Barbara

Started by wilder, March 23, 2012, 09:27:28 PM

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wilder





Barbara, a doctor, has applied for an exit visa from the GDR. In retribution she is transferred from Berlin to a provincial hospital. Her lover Jörg in the West is preparing her escape. Barbara's new boss treats her with unexpected kindness and understanding. Is he an informer? Is he in love with her? Barbara no longer has  a clear grasp on things.

Written and Directed by Christian Petzold
Release Date - December 21, 2012
IMDB


wilder

Potential spoilers herein

Life in a bubble
Christian Petzold on his new GDR drama "Barbara"
March 21, 2012

Berliner Zeitung: Mr. Petzold, with "Barbara" you undertake a journey back in time to East Germany in 1980. It is a very historical film - and also a film about a country that was probably very foreign to you.

Christian Petzold: No, East Germany was not so unfamiliar to me. My parents fled the GDR. I spent my initial period in West Germany in transitional housing. Later, between the years of six and sixteen, I spent many extended summer holidays with my relatives in the East. For my parents East Germany became a country from which they had emerged triumphant. They had left at the right time and were now able to buy a Ford, for example. In such moments I felt a bit ashamed for them. But basically they did not travel back to the "other side" to demonstrate that they were better than others, but merely because they were homesick.

In a strange way this was passed on to my brothers and me. We could not wait to travel back to the East. When the Wall came down our second home disappeared. When I was working on the film "Yella" with Nina Hoss in Wittenberge I had a GDR flashback. This city, which seemed a little bit forgotten, reminded me of my childhood stays in Rudolstadt, Zwickau and Karl-Marx-Stadt. I began to reexamine the East and take a look at what had been lost.

Did you look for appropriate literature as inspiration for your film? "Barbara" feels like a novella.

Two books were important to this film. One was Hermann Broch's novella "Barbara", which is set in 1928 and tells the story of a female doctor who takes a job in a rural hospital in order to hide her communist activities from the police. The other was the novel "Rummelplatz" (fairground) by Werner Bräunig. My friend Hartmut Bitomsky says that only through this novel did he again realise the extent to which anti-Fascists, workers, farmers and intellectuals had tried to establish a better country in eastern Germany in 1945.

In Bräunig's book there are two passages that I will always remember. A doctor's son from a well-do-to family is consumed by physical work for the first time in a uranium mine. He defines and objectifies himself through this work. Work had almost completely disappeared from the literature and cinema in the West. The second passage that appealed to me very much was when the book tells how skilled workers were almost completely wooed to the West, and women replaced them. For women, this brought a new self-understanding about what it meant to be a woman in the world. I wanted to tell a story about this.

However, in Bräunig's work you already sense that the GDR hardly stood a chance.

Yes, the country is largely isolated, and already in the history of the country's founding, Nazi and apparatnik structures had joined forces. I wanted to relate this, but not from above, from the perspective of a novel, not in a gesture of omniscience. For me cinema is more closely related to novellas than novels. I have more affinity for situations in which history surfaces in relationships between people, suddenly and explosively, in all its inconsolableness and in all its utopian force.

Before you begin filming you have developed a tradition of watching films with your team in order to get everyone into the mood. What did you watch this time?

No DEFA films. I rejected that from the very start. While writing the screenplay, I did watch a number of GDR films, of course, but I only used "Jahrgang 45" (born in '45) by Jürgen Böttcher as a point of departure. And not because of the plot but because of the feeling the film conveys. It is the DEFA nouvelle vague film - an authentic portrait of a generation that experienced the greatest hope and deepest disappointment of their lives in the year 1968. The Prague Spring had brought lightness and sensuality into the system. The moment the tanks of the Warsaw Pact crowded into Prague, it was all over. For me the exciting thing about "Jahrgang 45" was that the main character, a young worker, returns to work after taking three days holiday to try to resolve his love life. Work is a source of identity for him. Work and love are tightly interwoven. In contrast, in the West you always had the feeling that love has to defy work. Or love can only take place when you are on vacation.

The work shown in your film involves people in a clinic in northern East Germany. Barbara, a doctor from the respected Charité clinic in Berlin, has applied for an exit visa and is sent here by order of the government. Preparing to flee via the Baltic sea she encounters a colleague, whom she initially treats with a high degree of mistrust.

The hospital in our film assumes the function of the factory, of the site of production. Here two people come together who for all intents and purposes don't like each other. The man is a proletarian doctor. He did not become a doctor because his father was a doctor, but, as he says, because the system gave him and many others the opportunity to take on educated professions. This is why I cast Ronald Zehrfeld in the role. He has a strong physical presence, he seems proletarian but also refined. Not someone who socialised in libraries but someone whose educational path had been painful. And then a blonde female doctor comes from Berlin, who has applied for an exit visa, a young, so-called better-situated woman with a clear degree of class conceit. However, she examines this arrogance when she is denigrated by her circumstances. She asks herself: What are the rulers afraid of? The educated middle class!

In order to protect herself from the resentment directed at her because she wants to leave East Germany, she surrounds herself with an intensified sense of class arrogance. Suddenly she wants to "separate" herself and speaks sentences that seem to come from a French drama. This is how we introduce these two figures. We need the hospital, so that the two figures come to respect each other through their work. Love is not something that just blossoms for these two; they have to attain it. They both handle their instruments with care, they both have particular skills, deal with patients' emotions so brilliantly that each of them becomes someone to admire.

Like the central characters in your films "Gespenster" (Ghosts) and "Yella", Barbara also lives in a twilight realm, balancing between yesterday and tomorrow, here and there. In a universe of intuitions rather than certainties. A sleepwalker.

Cinema is closely linked to dreams. This does not mean that cinema provides the images of dreams, but in contrast to television or the computer, you sit in a dark room and are physically present but absent at the same time. In prepping for "Barbara" one of the films we watched was Roberto Rossellini's "Stromboli". I did not have the impression that  Rossellini was a great researcher trying to scrupulously convey how the Americans occupied Italy after World War II. However, I did have the feeling that the film came very close to life at this time and the tumult of emotions. Why? Because "Stromboli" is like a dream.

"Barbara" is not an objective view of the GDR but quite the opposite. It is told completely from the subjective perspective of its title figure.

Only in one scene in the very beginning did I decide to use the perspective of a surveillance camera. Instead, I wanted to only film personal gazes, how people look at each other. Looking and being looked at. We film the impressions of an individual. And also impressions of a world with confined borders. This has much to do with East German society, with the thousands of private islands that people had, the retreat into the protected sphere of the private. In "Barbara" the aim is to convey the sense of a life lived in a bubble through the hospital. The film was never conceived as claiming to show how things were in the East as a whole, but from the very beginning the idea was to concentrate on this bubble, this niche.

Precisely in her protected space Barbara is overcome by a strong sense of insecurity.

When someone has decided to leave but has to remain, it makes for an interesting time. Someone who leaves something develops a great sensibility for what is being left behind. Suddenly there is a feeling of having made mistakes, of having missed something, of not having taken the other, unknown path but of having cultivated one's own sense of discomfort. Barbara carries this feeling within her; never before had she recognised the original beauty of East German ideals. She realises this but is unwilling to admit it; she doesn't want to have any doubts. And yet, the moment the film begins so do her doubts. She understands clearly: I will go to the West, there I will be warmly received. I will find work right away, will be recognised as a doctor. There I have a man waiting for me. He owns a large four-room apartment with a view of the Rhein. It all sounds as good as an imagined holiday. But in the two-and-a-half weeks in which the film takes place Barbara is shown a Western mail order catalogue and her lover from the West says to her: You won't ever have work ever again. I earn enough for both of us. 

A powerful statement that sets a lot of things in Barbara in motion.

At one point Harun Farocki, who wrote the screenplay with me, said that we didn't need this sentence. I admit, I am also wary of these kinds of statements that jump out at you. And then I talked with Simone Bär, our casting woman, and she convinced me that the sentence had to stay. It is absolutely key. Without this sentence, the whole drama of 1989 would no longer be comprehensible. When the women of the GDR were taken over by the West, suddenly they lost everything that they had worked for and achieved in a matter of seconds. They were thrown back a hundred years, if you will. I understood right away: a row house development, the Avon lady rings the doorbell, the women in the West were kept at home. And Barbara understands this the moment she holds the mail order catalogue in her hands: I will stay at home and page through the catalogue for the rest of my life. That can't be it. Then a chill comes over her, which is at least as powerful as the surge of hate that the East had aroused in her. Then she is utterly distraught.

In contrast to the many films made about East Germany in recent years, it is not a film about leaving but about landing.

Since Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister", in every Bildungsroman a figure sets out and leaves their world. But apparently these novels are often not read through to the end. The heroes end up returning home, including Wilhelm Meister, Green Henry, and all the others. This return home is the most interesting part; this is not the failure that it is usually considered to be but the result of a process of maturity. The film is intended to end at the moment when both Barbara and André have passed through a maturation. From then on the story belongs to them, and it is no longer meant for us. Regardless of what happens to them - maybe they have to go to jail, maybe they have to undergo questioning. One thing stands clear: they have opened a door.

The agony of the GDR is made physically evident to the viewer, also through the exhaustion of the main characters.

In the final sickbed scene both Nina and Ronald asked, independently of one another, for chairs with backrests, not stools. I asked why, and they answered that what they had endured in the previous ninety minutes of the film could not be acted out on a stool. With a proper chair you can sit back, the body relaxes and uncramps. Words fall away. You just sit there so naked, stripped bare - you can only convey this in a chair with a backrest.

How difficult was it for you to reconstruct the setting of the GDR in the early '80s?

As I mentioned, it's my first historical film, and I have really gained a taste for it. Of course, you can't always reinvent cinema for yourself, but you also live with the films that surround you, which themselves are historical. These films often reconstruct the past merely through the set, but I was not satisfied with that.

François Truffaut and Jean Renoir once had a conversation about Renoir's "The Golden Coach". Truffaut was of the opinion that you could only do history in the studio, you couldn't show any sky, because the sky is always the sky of today. Renoir disagreed. You had to use both, the studio and the sky, that is, the historical and the present. If we were to act as if the film were only about the past and had to relationship to our present time, then the film itself would be a lie. I though to myself: he is actually right. In American films the stars are the link to the present - Russel Crowe as a gladiator, for example. For me, the logical consequence was that "Barbara" needed lots of sky, lots of wind, flowers, colours - absolutely not what we imagine in terms of East Germany, ORWO film material for example or the faded tones of the TV detective series "Polizeiruf 110". We wanted our film to be as bright as "Heißer Sommer" (Hot Summer). We collected thousands of photographs and we were amazed how much colour there actually was in the GDR. The pictures were hung in various spaces and the actors had time to contemplate them, and that proved to be a decisive component of the rehearsals. 

How did you find the locations?

The magnificent Romanian film "Police, Adjective" made me realise how East European cities have a completely different architectural fabric from those in the West. They always have a patchwork construction. Here something from the Victorian era, here a modern building from the 1950s, everything all together. And that's precisely what we were looking for. A housing complex built for railroad employees during the Weimar Republic, a Social Democratic government project. A place with lots of light but in a state of decay with a few modern details. We found just this kind of place in Kirchmöser in Brandenburg. Before we began filming the actors were allowed to spend two days in "their" rooms, in the apartments and in the hospital, and they defended these spaces to the last.

One of the film's discoveries is the experience of how two people develop a new, very intimate language of their own under extreme circumstances.

We watched "To Have and Have Not" by Howard Hawks with the single aim of studying how lovers set themselves apart from the predominant language in an extreme situation. They talk between the lines. Their language is more physical, more dance-like in order to create other viewpoints, another language, another form of eroticism - and this is what Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld also intended. This passion is most evident at the end of the film, and it could have served as a GDR utopia, if it had stood a chance. In phases of utter stagnation or agony, history itself is constantly in motion, and nothing is clear, also not now, in our time.

You mentioned that you have developed a taste for historical films...

Yes, my next film will also be historically based. It is set in 1945 - an Auschwitz survivor returns home.

Also with Nina Hoss?

I really enjoy working with her, although even my friends say "enough already"! But then I answer with Fassbinder and Schygulla or Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich or Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. When I have a project like "Barbara" and I know that Nina Hoss will play the lead, I feel reassured. I prefer to think about my projects lying down, when half-asleep, instead of researching in the library. And I can conduct somnambulant conversations with Nina Hoss about what dreams and in-between worlds actually mean. She doesn't come with set ideas, but joins me on my search and is open to what comes. There are two lines on her face that tell me if something is right or not. We talk together extensively before filming, and on the set we are almost completely in agreement. Her attitude toward the people she works with is similar. She is utterly unpretentious.

Source



wilder

Cineuropa Interview with Christian Petzold
March 2, 2012

How important was it for you to shoot Barbara, and what triggered the desire to do it?

Christian Petzold: Although I was born in the West, my parents fled the GDR. I was in the former GDR to shoot my last films and while I was there, I felt a certain homesickness. I don't know where it came from. The idea was that to talk about the GDR, all you had to do was write a novel that would sort everything out, but what we really need to write are novellas, vignettes about collapsing systems and about love. So we took the Hermann Broch novella, set it in the East, and turned it into the film Barbara.

So this is a love story rooted in the everyday life of the GDR?

I found interesting the idea to fall in love through work. For us (even in the cinema), love often comes after work - people fall in love on their holidays, at the Club Med... What fascinates me about the GDR is also that people would work together and that could turn into a love story. East and West are not so far removed from each other, but think of Sam Fuller films, where a woman can be making weapons, and suddenly love comes along: in the West, it sometimes seems that love is something you can find out of a catalogue... I think love is part of a production, not reproduction...

You chose as a final song Nile Rodgers' At last I am free.

We talked about that song at length. It is about love and the civil rights movement. Love and the revolution sometimes have something to do with each other: the colour red, the time of cherries (...) Freedom is not something that you see in the ads, sometimes it means putting up with coldness, loneliness, and there's also an element of that mood in the final image, the look the characters give each other, and then in the song.

Isn't there something grim about the image of the GDR presented here, when Barbara says it's crazy to think one can be happy in this country?

It is revised in the end. That sentence is not important, she says that to her lover not to us. She's not interested in finding a hero to save her, to sacrifice, she just wants to insist that she met him and will follow him. The most decisive sentence is when he says "You can sleep as much as you want when you come, I have enough for the both of us, you won't have to work", a sentence she doesn't respond to, but there's a wave of cold from the West rolling over this emancipation movement in the East – and nine years later, East Germans all got to stay home with money from the CDU...

The film feels like it is not only about the GDR...

Let's talk about the historical angle. Once I was thinking about Chinatown and how crucial the production design was for this film. We wanted to shoot a GDR film with a different production design. We wanted to have autumnal trees and more colourful clothes, to take the historical aspect and show it in a fluid way – GDR always looks so mothballed and stuffy... We wanted to make it look organic, physical, palpable. Then you can get all the emotions – the mistrust, the big decisions – brought into that. Precision is not all about the tiny stupid details – but we did search for the West-German Quelle catalogue for 16 days on ebay. That kind of historical precision is not what the film was about. My focus was not on the GDR but on collapsing regimes and how you can survive in them, and how the people who are left in the rubble can build a lifeboat. I have seen how wretched most East Germans were. I did not want to reconstitute the GDR, my film was not about renactment and high-precision historical drama – which entails reconstituting something about which you can wonder whether it is precisely true or not, whether it is actually true at all, whether it is not reproducing something which is just propaganda, or not... But that's a whole other issue !

Source

wilder

Playing at the New York Film Festival the following dates:

Monday, October 1

6:00pm

Saturday, October 6

12:15pm

Tuesday, October 9

1:00pm

This is also Germany's official entry for the Oscars


Pubrick

the interviews were fun to read, the first one was one of the most intellectual discussions I've read in promotion of a film. You'd never see an American director talk like that about movies, not outside a specialized documentary anyway, like Scorsese given free rein to talk about his favourite colours and where he got them from.

There's a trend in serious European films where they always feel like they were made for a university course.. from Burnt By The Sun, to The Lives Of Others, even with contemporary films like those of Fatih Akin that have nothing to do with the Soviet era.. anywhere you look they all have this component of political and historical context that is often very obvious and intentionally put there to be discussed.

If anyone wonders why all these "boring" European dramas always win so many awards overseas and then get crammed into the foreign film category in the Oscars, it's not cos they're boring,  just that American audiences have no idea how to approach them.

If an American film is set in a different era, it's usually for style, not for any other significant reason.
under the paving stones.

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: Pubrick on September 01, 2012, 08:48:21 PMIf an American film is set in a different era, it's usually for style, not for any other significant reason.

What about Back to the Future III?

wilder

NYFF: 'Barbara' Director Christian Petzold Talks The Influence Of 'Klute' & Reveals What He Plans To Do Next
via The Playlist



When the wall came down, German filmmakers found themselves ushered into two clusters: those that concentrated on the country's fascist past and the others that shined light on anything else. The latter clique was hailed as pushing the medium forward; they often dabbled in social-realism with little dialogue and snail-like pacing -- and though their box office receipts were low in comparison to their brother faction, they seduced international audiences and held their ground at many of the world's foremost film festivals. As the first and second generation of directors emerging after the split, the media dubbed their movement the "Berlin School" (a moniker they're not thrilled over) and the team pressed on making films, a trio of them even coming together to shoot a "Red Riding"-esque trilogy in "Dreileben."

One of those filmmakers was Christian Petzold, responsible for many great collaborations with German actor Nina Hoss in "Yella" and "Jerichow." The dynamic duo return for "Barbara," a subtle period piece centered on one woman in 1980s East Germany. Hoss's titular character arrives as a new employee in a small, quiet hospital, her reserved nature and fierce mug deterring the advances of another doctor at the complex, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). But there's more to her behavior than meets the eye, and eventually it's revealed that she plans to escape the German Democratic Republic with her conspirator husband -- but with the State Security keeping close eye on her suspicious demeanor, it may be easier said than done.

We caught the film at the New York Film Festival and loved the subtlety of its being: "Barbara" refuses to hold your hand, eschewing any expositional moments in favor of low-key scenes that allow the audience to piece together the puzzle in their head. Director Christian Petzold was in the Big Apple to talk about the movie and we had the chance to discuss with him the films that inspired the movie, differences between German and American actors, and what he's got cooking next. "Barbara" will hit US shores on December 21st.

Cracking The Idea
Born on the West side to parents from the East, Petzold had this link to the former GDR but found himself mostly in the dark in regards to what life was actually like for that particular society. "My mother and father spent their whole youth in the GDR and they never talked about it. We always went to the there to visit my relatives and I just thought... 40 years, 17 million people, and nobody was telling their story. The wall fell and nobody wanted to hear from them anymore. In 2002 I wanted to make this period picture, but I couldn't find my position in it because I wasn't a part of it. I'm a guest, from the outside," he explained. It took him almost five years to finally crack the perspective of what eventually became "Barbara" thanks to a book by an East German communist. "The author wrote about the dreams that founded the GDR, all the dreams of the anti-fascist people from the exile, the survivors from the Nazi time. They wanted to build up a society that was a better Germany -- socialism. These dreams eventually changed into nightmares." That's when things clicked for the director and the titular character played by Nina Hoss was born. "Barbara would be a doctor, a fantastic one in the East, and she had to be part of this dream. She must be a socialistic woman. But she lost her trust, so this must be tough -- someone who lost the dream and what is coming behind the dream. It's for her person and also a story for the whole society."

Exploitation Of A Country For Box Office
"The windows of history always have the fantastic position of telling stories, they're telling about the GDR as if it was North Korea or something," expounded Petzold on his distaste for any sort of representation of East Germany that was severely grim or miserablist. "The West had advertisements, music, erotica, everything, and in the East they had nothing, they looked like anabolic swimmers who swam one world record after another and they're all ugly, etc. And this I hate, because when I stayed there as a child, it was a complicated system with many people who were looking and searching for their position." He refused to showcase only the horrible elements of that time and place, instead finding an interesting middle ground between the good and the bad. "The GDR was an island surrounded by capitalistic structures and societies, so for themselves they were like an island with two meanings. One the one hand it's like Robinson Crusoe's island, an island of dreams, a paradise. One the other, it's a prison. From these two conflicting elements there is a tension between them and this tension must be where 'Barbara' has its place," he explained, adding that he wanted to "make pictures of infection." The inhabitants are infected by the mistrust of their government, and on the flip-side, the political body is poisoned by its people, who just want freedom and independence.

Influential Films
Instead of conventional rehearsing, the "Berlin School" filmmaker prefers to spend their time watching films that he feels are important to the project -- rehearsals extinguish the off-the-cuff, in-the-moment collaboration that Petzold favors. "It's not that I wrote a script that I wanted to realize. I hate that cinema stuff. I'm so glad that the best movie according to Sight & Sound is now 'Vertigo' and not 'Citizen Kane' anymore. Nothing against Orson Welles, but 'Kane' is always the movie of a genius, and I don't like that. 'I have so many fantasies in my head and I just want to realize them!' For me cinema is a collective work and therefore the rehearsals I do are much different than practicing lines and hitting specific beats."

Some of the movies that were most important to "Barbara" were "Klute," "The French Connection," "To Have And Have Not," "Summer With Monika," and "Stromboli." "After the second day of looking at movies, the actors said that the subjects had nothing to do with the GDR in the 1980s. But the movies have to do with a morality. I wanted to open the actors to cinema. 'French Connection' is a movie where you can reflect the position of the director. He's never over-the-shoulder of the sniper, he's always on the sight of the victims and the weak. The murderers don't have a subjective. 'Stromboli' is a movie about an exile, 'To Have' is about a man who wants to live on a fishing boat because the sea is his only society. This is always the mistake for a person, you cannot have an apartment on the ship. The society infected everything and you can see the infection in Humphrey Bogart and you can see it with politics and love in the same moment with Lauren Bacall," mentioned the director, who stressed that the actors loved Howard Hawks' film so much that they watched it an additional three times without him. "There was a scene in a night market in 'Klute' where Donald Sutherland is buying things for dinner and Jane Fonda watches him. He takes a melon and he's touching it and it's very erotic. She sees that he has senses, he has skill. She is living in her body, in her apartment, like a tank. So she's looking at him and she knows in this moment, he's not representing, he's presenting and it's a total difference. So love starts at this moment." It seems that both "To Have and Have Not" and "Klute" were very influential towards the love story between Hoss and Zehrfeld, as their relationship plays out very similarly to those in the aforementioned films.

On Acting, German vs. American
"I thought about American acting because it's totally based on European professors like Stanislavski, but also it is physical, it's no expression. It's something to do because the theater is so bad here, in Germany we have so many actors coming from stage, and that means loud speaking, face working. The American acting is of hiding and being. The people open a window, they have the skill to do it. The German theater actors never open a window because there are none on stage. Therefore I make rehearsals with actors I show them five American movies, by Gus Van Sant or something. 'This is walking,' I say. Germans can't walk in front of the camera because they're looking at the camera. When you're on the street, everyone is looking 45 degrees to the ground. They are thinking, dreaming. But the German actors want to express something for the audience, they are never on their alone. People on the street are dreaming, in a bubble or something, they're a bit sad when you see them. They're thinking about their children, money, etc. The German actors have to learn so much."

Next Stop, 1945
It seems Petzold isn't done with the past -- without a breath, the filmmaker already knows exactly what he's doing next. "It will be in Berlin, 1945, in which a survivor of Auschwitz is returning to get her life back." His muse Nina Hoss will be on deck again, and also returning from "Barbara" will be Ronald Zehrfeld and most of his trusty crew, including Director of Photography Hans Fromm. He does stress that he hasn't got the money just yet -- the film requires a bigger budget than the film he is currently promoting -- but he remains confident that this will be his next outing.

wilder

Spatial Suspense: A Conversation with Christian Petzold
via Mubi
written by Daniel Kasman
16 October 2012



Christian Petzold's Barbara was one of the standout films at Toronto, where I wrote a brief note on it:

...set in East Germany in 1980, [Barbara] finds a female doctor recently released from incarceration having to doubly-navigate the world by both dodging the suspicions of all those around her in her new provincial assignment and at the same time turn her own suspicions on those who could be her neighbors, peers, friends or even lovers. In other words: living in a police state, you are as suspect to the state as others are to you, and you to them. This comes out nicely, if a bit too neatly, too schematically, in Barbara, where ostensibly conventions of the thriller and of the romance overlap: "Am I attracted to him?" becomes, or is, "Do I trust him?" "Will I sleep with him?" becomes, or is, "Is this man a Stasi agent?" One could hardly imagine a more exhausting existence—which certainly explains Petzold's usual steely restraint and impeccable, heightened precision: a mise-en-scène held in check as everyone in it must, too, hold themselves in reserve to forestall a tell that could mean their lives. ...Its acute focus and especially its disturbingly casual, almost normative approach to making a period film (not stylistically similar to but philosophically like Michael Mann's ahistorical historicity in Public Enemies) is sleek and haunting. The way it presents the heightened risk of living in the world at the same time it flattens the sense that this dangerous world is something in the past, far removed, is undoubtedly a very bold gesture.

Barbara is also playing the New York Film Festival, where at a press conference Petzold had already detailed East Germans' reactions: some thanking him for capturing the terrible paranoia of the Stasi surveillance era, some thanking him for capturing the ease of a pre-capitalist world where each patient would be attended by four doctors in a public hospital; where surveillance had yet to become autonomous and—as Holy Motors puts it—smaller than the people it captures. David Phelps and I took the occasion to meet and chat with the director on the rooftop of a building at the end of a street on the East Side of Manhattan, a vision of the evolution of New York since Wyler's Dead End. We talked casually, launched by a mention of Henry James and Petzold's love of Jack Clayton's The Innocents, and segueing into the terrifying reveal in Petzold's Dreileben film, Beats Being Dead. All the while we took in the roof's unexpected and unusual view: Long Island City across the river, the Queensboro Bridge spanning the two islands, and, between the two, another, smaller presence, Roosevelt Island, terminated in the overgrown ruins of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: ...During the premiere of Dreileben at Berlinale, my film was the first of the trilogy, and Dominik Graf is sitting behind me. He hadn't seen the movie before, because we didn't want to see or talk to the others about what they were doing. His wife, Carolina Link—she won an Oscar about ten years ago—she's sitting beside him. And then there's this scene—and she screams so hard and then she comes to me and screams in my face: "WHY?!"

DANIEL KASMAN: Sounds like a great compliment!

PETZOLD: Yes, it's a compliment. Dominik told me after that she hates to feel this kind of fear, eh? I like this very much, I want to do it more often [laughs].

DAVID PHELPS: You didn't know any of the other directors' films? You knew their stories though...

PETZOLD: We did work together, we had some shooting days. But during and after editing we didn't want to see the versions of the others. It was good for me. There's also the producers, when they know we're talking about the editing, they might come to the editing and change something, perhaps make the three stories more together, overlap, as if one person had made them, and we didn't want that. So we said that once editing starts, our friendship is in the fridge for three months and then it's okay.

KASMAN: It was tremendous idea for a project. What made that possible, German television money?

PETZOLD: There was no money outside of the television. It was very cheap! All three films together cost four million dollars.

KASMAN: And yours was the most expensive, because it was shot on 35mm?

PETZOLD: No, no. It was my first and last film on digital.

KASMAN: Oh, I thought yours was on 35mm, Dominik's was on 16mm and Christoph Hochhäusler's was shot on the Red.

PETZOLD: First time in my life I tried digital! Christoph is always telling me—because I want to make 35, I'm a 35 guy, I love Kodak, the colors are human, the skin of all people is better—and he told me I'm a fucking romantic and I have to be modern. Every time the Left guys, like me, they don't want to make breakthrough things, they don't want to make things that are modern, they're always thinking of better old times. So, I tried once, I tried with a Red. I hated so many things.

KASMAN: Like what?

PETZOLD: I hate that there is really no space, because it is too sharp. I had to destroy the sharpness. And then the post production is very expensive. 35 is the same price. With digital, after editing you need post production with the cameraman—it's very expensive. It looks so ugly you have to work on it.

KASMAN: It's funny you say you want to destroy the sharpness, because it seems a kind of default style of digital filmmaking, the Haneke or Fincher approach of rooms in deep space with no focal plane, you see everything very clearly.

PETZOLD: Yeah, I don't like that. For me, I need that there's a room but the room's more in the imagination than you can see it in sharpness, in focus.

PHELPS: When I see all those hallways in your films, I think of horror films, like Argento or Carpenter.

PETZOLD: They are very important for me. I always think about it.

PHELPS: It's a suspense.

PETZOLD: Yes, a spatial suspense. Because the picture has to be objective and subjective in the same moment. Digital is always objective, its look is never subjective.

PHELPS: One of the things I'm always amazed at in your films, and particularly in Barbara, is the sound. The scene I'm really thinking of is when Barbara is going down into the basement, and she hears dogs that are barking the background and she keeps looking off camera. You know, we watch all these movies in which characters are standing around talking to each other and it's unclear if anyone can even hear anything that they're saying. But in Barbara, she's noticing all the sounds around her. And when you keep her noticing the sounds around her, you keep us noticing them, too.

PETZOLD: Yeah, because we make the sound mix before we shoot. For example when we use a score, with music, like in Dreileben for example, we have loud speakers on the set playing the score for the actors. It's like a dance.

KASMAN: That sounds like making a silent film, where the directors played music to put his actors in the mood.

PHELPS: And here what's the score, the dogs barking?

PETZOLD: In Barbara there is no score, we have dogs, engines, birds, for example. So, for the actors we prepare the sounds before, and they can hear it on set. Most sounds, not all! Otherwise the sound engineer would kill me, because he has to mix the original sound and he's working on his little machine. The reaction of the actor to the sound has to be natural. It's the ambiance. The ambiance must be the acoustic room of the German Democratic Republic, 1980, this must be on the scene too, not just in post production. For me, the post production is not to build a new movie, I'm not a musician or composer. I'm not a man sitting on an Apple with Final Cut Pro, like all the musicians, the nerds today. The movies are a product of collective work, therefore I don't to have to resort to tricks. The actors like it.

PHELPS: So you build an entire world for the actor's to inhabit? It's about walking with them through this world you've created...which again is like a horror film. Like a Carpenter film...

PETZOLD: It has something to do with the subject of this movie. For example, you see Barbara in the first sequence, she's sitting on a bench. She's under surveillance, and she knows she's under surveillance, so therefore her behavior is like a model. In ordinary life you don't like people who act like there's always a camera near them, they're very narcissistic, but she has to be like this [mimes a rigid, presentational outward appearance with highly mannered smoking gestures], smoking a cigarette, it's not natural: it's for someone else! So I told her, Nina Hoss, "all the things from the outside world, the colors, the wind...it must be real." This narcissistic shell she's made around her, it's under pressure. So when she's going out of the car for the first time with Andre, and she's walking through this little lane, all the noises you can hear are original, yeah? Her rhythm of walking is a reaction to the noises, and to loneliness and also to surveillance. You have to see it in the acting, I don't want to compose it later.

KASMAN: You're designing the sound before you're shooting the film and so you're coming to the set with this design which you integrate into the scene you're directing. And later, you're taking what you composed before and tweaking it to fit with what actually was shot.

PETZOLD: You are about right, but I can't realize it, really, because it's too expensive. I use this technique in some scenes. For example, this basement scene, when this super, this hausmeister, shows Barbara the basement room, in this moment we had this barking, yeah? Or, for example, when she's smoking inside the bathroom, at the beginning, the first time, we have this barking dog, and she looks out of the window. This is not just in my mind, I think it's in the reality: when an actress is turning her face in the direction of the window because she actually heard something, you can see it. When an actor decided by himself, "after ten seconds I'll look as if I heard a barking dog..."

PHELPS: It also plays into the whole style of this film, where everything seems to be like a clue. You hear the dog and you think, "okay this is maybe a horror film, the basement is dungeon, this whole thing is like a fairy tale, the old lady is taking her to a place that she didn't want to go to, she's going to show her something, later we'll go back there and find there's dead bodies there," or something. Which is also the case with the Stasi in the film, and so on. The movie keeps giving these hints of an outer world that Barbara is looking at, that she's reacting to, and yet it's all framed as a mystery that's never resolved, that might not be a mystery at all. Just like a horror film without an explanation as to the truth beneath or any kind of resolution.

PETZOLD: All these things I've learned from horror movies. For example, the scene where she's waiting in the bathroom, smoking. I said to her, "okay, we're on a set of a film, there are so many people around you, there's a microphone, a crowd. So when I say 'shoot' we have two minutes and nobody's talking, you're alone in this room, the camera's there..." But it's like when we make this "atmo" of the sound, everybody has to be very silent. We do it every time before we shoot, because the actor has to hear and feel the room, the acoustic room. This is a real house with people living there. So you can hear water in the pipes. It may sound a bit like an esoteric meditation, but I think an actor needs that, and us, too. We start to respect this acoustic room, and it's not just a "shoot place."

PHELPS: I thought of both Hitchcock and Rossellini. You're with this character so much that you are reacting to the same things they're reacting to; you're reacting to the sounds they hear, to the people they meet. You think you know them because of this, because you spend so much time with them, but in fact you don't know anything about them.

PETZOLD: That's right.

PHELPS: You're inside their consciousness, so you can't see them entirely from outside.

KASMAN: That goes back to what you were saying about filming that's at once objective and subjective. You feel with them, subjectively, but there's a layer you can't cross, a mystery.

PETZOLD: Yes, that's right. I was shocked, when I was sixteen, when I first saw Halloween, by Carpenter. You think, you are the subject, watching someone. And then another person will step in front of the camera, and be looking, and suddenly your view is over their shoulder. Subjective becomes over the shoulder in the same shot, I was always shocked. It's very simple, but this is the story of cinema, yeah? What is the position of the camera and who is looking. I was always interested. I'm a Hitchcock learner, yeah?—but there's a big difference. Hitchcock needs actors who have a social life outside of his movies, like James Stewart and Cary Grant. Because his characters are really empty. Really empty. He needs empty characters to create this world where they are living, and for me, I'm not like him in this.

PHELPS: You feel like Barbara has an entire history and background that we don't know about but you keep pointing towards, which is not what usually happens in Hitchcock. Even a villainous past seems obvious from the start.

PETZOLD: Hitchcock is not interested in this. Also, Hitchcock destroys the actors, I think [laughs]. I always use just one take. We have a relation from material to movie, 1:6—that's nothing! We always do it in one take. Because the actors have to know this is just one take, and not more, so they have to concentrate. So it's good for us.

PHELPS: Do you have to wait and prepare for a long time, so you have the right light at the right moment of the day?

PETZOLD: Not often, but when we have this luxury to wait two or three minutes until we start the camera because of the meditation of the actor, I think we have to do it in one take or the producer would kill me.

KASMAN: I was watching Jerichow recently, and I couldn't believe the lighting in that final sequence on the beach cliff.

PETZOLD: This was also one take! We had to wait, but I like this, when there is a tension. When we get it in this moment we have it. And when we miss it, there isn't a second chance. I like that. The camera, everybody is quiet, and the world is not a supermarket. We have just one chance, and it's very good, also, for the actors, because the whole team is not talking, yeah? We are talking hours before, but in this moment we have to...it's like a penalty, we have to do it!

PHELPS: It's also a respect for the moment, like not doing much post-production, you want to take what you get and that's your material.

PETZOLD: Yeah, in Jerichow it was the last light on this today. And if we missed it... it costs so much, because of the smoke [the film ends with a car crash and explosion], yeah? I'm not a Protestant in this way, I like to waste money, I like it, but I don't like to waste energy. I don't like to waste the work. So we have to wait until Hans Fromm the cameraman said "ten minutes," so then we put on the smoke from the car and Nina Hoss...she's walking brilliant in this moment, because she knows it's the only chance.

KASMAN: Does this make each take incredibly suspenseful for you and the cast and crew?

PETZOLD: Yes, but, well, okay so each day looks like this. The actors come to the set at 8 o'clock together with me. We have two hours without camera, the lighting man, everything, everybody is sleeping. At this moment the set is not a set, it's a real room with furniture, a smell and taste. We rehearse the whole morning, the whole day's work, we rehearse the whole thing. After this rehearsal the actors go put on makeup—costumes they already have on—meanwhile I discuss the rehearsals with the cameraman, discuss the positions of the camera, and after one hour the actors come back, the light is in place, and we shoot chronologically the day. It's really good, it works. But the first time the producers come on set at 11: "What have you made today? Nothing?!" [Laughs.]

PHELPS: Can you talk about your collaboration with Harun Farocki on your screenplays? I was pretty amazed by the opening shot of Dreileben, in which we see the surveillance cameras, after ten years of Farocki making surveillance camera films. But from Barbara to Dreileben, past to present, the surveillance isn't just an issue of moving from the Stasi and this human element of surveillance to this non-human form of surveillance, the East Germany vs. the Capitalist West...there's also the fact of them working in hospitals, working in public spaces, working where they are always, as you were saying before, enacting some kind of performance; they're always being watched by their bosses and being judged by how they are acting.

PETZOLD: When he was my teacher, at the German Film Academy in Berlin, there was a movie which impressed Harun and me very much. It's by Michael Kleier, and it's called Der Riese, or The Giant. It's a fantastic movie, I'm not sure how you can see it. It's made out of surveillance cameras. You see a girl in front of the supermarket, with a dog. Ten minutes. The dog has gone away, and then the girl is looking for the dog and goes out of the picture. You hear the whole time Mahler, the music of Gustav Mahler. And you then see someone in a big house in Hamburg, you see a garden in the night. Someone is coming into the light of a lamp, and he's smoking a cigarette, and then he's gone away. And it's like cinema. It's called The Giant because the giant is looking from above, down on the people. And also because the cameras, when they move, they're a bit jerky, slow, not very flexible, like a giant's point of view. This movie tells the story that cinema goes on in surveillance cameras—it's the rest of storytelling, it's just a picture, it makes you very sad, this movie. Really sad. So we talked, Harun and me, for five years about this movie, many times. He's always using surveillance cameras, since then, like his work about the American prison, for example. And I've used it also in, I think, five or six movies. Because it's something that's also subjective. For me, it's something like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. It's near the action, but at the same moment it's very far away. It doesn't express something, it just makes an objective picture of something, but in this objective picture, there's always a sadness. There's a fantastic documentary by [Raymond] Depardon called New York, N.Y., it's eleven minutes. He received money by the State, in France, to spend one year in New York to make a portrait and he comes back with two shots! One is of that bridge, there [points to the Queensboro Bridge], he's with a camera in the gondola, yeah? And he's showing this bridge. And then a corner at Wall Street, people going around the corner and you don't see their heads, just their feet. He erases the original sound and overdubs it with foley effects. It's just a sad picture of people—where they come from, where they go to. Anonymous. I think this camera, this surveillance camera has a bit of this effect.

PHELPS: Still, in Barbara the surveillance is human, there are no cameras.

PETZOLD: Yes, the Stasi. But I always have to ask myself and the cameraman: This is a movie where all people are under surveillance, but our camera can't share the position with the State. Therefore, our position of storytelling must be between the people, the angle of their eyes. Because we have to see the tension of the social life, the tension based on the surveillance—we don't want to choose the Stasi's position.

wilder



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Barbara is now available on blu-ray in Germany with English subtitles.



Barbara (2012) - Amazon.de

jenkins

I had a timespace freakout during this movie's middle. I couldn't figure out how it took place in 1980 -- it's some WWII fuckedupness. Its tension has the purity of atrocity. I was bored as hell. That's just me.

jenkins

Quote from: Pubrick on September 01, 2012, 08:48:21 PMThere's a trend in serious European films where they always feel like they were made for a university course.. from Burnt By The Sun, to The Lives Of Others, even with contemporary films like those of Fatih Akin that have nothing to do with the Soviet era.. anywhere you look they all have this component of political and historical context that is often very obvious and intentionally put there to be discussed.

If anyone wonders why all these "boring" European dramas always win so many awards overseas and then get crammed into the foreign film category in the Oscars, it's not cos they're boring,  just that American audiences have no idea how to approach them.

If an American film is set in a different era, it's usually for style, not for any other significant reason.

Feel like I should've read this post before I made my post, maybe, and that this reply is kind of tainted by a defensive posturing, 'cause I'm American and used boredom as a critique in my review.

Confess this bias.

This is my full rebuttal:

There's some bizarre disconnect between the first paragraph, that uses words like "trend" and says "anywhere you look," and the second paragraph, that's a counter-criticism about the use of "boredom." For cinephiles, I think, these things are actually directly related to each other.

Directly related to each other, such that Pubrick's post constitutes a double standard.

Don't ask more from the audience without asking more from the movies, IMO.

wilder

INTERVIEW: NINA HOSS
via Filmmaker Magazine
BY R. EMMET SWEENEY ON 12.21.2012

Barbara is one of the finest suspense thrillers of the year, and most of the tension is expressed in the impassive face of actress Nina Hoss. She plays the title character, a doctor at a rural hospital in East Germany planning an escape while under the vigilant eye of the Stasi. Her life has become one of watchfulness and fear, hiding her inner turmoil behind a mask of affected indifference. Hoss's layered performance shows the effort involved in maintaining this façade, and the terrifying freedom of making one's emotions known. FILM COMMENT spoke with Hoss in New York about how she prepared for the role, the backstory she invented, and how those who had lived in the GDR reacted to the film.



One of the most striking things about the movie is the extent of the detail, from your performance down to the set design and sound effects. Could you talk about the research you had to do to get into the role of Barbara?

It was a role where I knew there wasn't the possibility to talk much, to explain her. I would have to do a different kind of work, to make it interesting, her being silent, but always being present. I had to create a backstory. It was very crucial for this part, that I know why she tries to hide her true self. Because I thought she was a very lively, positive person. I had a backstory as to why she got in trouble with the state. She was forced to build up this defensive wall: "You can't get to me, you won't hurt me, not on the outside and not on the inside. I am not vulnerable." But that is not the truth. Someone cannot be like that, but it's something you can work on. I wanted to show her work on that—train to be strong, although she might not be. Like when she's at home and it gets to her when this woman [from the Stasi] is constantly there with her rubber gloves. But you can't really show it with this guy [the Stasi interrogator] sitting there. You can only give a hint of what this woman is going through: "He's looking at me, and I won't give you the victory of me being weak." And that is exhausting. It must have been exhausting for people like Barbara.

I researched a lot by reading books about that time—Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, all these authors from the GDR—in order to get to know this atmosphere and how people coped with it. I never experienced it, because I'm from the West. I talked with people a lot. How did it feel, this feeling that you can't talk freely? You had to go into the forest to talk, because sometimes it was your husband who spied on you. The subtleness of that threat was even more horrible than the obvious one, where you're already in the claw of the state, interrogations and prisons. That is another horror. But what infected the society was everywhere, and you didn't see it. And that's what they all described. As well as all the beauty, and that's what we wanted to portray, the area in all its vibrant colors. Not gray. It must be hard to leave that country. It's hard for Barbara to make this decision. Every home, as horrible as it can be, still has something. It makes you, and you're attached to it, and it's hard to leave.

What was the backstory you created for Barbara?

She must have gone along with the system for quite a while, because otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to study medicine. She must have gone through all these institutions, all those youth groups doing parades and so on. You have to be part of that. There must have been a point, and I thought in school, where she met a very good friend who was a Protestant pastor. This friend had a tough time in the GDR, because you weren't meant to pursue your religion under Communism. So this girl, this friend of hers, got in trouble in the classroom, and Barbara didn't stand up for her. She pretended not to be her friend. Which is something you can understand, as Barbara could get in trouble as well. But being the person that she is, she felt guilty through the years of her studies. It stuck with her. A deep wound, I thought.

Then at work, again something happened, where she could either keep quiet, or actually say something. And she speaks. The guilt, that wound is healed, although under a very thin layer of skin. So that's not what she is dealing with anymore. Now she's dealing with being in conflict with the state. Saying something against it, she really felt what they are like, in the claw of that system. We thought she was in prison, as well, and that happened by just saying you wanted to leave. They would put you in prison for a few days to intimidate you. And then having this punishment of not being allowed to work in the Charité, the biggest hospital in Berlin. It's clear she needs to leave, she can't make any compromises anymore. She closes down, and doesn't want anything to do with this country anymore.

But through her job [at the rural hospital], the only moment where she can't keep that wall up is when she meets the patient, Stella. And this is where she meets André [the head doctor, played by Ronald Zehrfeld]. He always gets to her in moments when she's actually feeling something. She teases him, trying to find out if he is a spy. "Who is this guy? Why is he interested in me? He should leave me alone." And he can withstand this. He always finds the right thing to say. No matter what she says, he has an answer.'



I understand that the director Christian Petzold screens a lot of movies before production begins. What titles did you watch and did any influence your performance?

He always does that, and I love it. We talk so much about filmmaking, and the perspective used. The standpoint of the camera tells a lot. Christian and Hans Fromm [the DP], thought that because the film is about the state observing the people, the camera should not be at an observing angle. The camera should be a friend of Barbara. When she's on her own in the bathroom, I never have the feeling that the way we look at her is threatening. The audience is never in the voyeuristic position. That was very important for me to know. We talk about that by watching movies. We watched The French Connection, for example, where you never see the shooter. It's about perspective. That tells a story in itself. Then we watched Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not: that is about a flirtation that is going on. [Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall] are quite harsh to each other, and very clever. And because they can handle each other, they are attracted to each other. The other person won't crumble. We watched that also just to watch a great movie [laughs].

I read that you watched Rossellini's Stromboli as well.

Yes, we also watched it for Yella [07]. It's about being foreign, her being on that island. There's always a struggle. I always have the feeling that the characters Christian creates are similar in that sense. Either they were thrown out of society, or something happened like in Wolfsburg [03] where a kid died and you're thrown out of it. It's always about, in a sense, how to get back in, to find their position. And how much do you have to give up of yourself to be a part of something? And don't you need to be part of something to be a fulfilled person?

Were you able to watch Barbara with people who lived through that period?

Yes, it was exciting and quite nerve-wracking, especially for Christian and me, coming from the West. The three of us—Ronald, Christian and me—did a cinema tour throughout Germany. Leipzig was the first city in the East, and we were nervous. I didn't know if they would tear us apart. It turned out to be the opposite, which made me really happy. I had this one incident, a woman came up to me afterward and said, "Thank you so much, for the first time I really felt this atmosphere again, it reminded me of my childhood, and that happiness. I felt happy. It was so green, and people had time, and God, people were sitting smoking in the hospital!" A minute later, a guy comes up to me and says, "Thank you so much for the movie because it just shows the way it was, and it was shit." Whatever your experience was with that state, that's what you'll find. And I was really happy about that. Because it means we treated it with a lot of respect.

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Barbara is now in theaters.

wilder

Kino Lorber and Adopt Films Team Up for Home Distribution Deal
via Criterion Cast

If last year marked one thing, it was the rise of small, seemingly independent distributors, with very few being as critically beloved as Adopt Films.

With titles like Christian Petzold's Barbara and particularly Miguel Gomes' Tabu, the company become home to various beloved pictures from 2012, the company has finally found a home for these films on home video, and it is in the hands of none other than Kino Lorber.

The companies have revealed that they are partnering up for a distribution deal that will see select Adopt titles (including the two mentioned above) release on home video and through digital outlets. Other pictures will begin with both Barbara and The Taviani Brothers' Caesar Must Die.

What's good to note here is that, unlike many of Kino's more modern releases, these are being eyed for both DVD and Blu-ray.

wilder

Blu-ray from Kino to be released on November 12, 2013.