working in the post-war era. They're showing film prints, which is more or less the only reason I'd watch these films. I'm not yet convinced. It's almost a case of just barely getting by in directorial quality, and he seems very apolitical, maybe escapist — which is interesting because he was apparently a ski champion in Austria in the 30s and then Leni Riefenstahl's assistant, and I feel like that must have had something to do with his avoidance of any critical perspective on West Germany in the 1950s and 60s. But I've only seen three of his 80 films, so I don't really know yet.

Would you say your films are political?

Anything is political, which is a stupid thing to say — but true. What I dislike is the didactic, which I consider short-sighted and maybe naive, because I don't think films can change the world. But that doesn't mean they can't be political in terms of how they relate to people, how they observe people, how they portray people in society.

If you're consciously working in an idiom that is not the industrial idiom, pointing the camera differently at different people, there's inevitably something political about it — and it doesn't need to be underlined.

The background to all my American films is the second half of the Obama era and then the beginning of the Trump era. "Classical Period" was made in the first months of the Trump presidency. It's not stated in the film, but if you look at when it was made, you could extrapolate something from that. What does it mean, in America in 2017–18, to dive into classical work? Is it escaping the present world because it's intolerable? Is it trying to find an answer to the contemporary situation?

The current film is maybe the most overtly political. In a country where the extreme right is extremely present, people are discussing a book in which Italian fascism is an important topic — an author whose life was quite marked by that. There's also something in the book where Ortese describes living through the Allied bombing and destruction of Naples — her whole neighborhood leveled — and while we were making the film, other parts of the world were being leveled and destroyed. Wandering around the city nowadays, the question of how one orients oneself towards Germany today is there in the background of the film. And the film has characters who are open to the world — who want to learn languages, to go deeper into other cultures.

Particularly in your film "Short Stay", there's also this sense of the daily grind, of surviving in a capitalist environment and the hardships of people under economic pressure. Besides these elements, there’s something political in the way your films are made as well — not just in their content but in their method, being made outside the regular system. In "Auslandsreise“ it is mentioned that Ortese would have shied away from being categorized or taken in by a concrete political direction.

She was opposed to all forms of oppression, quite directly, and believed it was up to the people who are oppressed to realize that and liberate themselves, rather than waiting for intellectuals from above. She was very much an anti-intellectual — though there are traces throughout her books that suggest she was quite well-read in the classics even though she dropped out of school at thirteen.

In the beginning of "Auslandsreise“, the people in the book club talk about Ortese describing a fascination for a coldness, almost a cruelty in a man she likes — and about being subordinated to a force like this. What do you make of that?

There are two people referred to. There's the man writing a letter to her — an editor of a literary magazine who she looks up to, and on whom she develops a sort of crush, because he's the first person to validate her as a writer. Then later there's another person, the man she's in love with. I think the real-life person was a fascist — a military man, maybe. It's not made completely clear in the book. He's an older man, alternately cold and interested — what psychology would call an avoidant attachment style. She was always confused by him, pushed away, and then he would show up again. That must have been very difficult — and of course she had the kind of personality that would be drawn to that relational dynamic.

In "Outside Noise", the character you play gives a lot of good advice to a person visiting Vienna in one scene. He mentions his favorite museums. Do you have favorite museums or spots in Berlin?

I've been here a long time but I'm not sure I have anything secret. Leoni, who knows a lot more about art than I do, has been talking lately about how confusing the collections of other museums can be — mediocre in their organization. But the Gemäldegalerie is really solid, and it's such a nice, quiet gallery and a beautiful building. Everyone who goes there comments on how empty it is — which is so uncommon. I was in Paris recently. The Musée d'Orsay has a fantastic collection, almost too good, but it's nearly impossible to see because it's so crowded.

A lot of my favorite things are just in the film. I go to the Markthalle in Bergmannkiez all the time. I spend a lot of time in the west, in Charlottenburg — that's the neighborhood I like to wander around in when I have free time. Eating old-lady cake at Café Keese, in the Kantstraße area. That's my place.

Thank you so much for the interview.

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SUFFERING AND GRACE - DAWNING by Patrik Syversen

With his feature film DEMRING (DAWNING) about three sisters who come together in a time of personal crisis in their remote family home, Norwegian director Patrik Syversen creates a unique mix of such different elements as family drama, survival horror and a sense of existential, cosmic mystery. We talked to him about his movie and the process making it.

You are quite prolific and have worked in different genres and formats, especially in series lately. Can you tell us a little bit about your background.

I’ve made films for quite some time, but I must say that the indie films have been the ones that are dearest to my heart. In that respect, DAWNING feels like a creative culmination of the themes and the visual approach I’ve been working towards. I have a somewhat eclectic filmography, but it adds up, since I kind of started my love for film with a large specter of preferences. I adored films by Jarmusch, Bergman and Bresson (still do), and the ascetic, understated and low-key. At the same time, another side of me embraces the more extreme, boundary-pushing genre films, horror and exploitation, which are unpredictable in other ways. And I have never been able to accept that you have to like - or make - either one or the other.

I’ve dones some series, and I’m proud of a lot of that work, but there’s something about the finite nature of a feature film that lends itself to more economy and precision that I like, because you have a limited time at your disposal.

What was your starting point for this particular film?

I tend to start from a thematic point of view when I make a film, in this specific case the intent was to explore the cosmic mystery of how so many contradictory truths can co-exist. How do we come to terms with a world simultaneously so full of suffering and grace, of structure and chaos?

So it was kind of a twofold seed, where one seed grapples with structure and how our need to define and analyze our pain in order to "overcome" it can bring more pain than good; and the other seed explores how chaos sometimes can bring peace, because we eventually have to surrender to forces greater than us.

Cinematically that means trying to establish a fully fledged, self contained world that is genuinely interested in exploring the personal dynamics between the characters, then tearing it down with something, at first sight, banal. By merging two extremes; the understated chamber piece, and the expressive horror film, hopefully the film mirrors the universal feeling of unease we experience when we expect one thing, and are given another. I think how we come to terms with this clash of tones, or choose not to, says a lot about who we are, and how we see the world. Also, the context and the balance of the film tries to reframe how we endure suffering, both in our lives, but also in storytelling in general. What makes us "accept" certain types of pain and reject others?

The theme of "absent creative parents" appears in your film in the form of the sisters’ mother. I have encountered it lately in different films such as SENTIMENTAL VALUE (the absent actor father) or the French movie LOVE LETTERS (the absent mother who was a famous singer). What drew you to this theme? Is that something you think about yourself?

I think the absent creative parent is an archetype rooted in existential musings, and more often than not, mortality is at the core. The fact that the world, the giver of life, is also the one who deprives you of it, (or sometimes does what it wants without considering our feelings), can seem baffling, and I think these universal feelings extend to how we relate to our parents the moment we see them as flawed human beings. The magic disappears and the flip side of reality, the inherent darkness, is revealed. How do we keep believing in good when the complexity of the world is on display? It’s the first step of attaining a mature world view, but many of us remain stuck in an adolescent perspective on life, even in old age, finding it easier to tear down, deconstruct and criticize, because we feel we have seen through some elaborate lie that we have been served. But what I find interesting is what we can find on the other side of deconstruction, which is choosing some form of forgiveness and hope, even when we should "know better".

Tell us a little bit about the way the movie was shot and how you came to certain creative decisions - like the interviews of the sisters, telling moments from different perspectives, the switches in style.

Stripping down, subtracting as opposed to adding, was one of the major things DOP Andreas Johannessen and I talked about while planning the film. We didn’t storyboard, but we shot listed certain parts, and knew that we wanted minimal amounts of shots, and that the blocking would dictate the visual approach as much as the other way around. The film is full of few, carefully chosen shots that feel controlled and measured, but we also wanted the film to feel light on its feet and impulsive, mirroring the paradox at the core. Since the film juggles multiple tones at once, the key was to make it all feel part of a whole, and not scattershot. In that way, when the major tonal shift appears, and the film sort of bursts at the seams, it hopefully comes across as part of a plan, since we’ve up until then have been very selective as to what we show and what we withhold. I think this point of view extends to every aspect of the film.

Quite early, you make - without giving to much away - the decision to talk about the ending of the film in the way of an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator. Can you tell us more about that decision?

I think we all have this blind spot where we think we know how life works, and that we can deal with it to a certain extent, but once things get upended we quickly shift into denial, no matter how much intellectual leverage we have.

The idea was that the narrator literally prepares the audience for what’s coming, but when the moment arrives, it’s still shocking. Why is that? I don’t have the exact answers, but I think a part of us hopes that the narrator is unreliable, and that tragedy doesn’t happen to us (or in this case, the characters), because we (and they) have our own narrative and our own dramatic arc, and left field changes in tone just don’t fit in to that plan.

I think that spec of hope is also a beautiful thing; it’s how we get through the worst parts of life as well, because we know there are rays of light somewhere down the line, and that life continues, whether we’re there or not. So it’s hopeful the moment we take ourselves and our egos out of the equation. I find a certain comfort in that.

You put together a strong ensemble, especially the three sisters and the partner of one of them. How did you find them? Did you work with them before?

Apart from Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, I had worked with all the actors prior to making this film. Silje Storstein is the one I have worked with the most, she always comes to mind when I write screenplays. She and Marte Magnusdotter Solem played a police officer duo in a series I did called Kieler Street, and they had a wonderful, almost sister-like chemistry. I met Kathrine through Silje, and I noticed a similar dynamic between them. The three of them have very different energies, but with a similar core and world view. So I wrote the characters with the entire cast in mind before they were even approached. Writing for specific actors, especially in a film like this, where a lot depends on the unspoken and the history they carry, is very rewarding. Especially when they all want to do it!

You made the film with the US American company Spectrevision. How did that collaboration come about?

DoP and producer Andreas Johannessen had shot Bryn Chainey’s RABBIT TRAP for SpectreVision. A wonderful film I urge you to seek out if you haven’t seen it. He went directly from that film to prepping DAWNING, and the producers were curious about what was next for him. So we showed them what we were working on, and they were very excited and wanted to be part of it. DAWNING is a film driven by a need to explore the unknown, both thematically and formally, and I find that SpectreVision operate in that field too. I felt that they embraced the project because of those creative ambitions, and they are wonderful partners and collaborators.

What are your creative goals for the future?

The plan is to continue exploring a type of filmmaking that I’d like to see myself; uncompromising and playful, hopefully rooted in a form or responsibility and artistic integrity. We’re bombarded with stories that have no center, just content filling up our lives (I’ve been guilty of this myself), and I feel that a spiritual and philosophical responsibility is sorely needed when we make something and put it out into the world. I would go as far as to say I think it’s immoral not to consider this aspect of creating. The work doesn’t have to be self serious, but it has to have purpose or come from somewhere beyond our egos and our need for attention.

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A TIME WITH FEWER SHARED MYTHS - WEIRD TO BE HUMAN BY JAN GRABOWSKI

The sci-fi short film WEIRD TO BE HUMAN by Polish director Jan Grabowski takes place in the year 2194 where transfers between the virtual and the physical world have become normality. In specialized institutions, bodies are manufactured for AI beings looking for a human form. WEIRD TO BE HUMAN takes place in one such facility where an agent from the incarnation department questions a being in the process of completing this kind of transformation. It’s an intense, beautifully-designed and well-executed film. We asked Jan a few questions about his work.

With very little, you paint an entire world as a backdrop. Can you tell us a little bit more about the world we are in?

I wanted to offer a glimpse into a future that — like many classic sci-fi stories — is a distorted reflection of the world we live in today. The starting point was the theme of immigration and the questions it raises about bureaucracy: how systems divide us and build walls between beings who simply want to live.

I deliberately avoided defining specifics and instead left only a few clues about the bigger picture. My goal was to make the world feel alive in this particular moment, without heavy exposition or explicit world-building — much like in real life. This approach allows the audience to remain fully present with the characters and their drama, while their imagination fills in the space beyond the four walls.

Once a highly developed artificial intelligence inhabits a human-like body and becomes indistinguishable from a human being (think BLADE RUNNER), new dangers and possibilities emerge. What implications do you see there, and what rights should such beings have?

In many ways, this is the foundation of every story dealing with the idea of the “other,” to which the classic sci-fi trope of the artificial human also belongs. However, I wanted to approach it through the lens of a meeting between two people who cannot truly communicate, because the system itself divides them.

I don’t feel it would be wise for me to speculate in detail about general artificial intelligence or consciousness — I’m a storyteller, not a scientist. What I do believe is that any living being, whether human, non-human, digital, or physical, deserves the right to live freely. If artificial intelligence ever becomes conscious, there will probably be good and bad individuals, just as there are among humans.

At this moment, I am more concerned with what our species can do with god-like technology than with the idea of AI becoming fully independent.

Can you tell us more about the body the artificial intelligence inhabits? It is biological, right?

Exactly. In the film, the technology is essentially organic, enhanced by subtle technological elements. I wanted to imagine a world in which biotechnology has become dominant — a world where technology and biology merge so deeply that one could almost “breathe the internet”. These were the boundaries I set early on and then developed together with my team.

Agnieszka Adamska, my art director, who created all the prosthetics and designed the cradle machine connected to the AI being, was central to shaping this vision. She worked closely with Julita Goździk, the costume designer, and Rafał Ziemiński, our VFX artist, who created the visualization of the embodied AI and the film’s visual effects.

We were looking for an approach that would feel organic and rooted in nature, yet unmistakably non-human. The key was that the physical form of the character is not yet fully formed as she approaches embodiment, and that the cradle machine functions almost like a womb to which she remains connected until the process is complete. Much of our inspiration came from insects, snakes, and other reptiles. The costume became almost like a shell — a cocoon from which a human shape gradually emerges.

The design is outstanding. Can you tell us more about the development process and your inspirations?

Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, I established some rules for this world quite early on, and beyond that, there were also rules for the film itself. I wanted it to feel vintage, organic, and handmade, but at the same time not nostalgic.

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of retrofuturism as an aesthetic. Too often it feels like an empty shell, a superficial imitation of the past. For me, good science fiction reflects the time in which it is created and is an honest attempt to imagine the future from a present perspective. That said, I do believe that the design of past decades was exceptional — just look at the original ALIEN or other futuristic visions from the 70s and 80s. They had a tactile quality that we rarely see in today’s sleek, overly polished visual culture. Still, it would have felt wrong to rely on oversized computers or cassette-era aesthetics, because we all know the future will not look like that.

The challenge was to balance strong, expressive design with a sense of modernity. Biotechnology, which is deeply connected to the main character, allowed us to create something organic while remaining believable as a technological evolution of what already exists today.

How did you decide on the green color palette and the overall look of the film?

Green, along with white, was something I had in mind already while writing the script. I knew it would be memorable and visually distinctive, and it emerged naturally from the story itself. The film takes place in a laboratory-like, hospital environment, and these colors immediately communicate that atmosphere.

Paulina Kowol, my cinematographer, supported this idea with one condition: no white walls — and she didn’t have to convince me. As a result, the walls became entirely green, creating a strong contrast with the white costume of the embodied AI and achieving the color balance I had envisioned.

Where did the idea of the bent wall come from?

It was a long process with my production designer and co-producer, Juliusz Dąbrowski, who is an excellent craftsman and runs his own interior design company. I wanted the room to feel practical and believable as a working medical space — not overly stylized, but still visually striking.

We explored many options, searching for a form that would resonate with the core ideas. At one point, we even tested a more rigid, industrial approach to contrast with the fluidity of the AI character. As always, we also had to consider what was realistically achievable within our production limits and production needs on set.

One day, shortly before the shoot, I was leaving a Warsaw metro station and noticed a wall that immediately became our final inspiration. I sent a photo to Juliusz, and we instantly knew we had found the right direction. He transformed that reference through his own creative process and, together with his team, built a truly remarkable set.

What are your plans for this project?

For both me and my producer, Emmanuel Levy, the goal was simply to create something meaningful, driven by pure passion. He approached me after seeing my previous short film, the no-budget experimental thriller HALF-DREAM, and offered to produce my next project through his French company, Anda Films. Although it was a leap of faith, he fully committed to my vision. What makes the project especially meaningful is that it was produced entirely independently, without any state funding — which is quite uncommon in Poland.

Last year, the film premiered at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal, where we received two awards: a Special Mention for Design and the Outstanding Performance Award for Agnieszka Rajda, who delivered a truly hypnotic portrayal of the AI being. Since then, the film has been selected for several additional festivals, and we continue submitting it to many more as part of our festival strategy.

We have also received a lot of attention through our Instagram page, and many people keep asking where they can watch the film. For now, we are continuing the festival run and hoping for further selections this year and next. Ideally, after the festival circuit, the film will be picked up by a streamer, VOD platform, or television network so it can reach a wider audience.

We often speak about the human need to reflect through stories. Do you think artificial intelligence might develop a similar need? What could that look like?

I believe we live in a time with fewer shared myths — a world overwhelmed by information and lacking narratives that really matter. Stories allow us to understand through emotion; they build empathy and give us tools to grow and reflect.

Once again, I don’t think I’m the right person to speculate on the inner life of artificial intelligence. However, as a storyteller, I strongly believe that humans must become more thoughtful in how we treat one another and other non-human beings. The ability to reflect alone is not enough if it is not accompanied by compassion. Thinking itself carries responsibility.

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FALSELY SIMPLE, FALSELY NATURAL - LOVE LETTERS BY ALICE DOUARD

In her directorial debut LOVE LETTERS, writer & director Alice Douard talks about the bureaucratic hurdles a young lesbian couple (Ella Rumpf and Monica Chokri) has to face in order for both of themto officially become the child’s parents. We talked to the director from her home in Paris.

What was the starting point of the film? Was it the political situation, the characters, or a personal question? First and foremost, it’s a perspective that was previously missing. One that I wanted to create for the next generation: a joyful and humorous perspective on this subject. The political aspect is the role of women in it, but above all it's about this period, which was marked by intense conflict in French politics.

It's almost a period film in that sense, showing the change since then and the path we've come in a relatively short time. We see that by many little details in the production design as well. Exactly. It's only been ten years, but of course, technology has changed enormously, and so has behavior. You see people reading newspapers on the subway or holding a real cigarette pack which don’t exist anymore, clothing has changed, of course, too. That was part of the team's work and was the starting point in which this couple finds themselves, and where the story is set.

Has anything changed in the adoption process over the last ten years, or is the legal framework still the same as it was back then? It has evolved. In 2021, the law was amended so that the partner could acknowledge the child even before birth, thus eliminating the need for the adoption process. For example, in my own experience, it took 14 months for my signature to be recognized. Those 14 months were fraught with uncertainty regarding my legal status. If something had happened, I would have had no rights to the child at all. So, this amendment is progress in some respects but not completely - as it doesn't yet represent equality with the parenthood rights of heterosexual couples. But there are also significant setbacks and difficulties, especially for transgender people.

You just mentioned that there's this autobiographical element in the film. Did you sometimes feel like you're revealing too much of yourself? I've learned about many other women's relationships and compiled these stories and mine to write. So I quickly distanced myself in the scenario from my own history by saying to myself, "This is our story, this generation's story." I found many elements to make a film that was intimate, but wasn't my story. I'm not a musician—my mother isn't a pianist. And then, when the actors for the couple were discovered, it became something else entirely again.

As you mention the role of the mother of one of the parents - why was it important to include this perspective, and what inspired it? I think this character opens up the film in terms of maternity and the generations. Women always have this issue of being a good mother. Their maternal relationship has to be successful. Our mothers, the generation before us, also had their career successes. We, their children, sometimes judged them for that. But at the same time, they opened a path of freedom and a path of possible fulfillment for us. They were also the first generation to live differently than just in the apartment for their husbands. I think the question, what does it mean to be a good mother, is infinite, and no one has an answer. I think this artist is addressing that, knowing that she is a biological mother, that her daughter will be a non-biological mother, and that the question of biology is very quickly forgotten when one is asked to take care of a child.

You have a background in art history. To what extent has that influenced your filmmaking? It's a film that's hybrid in the tonalities. It's a melodrama, but at the same time funny and also a romantic comedy. The film is nourished by my desire for music, my desire for art. I worked with references for my whole team. We talked a lot about the woodblocks of the parquet. And then there is the form of art videos, the way we filmed these videos. I have the feeling that the film takes a somewhat broader approach in these choices.

How did you work with the actors? The script was very preceisely written, and the two really respected their lines. That requires a lot of takes. Monja and Ella listen to each other well. They grasped it very quickly, they had a way of observing each other, of figuring out how it worked. That was great. It's a film that's falsely simple and falsely natural. There are many scenes that require a lot of technique to make them look natural. The language I often have in mind is by Alexi Gruss, a circus director. He says that art is work, and that through work, the work disappears. The more we work, the less we see the work. When the circus artists walk on the hoops, we think it's easy, but they've worked so hard that it becomes easy. To achieve this simplicity in the presentation, a great deal of work actually took place.

Do you need more or less technique to truly reach your goal? That depends on the filmmakers, the films, and the scenarios. I'm a little bit German. I work with my wife, whom I've been together with for 20 years and with whom I've worked for 20 years. We produce together, giving ourselves plenty of time before we start the preparation and filming, to find the best partners, the best locations, to figure out how to make it work. Time, that's the most important thing.

You are also a producer. Yes, my wife Marie and I put together a production company for a short film shoot. That film won the César Award. Because that was all we had produced, we joined a production company to produce my first feature film but we wanted to be co-producers and also executive producers of this film. That's the key to my freedom.

Might be a sequel to the story of the two of them? What I found beautiful about the film was showing all the ideas and questions one might have beforehand, before the birth. And then to arrive at the moment when the child is there, the encounter and the silence surrounding that encounter. We move away from this public and legal perspective and into the question of family, into what happens in the intimate sphere. I felt it was a good focal point to the story.

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The Group Chat Goes to the Movies

The movie theater is dying, we're told, and Gen Z is holding the murder weapon: a smartphone. But what if the problem isn't the phone itself—what if it's the theater's stubborn insistence that we pretend we're still living in 1952?

Walk into any cinema today and you'll encounter the same rituals that governed moviegoing for generations: the stern pre-show warnings, the aggressive shushing, the radical demand that you sit in enforced silence and darkness, cut off from the rest of your life for two uninterrupted hours. It's a model built on scarcity—when movies were the only place to see moving images, when going out meant genuinely leaving your world behind. But for a generation that's never known life without a device in their pocket, this enforced disconnection isn't reverent. It's claustrophobic.

The data is undeniable. Gen Z goes to the movies less than any generation before them, and when they do show up, it's for events—Barbenheimer, Eras Tour screenings, fan-driven phenomena that feel more like parties than religious observances. Meanwhile, at home, they're watching Succession with their phones face-up on the couch, toggling between the show and Twitter reactions, texting friends hot takes in real time, pausing to look up that actor's filmography. The second screen isn't a distraction from engagement; it's become the texture of engagement itself.

Cinema operators have responded to this shift the way embattled institutions always do: by doubling down. Stricter phone policies. More aggressive ushers. Longer, louder PSAs about etiquette. They're trying to protect an experience, which is admirable, except the experience they're protecting is one that an entire generation has learned to find alienating. You can't shame people into nostalgia.

But here's a thought: what if cinemas stopped fighting the smartphone and started designing for it?

Imagine this: special "Watch Party" screenings where phone use isn't just tolerated but actively encouraged. Before the movie starts, everyone in the theater gets invited to a WhatsApp group or Discord server created specifically for that showing. As the film unfolds, the audience can share reactions, post screenshots, drop commentary, make jokes. Someone spots a continuity error? It's in the chat. That line hit different? Thirty people just reacted with fire emojis. The college student in Row F and the graphic designer in Row M realize they have the same niche taste in sci-fi and make plans to catch the next screening together.

This isn't sacrilege—it's just acknowledging how community actually forms now. For Gen Z, the social experience of media is the conversation around it. The memes, the discourse, the shared inside jokes that calcify within minutes of a plot twist—that's the draw. Traditional theatrical exhibition asks them to delay that gratification, to sit in silence and then maybe, if they're lucky, debrief with the one or two friends they came with. Watch Parties would let the communal electricity happen in real time, in the room, with strangers who might become friends.

The objections write themselves. Won't this ruin the movie? Won't people miss key moments while they're typing? Won't it devolve into chaos? Maybe. But these same concerns were raised about Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings, about quote-alongs, about every innovation in participatory cinema. What we call "ruin," Gen Z might call "transformation." And crucially, this wouldn't replace traditional screenings—it would supplement them. Cinephiles who want monastic silence would still get their 7 PM showings. But the 10 PM Friday slot could belong to something looser, messier, more alive.

There's a deeper argument here about what movies even are in 2025. We've spent a century treating film as a top-down medium: the artist creates, the audience receives, and the magic happens in the individual psyche, alone in the dark. But that was never the whole story. Movies have always been social—the dates, the group outings, the water-cooler debates. What's changed is the infrastructure of sociality itself. The group chat is where Gen Z lives. The question isn't whether they'll come to the movies, it's whether the movies will come to where they already are.

And yes, there's something lost in all this. The reverie of total absorption, the way a great film can colonize your entire consciousness when nothing else is competing for it—that's real, and it's worth preserving. But preservation doesn't mean fossilization. You can mourn the passing of the silent, sacred theater while also recognizing that new forms of connection are worth building toward.

The irony is that cinema's original purpose wasn't really about isolation. It was about gathering—strangers in a room, sharing something together, the knowledge that you're all seeing the same images at the same time creating a temporary but real kind of intimacy. Watch Parties would just be updating the firmware on that intimacy. Instead of shared silence, shared commentary. Instead of collective attention, collective conversation. Instead of the internet as the enemy of cinema, the internet as cinema's unexpected collaborator.

Gen Z isn't killing the movies. They're just refusing to participate in a model of moviegoing that doesn't account for who they actually are. The question is whether theaters will adapt, or whether they'll keep polishing the brass on a sinking ship, wondering why young people would rather stay home.

Maybe it's time to let the group chat buy a ticket.

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FLEETING ENCOUNTERS - MAGNETIC FIELDS by Giorgos Gousis

A man and a woman meet on a Greek island. She is there by car. He is carrying a box of bones to bury. In MAGNETIC FIELDS, director Giorgos Gousis tells the story of a fleeting encounter. We interviewed him ahead of the Greek Film Festival Berlin where the film is screening.

What was your starting point for the film? The start of this film was a pure necessity that we were feeling to do a film and we were looking around for any excuses, for any starting points. I had vacations with my DoP, my cinematographer, and we really liked the landscapes and the impact of the island for a road film. After that, we met Elena, the protagonist. We were shooting a music video with her, with the same camera, a MiniDV. We liked the result, the feeling of the picture, and we really liked Elena. So we said, let's make a movie as soon as possible altogether. And there it was, a starting point to sit down and write something. What do we have on our table right now? For some reason that I don't know, it was a glimpse of the moment, we decided that we'll do this film improvising, without script, like an adventure, for us also. I had this feeling of a road film with a woman that changed directions. Elena had told me from her personal life that there was a moment when she stopped dancing. She saw herself in a mirror, and she couldn't recognize herself. And that that was the starting point for this character and also for the story.

So it was collaborative with the actress Elena Topsalidou, actor Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos and DoP Giorgos Koutsaliaris from the very beginning. I always start the project but then I’m talking and discussing with the others. Also, when, when we wrote the storyline with the other actor, the male actor, we improvised and we said, let's pick things from our lives and put them in the characters and in the story. In the 10 days of shooting, there was always something happening, and then we were checking the shots, the ideas and decided to let’s put it in another scene also. Stuff like that.

Like an ongoing process. Did you have something like a structure in the beginning with an ending in mind? We had a synopsis with scenes, one after another. A small description of each scene. No dialogues, no locations.

How many takes would you usually do? You said you shot it in 10 days. Were there a lot of moments where you thought, oh my God, we have to change the scene, and you did very different variations of the scene? Or was that pretty smooth?

(Laughs.) Most of the scenes were in one shot. A few of them, there were three takes. And there were some things that we didn't use it at all. It was one time that a scene didn't work, at all. It was all always wrong. The location was wrong, the lighting was wrong, the acting was wrong. And then I was looking for a moment to reshoot this. It was the scene at the tree where they meet again then Elena tells him to come with her to help him with the box. This scene was totally different. And in a break of another scene, I saw this landscape and said, let's do this scene again there, in the most simple way. And it worked with one take.

You need to have a lot of trust and a good connection to your actors for an approach like this. Did you rehearse scenes before or did you not want to do that to keep it alive? We didn't rehearse, at all. We were talking a lot about past things, about the moment. What is this character is feeling right now? What kind of things are in his or her imagination at this moment? Do you think you should tell her this or that?

For a director, it can be quite a magical thing when you see what comes from the actors in that moment, in contrast to having an idea, or a script and every dialogue written. Was it stressful for you because you think, what if this doesn't work, what do we do then? Sometimes, but I'm used to this feeling cause I started with a documentary. So I like this adrenaline. I'm more focused on the moment and thinking a lot about what's going on. What else can can be said or what else can we do?Also, the trust, you know, you create a family, and then you trust them and they trust you. It's something like love. You feel that they can overdo things, and that you will save them at the end. Even even if it doesn't go well. Like you say, I think that this thing doesn't work, let’s let's find something else. It's stressful. You have a fear. But also I feel more alive and more connected. I don't want to be flat and safe with a script and do exactly what we have already organized and imagined.

You were mentioning love. It’s is a big theme in the film, a kind of unfulfilled love. A moment that could go into different directions but it remains just a moment. And then they separate again.

That was there from the beginning. We felt that there was no room for sexual attraction in this story, particularly to those two characters in those moments of their life. At the end, it’s a film about the power of companionship. It's love, but it's not sexual.

In Greek, there are different words for different kinds of love. Yes. In Greece, we use agápe for the word love, érota for love which includes passion. But for me, the right word for this story is companionship, the love feeling you feel with a companion, if it's your friend or your lover or your ex-lover or your partner. It's something that is not driven by sexual attraction. It’s not the main thing of this kind of love. If those characters were 25 year old, it would be different. But at this moment, they feel that if they have sex, it'll be a distraction.

It’s also about this passing of time and looking back at your life. You have this encounter that maybe changes something or gives some new inspiration, but whether they will see each other again or not, is not that important somehow. You never know. But I feel that in my life, sex is a totally different thing than it was in my twenties. It doesn't have this impact.

Maybe using MiniDV adds a layer to this nostalgia, to the passing time. How was it for you to shoot on this format? For us, it wasn’t about the vintage thing. But there is something nostalgic. It’s like a painting, it’s unique. So you have this specific kind of image that we felt fits the story. We knew that you could saturate the pictures a lot. It would be the feeling of a painting, of impressionism in this fairy tale. We thought that it's going to give a layer of a specific universe for this story.

There's something of a fairytale in the atmosphere, also through the images. At the beginning and the end, it's more realistic. But in the center, they are getting lost in a dream.

I felt that the car is a real character in the film as well. Tell us more about the car. Where did that come from?

We were looking for a car and we knew it would be destroyed. I knew it had to be an old car, and it had to be a car that looks like Elena. I really like the design of the Renault, the square form. But it was white when I bought it, and I painted it, to make it a character, to be unique. You can see it in the landscape easily. I knew that Elena gives names to her cars. So I asked her to give a name to this car also. The box that Antonis is carrying is another character in the story. Two metallic items that they carry with them. And both items decide to leave them.

It almost sounds a bit mythological, the woman in her car, like a knight on a horse, and the guy carrying this item. It had to have a huge impact of symbolism, yeah, but not melodramatic. When we had this idea about the box, we were thinking a lot about what would be his adventure. What is he going to do? We knew that he had to do a simple thing, but with a deep essence. When we thought about the box with the bones, we immediately said, it's not someone that he’s related to. It's not his mother or his father or his ex-wife. It's someone that he doesn't really know. If it's not your relative, it's weird. There's no connection or drama. But here's a symbol, isn't there? And there's humor.

There are a lot of things in the film that don't work. Like the car breaks down, the roads are not finished, the place where they want to bury the bones does not allow it because of bureaucracy. Do you see this place with the two characters also as a symbol for Greece? No. I’m not doing this thing to show the world whatever we experience here. It’s perfectly normal in Greece to have bureaucracy troubles, so we use it as an aspect. But the main essence is that it really doesn't matter. You will find another way then. That’s the main thing, that whatever happens, it's not a problem actually. It's just an adventure. Don’t see problems, see adventures. You keep going and enjoying whatever is happening as an aspect of your story. I think Greeks and Vikings had this mythology about the sagas. They felt that problems are just more interesting stories in their saga.

There’s a moment I really liked, where they reach a broken road, destroyed by the rain. They think now they can finally get rid of the box, but then this older guy appears and they have this little fight. And I felt the older guy was kind of enjoying this conversation, this back and forth. They have this discussion, but there's something underlying, there's some connection still. He calls him „my friend“ at the end. It's funny. I didn't know that guy. I was looking for someone to play the guy at the graveyard. A friend of us who was working as a line producer is from the island and showed me some of his friends. I saw this man’s face and said, okay, let's bring this guy. He came to the church, and he gave this performance by first take.

A natural talent. I had to bring this guy again somewhere in the film again, because it couldn’t just be one funny moment and then nothing. We had found this bridge and were discussing the end of the road scene. I thought, let's bring this guy there again. He brings them back to reality for me. They are lost in a dream sequence, something like that, and he's coming and says, you are just bullshitting, go home, it’s enough. But it’s super fun that there is this separation, this gap between them. It’s like a little stage. And it's good there is this gap because it cannot get physical. They can say whatever they want without being attacked.

You’ve also done documentaries. Do you want to continue making features, maybe using a similar approach of improvisation, or do you want to try other things? I'm writing a feature film now. I have to fund some money, so I have to write something. But at the end, I believe that it's gonna change a lot. For me, the script is just the base to start working. But also if I had an idea for a low budget project, I would do low budget again. I feel that I always have to a low budget idea waiting for me. An opportunity to do it with the same few people as crew and as an adventure.

As you say, it’s quite difficult to get funding without a script. And even then it takes a long time to finance. How did you fund this film? Was that your own money, did you have a producer before the film was made, or did you get the sales company attached after the film was made? It was my money, 6,000 EUR. I spent some of this money to pay our costs, like food and stuff like that, and to buy the car. That's it. No-one got paid. With the prizes, the tickets and the success of this film, we all got paid in the end. I would do this thing again. Not with 6,000 but with 50,000, to have some money to pay the people. For me, the problem is that if you don't have a script and no-one can read the thing, no-one will give you money. If a script needs money, you have to start this funding process, so you always need to have another project that doesn't need all this stuff. For me, the perfect situation is to have the money to do my own productions someday.

How do you see the Greek film scene in general? From outside it feels very alive, and there are a lot of interesting things happening. How do you see it? The past years, there was a lot of new blood. There was this boom with festivals and the Greek weird wave and stuff like that. But for me, the most interesting thing is the end of the festival area, the festivals as the point and the target for a film. I feel that they’re losing their power and their impact. There’s a lot of directors now that care more about how the movie will be shown in theaters, how many people will see it, directors who have a connection with the actual crowd and not the festival career. I always feel that the cinema of the seventies and sixties was the right place to go to again. Take some risks and talk directly to the people who are going to see your movies - not because you believe something is a good subject for nowadays, or a distributor or a festival will take it.

I feel that the sixties, seventies were such a free time, the kind of movies that were made then, the freedom and playfulness. How do you know if that’s still relevant or not or you are stuck with your film taste in the past? The risks they were taking in the 70’s produced interesting films. Even if was not the best film of the era, it could still be an interesting film. I watch films from the 70’s, the 60’s, the 40’s. I just watched SUNSET BOULEVARD again. It's a fucking fresh film. If it was a film from today, it would be perfect. It's a classic film. It means that it feels original in every time. In every time, you would watch this film and you would feel that it's for now. It’s so easy to film something now. We don't need to have expensive cameras or a big crew. I was in Los Angeles for the Greek Oscar campaign for MAGNETIC FIELDS. Every road, every everything, is like a possible location for filming there. An hour out of the city, there's a desert. I don’t know why people in Los Angeles don’t do MAGNETIC FIELDS every year. Take a fucking camera and your friends and do this film.

Could you imagine doing a project in another country? If I had someone in Los Angeles, a producer and we can find hundred thousand and do a film like with three actors n the desert, I would do it, yeah. Easy. yeah. For the US, it’s nothing. I went there with my DoP, we took a car and drove in the desert until we found Las Vegas. We were talking a lot during the trip. Here you could have this scene, there something else. I like the feeling that I could bring a small crew and two Greek actors. And if the story has this feeling, two Greeks traveling there for a reason, it would be perfect for us because we would have this observational perspective as strangers. And also the protagonists are strangers.

Two Greeks in Las Vegas, maybe. In the desert. (Laughs.) I have the idea of two Greeks going to Las Vegas to kill someone.

A hit man or a hit woman or a hit couple. It’s a hit couple.

That sounds good. They're together in life and they also work together.

Beautiful and romantic. Love and death, close together. I have to write the treatment and then we'll see.

Giorgo, thank you so much for this interview.

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OBJECTS OF DESIRE - INSIDE by Vasilis Katsoupis

We talked to Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis about his feature film debut INSIDE, starring Willem Dafoe as an art thief.

What was the initial spark for INSIDE? Did you want to make a heist movie or a film about art?

The idea for the film came after my studies, when I first went to New York. These huge buildings and all this stuff, this is where the idea sparked. The heist element came later. The initial idea was someone stuck in a penthouse. The heist element came to make a narrative for the film. But from the beginning I wanted to have a very well-designed penthouse full of artworks and objects of desire. Because I really wanted people to get goosebumps for everything that he destroys. Before my bachelor degree, I studied the history of art, and that that was something really new for me because in the Greek high school and curriculum there's no any mention of the history of art, at all. That sparked my fascination with the art world.

Nemo, the thief played by Willem Dafoe, uses the art in the film like a tool, like a caveman. The art becomes a way to break out and at the same time he's becoming something of a primitive artist himself. He not only turns shamanistic but transforms the setting around him, from a normal beginning to an almost religious or spiritual ending. How did the story change over time?

From the very beginning, I said it is a project that I don't want to write. I had a timeline. I had a treatment. I had all of this. And then Giorgos Karnavas, the producer, found the writer Ben Hopkins. We talked with Ben, and he found it very challenging to write the story because there's no dialogue. He's a great writer, a great director, and he's an amazing collaborator. So he made a fantastic treatment in order for us to get development money from the European media fund. And this is how it started. If you read the script, it's a very beautiful script. It puts you inside the story, you can smell, feel the story. He writes it like literature. It's amazing how Ben makes you see the film.

How much was planned in the preproduction, how much improvised?

It was difficult for me to do the storyboarding because there was no location. The only thing we had from the location was a SketchUp, a model. The production designer Thorsten Sagel had a friend, a computer genius. He took this model and put it on an Unreal engine so I could make some screenshots and have a dummy of the place. We flew Steve Annis, the DoP, to the office in Greece and we storyboarded together through this thing, Steve is a very experienced and amazing DoP. Because we were shooting in the studio, he made a set of lights that we could change very, very quickly. Mainly the light was coming from outside the building. Rarely, maybe in one scene, he put lights inside. So everything was achieved by using he security lights around the house. We built these lights in the corner of the house and practical lights and some soft stands outside of the screen together with the projection.

It's one of those projections where you already see the city in the studio, not a green screen, right?

It was front projection, yeah. That was something I really wanted from the beginning. First of all, it works perfectly with the actor in order to perform. The actor feels the day, the night. It's completely realistic where he works. Secondly, it could be a hell in post-production to do the green screen through glasses. It looks really good now but it was something that worried me until the premiere in New York. It was funny when New Yorkers came to me there and said, where is this? Who lets you destroy their penthouse? When you get that from real New Yorkers, when they think it's a realistic place, it worked. It worked because Thorsten made a fantastic set.

Was there a real ceiling?

The center piece was removable. You can take It down where the light comes out. The ceiling was fixed but it was, and this is how clever Thorsten was, made of fabric. Very, very light. So it looks like cement, but it's fabric. It's amazing.

How much time did you have to plan and to build?

We talked a lot a year before the start because we were developing and waiting for money. We talked a lot and exchanged ideas, and then we built it. To make the tower was also very difficult. Don't forget that all the set had to be waterproof because it gets flooded. There were many elements that we had to overpass. To shoot chronologically helped the performance so much. It helped to sculpture the character and the personality of the protagonist. Because neither me nor Willem wanted for this character to have a backstory. It would be this character getting trapped, and from that, we start understanding this person: Who is it? To shoot chronologically is a luxury for many fields. For us it was inevitable because everything was getting destroyed as the film progresses. But we were very, very careful with continuity. At the end of the day, when we edited the film, we saw that we were overly careful with the continuity because everything's getting in a time warp, and you don't care what's going on. So that was really good, but it was good that we were extra careful with the continuity. The problem with shooting chronologically is that you cannot go back. If you find out that something is not working or something is destroyed, you cannot go back and reshoot it. But that was the pact I made with Willem. I said to him, we have a beautiful script but from the moment we get to the set we can follow the script but there will also be thousands of things that will come to our mind and for us to try. There is 40% in the film that is not scripted. And this is why I love Ben, because his script gave us this freedom.

Was the Macarena song in the script or something you chose?

It was in there from the first drafts. When we were doing the film, it was something I wanted. Mainly because it's a ridiculous song, and second, because the building is trolling the protagonist. But also because it's a song that the American Army uses to befriend the enemy. And I guess it works also as a torture device.

You obviously have many artworks in the film.They are objects of desire that later become tools for escape but they are also status symbols for the owner. What were the criteria you discussed with the curator who made the selection?

Leonardo, the curator, was found by the producer, Giorgos. It was something I really needed. We found him last minute. He then had three or four months to make this collection, and that was a really difficult task. I talked with Leonardo about the characteristics and the personality of the owner who conceived this collection. I had done my research but my collection was very scattered. It wasn’t a believable collection. So he had to make the collection realistic. Because if it wasn't, we were to have the backlash of the whole art community that we really wanted to have in on our film. And it happened to many films before, when they just use lookalikes.

It’s true that art often looks bad in movies. There’s something that quickly can make it look quite cheesy through the camera lens.

Yeah, if it's not real. It is very difficult. I think it’s maybe the first time that this happens in cinema, that you have a collection of contemporary artists that are alive. It's fairly easier to get art from artists in institutions, where you just go and get a license. But when you have people that are alive and still work like Cettelan, like Clemente, all these huge artists, then it’s not so easy to convince them. Because they need to be convinced that their artwork will be well-treated. It was a risk for them as well. And only to make the contracts of how the art will be treated was a huge project by itself. It's a big conversation.

What's your view about this kind of collecting and the art market?

I don't know so much about collections and collectors. I wish that all the artworks would be accessible to the public and not hidden in a vault of some multi-billionaire in Japan. I don't understand why something should be evaluated a hundred million. It's good for the artists that are alive to get to make work. But I really don't understand why a Francis Bacon picture is worth 50 million, as much as I adore it. It works like the stock market. It becomes an investment. It is a way of some rich people to wash money and not pay taxes. But at the end of the day, art is a creation. So it'll be there even if the stock loses valuation.

The way Nemo comes into the apartment and then uses the art as a means of escape also talks about the value of art in a time of crisis. The art becomes a piece of paper or wood and has no representative value anymore. Is that something you were thinking about, how art changes its worth in different times?

Inevitably. I think that’s how it works at the end of the day. It's a canvas and paint. For me, there is one scene in cinema that also worked very much not so much as a reference but that was inspirational for me. It’s in a film with Peter Sellers, THE PARTY. There is a scene where he goes to the bathroom and the toilet paper clogs the toilet. And behind the toilet there is a beautiful painting by Chagall. It falls inside the bowl, and he takes it out and takes some paper to clean it. If you know whose painting it is, you see it with different eyes. The value of the same painting changes by how it is perceived by the viewer.

It reminds me of the time a person washed a Jesus painting in a church and the religious painting started to look like a cartoon. At the same time, this comic figure is probably so famous now and iconic on its own terms that it might be just as valuable as the original, or even more.

Leonardo told me that there are collectors that have their collection in their living room and maybe the kids go and play with the artworks. Others find that an artwork should be adored and praised like a holy grail. It changes with time. But if you ask me, I wouldn’t let any kids play with it. (Laughs.)

Nemo is transforming a lot in the film, physically but also spiritually. What’s his journey, is it a kind of catharsis for you? Does he go insane or does he find the destiny he was supposed to find? Is it connected to his background? There was just a little hint about a sketchbook in his past.

When Willem talks about the character, he says he doesn't go insane. And I believe that he doesn't go insane as well. When you are alone for so many days, it's not insanity that hits you. It's that you are uncomfortable. Then malnutrition comes because he doesn't have any food anymore. So he’s just in a bad situation, physically, organically. But I don't know if there is a catharsis in all this. I've never thought like this. For some reason, I just observe him rather than trying to drive him somewhere.

I like the fact that it's not openly about someone with a backstory wound and then through a process of crisis gets healed from it. It's something that often really annoys me. Do you remember a film like GRAVITY with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock where they are trapped in space?

I haven't seen it. But someone told me about GRAVITY and they told me that what they didn't like about GRAVITY is that you have the protagonist always talking, explaining what she is doing, something that we really didn't want to happen in our story.

I thought of this movie because Bullock’s character is trapped in space, and she gets out of it, but in the end it is mainly about her overcoming the trauma of losing her child. So the whole thing becomes reduced to that, that she finds life again. You make a movie in space with so much spectacle but thematically it seems very limited in the end.

When you start talking about a film, especially with the screenwriter, he asks you, okay, what's the backstory of the protagonist. And I was telling Ben, I don't care about backstory. There is no backstory to this guy. We only care about him when he's inside. No backstory. For me, the audience should reflect on this character. After that, we had the first meeting with Dafoe. Giorgos, the producer, told me, look, man, the first thing Willem will ask is the backstory of the character. This is what all actors ask before talking about a role. And I said to them, there is no backstory. I don't give a fuck. But they were no, no, no, we really have to think of something, if he asks, we have to answer. So I spent the whole day before the meeting with Ben and Giorgos and we made up a backstory. And we go and meet Willem and we start talking. He had already read the script. I show him the mood video I made, my presentation. He really likes it and he says, guys, I'm Nemo. There's no reason to look further, I want to do it. And we are all happy. And, and at that moment, I say to Willem, look, let me tell you about the backstory of the character. And he goes, no, no, no, no. Don't tell me anything. I don't want to know about that. Because if you tell me, I have to play this character. So this is what you say about GRAVITY. The same thing, that then, you have only one dimension for the whole narrative. This is what I liked about Willem. We were on the same page from the beginning.

Vasili, thank you for the interview..

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“A E I O U” – THE FAST ALPHABET OF LOVE by Nicolette Krebitz

A E I O U describes an acting exercise that encourages clearer pronunciation. Also called mouth exercise or tongue exercise, it allows the vowels to flow better in combination with various breathing exercises and techniques.

In Nicolette Krebitz’s film of the same name, an actress - Sophie Rois (born 1961) - plays an actress whose time, crudely formulated, is already over and who has been living forever in an apartment for rent above the well-known Paris Bar in Berlin. The owner of the bar, Michel (played by veteran Udo Kier), portrays the real owner, Michel Würthle, which is very funny.

The unemployed actress meets the young rowdy Adrian (played by Milian Herms, born sometime in the 21st century) who tries to steal her bag. By coincidence, they meet again in her apartment as she is now supposed to give him language lessons: Adrian really has a miserable pronunciation and is about to have a theatrical performance, probably in some measure for difficult young people.

A E I O U – THE FAST ALPHABET OF LOVE is a film about love which the title already tells us, but also about age and the question: Can love work when one person has a completely different background from the other? And when there is a huge age difference.

Everyone asks questions like this just before falling asleep: Do I prefer to be lonely or is it precisely this loneliness that makes me even more lonely? Do I even want to be alone and why am I alone? Does it fit with her, she, it or does it just not fit? How many people on a dating platform do I need to consume to be happy, too? Am I still beautiful enough and is she, he, it too young or am I too old? Whereby the aesthetic ideal of beauty of Ancient Greece - to be fair, I must say that this happens to be my personal ideal - may also play a role in look at people in relation to one another. Also in this film.

The answer to the question of whether an odd pair like the one in A E I O U can exist - is yes! You can dare to allow love - against any norm, other people’s glances, condemnations and Freudian, quite outdated, theories! After all, both are already grown up and when a young woman gets involved with a man over sixty, nobody cares usually.

Have courage, I think to myself as I continue to follow the course of the carefully unfolding love story on the screen with interest. I sense the two as a membrane, a thin layer of tissue that separates two rooms from one another. They want each other and then again they don't want each other, which mainly comes from the female main character.

The film captivates with good dialogue right from the start. “A, like life and lust, as well as anger. It all starts with an A!” And that's true. The film is an amour fou! However, it takes a while before you get served a sex scene that you, admittedly, waited for a bit. So it's all the nicer that towards the end of the film there finally is one, staged with wonderful sensitivity. Again I ask myself the question whether, even if one has such an aesthetic body as Ms. Rois, one is not also afraid of youth, and of transience. These themes oscillate through the film: youth, age, beauty and eroticism. When the two lovers walk naked through the streets of a seaside town in France, I think that naked we are all the same.

The film features well-known faces and great actors and actresses down to the smallest role (casting: Nina Haun). The filming locations and the set design by Sylvester Koziolek, who is already working with director Nicolette Krebitz for the third time, show a feeling for the very peculiar world of the art and acting scene without coming across as elitist.

Refined by Tabassom Charaf's sophisticated costume design, the director succeeds in showing us this world in a way that not only pleases those who are already familiar with it. Not everyone knows that Martin Kippenberger - whom the actress in the film owns an artwork of - and Michel Würthle were close friends in real life. But that's also what makes these details so charming.

In terms of film history, some scenes made me think briefly of Robert Bresson's 1959 film PICKPOCKET which shows an intellectual young man who increasingly mutates into a pickpocket. An emotionless off-screen commentary soberly comments on the protagonist's feelings and motives. 

Similar to A E I O U.

A E I O U is in German cinemas now via Port au Prince Pictures.

You can find the trailer here: https://youtu.be/FqOYMslbjR4

Review by Oona von Maydell.

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“A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM” - VORTEX BY GASPAR NOÉ

VORTEX might be Gaspar Noé’s most tender film to date, a meditation on death and togetherness that evokes films like AMOUR by Michael Haneke.

Mostly in split-screens shot by his long-time collaborator and DoP Benoit Debie, we observe the daily life of an elderly couple played by Françoise Lebrun (LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN) and Italian horror director Dario Argento (starring as a film critic here).

They live together in an apartment in Paris, their place filled with books. Their balcony full of flowers feels like an oasis in the city, a little Garden of Eden, an image for their bond, their love which is going through its last phase of age.

Already in IRREVERSIBLE, Noé dealt with the topic of time, the natural ender of things, almost with mantra-like intensity: TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING (LE TEMPS DETRUIT TOUT). In ENTER THE VOID, he dealt with death and a wandering soul flying through Tokyo based on the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. And in CLIMAX, hallucinogenic drugs played a role as well, bringing terror to a group of dancers.

Death and drugs play a big role in VORTEX as well, and while the film plays out much quieter, much more observant, its conclusion is not less chilling. What remains of us, it seems and as Noé shows us, is stiff matter on a piece of - almost religious-looking - cloth. And death is the ender of all things, even the love between Elle (Lebrun) and Lui (Argento). She is struck by dementia and wanders around the city, he is lost in the research for his next book project and has recovered from a heart attack, their son is fighting his addiction. It’s a doomed triangle but the way Noé shows is, is the view of a romantic who does see beauty in all the apparent nihilism - even if it’s just as passing as the flow of time.

VORTEX is in German cinemas now via RAPID EYE MOVIES.

You can find the trailer here: https://youtu.be/KHRwS5OT9aU

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“PERFUME MEETS RATATOUILLE” - THE DOG by AKIZ

With the novel The Dog, the German film and TV director Achim Bornhak (Eight Miles High, Der Nachtmahr) who has given himself the artist name AKIZ, tells the story of the hard rise of a young man everyone calls “dog“, a character who feels slightly related in spirit to the murderer Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume“.

Dog doesn’t know the names of any spices but he has a remarkable talent of dealing with food and groceries. With this almost autistic nature, he takes over the main plot. Then there is Lily, a former junkie. AKIZ equates the restaurant El Cion with a techno club. The world’s wide stage with a tough door that one fears hours before lining up in front of it, just to turn around again and leave when one’s not allowed in.

A journey into a world that is hard to access at first. Initially, time and place remain clouded. The characters, like honchos from the underworld, are introduced one after the other without further context. One stereotype follows the next with hard sentences that again carburize more stereotypes (“Valentino was the head and balls of the El Cion but Lily was the heart. A heart, cold like a cannula made of medical steel and hard like the concrete ground of a torture chamber.“)

AKIZ fortifies an untimely, ailing patrarchical position. The way he describes women seems appaling and redundant at times, lacking admiration as well as specificity. What happened there? One can’t help the feeling the author feels most at ease looking under the women’s skirts (“Alisha looked off-limits and beautiful in an unreal way, like a crystalline, feverish summer night, somewhere in a tropical harbor“). Oversexualized, exalted, and hardly imaginiative.

On the other hand, there is his great, maybe slightly bitter description of characters in a scene resembling Berlin’s art crowd with their Grill Royals, Borchardts or the Paris Bar – a parody, perhaps.

The first chapters describe aimless lives drifting along addiction and drugs, albeit lacking the romanticism or the empathy evoked by books like “Faserland“ by Christian Kracht or “Christiane F.“ in which the author, an addict herself, describes her experiences and life with addiction and the accompanied losses. It remains open which experiences the author really made with addiction and hard drugs and if the topic doesn’t remain a filmic platitude with little research in the “scene“.

But as soon as AKIZ, in the book’s third chapter, elaborately starts to write about the world of gourmet chefs and the preparation of good and simultaneously forbidden food (like Foie gras), I manage to dive into this world of earthly indulgences, perverse cravings and illustrious decadence. It makes one long to particiate in this world just for once – to belong to the rich and beautiful of this Western, unkosher world. To those who wear expensive, way too huge watches on skinny arms and whose purses never want to empty. Pandora’s Box has been opened.

Of course, we carry responsibility towards nature and ourselves. I don’t eat frog legs or birds just because I like reading about their preparation. I feel caught, almost like a voyeur. My hand is still deep into cookie jar as I turn the page to the next chapter. 

“We work, we eat, we drink, and we fuck in the kitchen. This is where we live. This is our home. The other home ain’t no home.“ Paul Bocuse is mentioned, one of the 20th century’s top chefs. Many other characters seem fictitious. At the end, a scene in which women go on a race through the city in fast cars reminds one of the Russ Meyer movie “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!“.

Thankfully, the novel gets the curve I hoped for and it becomes fun, too. For sure, “The Dog“ is no Hunter S. Thompson novel or Baudelaire poem. It’s too sloppy for that. But there is a real sense, a palpable enthusiasm in its dirty and expansive descriptions of gourmet food, expensive wines, ingredients and the terrific kitchen in a stunning restaurant. And that is a lot of fun to read.

Reaching the last page, an insipid taste remains. Let’s go for a simple Schnitzel in Borchardt now?

  Published with hanserblau in 2020.

Review by Oona von Maydell.

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“TATORT” - How many women are working on Germany’s favorite crime show?

We took a look at the number of women working on Germany’s favorite crime show TATORT. In the year 2017, there were 35 episodes.

Screenplays: 3 female writers - 50 male writers - percentage of women: 6%

Directors: 5 female - 30 male - percentage of women: 14,3%

TV commissioners*: 18 female - 12 male - percentage of women: 60%

List of episodes:

1006 D: 2F 1M / R: M / TV: 2F

1007 D: M / R: M

1008 D+R: M / TV: 1F 2M

1009 D: 2M / R: M

1010 D: 2M / R: M

1011  D: M / R: M

1012 D: M / R: M

1013 D: 2M / R: M

1014 D: 1M 1F / R: M

1015 D: 2M / R: M

1016 D: M / R: M

1017 D: 2M / R: M

1018 D: M / R: M

1019 D: 2M / R: M

1020 D: M / R: M

1021 D: M / R: M / TV: F

1022 D: F / R: M / TV: F

1023 D: M / R: F / TV: F

1024 D: M / R: M / TV: M

1025 D: M / R: M / TV: F

1026 D: M / R: F / TV: 2M 1F

1027 D: 2M / R: M / TV: F

1028 D: 2M / R: M / TV: F

1029 D: M / R: M / TV: F

1030 D: 2M / R: M / TV: F

1031 D: M / R: M / TV: F

1032 D: 2M / R: M / TV: F

1033 D: 2M / R: M / TV: 1M 1F

1034 D: M / R: F / TV: 2M

1035 D: 2M / R: F / TV: M

1036 D: 2M / R: M / TV: F

1037 D: 2M / R: F / TV: M

1038 D: 2M / R: M / TV: 2F

1039 D: M / R: M / TV: M

1040 D: 2M / R: M / TV: M

*Number of TV commissioners might not be complete but was what was available at the source.

Source: http://www.tatort-fundus.de/web/folgen/chrono/ab-2010/2017.html

DEUTSCH:

Der TATORT und sein Frauenanteil.

35 x TATORT 2017

Drehbuch: 3F 50M - Frauenanteil 6%

Regie: 5F 30M - Frauenananteil 14,3%

Redaktion*: 18F 12M - Frauenanteil 60%

1006 D: 2F 1M / R: M / Red: 2F

1007 D: M / R: M

1008 D+R: M / Red: 1F 2M

1009 D: 2M / R: M

1010 D: 2M / R: M

1011  D: M / R: M

1012 D: M / R: M

1013 D: 2M / R: M

1014 D: 1M 1F / R: M

1015 D: 2M / R: M

1016 D: M / R: M

1017 D: 2M / R: M

1018 D: M / R: M

1019 D: 2M / R: M

1020 D: M / R: M

1021 D: M / R: M / Red: F

1022 D: F / R: M / Red: F

1023 D: M / R: F / Red: F

1024 D: M / R: M / Red: M

1025 D: M / R: M / Red: F

1026 D: M / R: F / Red: 2M 1F

1027 D: 2M / R: M / Red: F

1028 D: 2M / R: M / Red: F

1029 D: M / R: M / Red: F

1030 D: 2M / R: M / Red: F

1031 D: M / R: M / Red: F

1032 D: 2M / R: M / Red: F

1033 D: 2M / R: M / Red: 1M 1F

1034 D: M / R: F / Red: 2M

1035 D: 2M / R: F / Red: M

1036 D: 2M / R: M / Red: F

1037 D: 2M / R: F / Red: M

1038 D: 2M / R: M / Red: 2F

1039 D: M / R: M / Red: M

1040 D: 2M / R: M / Red: M

D: Drehbuch

R: Regie

Red: Redaktion

W: weiblich M: männlich

*Redaktion u.U. nicht vollständig.

Quelle: http://www.tatort-fundus.de/web/folgen/chrono/ab-2010/2017.html

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“WATCH YOUR STEP MIND YOUR HEAD” - An interview with Marina Reyes Franco

We sat down with art historian and independent curator Marina Reyes Franco to talk about her current exhibition in Berlin, “WATCH YOUR STEP MIND YOUR HEAD”, the perception of the Caribbean, colonial legacies and the idea of Paradise. 

-Hi Marina! So great to have you here, what brought you to the city?

I’m a resident curator invited by ifa and KfW Stiftung as part of an ongoing program of exhibitions called Untie to Tie that was conceived by the director of the gallery Alya Sebti.

-Did the open call have a particular focus?

The program is sort of a counter programming because of the City Palace reconstruction situation, it is based on de-colonial studies, also the partnership with KFW specifies that the curator invited would have to come from Latin America, Africa or Asia. It was under the banner of Urban Cultures.

-Talk to me about the exhibition

I visited Berlin last year when I learned about the palace situation, the reconstruction of imperial Prussian architecture and all the things that that entails, because it seemed like this German past that they could be proud of instead of 20th  century regrets in history so I was aware of that, I came here in September 2016 to participated in a Berlin Biennale Program and that was  a good introduction to the city which is why I was encouraged to apply. I wanted to present an idea that would address another part of the world that I didn’t think was being addressed in the general Untie to Tie program yet.

-That part being the Caribbean?

Exactly, other Tropics. The exhibition is called Watch Your Step Mind Your Head, which is something you can see in boats all over, like when you get on or off a cruise ship or when you pass a certain threshold in a ship, but it also references just be mindful of what you put into your head.

It includes the work of Irene de Andres and Sofia Gallisá Muriente. Sofia is from Puerto Rico and Irene is from Ibiza. Irene has been working on a project in Puerto Rico, which started three years ago, when she participated in a residency program at Beta Local in Puerto Rico, she was very interested in several locations and histories that Sofia and I (who at the time were roommates) were also interested in.  She wanted to visit certain post military spaces like Vieques, Roosevelt Roads, and to check out some monuments, remnants of the Spanish empire in Puerto Rico that are also tourist attractions now, there was also an emphasis on cruise ships (at the time we lived right next to the port). Her visiting Puerto Rico and continuing her research project around Tourism in the Caribbean was very timely because we were investigating the same things. So the exhibition is the culmination of this two-year research process into the construction of the idea of the Caribbean as seen and experience from Puerto Rico.

It stems from our recent search in cruise ship tourism or the current emphasis that the government has in inviting foreign investors to come live in Puerto Rico. There are several pieces that use archival material to reference an earlier period where there was also this incentive to bring in foreign investment to the island.

Irene has a multimedia installation that’s called the second voyage which features some slides and collages that have images that come from the national archives and there’s where she found images from an American soldier, which are then reproduced in a triptych in the entrance of the gallery. Many of the images are of airports, hotels, and different monuments around Old San Juan but also construction sites that convey this idea of progress. There is a wall projection that has a more contemporary narrative that she created over the two years and several visits to the port and to the construction site of the “Birth of the new world sculpture”

-So this is work that’s very critical of the idea of tourism as an investment, or tourism as an economic savior?

I think that the exhibition is concerned with how the development of photography and film went hand in hand with the development of tourism. How the ideas that we have of a place, any place, but in particular at this time in the Caribbean, its related to how it was marketed in the past and realizing that we are performing a role in that society that was also created and mitigated for us through images.

That is why I think it’s really good to see one of the videos that’s included in Irene’s installation, it is a re-editing of films from the mid 40s to the mid 60s, particularly a news reel that shows how Puerto Rico was presented in cinemas in the United States, for an American audience.  And there is also a mini documentary made by the Puerto Rican Development Bank that is informing Puerto Ricans about the progress that they’re making with all these investors that are coming in. In the past what the government was focusing on was trying to bring in foreign investors to develop industry and to create jobs through industry. They were investing in building hotels and in building infrastructure that eventually other corporate partners would administer, it was a very strange kind of public/private association, where the Puerto Rican people were really putting everything on the line, we were the one putting our credits, investing the money and then given the hotel over to the Hilton, for example. But in the present, I think it’s even worse. The discourse hasn’t really changed and that’s what the exhibition reveals.  

Puerto Rico is still the paradise and now, as one may see in Sofia’s video B-Roll, where she re-edit videos from tourism campaigns that were showed at the Puerto Rico investment summit in 2016, that have these swiping views of a really modern looking Puerto Rico as well as empty beaches and luxury hotels, the discourse is the same, come live in Paradise, the people are great, they are really nice, the government is doing everything that they can they are bending over backwards for you, so come to Puerto Rico enjoy the marvelous tax benefits of paying 4% tax and evading federal taxes. So it’s a look into how the Caribbean has been sold.

-How was the reception here in Germany?

There are always many questions about what is Puerto Rico and where is it among awkward conversations about Costa Rica…

-Talked to me about the new project German Tropics

One of the things that Irene told me when you were preparing the show was you have to go to Tropical Islands! So I went there during my first week.  But German Tropics is mostly an appreciation of all the summer advertising that I’ve seen revolving around how Germans perceive these tropical places. It’s not really a project, it’s more observations and I presented it in an open studio setting.

-Do you see the investigation into the relationships of North/South as your main focus as a curator?

As I’m able to travel more, I get to see more of these relationships, so I can comment on them and think about them in a more precise and informed way. So I guess that it has increasingly become more of a focus. After living in Argentina almost seven years and also being informed by their own political history and their own battles with the economic crisis and foreign investors, also the debt that was such a prevalent conversation, I mean I was there when some foreign investors seize a war ship that they have in Africa, the investors were trying to claim some money and they just seized a ship. After I was informed by that situation and going back to Puerto Rico and having the realization that it’s not a recession we are living through but a depression and seeing how a certain part of the cultural sector has reacted and with this whole idea of cultural enterprises and cultural entrepreneurs and how problematic can that be in a very precarious situation, I got more and more interested in what I perceived as this idea that they were trying to impose of Puerto Rico, and by they I mean certain government operatives and think-tanks like the Foundation for Puerto Rico and their immediate advisors, everything is being geared towards the service industry and towards providing services for people who are going to be living in Puerto Rico and are being incentivized to live in Puerto Rico. And working in culture and in arts there’s always the problem of “can you really be ethical about where the money is coming from?” If it’s coming from the government and it’s a terrible administration then what do you do? But right now there isn’t even that.

-Talk to me about your future plans.

This project was able to be shown here but I see it as the first installment of this ongoing research project that I started from afar already and now will be traveling to the Caribbean thanks to a grant I was awarded from Independent Curators International and the Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, it’s a travel research grant and it’s only geared towards the Caribbean and Central America so I'll be going to the Bahamas Jamaica, Panama, Dominican Republic and Trinidad to continue my research into  tax evasion, Panama papers, money laundering but also the culture in the Panama canal and the construction of the Caribbean as Paradise.

Visit “WATCH YOUR STEP MIND YOUR HEAD”  @ ifa Gallery Berlin | Linienstraße 139/140 | Tuesdays – Sundays 2 – 6 p.m | Closed on Mondays and on holidays 23.06. – 17.09.2017

*All photos courtesy of Wataru Marukami

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“DER CLUB” – A novel by Takis Würger

From multiple perspectives, SPIEGEL journalist Takis Würger tells the story of a secret fraternity within a British elite college in his first novel DER CLUB. Young Hans Stichler, a young man with boxing ambitions, is sent to Cambridge by his aunt to infiltrate one of the University’s most legendary clubs and unveil a dark secret. 

Würger, born in 1985, was a student in Cambridge and a boxer himself, and sometimes his cocky protagonist might seem like a stand-in for the author. His language is simple, clear, and strong, and Würger starts intriguing, building a lot of tension and anticipation during the first course of events with a great sense for detail and atmosphere. Unfortunately, the mystery only remains fascinating until the story’s final act, where it, as too often, ultimately fails. The interesting build up just can’t be cashed in by the slightly generic resolution while the plot is played by the numbers a bit too much. Besides the lack of imagination for its finale, Würger’s novel might also suffer from a tendency for pathos the more it progresses, which makes it an overall underwhelming experience.  

Still, despite some questionable decisions like quoting chaos theory and even though it takes place in a setting that might seem all too familiar to some from Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction, the Dead Poets Society, or Donna Tartt’s overpraised snoozefest The Secret History, DER CLUB remains worth reading for its multiple point of views, the brooding atmosphere and Würger’s new and entertaining voice alone. Shame about the weak climax, though. 

DER CLUB by Takis Würger is published by Kein & Aber: https://keinundaber.ch/de/literary-work/der-club/ 

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“Just Call Me God” - John Malkovich at the Elbphilharmonie

What is this? Where are we? This is the gigantic private concert hall of dictator Satur Diman Cha, in power in the republic of Circassia for over thirty years. Now there is a coup: American soldiers and an embedded TV-Crew are looking for the dictator, even searching his private, underground concert. Right after the soldiers check the building and decide it is cleared, someone starts playing Johann Sebastian Bach on an organ.

This is the first time a theatre play is taking place in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. "Just Call Me God" is a play written by Austrian author and director Michael Sturminger. After its premiere in Hamburg, it will be shown in Wien, Amsterdam, Groningen, Birmingham, London, Luxembourg, Moscow, Budapest and from April 30th you can see it on TV on Sky. It is not the first time that Michael Sturminger and John Malkovich, the star of the play, worked together. They did "The infernal Comedy", a play about a serial killer, and a piece on Casanova called "The Giacomo Variations".

Now a dictator. After Bach, a cleaning lady with a colorful headscarf and a blue gown enters the scene, killing the soldiers and the camera man. At first, you assume it is a cleaning lady who wants to protect herself. Then you find out it is the dictator himself. Only the organ player is spared. The dictator commands him to play: "Play on! If music be the food of love, play on!" If the soldier does not play what the dictator wants, he is going to kill him. A dictator needs music for his spectacle.

Caroline, host of the TV channel, did not die, either, wearing a bulletproof jacket. A talk between her and the dictator unfolds, about being in power, about wanting information and giving information. There is an element of sensuality behind the fun as the host and the dictator are flirting to get what they want, their need for the best story, revealing itself as a dark version of courtship and desire. 

No surprise: John Malkovich as a dictator is amazing here. He is the star of the stage, of Circassia, and, like every dictator, of his own delusional play.

Text: Martina Kix. Photo credits: Claudia Höhne.

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“EXCESS AND INDIFFERENCE” - ANDREAS HORVATH & HELMUT BERGER, ACTOR

Named as one of their favorite films by such illustrious directors as John Waters and Jim Hosking, HELMUT BERGER, ACTOR is a fascinating, funny, intimate, ambiguous, nasty and in a very special way sweet portrayal of the Austrian actor who might well have been one of the world’s most handsome men at some point. It is also a remarkable film about the relationship between a documentary filmmaker and his subject. We talked to its director Andreas Horvath.

How did you get the idea to make a film about Helmut Berger? 

I have always admired Helmut Berger. As a teenager, I wanted to become an actor and Helmut Berger was one of my great idols. But I was also fascinated early by his other, his dark side: The excess, his indifference towards public opinion. 

Were you ever scared during the shoot? Did you ever fear for your life? 

No, I’ve never feared for my life. Maybe there was the scare to get drawn in too much – that the private mixes too much with the business aspect. As it was always just the two of us traveling, I wasn’t only the documentarian but also the driver, suitcase carrier, and the addressee of his tirades when the taxi didn’t arrive or the waiting time between two flights appeared too long for him. 

Has your image of Helmut Berger changed in the course of time, and if yes, how? 

It was known to me that he can be very inordinate and choleric, similar to Klaus Kinski, but it surprised me how lonely he is, how locked up, how destructive and ruthless he can be against himself above all. 

Did the project itself also evolve differently than initially planned? 

At the beginning, I did indeed intend to incorporate more of his stories and memories to the film. I would have hoped to hear more about the background of the shooting of Ludwig II or The Damned. But other anecdotes as well: Besides Visconti, this guy knew half the world. Very quickly it became clear that I wouldn’t get that. He just didn’t want to tell stories. There was this destructive element again: We had agreed to an interview but he doesn’t even think about talking about something like that. Instead, he abruptly offers me a blow job. From the beginning, he steered the collaboration to a very personal level – very consciously, as I think today. So I decided to engage in that and put the focus on our relationship. Thus it finally became a film about filmmaking itself, about the relationship between director and protagonist. Then the messages arrived that he left at night on my answering machine. Only gradually I realized what kind of treasures they were. I had often been sitting face to face with him with the camera for hours without him saying the essential – and then there was all this emotion and truthfulness, suddenly packed in a nightly call. I had to find images for these sound recordings, so I started to visualize Helmut Berger’s mind world. In this sense, the film is laid out very subjectively, almost expressionistically. 

At one point in the film, Berger says he has fallen in love with you. How do you see that? 

The word Actor in the title tells about my fundamental skepticism towards the truthfulness of his statements – but in spite of that, I believed him in that case. 

It is rare that you see a director getting angry in his own film. How did you experience the argument in Saint-Tropez? 

In the film, this scene takes place towards the end. Actually, this happened more at the beginning of the shoot. I had already put a lot of my own money into the project and didn’t know if I’d ever have enough material for a film. So I was quite stressed. But the situation only escalated because he crossed a line and lashed out at me. You could also say it’s pretty rare to see a director getting physically attacked by his protagonist. 

Would you call Berger a friend? 

Yes. 

What does he say about the film? We read his boyfriend separated because of the masturbation scene. 

When the film was finished, I drove to Helmut Berger and we watched the film together in his flat. He was enthusiastic and wanted to see it a second time. We made it about half-way through then. But I’m aware that he often changes his opinion. Recently he said, for example, the last scene was “not beautiful”. The reason he stated, however, was that he looked too fat. In any case he always wanted to have an honest – not a euphemistic – portrait. We agreed on that from the beginning in all our conversations. There are two masturbation scenes that frame the film. These scenes are really edited as they happened chronologically. When I visited him with the camera for the first time, he suddenly took to his bed and began to masturbate. That was only acted. The masturbation scene at the end of the film developed just as surprising to me, but it was real. It was the last evening I was shooting with him. Therefore, the first and the last scene of the film actually took place at the beginning and the end of the shoot. 

Was it your intention to unmask Berger? In what way were you interested in the topic of fame, beauty, age in this project? 

All these subject matters are obviously crucial to Helmut Berger but key was the dropping of the mask. That’s why he wears a mask at the beginning of the film. It’s a beauty mask instead of a thespian mask but this fact tells a lot about Berger’s life: Did he gain so much fame because of his beauty or because of his acting talent? In the last scene, the mask is dropped. Nothing is acted there anymore. 

Would you say the last scene was the moment of biggest intimacy? What does that tell about sexuality of a way of getting closer to each other? 

Everything amounts to this moment. In retrospect, the audience says: That’s what it was about for Helmut Berger all that time! He was looking for closeness but was seemingly unable to find the right language for that. At the end, everything is suddenly very simple and banal. The exhibitionist exposes himself in front of the voyeur with the camera (and thus in front of us all) and reaches his long-desired climax. And we realize: Berger’s attitude of resistance is basically also a form of communication. He wanted to tell us that he’s annoyed by the interest in his persona and his biography, that it just matters to him to be loved. The last scene is full of vigor and lust for life. It’s liberating and honest – that’s why it is important. 

Are you still in contact with each other? 

We’ve celebrated New Year’s Eve together. Last year, I spent nine months working on a new film in North America. From there, I tried to call him every few weeks. 

Did you ever hesitate to bring such a bold film to the public? 

Not really. A film about Helmut Berger can only be bold. Anything else wouldn’t do his real character justice. I edited the film but he co-determined the shoot in every phase and crucially influenced it.

Andreas Horvath: http://www.andreas-horvath.com

Questions: Chaveli Sifre Riestra & Nikias Chryssos. 

Pictures: Courtesy of Andreas Horvath. 

The last picture shows the director and his protagonist celebrating New Year’s together. Copyright: Marion Kalter (http://www.marionkalter.com)

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“An Invisible Cauldron Of Black Magick” - Jarett Kobek

Turkish-American writer Jarett Kobek’s novel I HATE THE INTERNET has been called a “relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire” (by Greil Marcus), “entertaining” (by the New York Times) and “useful” (by the author). Kobek was compared to Michel Houellebecq as well as a “mad priest”. We asked him about the book and also his novella ATTA, a fictional biographic account of 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta.

What’s the most common question you are asked about I HATE THE INTERNET?

The question almost every interview starts with is someone saying something like, “Well, we know that you hate the Internet, but is there anything good you can say about it?” This is often tied to the supposed success of the book via chatter on the Internet. 

The book starts and ends with a curse, a death threat, and in-between someone prays to Google and other Internet giants. Is the Internet a spiritual place for you?

I guess it depends on whether or not you consider an invisible cauldron of black magick in services of Necromancers to be “spiritual.” In theory, the necromancy would be predicated on an engagement with spirits and their world, but is the mere presence of the dead “spiritual” in the colloquial sense? Your guess is as good as mine! 

Do you have a favorite meme? 

I like that Scumbag Steve. 

Did you ever write a YouTube comment? 

Never have. Never will. 

There’s a clip of a man getting very agitated at a reading of yours because he can’t understand your position that free expression on Twitter is not possible but rather an illusion, because all the content generated on social media is part of the company making profit. Do you think real political discourse is not possible on these platforms? 

Political discourse is possible, but from the Left, it’s the same kind of discourse that you used to be able to find in cafes in Berkeley and the East Village. Powerless people talking to themselves. What’s new is that whereas before the discourse had a sort of oppositional relationship to our corporate masters, now it serves their financial interest. That guy at the reading in City Lights was right, sort of—he was screaming about there being a Revolution on Twitter. The only problem was that he had the wrong revolution, as he was a Sanders supporter. I think it’s impossible to deny that these platforms are capable of hosting very powerful political dialogues—but only for the Right. After all, Twitter got a cryptofascist elected to the Presidency.

So we generate money, we basically work for Facebook and feed it when we write something there. How is that different to reading an article and the advertisement around it online, or walking through a street with billboards?

The difference, I think, is that the people who created the billboard or wrote the article were, in theory, paid for their efforts. 

Was “Arab Spring” really exploited by companies like Facebook & Twitter in the way that they paid for marketing it as an event they made possible? 

I don’t know if they actually paid for marketing relative to it, but I can assure you that the way the so-called Arab Spring was covered by the news media in the US was as an advertisement for Facebook and Twitter. Google even got in on the cycle when one of their employees was kidnapped. I went to Cairo a few weeks after Mubarak fell and no one mentioned any of these companies. All they talked about was money and how they had none. I did see a Facebook logo spraypainted on the side of a building near Tahrir Square—I assumed the company’s predilection for graffiti artists, they paid someone to put it up. 

How is opposition possible? 

It may not be. We may just have to wait until the people in control get so out of control that they break everything. But it doesn’t hurt to be in opposition—especially if it gets people out of their houses. 

You write that a medium is inhabited by its intention at founding. How did you develop this thought? 

I don’t remember! But I know what must have inspired it: the way that every new technology is presented as a received event, as a foreordained inevitability. Which is really crazy, when you think about it—it suggests that the technology is a fact floating around in the aether, waiting to be discovered, when actually it’s a thing shaped by the perceptions of its creators. It’s a little like a novel—no one receives a novel, everyone knows that someone wrote it. 

Your book is written like it was aimed at a future where the things described have already vanished. Why? 

Writing about the Internet, or technology in general, is a thankless task. Books about the Internet start to rot from the moment of publication. Imagine if I Hate the Internet had been written ten years ago—it’d be a book about MySpace. So there was a strategy cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—to treat every day objects and ideas as if they required definition and explanation. This ended up being both funny and, hopefully, hedges against the future. 

There is also a timeless quality in your novel ATTA, a young man, lost, almost like a Bildungsroman. It’s also a story of psychosis, of madness, with a musical undertone, dark, brooding, funny. I was wondering about some elements, structure-wise, the countdown of chapters, the change of perspective. How did you come to these decisions? 

Most of it was instinctual, just trying to figure out how to make the book as readable as I could. ATTA is a strange book—it’s the best thing I’ve written, but it’s also the one which felt the most like channeling, as if the normal decisions and thoughts in terms of writing were more received than consciously thought out. 

I like how the father talks to his son, treating him like a child. How much of the story was invented, how much was research?

I think ATTA is about 95% factual, and that factuality is very heavily researched. The 5% that’s not factual is pretty clearly fictitious. In terms of the father/son relationship, that’s pretty much based on interviews with his father, where his father admitted that this was how he talked to his son. 

How did you research? Where did you travel, what did you read? Did you actually go to Mecca and to Hamburg? 

I didn’t travel for the book. I didn’t have the money! In terms of the reading, I read everything. Every news article, every book, all the FBI files that got released under an FOIA request that some Truthers put online. Just everything. 

Are you interested in the perspective of Truthers as well? 

No. It’s stupid. But they were useful in doing the book, because they’d put so much of the FBI’s information online. 

How did it feel to write this? To be in his mind? 

It was fine until the last chapter—when I had to start writing the actual hijacking, it was the only time my own writing made me sick. 

Did you have problems with the idea of sympathizing too much with Atta, idolizing or setting a monument to him?

No. I don’t think the book is particularly sympathetic to him—unless you believe, which some people might, that even presenting the individual is inherently sympathetic. 

What interested you more in him than someone who was more of a planner in the background, like let’s say Bin Laden? 

The interesting thing about the historical figure of Mohamed Atta was his educational background—he did his bachelor’s in engineer/architecture, and his master’s in urban planning. His master’s thesis was on the city of Aleppo, and was specifically about what he viewed as the imposition of Western style architecture on an ancient “Islamic-Oriental” city. In effect, he wrote a document that critiqued modernist architecture and then suggested that it be pulled down and destroyed. 

After 9/11, the event was viewed entirely through the prism of Islamic-themed terrorism. But the reality is that Atta wasn’t an imam—he hadn’t even really gone to a madrassa. His training was entirely in architecture, he’d presented this thesis about removing modernist architecture, and then he participated in the biggest attack on modernist architecture in world history. Surely this is a useful prism through which to write about the event? As a matter of architectural critique. 

So that’s where the book came from. 

It seemed Atta wanted to put Aleppo back in some kind of “primary”, more human state when he wrote his thesis – and Manhattan with its rectangular structure and buildings like the WTC is the antipode to this. You also mention Yamasaki’s failed housing project. And in both novels, there’s this theme of gentrification, of a changing city (Aleppo, San Francisco). What interests you about that? 

By virtue of being overprivileged, I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life in American cities that are either in the process of being gentrified or have been gentrified. When I moved to New York, I was 17 and it was still fairly grimy in the East Village, and I was young enough to believe that this was a permanent state, that the East Village would always be scummy and interesting. Reality disabused me of that notion and I’ve been dealing with the wound ever since. 

Where do you live now? 

I’m back in Los Angeles. My solution to gentrification was to move to a neighborhood originally built for the gentry. 

How has the book been received? 

It did well at first, was then ignored for a few years, and then got picked up by academics, who seem to like writing about it and teaching it. So it’s had a very nice life and sells reasonably well for a small press book. It’s gone into several printings. 

ATTA was published by MIT, if I see that correctly, an institution that, as you describe it in your latest novel, develops arms for the military. How do you feel about that? 

The book was published by Semiotext(e), who are distributed by MIT Press, so it’s a little more complicated than saying that they published it. In terms of my feeling, I think the act of being published by almost anyone but yourself is an act of moral compromise, but that one accepts the reality of the situation and goes forward. 

Do you see yourself as an angry young man? 

I’m past the age where I can comfortable call myself young. But I’m definitely angry. 

I HATE THE INTERNET / ICH HASSE DIESES INTERNET: 

http://weheardyoulikebooks.com/releases/i-hate-the-internet/ 

http://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/ich_hasse_dieses_internet_ein_nuetzlicher_roman/9783103972603 

ATTA:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/atta 

Questions: Nikias Chryssos. Picture: Courtesy of Jarett Kobek.

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“A great human tragicomedy” - Stefan Fischer & Hieronymus Bosch

With two exhibitions in Berlin and new books out by Taschen and Reclam, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch a.k.a. Jheronimus van Aken (1450-1516) seems to be everywhere these days. The Taschen Book “Hieronymus Bosch. Complete Works” features beautiful new photography, a huge fold-out spread of his painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, and an extensive text about his life, work, and influence. We talked to art historian and Bosch expert Dr. Stefan Fischer, the author.

How did you come to the Taschen book project? What interested you in Bosch? 

I’ve been dealing with Bosch for a long time, since I’ve studied art history. My PhD thesis dealt with Bosch’s art as well. When I wasn’t finished with that, I didn’t even dream of writing a big monograph. A few months after my thesis was published, Taschen Books approached me, later the publishing house Reclam. What fascinates me about Bosch is the complexity of his art itself and as a subject of science: Why are his pictures not as “pretty” as others of that time, why is his art not as “consumable” as others, how are his images structured, what tradition do they stand in? In what way are they subjective?

Can you tell something about the technical genesis of the book? 

Taschen contacted the museums and when the pictures did not seem good enough, new ones were ordered. Sometimes they compared the prints on site with the originals to reproduce the originals as good as possible. The book was then printed in Italy using a variety of paper grades.

What’s the difference to previous editions? 

The budget-priced new edition has a smaller format and only one paper grade. And the big fold-out poster of the Garden of Earthly Delights is missing. The book is well-structured: First his life and work, then the catalog of his work and the appendix. My Bosch book for Reclam focuses much more on Bosch’s biography, his role models, the literature he was reading, his family, the comrades of his brotherhood, the artists and clients.

He comes from a family of painters. In what way did that influence him? 

Bosch’s father had many more brothers who were painters, and Bosch was only the third-oldest son or, to put it differently, the youngest of three. His oldest brother took over the workshop. That’s the way it was handled at the time, even city citizens thought in dynastic ways. Bosch was sent to Latin school, maybe he was supposed to become a cleric and take another profession. That would have been a social rise. But then he was educated as a painter, maybe because his relatives, i.e. his many uncles who didn’t have children, died one after the other. Within a few years, there were only six or seven van Akens, Bosch’s actual name, who were painters and wanted to live from that job left. When finally Bosch’s father tied, only him and his two brothers remained. It was helpful that Bosch was educated, and he married a wealthy woman above his rank who brought a house and some land into the marriage. A few years later he could even enter the elitist Liebfrauenbruderschaft, Brotherhood of Our Lady, which found him assignments.

What kind of society was that? 

The Liebfrauenbruderschaft was public and had thousands of members. But there was an elitist inner leading circle, the sworn brothers, around 50-60 members. They were mostly highly educated clerics with different levels of consecration like lawyers, doctors, and priests. They came from the wealthy upper class. They held a mass twice a week in their own, representatively equipped chapel, fastened on Fridays, met every six weeks for a communal meal, celebrated publicly on Marian and John holidays and took care of nationwide contacts to important personalities.

**Who were the clients for his paintings? **

At first citizens of his city, then also people from out-of-town who ordered rather traditional paintings with a religious function, finally the higher nobility in the Netherlands who asked for big triptychs.

How did Bosch develop artistically from there? 

At first, he adopted the art of his family and his town that was rather provincial, a mere rip-off of the sculpting and painting sought-after internationally. The demons rose with the employers: Initially only for his town’s citizens, then for Antwerp, one of the art and commercial centers around 1500, finally the higher nobility in the Netherlands and Spain. They had the highest demands.

Which worldview speaks from his paintings? Is he more interested in psychological conditions, magical worlds or a religious-ethical ideology? 

It’s mainly about a religious-ethical worldview, only in certain parts about psychological conditions or even magical worlds. At Bosch’s time, there was pluralism in the way religion was acted out: There were ritualized, ascetic, intellectual but also magical-superstitious modes of behavior. The latter consisted of asking certain saints for certain assistance, against illness for example or the success of a business or a private matter. If that succeeded, the saint or the saints were made a present.

Is there a clear dichotomy of good and evil? Are the paintings “moral”? 

Yes, the good are mostly the ascetically living saints. They are mostly depicted in the middle but often so small that you almost have to look for them. Evil appears in the form of devils, demons, and sinners. It’s swarming around the saints or is embedded into the landscape in the background. That way, a polarity between the extremes of Good and Evil is constructed. Bosch’s paintings are moral in the way that they suggest a moderate, cautious, and reflected way of life to the viewer, something between the extremes. This was fully in accordance with the humanists and the “reform Christian” oriented laymen. They rejected a superficial, only ritualized way of religious practice. They stood in for a self-critical and reflective way of life.

Was Bosch religious himself or did he challenge the doctrine of the church at the time? 

He belongs to an educated and reflected, moderately or even ascetically living, intellectual position of Christianity in the Netherlands. A mixture of humanism and the Devotio Moderna of those “reform Christian” oriented laymen and clerics. He did not doubt the current doctrine of the church but rather how one should live as a good Christian. For example, he didn’t depict his saints like the patron saints one called to not get sick, to become healthy again or to survive a trip without a hold-up. His saints are examples of a wise and careful conduct of life amidst a world of dangers. Today you would probably call it consumption critique. He saw himself, like the painters of the Renaissance, as an intellectual worker and rejected a fixation on the material-carnal.

There are many depictions of jugglers and magicians in his paintings. Did he see church in that context as well? 

He surely opposed hypocrites and frauds within the church. He himself depicts greedy and false bishops, priests, nuns, and monks in the Haywain Triptych and the Temptation of Saint Anthony. But that was part of treformation, everyone reproached everyone else with something - that they didn’t represent the ideal of their rank or their profession – if there was any occasion.

Sometimes there is the feeling of a certain arrogance in his panoramas. Did he look down on people, especially “ordinary men”? 

Yes, indeed, he for sure was proud that he “made” it: He arrived on the top, as a man and as a painter. But in general, he looked down on inappropriate ways of behavior. He liked making fun of that and show how silly or absurd this behavior is. He is a painting cabaret artist. In the end, everybody receives her and his just deserts.

In his Last Judgment the rescued ones are the minority. Why? Are we all sinners? Did he have a “sinful” life himself? 

Well, that raises the titillation for the viewer: Just a few are the chosen ones! You have to look at it more didactical or rhetorical. Bosch was no pessimist but a critic. He shows that salvation is possible but you have to be very self-disciplined and attentive to avoid sin and foolishness. “Common” depictions of Judgment Day with well-balanced proportions of damned and redeemed were put on display in courts of justice. There, it would have been inappropriate to depict only a few redeemed – that is not convicted ones. Bosch’s paintings of Judgment are presumably best understood as rather private and spiritual, they aim at individual viewers as stimulation for reflection.

But even in his paradises, we find “filth”, elements of depravity. Did he doubt the existence of a flawless paradise? 

Yes, Bosch is a pessimist here: The human body and sensual enjoyment are ephemeral, that’s why one should focus on the rescue of his and her soul – which is eternal. The material and fleshly are “accident-sensitive”. The world, with everything that is in it, is ambivalent from the beginning – that’s how theologians saw it as well. It depends on the adherence of God’s instructions. But Adam and Eve gave that up in paradise already. Bosch depicts everything in a theologically and dogmatically correct way, he merely emphasizes the negative aspects of things that other painters conceal or omit.

Did he develop the symbolism in his paintings himself or was that a characteristic of the time? 

The symbolism is a characteristic of the time but it is rarely as concentrated and complex as in Bosch’s paintings. As an example, single motives can be understood with so-called bestiaries that explain the features and behaviors of animals and let one deduct the symbolism. The owl is a bird of the night that brings doom or seduces to evil. Then there are the composite beings that Bosch arranges mostly himself and which are not as easy to understand. The composite beings often ridicule acts of the saints so that you can “unriddle” them mostly by their context. The fact that Bosch often painted triptychs increases their complexity as there are often references from one panel to the other.

What were the influences for his creatures? 

During the entire Middle Ages, the monstrous was part of the cultural perception, similar to other pre-modern cultures. As signs of the extraordinary, it marked the threshold to another, ulterior world or reality: The power of the Devil, the deformation through sin or the unsaved, non-Christian nations. It was always something that complemented the view of the world, something aesthetically outstanding and overwhelming and through that, something marvelous and mysterious. In Bosch’s time, the monstrous, which was even in 16th century’s art literature often just seen as an individual, artistic stylistic device of single artists, appears more and more in the form of allegories with an artistic, symbolic, and didactic function. With his composite beings, Bosch shows his skill of inventing, namely new and bizarre figurations. And you can even reflect about them, for example which bad or stupid forms of behaviors they depict.

What’s your favorite painting or favorite element in a painting? 

The scene that shows Saint Anthony surrounded by a variety of satirical looking figures in the middle of the Antonius triptych in Lisbon. Antonius appears very tranquil, almost amused, and looks at the viewer from out of the painting. Demons are around him, rather comical spook characters like noblemen, clerics, and beggars, who all seem to want something from him but Antonius does not notice them. In the background, Christ appears inconspicuously in the ruin of a tower and looks at Antonius. The gazes and the directions of the gazes simply tell everything: The personified tranquility on one hand, chaos, the noise, the garish, and the absurd.

How much did humor and irony matter to him? 

They play a big role. Among painters, he’s the greatest mocker of his time. You just have to take a look at his cephalopod demons or how superficial and silly people act. A great human tragicomedy!

Taschen Books: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/01102/facts.hieronymus_bosch_complete_works.htm 

Reclam: 

http://www.reclam.de/detail/978-3-15-011003-4/Fischer__Stefan/Im_Irrgarten_der_Bilder

Exhibitions: 

http://www.smb.museum/ausstellungen/detail/hieronymus-bosch-und-seine-bilderwelt-im-16-und-17-jahrhundert.html 

http://www.boschalive.com/

Questions: Nikias Chryssos. Pictures: Taschen Books.