Michael Baute: After ICH WILL MICH NICHT KÜNSTLICH AUFREGEN (2014) and WEITERMACHEN SANSSOUCI (2019) L’ÉTAT ET MOI is your third film to be shown at Berlinale Forum. This film is more self-evident than the previous ones, the acting of all the cast members seems to be suspended in a form that has become more autonomous. It reminded me of silent film: on the one hand of the 1920’s Soviet “Factory of the Eccentric Actor” and, on the other, of American slapstick of that era. And in terms of genre, the film is a "Klamotte" or slapstick comedy.
Max Linz: As a writer and director, it's incredibly liberating that there are these particular historical grammars you can refer to and all work with. It then becomes relatively clear, right up to the editing, how you actually want the story to be told. At the same time, it probably also has to do with what the film is about, what it deals with. The point was to bring about a process here—as entertainingly as possible. And for me, this time, as in the courts, failing to come to a decision was not an option.
How did the film come about?
ML: I had originally written a longer synopsis about a trainee barrister who changes sides, ending up in the dock himself. At the same time, I wanted to examine my notion of politics and was therefore interested in the operation of political institutions, namely the part that is public: spectatorship of parliamentary sessions on Parliament TV, attendance at committee meetings of the Bundestag or district assemblies, and public presence at court hearings. I wanted to follow the Jerry Lewis principle in THE ERRAND BOY: You go into the courthouse, open a door, and you're in a divorce drama; open the next door and it's a bank robbery case; open the next door and it's THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING. That's what happens in a criminal court, behind every door is a different case, and that's how I originally imagined the film, in terms of scaling.
The Paris Commune wasn't the point of departure.
ML: It was more a question of how to prise the genre of the courtroom drama out of the dull, audience-disparaging "Wie würden Sie entscheiden?" (German TV court show, translator’s note) empathy trap, the various televisual contexts of delusion. During a trial I once tried to imagine I was sitting in the judge's seat. The case was a trivial matter. I thought I would instantly pass out, collapse under the weight of expertise needed to even understand what was going on and the scale of what it meant for the people sitting there in the courtroom. What does this act of judgement "in the name of the people" mean—it is no small thing. Sitting in the courtroom was enlightening and exciting, but it didn't get me any further in terms of the script. I rushed from the court to the library to type up my notes, then read up on some stuff again, and so on—this didn't give me any insight into how I wanted to write the film. It was just reality plus a sociology of law, not a feature film.
The key was then ultimately something I came across in the state library: that the penal code came into force in its present form in May 1871. And at some point earlier I had read Brecht's "The Days of the Commune", which is about exactly that time, May 1871. The historical part of the film begins where "The Days of the Commune" leaves off.
It was prompted through Brecht.
ML: That's where I saw the option of dealing quite realistically with the judicial system, with a patchwork of secondary characters—lay judges, bailiffs, law clerks—powerfully set within the filmic plot, i.e., a fiction, with a doppelgänger. In Brecht's play, there is a Prussian deserter who fights on the side of the Commune, and from this character I evolved the time-travelling composer Hans List. At that point Sophie Rois came into the picture as the judge and composer and it became plausible to make a film that explored these very classical parameters—script, characters, scenic resolution—as it was 100 years ago. Because the judiciary is a field that also features such old scripts.
"The economic structures and logics of production make it necessary to play the existing script over and over again, and in doing so they seem to allow little revision and evolution."
The plot then works itself out by means of mix-ups and confusions on all kinds of levels: linguistic, identitary, textile.
ML: This constant confusion was the driving force behind the script, or actually its stalling process. After all, the point of law training, like for the trainee lawyer played by Jeremy Mockridge, is ultimately to be able to take on a role by means of reproductive competence. Hence the great importance of tests and examinations. And on the other hand, the constant failures manifest themselves as materialisations of the repressed question of what it's actually all about. Because there is no one to give you an answer. For us, the key scene was when the trainee lawyer comes back into the judge's chambers from the library and declaims, "If we want to banish the ghosts of the past, we need a new text." And when the judge then asks him to start working on the formulation while she still makes do with the old text, she sums up the entire dilemma facing anyone wanting to approach things differently and anew—a dilemma also facing me as a filmmaker: that the economic structures and logics of production make it necessary to play the existing script over and over again, and in doing so they seem to allow little revision and evolution.
So for you is the film also about poking fun at "authority"?
ML: I, at least, have no interest in the film setting out to portray an authentic rascal. Because of the aggressiveness of our ridicule, authority becomes difficult to define. As with the prosecutor Donnerstrunkhausen played by Hauke Heumann, whose name is constantly mispronounced—even when other characters try to acknowledge his authority, it always goes wrong. You almost grow fond of him.
It's more complicated with Bernhard Schütz's policeman. He carries all the baggage of the cruelty of the German executive. And he develops a subversive side: he looks into the camera, stands up during a scene and walks out of shot—he doesn't allow himself to be ruled by the desire for comedy at all. He generates an eeriness that does indeed frighten me. Bernhard's portrayal formulates a latent reproach to the film's escapism. In so doing, he raises again the question of whether we can make fun of it at all. Because on the one hand we have this desire for comedy and entertainment of society. And on the other, we are dealing with things that aren't funny at all.
"This context is something that interests us: cinema as public art production; aesthetic experience that has something democratic about it because it is easily accessible".
The film works very much through framing. And then you make it rattle in this picture box. The actors all communicate an awareness of acting in their respective image frame.
ML: This is thanks to Markus Koob's camerawork. A space is created that seems to exist only for the performance. The camera does not compartmentalise reality, i.e. neither into the high-resolution "industry standard", where you are supposed to look at every take from at least nine different shots sizes, nor into the Bressonian fragmentary style, where cropped excerpts are emphasised. Instead, we wanted to create spatially stable scenes with our rather limited means. That's why the old 1.37:1 academy ratio really worked. The images are not exactly stages because they are not oriented to a portal, but the camera shot views them like a scene.
They are more like Eisenstein’s ideograms, who you also quote.
ML: That's not a direct quote of Eisenstein that Franz Friedrich is reading, it's Oksana Bulgakova on Eisenstein, a description of his beginnings in proletarian culture. This context is something that interests us: cinema as public art production; aesthetic experience that has something democratic about it because it is easily accessible, where, provided there's interest, everyone can participate.
So we continue working on a form that has sometimes been viewed as passé. But we still have plans for it, we are not finished yet. Nor are we finished with the question of how a realism can come about that isn't confused with reality, but one which is also a realism of form, a realism of the entertaining feature film. I'm glad it worked for you, but if we also take the desire for "a new text" seriously, I have to ask myself: is this already the new text?
For me, I see it in the inherent transformative possibility of forms of expression that contain the promise of equality.
ML: That's beautiful. That would mean this music is not over yet.
This conversation took place in Berlin on 19 January 2022.
Translation: Claire Cahm
