Interview with Jean-Marie Straub
Niko Paape, Wim Schlebaum, and Frans van de Staak, 1966
Translated by Jelte Vangenechten
The following interview was originally published in CineEcri: publikaties over film no. 2 in 1966 on the occasion of the presentation of Jean-Marie Straub’s Nicht versöhnt and Machorka-Muff at the Dutch Film Museum. It has never been compiled or republished until now. CineEcri was a small Amsterdam film journal founded in the late 1960s and edited by Frans van de Staak, a filmmaker whom Straub would later call “the only heir to Dziga Vertov.”
We present this translation in collaboration with Punto de Vista, International Film Festival of Navarra, whose 19th edition features an eleven-film retrospective of Van de Staak’s work, along with the first ever monograph dedicated to the Dutch cineaste, Frans van de Staak. The Word as Archipelago.
With special thanks to Carlos Saldaña, Manuel Asín, Teresa Morales, and Pablo Sotés.
A postcard from Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub to Frans van de Staak. Courtesy Punto de Vista Festival.
CineEcri: Why do you make films based on books and ideas? Apart from Peter Weiss*, are you thinking of making a film with your own original screenplays in the future?
Jean-Marie Straub: I came to Germany with my own screenplay. It was a film about Johann Sebastian Bach, and it was the very first one I wanted to make, back in 1954. It is called Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, a biography, even though I don’t think such a film genre exists yet. The film is based on the last thirty years of Bach's life and could be categorised as somewhere between a documentary and a fictional feature film. Actually, it's also a love story, even though people from East Germany have told me that it’s obviously a documentary. And in Düsseldorf, people told me it’s a typical feature film.
However, this film was too expensive: it would have cost me 300,000 Deutsche Marks. After five years of trying to find money for it, I discovered the novel Billard um halb zehn [Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Heinrich Böll, 1959], but it was also too expensive. That’s why I first made the short film Machorka-Muff [1963]. Now I want to try to make Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach after all.
CE: And does the Bach film also have a documentary approach?
JMS: Are you saying that the documentary structure was already evident in Machorka-Muff and Nicht versöhnt [Not Reconciled, 1965]?
CE: No, I mean the documentary nature of the starting point, of the original idea.
JMS: What you have just said contains two different things. On the one hand, there’s something pre-existing, like the life and the writings of Bach in the Bach film, even though it was my own idea to make a film about it. His wife Anna Magdalena would indeed speak and recount exactly what he had written. That is right: for me, it doesn’t matter if one is inspired by a fait divers like Godard in À bout de souffle [Breathless, 1960], or by Bach. The idea behind À bout de souffle came from a real incident: a young man had shot a police officer and was later convicted for it. What is important is not the idea itself, but what one does with it.
On the other hand, there is this documentary foundation that is essential to me. I would like to make a film about a female worker in Munich and, for that, I need reality and a documentary point of departure. For example: I am not at all musically developed, but I spent two years studying up on music, because I was interested in this Bach film.
CE: Is a documentary always related to an existing theme?
JMS: I don’t believe in “themes.” For me, they don’t exist. I think they only exist when the film is ready. Then the starting point is also resolved and broken. For Nicht versöhnt, for example, I had no theme in mind. My point of departure was only what interested me in the novel, namely, the conversation at the end between Robert and Schrella, who meet each other again after twenty years. Schrella has been abroad for twenty years, while Robert came back after two years. During their conversation, they talk about how they, the world and their environment have changed.
One should not only start concretely, but should keep on thinking concretely, and that’s what post-war German films lack. Brecht, for example, always thought in very concrete terms. Goethe would have made very awful films because he didn’t think in concrete terms. That is what Germany lacks completely. The filmmakers force a theme into a film, but there’s nothing concrete. They incorporate direct symbolism and obvious abstractions, but thinking in concrete terms, as in American films, is completely absent.
CE: In the January edition of Filmkritik, you give films a more or less national character: what can a German, American, French director turn into a film and what can they not?
JMS: Yes, I didn’t mean to put it that way. If someone makes a film in a country with which they share no customs—whether good or bad—then the film can show the reality of the country more clearly. That’s because the filmmaker sees it with unbiased eyes, from a certain distance and, at the same time, even more closely than the people of that country themselves.
CE: But don’t you think that, apart from this national character, there is also a certain cinematographic-cultural character; that one cannot be consistent in the classification of films; and that a film by Kristl, for example, cannot be said to be a “type of film” precisely because it is simply cinema?
JMS: Yes, of course. If I have said “a type of film,” I take it back. I actually meant to say “a distance.” Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the matière cinématographique [cinematographic material], which is the same for all films, of course. The film only exists because the matière cinématographique exists.
CE: Is the political and social engagement in Nicht versöhnt and Machorka-Muff important to you?
JMS: It is important to me. Before one can approach the matière cinématographique, one should respect the reality in a very humble way, in my opinion. I haven’t seen Der Damm [The Dam, Vlado Kristl, 1964], but there are enough examples that go in the same direction. The reality is broken, deformed a priori. Only with effort can the matière cinématographique be attained. That means: one wants the matière cinématographique a priori, but what makes film so difficult is the complicated dialectic between reality and abstraction. What I like, and where I find the most abstraction, are films by Mizoguchi, Lang and Renoir. They seem very realistic to me. I can find more abstraction in them than in films that try to be abstract a priori and, precisely because of that, fail to attain the matière cinématographique.
What you call engagement is, of course, important because it belongs to that dialectic. On the one hand, we have what is called the theme (which doesn't actually exist but only appears in retrospect, through the film) and, on the other, the matière cinématographique. Reality on the one hand and abstraction on the other. And before one jumps to abstraction, everything else remains important, too. In Nicht Versöhnt, the theme is something that emerged organically, something that materialised in the end.
I saw Pierrot le Fou [Jean-Luc Godard, 1965] for the first time in Venice, and to me, it seems that the film ends in the same way as Nicht versöhnt. In Pierrot le Fou, there is a panning over the sea and the image at the end remains white. At the same time, the audience hears a quote by Rimbaud: “Elle est retrouvée. Quoi? L’éternité.” ["She is found. What? Eternity."] Even though I never put it that way, it is almost the same—but in this case, Nicht versöhnt has even less substance than Pierrot le Fou.
What came about naturally during the construction of the film is, for example, the significant whiteness in the panning over the Rhine, just before the conversation between Robert and Schrella on the bridge; and the whiteness of the door after the conversation between Robert and an old lady, when he notices that she is starting to lie. And the same is true of the ending of Nicht versöhnt.
CE: The dialectical principle (the interplay of reality and abstraction) can be found in every scene, in every image, and the audience has to make that leap in every image.
JMS: In Venice, Godard answered another question, the answer to which is also applicable here: “Le cinema, c’est la navette” [Cinema is a coming and going].
The audience should not make the leap, they should only feel it. Let’s say there's the jump from reality to abstraction, and the one from realism to symbolism. Symbolism doesn’t go hand in hand with reality, and realism doesn’t go hand in hand with abstraction. I just mean to say that when one attempts to make a symbolic film, one makes a bad film, in my opinion. Let's take the scene of the old lady with her gloves in front of the mirror (Nicht versöhnt) as an example. I hadn’t thought of Cocteau, because it was only meant as a depiction of reality. It was nothing more than putting on the gloves, but during the sixth or seventh take, the gloves accidentally became visible in the mirror. Because of that, it transcended facticity.
CE: But it happens, and that’s the important thing. It doesn’t matter if it happened accidentally or not. What you primarily do in film is to give a statement of facts, and because of the film, the complexities of the scenes, the film obtains an added value.
JMS: In The Big Sleep [Howard Hawks, 1946], Humphrey Bogart visits an old man in a greenhouse. Through Bogart’s gestures and behaviour, the audience feels that the greenhouse takes on more meanings. That is very well done, but looking at the greenhouse from Nicht versöhnt, we come to the conclusion that it is very different. In Nicht versöhnt, there are no thoughts, and no indication or addition is given. Still, even though the old lady just walks through it slowly, the audience senses a special atmosphere. Even before she walks through the greenhouse, when she comes out of the house, it’s there. It looks like she emerges from a coffin, like she returns from the dead, in part because the door in the background remains black, although again this was included without any secondary intention.
What was done deliberately, however, was making sure that the costumes cannot be clearly assigned to a particular time period. The audience can’t say, “Ah, this is 1934.” And merely because one cannot directly tell it’s 1934 due to the fused time periods, the succession of 40-year-old Robert’s “Why, why...” and the “Are you Jewish?” from the 20-year-old is more striking than it otherwise would have been.
That is what I call the science-fiction quality. The audience asks what kind of planet it is, where being Jewish or not plays a certain role. These questions create a distance from the film.
CE: It’s not only about what is said, but also about what the audience can see on screen.
JMS: Yes, even when Robert and the old lady sit in a position—the window in the background—that gives the audience the impression they are in an aquarium. Maybe the film keeps the greatest distance there. However, this film is also very close, because the audience never gets the impression that there is a foreground, which means that the scenery is direct and there’s no glass between the film people and the audience.
An up-and-coming filmmaker who was learning with John Ford once prepared a scene and placed, as to heighten the “art” of the film, a bottle in front of the lens. He asked Ford if he was okay with that, and Ford was, except for one detail: he took the bottle away.
CE: In his book**, Jean Mitry describes how the “creative” value of a film is established through the coalition of “logical language” and “rhythmic language.” We could see editing as a predominant factor in determining time and rhythm. This in response to Stockhausen's letter***.
JMS: I don’t agree with Mitry on that. I don’t believe that one obtains the matière cinématographique when one tries to imitate music, even when it is done with optical and rhythmical tools like the ones Mitry used. By chance, I saw Pacific 231 [Jean Mitry, 1949] in Munich three weeks ago and I thought… We can't watch that anymore. Rhythmically, the film is well made, but it is completely artificial. And I didn’t try or think to make music by optical means, or through the montage and the rhythm. I think that film, in a paradoxical way, is not an “art of space.” A film can only exist if it sticks to the principle that film is an “art of time.” And that’s what film and music have in common. I didn’t know Stockhausen before he saw Machorka-Muff. I knew of his music, of course, but nothing more than that. And he very much liked Machorka-Muff, simply because the film doesn’t go into the direction Mitry attempted.
In order for film to become an “art of time,” there are two possible paths. This is, of course, somewhat schematically portrayed: I think it's either Bresson's way or the Nicht versöhnt way.
The problem is that, even though film should become an “art of time,” one must still assume a space. We live in a certain space, the image is space, and so on. Bresson configures his scenery in such a way that space is dissolved, eliminated, even within the image itself. In Nicht versöhnt I feel very clearly—because I had to rewatch the film several times—that “pure” spaces produce time. The space is not eliminated, it remains intact as “pure” space, but it is portrayed as so pure, so clean, so purified that it is already time a priori.
CE: Space and time, those are two words…
JMS: It is one, of course, but in the beginning one has two données: one has space and wants to achieve time.
CE: It could be said that the performance, as it exists outside of the film, has its own time, like Böll’s book, but the film has an entirely unique impression of time.
JMS: What you said about the book, I wouldn’t want to call that time. I would prefer to call it a structure, because it is not pure time. What interests me is the crystallisation of time, without the intervention of montage. In the first place, time crystallises because the images and sounds are recorded at the same time. That is important. Also, because the characters are not actors, and because they have a huge pile of lines.
Let's take as an example the scene of the old man at the train station. He talks as if, at any moment, he might forget his lines. However, that is completely impossible, because he knew them by heart after having practised them twenty-five times. In that respect, he acts like a tightrope walker who could suddenly break his neck and die in front of the camera. And the scene on the balcony, right before the woman shoots. If she shoots, time stops, time freezes. In the beginning, I assumed a completely different, more obvious sequence of images, until it formed a single creation. And it’s the same in Jean Rouch's episode in Paris vu par… [Six in Paris, Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Éric Rohmer and Jean Rouch, 1965].
A shot has no tension an sich [per se]. Actually, it has a tension, but one that could be compared to a straight horizontal line. If one has a shot that possesses a tension comparable to a curve, then, in the editing process, there is usually little one can do with it.
Because in Nicht versöhnt both the image and the sound have that horizontal tension and can be compared to parallel lines, it is possible to cut at any desired moment, very precisely on an image or on a certain word, or very slowly, in stages.
CE: The film doesn’t have a process-oriented curve, as we normally see in films.
JMS: There is a connecting line (a train) that runs throughout the film, and that line is created because of the whole, not because of the separate scenes.
CE: And that also goes for the text.
JMS: Yes, the text is also part of the matière cinématographique. The imagery, background noises, dialogue, music, they all are continuous parallel lines. At a certain moment, one stops and another falls in, like in a fugue. That is the kind of musicality film has, not an optical or rhythmic composition.
But it’s good that people in the film talk like Böll, who lives in Germany and also forms part of German society. If you come from abroad like me and if you make a film from that position, then the novel itself becomes a document.
What makes people in a film concrete is the fact that they are not actors. They are not “players” who, through their “play,” create distance and are more or less transparent. Here, they are concrete and at the same time see-through because they are transparent for the idea of the film.
- end -
Translation to English in collaboration with Punto de Vista, International Film Festival of Navarra by Jelte Vangenechten, for the book 'Frans van de Staak. The Word as Archipiélago'.
* Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub developed two unrealised projects based on texts by Peter Weiss (1916-1982): Marat/Sade (1963) and Die Ermittlung [The Investigation] (1965). See Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, University of California Press, 1995.
** Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, Éditions universitaires, 1965.
*** “What interested me most in your film is the composition of time, which is—as it is to music—particular to film. You have achieved good proportions in the duration of scenes, between those which almost stand still—how astonishing is the courage to be still, to a slow tempo, in such a relatively short film!—and extremely fast events—brilliant, to choose for this the newspaper citations at all angles to the vertical of the screen. Furthermore, the relative density of the changes in the varied tempos is good. […] And moreover, this ‘unrealistic’ condensation in time, without being rushed.” Letter from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Jean-Marie Straub, in Film 1 no. 2 (June/July 1963), p. 52.
