Barbara Wurm: René, your film “tells the story” of a Swiss publishing house and its heirs, exploring the idea of inheritance. How do you see that? Why did you want to make a film about these people?
René Frölke: It’s not actually a film about these people, but rather the traces they left behind. And for me, it’s also not a documentary about what this publishing house actually was, because you only see that relatively obliquely. It’s actually about all the publishing houses that exist and that have ever existed and that ever will exist. Why do people do that? And what happens to all the things left behind? Isn’t it all to a certain extent the conquest of the useless, to borrow a term from Werner Herzog? At the beginning, I was obviously interested in what sort of publishing house it was and all the titles they released. But that’s not something you can really narrate. And due to my aversion to the anecdotal, I relied instead on the traces that I found, that I felt drawn to and that touched me, as fragments that spoke for themselves.
Carolin Weidner: How did you track down the publishing house in the first place?
RF: That was in 2017. Ann Carolin Renninger, who produced the film, and I originally just wanted to get our hands on some books, some very particular books, which were supposed to be in somewhere in the cellar of this publishing house in Zurich. We were at a festival, Visions du Réel in Nyon, where our last film AUS EINEM JAHR DER NICHTEREIGNISSE showed, and afterwards we took a quick trip to Zurich to see if we could get them. That was the first meeting, the first scene, bumping into each other in that flat.
CW: What exactly was it that fascinated you about those particular books? Why did you want to get your hands on them?
RF: They were basically books by Robert Lax. Bernhard Moosbrugger, one of the co-founders of the Pendo publishing house, did the design for and published what I consider Lax’s magnum opus. They’re now only available on eBay or second hand. But when we noticed how much more there was in that flat that just these books, it was like an avalanche of impressions. And avalanches are very interesting constructions. That’s ultimately what attracted us, more than just the books. A door opened up before us, and behind it was the next one, followed by the next one, and in the end there were doors as far as the eye could see. When it comes down to it, the film is actually about the vast number of doors, not the individual books.
It is a subjective objectivity, there are personal preferences that play a role there, but at the same time it is also the material itself that sometimes says to you, “No, I don’t want it done that way.”
CW: But you still needed people to help you open those doors. You were very reliant on Tessa. Was she open to your plan? In the film, you come across as very close, even if there’s a certain level of mystery there too.
RF: In the first year, Gladys, Tessa’s mother and the co-founder of the publishing house, was still alive. And Gladys actually didn’t want to be filmed or recorded any more, but then Caro managed to persuade her. It was as if Gladys had somehow guessed that we maybe weren’t going to see each other again. Tessa, on the other hand, was always open to the project. We also didn’t make this film the entire time, I think you also notice that a bit. A sort of search takes place, the search for the ominous box that contains the important documents. During the four, five years that we were shooting, we still didn’t manage to find the box. It’s bound to be there somewhere. That was our shared work, alongside that of filming. And I think this sense of being together in something is what you see and feel in the film.
BW: One of the principles was thus to follow the chronology of events and encounters. When you then decided to pick out specific particles or quotes and keep the camera on them, what were your criteria to make that selection? Which quotes were supposed to remain how long on screen and were they supposed to be seen in their entirety or become temporally fragmented?
RF: Those are two different decisions in terms of time. To begin with, it was already clear during the shoot that we couldn’t film everything, as we only had a limited amount of film stock. That creates a lot of pressure, and you thus decide what has to be recorded based on affect – that is, subjectively and half unconsciously. Later on, during the montage, there follows a second decision-making process where you have to find out what’s the core of the matter. Different things happen here: some elements of the material become connected to others, while others are discarded as if of their own accord. Originally, I wanted to say much more about the people, about Bernhard and Gladys, but then I quickly noticed that it was getting anecdotal and that it was like narrating around the edges of something. That’s where all the doors that only led to yet more doors reappear. That’s not how you’ll do justice to the story. I can’t easily describe why I decided one way or another. It is a subjective objectivity, there are personal preferences that play a role there, but at the same time it is also the material itself that sometimes says to you, “No, I don’t want it done that way.”
At the very end, sediments are formed, all this leaves something behind
CW: I had the impression that Fritz Weigner, Gladys Mann and Tessa’s father in particular all play a big role in introducing the theme of religion. Is that something that came more and more to the fore during the process?
RF: Fritz Weigner was actually the central figure for me from the very beginning. What did it mean that he was Catholic? And what did his Catholicism have to do with his pictures? My idea was to purely use the materials we found to narrate the tracks Weigner left behind. There were two to three big boxes containing mostly loose sheets of paper. Over the years, the chronology of all these notes had been lost, but I was able to see that he had noted down every Sunday mass over a period of 30 to 40 years. Sometimes it was just the back of a tram ticket or a receipt that had been written on. All these pieces of paper fascinated me, but it seemed difficult to me to show or even grasp them in their entirety. Luckily there were also around 20 exercise books, most of which contained notes taken on a lecture series given by a Catholic study group. I decided on the winter semester of 1943/44 out of a historical interest and because there were some notes there that were graphically very beautiful, trying first to transcribe the text as accurately as possible simply to understand it. The transcription process became progressively more and more obsessive and I began to almost reproduce the text, which culminating in my starting to copy entire lines, underlined passages and references. This then became one layer of the film.
CW: But you also made your own book to accompany the film if I understood correctly. It looks like a sort of script, but that doesn’t adequately describe what it is.
RF: I’ve actually always worked very intensively with transcripts. For FÜHRUNG [2010] too, I wrote down absolutely everything very precisely, including every repeated or interrupted word. I did that here too. And as we had a relatively large amount of sound, the transcript came to more than 1000 pages, three big books. In order to film inside them, I had to format the text in a particular way. With the macro lens, our Super 8 camera can get as close as two centimetres from an object, which represents about five lines of the transcript book. A book was thus made and with it an idea: this is also a book that will disappear, that no one needs, that is totally pointless. But by making this book, I somehow grasped that whole trajectory again myself, struggled through the process. At the very end, sediments are formed, all this leaves something behind. This work dragged on for over three years.
I think the elliptical is actually really important for how we think, for our thought processes
BW: How would you describe your film in terms of genre? Alongside all these aspects, is there anything that actually comes to the fore for you?
RF: I can’t pin it down to one single concept. One might say a “document film”. I always wanted to create an effect whereby you have a sense that we’re all permanently surrounded by language. What does that do to us? Do we control language or does language control us? In the store room I then had the feeling that preserving absolutely everything, keeping hold of it, somehow documenting it and making it accessible is what’s really desired. But that’s impossible.
BW: When we were discussing the film, we talked a lot about this mirroring or doubling. There’s the idea of reading the script at the same time as what is being said, but also the relationship with the protagonist herself, when she stops finishing her sentences entirely, or new associations line up.
RF: Yes, and her way of speaking also reflects her approach as a jazz composer. For her, it isn’t an intellectual idea, you might simply say that she jumps from one thing to another, which is important for her composing. I think the elliptical is actually really important for how we think, for our thought processes. It’s something that the rules of language often interferes with. One can to a certain extent experience the elliptical twice over here by observing it. That’s why I always find it good when sentences are broken off, because it already isn’t correct anymore if it’s spoken to the end.
CW: I’d also like to come back to Tessa. Probably one of the reasons why I was so moved by her is that she seemed to me like someone who could no longer exist in the future, much like the books and publishing house. Did you have the same feeling? Did you also want to hold on to her in your film?
RF: Perhaps. But I would shift the perspective a little bit here: what interests me about her is also something that’s a part of me, without wanting to narrow that down any further here in conceptual terms. What I mean is that it interests me how she expresses something that is in me, something that is in all of us when it comes down to it, that she makes visible with her presence. It’s more this expression that I would like to hold on to.
But for me it was important to narrate the chronology of this journey, the process of digging ever deeper into these storage spaces, which also became my working and mental spaces
BW: At the beginning of the film, a book appears that’s entitled “Memory Capsule” or something like that. And you increasingly have the feeling that your film is itself a memory capsule. What happens to you when constructing such a capsule? At which point do you find your way back to the present? Or to turn around the question: is there something disruptive about the actual present while you’re shooting, something that for you has a lot to do with artistic perception?
RF: Yes, that already interested me back with LE BEAU DANGER, the demand made of a large proportion of literature that it be seen as part of a memory culture. At the same time, how memory is transferred across literature is inextricably linked to a reshaping, a sort of sublimation. This reshaping is simultaneously at least a partial process of forgetting. There’s a contradiction there that interests me. At the back of one’s mind, there is always a bigger space present too – the 20th century, for example – in which all this unfolded, the origin of all these objects and things. I then feel this very strong sense of transience that I then have to permanently, obsessively relate to the present, however. That changes how one sees details.
BW: What about the montage, do you put together sequences and then check whether they work? Do you test if they’re working as you’re going along?
RF: It’s like knitting actually. The film is more or less edited from the beginning to the end. But the first test for me was the scene with the composition “Black and White” relatively close to the beginning: finding the right rhythm. I thought that if that worked I could keep going. But you test things the whole time. The sound design essentially takes place immediately. Without the right sound, I can’t edit together any images or make any decisions. I can’t just rough edit stuff together in advance – some images only work via their ruptures. Extraneous sound can help to interrogate and transform the image, which doesn’t mean that you don’t still return to a realistic sound in the end. Sometimes the sound doesn’t even need any image, in which case everything is black. Emerging from the black is then always like a tiny new beginning, enabling the gaze to be realigned. But I’ve also asked myself if it isn’t perhaps a mistake to narrate more or less chronologically instead of starting somewhere in the middle, establishing what is important from there and grouping everything around it. But for me it was important to narrate the chronology of this journey, the process of digging ever deeper into these storage spaces, which also became my working and mental spaces.
It's always a shot in the dark
CW: You mentioned that it was a long editing process – when did you know that it was done?
RF: There’s a moment at which everything becomes even more dispersed than it has been already, where the film begins to follow its own rules. Once the quote from the book about the sinking of the Titanic appears everything really does begin to go down the tube and starts flowing at the same time. That was when I had the feeling that it could work – the idea of creating a sort of telos that now only consists of lines and points. When I reached this point, the sort of point where everything dissolves or crystallises, as it were, everything seemed in harmony. But it was really only right at the end that I saw that.
CW: Are you ever afraid of not reaching that point?
RF: Yes. I did occasionally think that it wasn’t going to work out this time, that I was on the wrong track. It was similar with LE BEAU DANGER, but then I was either more ignorant or there wasn’t so much riding on it. For this film, we had major funding for the first time, from the German cultural ministry. Suddenly you feel a sort of responsibility, as it could also be the last funding. But it’s always a shot in the dark.
Translation: James Lattimer
