“I don’t want to wait for something to happen, nor for something to fade away.”
Your influences are clearly more French than German.
Text is omnipresent in your films: many characters write, read, have books on their shelves. You also said that you write dialogues meticulously. You even translated Shakespeare, and the act of translating establishes a particular relationship with the text. Yet, we are under the impression that all your literary influences bring you back to theatre, or even poetry.
They say that directors sometimes make a film for a single scene. Does this apply to you?
You said that Der traumhafte Weg was a silent film, for which you went without a tool, dialogues, and that consequently, for the next film, you really felt the need to write dialogues. You seem to consider your work in a kind of continuity, in which each film already contains the next one, that adjusts, completes, extends or clarifies the one before. Are you concerned, like the young writer in Nachmittag, that “it” might stop?
You said that “Writing is a solitary thing for me, it deals with one person only. To me, the specificity of writing is the fact that you are alone.” How do you experience the transition to a collective endeavour with a film crew?
AS : I do want to share. Sure, I write alone, but then I want to share. The trick is to find the right people to do so. Everything depends on it. These are two very different needs: solitude and sharing. That moment when you can open up to someone else’s thought. It is not easy, it either happens or it doesn’t. But is not a test, I am not appraising anyone.
In Mein langsames Leben, a woman starts a conversation with a stranger in a café about a trip to Italy she has just taken: “In a way, all the time I was there, I was always slightly excited and also slightly bored. Somehow, I keep waiting for something to happen”. The stranger goes back to reading his paper. “Anything new?”, she asks. “No disaster today”, he says. She laughs. “You never know if you want one or not.” Do you prefer disasters to boredom?
The way you use music, among other elements in your films, reminded me of Jean Eustache. In La Maman et la Putain, the characters use music to communicate, they put on songs to send messages, they converse with the singer. Is this film, or this director, important to you?
You said: “I try to make myself understood, it is something that the characters in my films usually don’t care about”.
What do you make of the act of understanding?
AS : As I said, it is unclear to me. Understanding something has nothing to do with an effort or with difficulties. It happens suddenly, it isn’t final, it might be a one-time thing, a single moment of clarity that you cannot get hold of. Trying to understand someone doesn’t mean much either. Sometimes, you want to understand something just to get it over with, so that you can move on.
AS : Tackling a subject means questioning it. It is an art school, the students must be able to bear the fact that things might be called into question, by me or by them.
In Ich war zuhause, aber, a woman tells her partner that she doesn’t want to have children, thus radically rejecting the social expectations of her genre, just like many other characters in your films try to escape their destinies, to free themselves from the expectations they were born to. Do you see yourself that way: as a person who freed herself from what others expected of her – as a woman, as a human being, or as a filmmaker?
AS : No. I don’t see fate as a conscious thing you can escape from. I have never wanted to escape, and I have never tried. I will probably escape when I die.
At Orly airport, the woman who just had her coat stolen says “it is so horrible to think that we are surrounded by people like that”, and the man she just met tells her: “It was probably just one person.” Your characters seem to be fighting against misanthropy. How do you relate to this characteristic?
AS : I think I said that from a really practical perspective. Cinema is a place where you are not alone. But the idea that you can learn a gesture is beautiful.
In some
sense, Angela Schanelec has been doing the same thing for 30 years. Even before
she completed her thesis project, I Stayed in Berlin All Summer (1993), she was
making movies according to her own inimitable design. As far back as 1991’s
Beautiful Yellow Color, which runs just 5 short minutes, the now-familiar
Schanelec system appears already operational: the compositions will be stable
and severe; the cutting will be swift and hard; and the narrative—or what
remains of it—will lie somewhere in the breach, between the two. These
principles continue to shape Schanelec’s work to the present day, and, under
her direction, constitute a more or less exhaustive formal approach. It’s
perfectly logical, then, that we might take Schanelec to be the kind of artist
who, with preternatural assurance, etches a roadmap for herself at the outset,
and whose career traces a pre-established arc of concentration, concatenation,
and refinement—something like the unwavering teleological trajectory of a
Robert Bresson, say, to whom she is often compared. A filmmaker who disavows
novelty, who works by paring away, who refuses to wander.
Thankfully, for Schanelec, there is still the occasional unmapped byway. And there is certainly The Dreamed Path. That film, Schanelec’s seventh feature, first appeared stateside in the 2017 edition of New Directors/New Films series, a program put on annually by Film at Lincoln Center, which, as the name implies, is meant to highlight emerging, as-yet fully formed talent. Given her veteran status on the festival circuit and within her native Germany—to say nothing of the stylistic mastery amply displayed in her six preceding features—Schanelec’s belated inclusion in the series might seem a kind of backhanded compliment. But it might also be the case that The Dreamed Path, if not precisely an aesthetic reset, is the culmination of trends more lately apparent in Schanelec’s cinema. Around the time of Marseille (2004), Schanelec started to experiment more openly with structuring absences; the blank spaces that marked her earlier work—but which were previously circumscribed, carefully—began to grow more yawning. In I Stayed At Home in Berlin All Summer, for example, the gaps never get so large as to prevent an attentive, attuned viewer from forming a linear read on the plot. But in The Dreamed Path, the empty spaces expand far beyond the point of resolvability, and Schanelec’s strange, lapidary syntax stops simply obfuscating the underlying narrative material—instead, it remakes it from cut to cut. The breach is suddenly big enough to hold many more narrative possibilities, to accommodate manifold potential fictions, which churn and combust in a perpetual state of emergence. The Dreamed Path is many new films, so to speak.
With introductions out of the way, Film at Lincoln Center has now invited Angela Schanelec back for a complete survey of her oeuvre, titled, quite appropriately, “Dreamed Paths.” The occasion is the release of her newest new work, I Was at Home But…, a film that finds the director returning to familiar domestic spaces and narratives as one might encounter in early films such as My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995) or Places in Cities (1998), but which is nevertheless fit to wander, down paths dreamed or otherwise. Indeed, I Was at Home But… begins and ends with images that—as Schanelec herself puts it—she wouldn’t have dared to shoot as a younger filmmaker. That, and much else that she says in this career-spanning interview, ought to prevent any rigid assessment of her artistic development from taking hold. But if it is, finally, too difficult a task to reconcile Schanelec’s evident, enviable consistency with the intensifying changeability of her work, well then I’ll simply parrot Maren Eggert in I Was at Home But…: “There’s no word for the state of becoming and being at the same time.”
NOTEBOOK: I’d like to begin, if we can, with a quote from you. I came across it the other day, after I had a very emotional experience rewatching I Was at Home, But…, and it really struck me. You said: “It’s impossible to imagine people without space.” I like the quote because it helped me understand what I find so moving in I Was at Home, But…: the accumulation of small domestic details, unspoken little things that hover in the background, like the notes and stickers tapped to the back of this family’s front door, which imbue their home with so much life. So I wanted to ask: How do you begin imagining the spaces that your people occupy?
ANGELA SCHANELEC: Well, I’m unable to imagine any scene or dialogue or situation without space, so when I start writing, I’m already aware of the question of space. The space is already present, so of course I try to find that space when we’re looking for locations. It’s an essential question for my work, because writing without imagining space means something… something imaginary. Or a kind of dream. Sometimes in dreams you don’t see the space.
NOTEBOOK: Are the locations in your films generally places that are familiar to you?
SCHANELEC: When I started making films in the 90s, I often shot in familiar spaces like my own apartment or the apartments of friends. So at the time, it was possible to have all these spaces already in mind during writing. Now, I scout for locations. For The Dreamed Path and I Was at Home, But… we did a lot of location scouting because I didn’t know the spaces. It was very important for me to have enough time—months—and a partner in my DoP, who could speak with me about the locations. We’d find them, discuss them. It’s an essential part of the process.
NOTEBOOK: Have you changed how you approach these spaces, compared to your early films? In something like The Dreamed Path there’s a sense of rootlessness—homelessness even. Thorbjörn Björnsson ends up literally homeless in that film...
SCHANELEC: Yes, but if someone is homeless or rootless you still have to find the place you want to shoot with them [laughs]. So for example, in The Dreamed Path, the location at the end, when he’s on the street in Berlin, that took a very long time to find. It was quite painful, really, to find that space. Partly because it was not private. It was public—people are always around. But, in the end, there’s no difference. The effort to find a space for someone who is homeless might even be more difficult than, say, finding an apartment for a mother with two children, as in I Was at Home, But...
Thankfully, for Schanelec, there is still the occasional unmapped byway. And there is certainly The Dreamed Path. That film, Schanelec’s seventh feature, first appeared stateside in the 2017 edition of New Directors/New Films series, a program put on annually by Film at Lincoln Center, which, as the name implies, is meant to highlight emerging, as-yet fully formed talent. Given her veteran status on the festival circuit and within her native Germany—to say nothing of the stylistic mastery amply displayed in her six preceding features—Schanelec’s belated inclusion in the series might seem a kind of backhanded compliment. But it might also be the case that The Dreamed Path, if not precisely an aesthetic reset, is the culmination of trends more lately apparent in Schanelec’s cinema. Around the time of Marseille (2004), Schanelec started to experiment more openly with structuring absences; the blank spaces that marked her earlier work—but which were previously circumscribed, carefully—began to grow more yawning. In I Stayed At Home in Berlin All Summer, for example, the gaps never get so large as to prevent an attentive, attuned viewer from forming a linear read on the plot. But in The Dreamed Path, the empty spaces expand far beyond the point of resolvability, and Schanelec’s strange, lapidary syntax stops simply obfuscating the underlying narrative material—instead, it remakes it from cut to cut. The breach is suddenly big enough to hold many more narrative possibilities, to accommodate manifold potential fictions, which churn and combust in a perpetual state of emergence. The Dreamed Path is many new films, so to speak.
With introductions out of the way, Film at Lincoln Center has now invited Angela Schanelec back for a complete survey of her oeuvre, titled, quite appropriately, “Dreamed Paths.” The occasion is the release of her newest new work, I Was at Home But…, a film that finds the director returning to familiar domestic spaces and narratives as one might encounter in early films such as My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995) or Places in Cities (1998), but which is nevertheless fit to wander, down paths dreamed or otherwise. Indeed, I Was at Home But… begins and ends with images that—as Schanelec herself puts it—she wouldn’t have dared to shoot as a younger filmmaker. That, and much else that she says in this career-spanning interview, ought to prevent any rigid assessment of her artistic development from taking hold. But if it is, finally, too difficult a task to reconcile Schanelec’s evident, enviable consistency with the intensifying changeability of her work, well then I’ll simply parrot Maren Eggert in I Was at Home But…: “There’s no word for the state of becoming and being at the same time.”
NOTEBOOK: I’d like to begin, if we can, with a quote from you. I came across it the other day, after I had a very emotional experience rewatching I Was at Home, But…, and it really struck me. You said: “It’s impossible to imagine people without space.” I like the quote because it helped me understand what I find so moving in I Was at Home, But…: the accumulation of small domestic details, unspoken little things that hover in the background, like the notes and stickers tapped to the back of this family’s front door, which imbue their home with so much life. So I wanted to ask: How do you begin imagining the spaces that your people occupy?
ANGELA SCHANELEC: Well, I’m unable to imagine any scene or dialogue or situation without space, so when I start writing, I’m already aware of the question of space. The space is already present, so of course I try to find that space when we’re looking for locations. It’s an essential question for my work, because writing without imagining space means something… something imaginary. Or a kind of dream. Sometimes in dreams you don’t see the space.
NOTEBOOK: Are the locations in your films generally places that are familiar to you?
SCHANELEC: When I started making films in the 90s, I often shot in familiar spaces like my own apartment or the apartments of friends. So at the time, it was possible to have all these spaces already in mind during writing. Now, I scout for locations. For The Dreamed Path and I Was at Home, But… we did a lot of location scouting because I didn’t know the spaces. It was very important for me to have enough time—months—and a partner in my DoP, who could speak with me about the locations. We’d find them, discuss them. It’s an essential part of the process.
NOTEBOOK: Have you changed how you approach these spaces, compared to your early films? In something like The Dreamed Path there’s a sense of rootlessness—homelessness even. Thorbjörn Björnsson ends up literally homeless in that film...
SCHANELEC: Yes, but if someone is homeless or rootless you still have to find the place you want to shoot with them [laughs]. So for example, in The Dreamed Path, the location at the end, when he’s on the street in Berlin, that took a very long time to find. It was quite painful, really, to find that space. Partly because it was not private. It was public—people are always around. But, in the end, there’s no difference. The effort to find a space for someone who is homeless might even be more difficult than, say, finding an apartment for a mother with two children, as in I Was at Home, But...
NOTEBOOK: Does that change how you think about camera placement? Are you finding shots on the set? Planning them out in advance?
SCHANELEC: Everything concerning the locations and spaces happens in advance. When we see a location we see it through the camera. Whether a location works or not is always determined by the imagined frame. Location scouting means seeing spaces through a camera, and understanding what images are possible.
NOTEBOOK: Often when I read about your films, I see them described as controlled and methodical, which I understand, though that doesn't seem entirely right to me. I think the precision of the camera placement often masks how intuitive the broader movements feel. I ran across another quote of yours that might articulate why that’s the case: “All of my films are based on the thought that the better part of life is inscrutable, full of misunderstandings and ruled by chance." Where does chance enter your process? Is it in collaboration with the actors? At the scripting stage?
SCHANELEC: I find this an extremely interesting question... [pauses] During the writing. And I have to say, I think I said that 15 years ago, but I still find it true. Even more so now. Really, I know less and less. I could describe the wisdom that I’ve gained as I’ve grown older, for sure. But in fact, I know less. So this quote still plays a role. What I’m describing there happens with me, alone, during writing. And after the script exists, things become controlled, it’s true. It becomes about fixing things, choosing locations, casting. It’s full of decisions. What I said in that quote, it’s contained in the writing.
NOTEBOOK: This idea, that—with time—you’ve come to know less, seems to track with certain developments in your work. I sense an increasing openness in the recent films, more comfort with incongruous elements, which are allowed to disrupt the film, and which are not easily placeable within the narrative. Things like the animals that open and close I Was at Home, But.... Do you think your films have grown increasingly open to these kinds of possibilities, where chance can interrupt the narrative?
SCHANELEC: It’s obvious that I’m not interested in classical dramaturgy. Which is not to say that I don’t know classical dramaturgy. That is deep inside me, as a base. But then the question is: when, where, and how do you leave it? How free do you feel to leave all of that? For me, it is always interesting to follow what comes in my mind during writing, which might mean not following a main character through a whole film. Places in Cities, which I did twenty years ago, is a film where you see the main character in every scene. But the fact that you see in her every scene had to do with my relationship with her. I wanted to see her in every scene. And I had no no desire—no, I don’t want to label it as desire. The film simply didn’t bring me to the point where I could imagine something like the animals in I Was at Home, But…. It was a different kind of script, and it happened at a different point in my life.
NOTEBOOK: Is that related to the psychologies of the central figures, then? Perhaps Maren Eggert’s character in I Was at Home, But... possesses a less coherent psychology than the young woman in Places in Cities, and therefore the film itself is more fragmented. I imagine that might affect how you direct the actors.
SCHANELEC: Well that’s something completely different. The direction depends entirely on the nature of the actor. In Places in Cities I found Sophie [Aigner], this nineteen year old girl who had never acted before. I was looking for non-professional actors, and I found her through friends. The work with a non-professional performer, compared to an actor, is so different. Even the work between actors is different. It’s simply a relationship between people. The work is to find out how I can reach someone, and I have no rules.
You can’t really compare Maren Eggert in I Was at Home, But... with Sophie’s character. Maren is a professional actor. I understand her completely differently than Sophie. For example, in Places in Cities, there is a moment in the last quarter of the film, when Sophie is in Paris, where she falls asleep at a bus station because she has nowhere to go. There’s a homeless man at the station who, while Sophie is sleeping, sleeps beside her, and who allows Sophie to rest her head on his shoulder. I shot that moment. And then Sophie is supposed to wake and realize what has happened. She stands up, looks at him. As we were shooting this, I asked her, “Can you try to look at him with an open mouth? Breathe with an open mouth.” And she just looked at me and said, “I don’t know.” When we tried it, she wasn’t able to do it. So I discovered that I have to accept things. A scene like the long dialogue between Maren Eggert and the young director in the middle of I Was at Home, But..., or the scene in the kitchen, where she shouts at the children, it’s not possible to expect something like that from Sophie. So I must assess what I can expect from someone. It’s fundamentally individual.
NOTEBOOK:
Can I ask you about your relationship with literature? Afternoon begins, in a
sense, with Chekhov and The Seagull. In I Was at Home, But... we get snatches
of Hamlet. Does your interest in these texts arise from your background in
theater? Or are these the kinds of things that you have around, that you’re
reading for pleasure, and which then enter your films?
SCHANELEC:
Reading is important for me, but with Chekhov and Shakespeare specifically,
yes, that has to do with the time that I spent in the theater. And all the
questions that I couldn't solve during my time there.
NOTEBOOK:
So is that move that you make, from theater to filmmaking, a way to deal with
those questions?
SCHANELEC:
At the time, when I decided to make films, I had chosen not to accept a
theatrical contract. It felt like a severe decision against theater. It took
years before I understood that such a decision was not possible. What you have
lived and what you have experienced continues in your thinking. So it wasn’t a
rational or intellectual decision to return to—and try to find a way to deal
with—questions that I had during my time in theater. Looking back, I can only
say that these Chekhov and Shakespeare plays, which stayed with me, were
unsolved questions—are still unsolved. Films like Afternoon or I Was at Home,
But... are just attempts to find out something. There is so much in these
plays.
NOTEBOOK:
I’m also curious about the role of nature in your work. We’ve been talking
about Places in Cities, a title that seems to reflect something essential in
your cinema, this interest in modern city life. But there are also these
recurring images, where your characters are drawn to—almost literally collapse
into—nature. I Was at Home, But... ends with Maren Eggert asleep on a rock in a
stream. In Afternoon, there’s the lake they’re constantly plunging into.
Thorbjörn Björnsson digs a grave for himself in The Dreamed Path and then lays
down in it. Is there something that draws you to these images?
SCHANELEC:
Again, this is a very essential question. What I can say is that, in my earlier
films, I wouldn’t have dared to shoot nature as I have in my recent films. I
don’t know enough about nature. I don’t live in nature. I live in a city.
Nature is something else to me, not just another space or location. It’s
something much more profound than a city. In The Dreamed Path it appears like
in a dream. In I Was at Home, But… it’s a bit more real. Then again, at the
end, she’s on that rock. Nature is something that I feel is lost, that I want
to have back. Though to be clear, I love the city. I love Berlin. I accept
this. But in nature I feel something completely different.
Let me
put this more concretely: I can talk about it in terms of the development of
sound in my films over the last 20 years. That’s very easy to describe. In the
beginning it was very important for me to use direct sound. I did that like a
maniac, even in places like a park located right next to a busy street.
Everyone told me that it would be impossible to shoot a dialogue scene 10
meters from where cars are driving by. But I was really interested in this
convergence, in trying to express something, in words, in a space where cars
are loudly driving by.
But in
my last two films, where these appearances of nature are more obvious, the
sound design is all post-production. The sounds are 100% post-production. It’s
not possible to capture that natural sound directly. Because things that look
like pure nature are not pure nature. Pure nature does not exist in Europe. You
will always hear something coming from somewhere else. I think my relationship
with nature makes more sense when I describe it like this, more technically.
We've lost something. When I shoot a scene in nature, the things I want to
create with these images, they require 100% post-production sound.
NOTEBOOK:
I find it quite fitting that the city sounds are direct, concrete sounds, and
all of these natural spaces, which you describe as dreamlike, require
post-production sound…
SCHANELEC:
Yes, and that’s why I said it took me time to feel like I could dare to do
that, to accept that the sound had to be created. If I create an image and sync
it to the original sound, it makes it feel more secure, makes me feel that what
I’ve created actually exists. Now I create everything, image and sound. It took
me time to come to that point.
The
first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile
about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&A for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she
fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate
universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch.
Returning to TIFF, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I
Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s
Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on,
and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I
interviewed her and during her subsequent intro, a grin as wide but much more
sincere than the Cheshire Cat’s appeared as she warmed to her subject. If we’re
supposed to believe that art can have some kind of transformative
effect—measured not in knee-jerk responses or clearly defined polemical goals,
but something stranger and less quantifiable that can transcend the
hollowed-out, verbally exhausted and often rotely/cynically invoked idea of
“transformative art”—it’s hard not to be inspired by someone for whom it’s
clearly so important and warming, and the effect is very hypnotic.
Starring
Marin Eggert as a professor two years out from the death of her theater
director husband, I Was at Home, But… (which I wrote about here) places the
protagonist in multiple stress positions. The most extended recurring sequence
involves buying a bicycle from a man (Phil Hayes) who speaks through a
mechanical larynx (the correct term I found by googling “voicebox,” a more
intuitive but inaccurate label); the vehicle subsequently turns out to be
faulty, necessitating negotiations about a refund or repairs he croaks
responses to. She loses her cool then, just as she does in a 13-minute or so
monologue delivered to a director (Dane Komljen) whose work she finds faulty on
the basis of its juxtaposition of actorly artifice and really terminally ill
patients. In a flashback, Eggert’s seen dancing alongside her children in front
of her dying husband in a moment where there are literally no words, only
awkward motions. The importance of the gesture over deliberate inflection and
screen acting, and its relationship to Bresson, was where I started while
speaking with Schanelec at this year’s TIFF before her first Q&A; the film
screens next week at NYFF before opening via Cinema Guild next year.
Filmmaker:
When the publicist set this up, she said I could interview you about your new
movie, or that we could talk about Pickpocket. I thought, “That’s an
interesting idea.” Why Pickpocket above every other Bresson?
Schanelec:
This was the first one that came in my mind. I could have said any other one
also. It’s one of the most obvious ones.
Filmmaker:
It’s the first one I saw. Do you remember how old you were when you saw your
first Bresson?
Schanelec:
The first film I saw was L’Argent. This was in the ’90s. No, it was in the
’80s!
Filmmaker:
Did you see it when it came out?
Schanelec:
Yeah.
Filmmaker:
Did you know about his reputation going in?
Schanelec:
No, at that time this film was seen in cinemas. It was not history, it was
distributed. I did not know anything.
Filmmaker:
Were you in the habit of going to see a lot of things at the time?
Schanelec:
No, at that time I did not make films. I was at the theater, working as an
actress. I saw this film and found out that this [was] something I [had] never
seen before—which I never lost, in a way. It was a film, but much more than a
film.
Filmmaker:
As an actress, was it shocking to see that kind of performance onscreen?
Schanelec:
As an actress, it was really interesting, because I asked myself many things
about acting which I couldn’t find out although I was working continuously
onstage for years. I was standing onstage and did not know how to get rid of my
thoughts, and my thoughts [hindered] my playing—a very strange experience. Now
there was suddenly the chance to see a face, and to hear a word, and to see a
movement—not to see what the actor or director wants to tell us, just to see
what happens. And, not because of a decision, but unconsciously.
Filmmaker:
Did seeing the film change the way you performed?
Schanelec:
No. It changed [in that] I stopped.
Filmmaker:
So, it caused a kind of crisis?
Schanelec:
Yeah. But I’d already lost interest in what I did when I saw the film. I was
not enthusiastic about my work. There were moments where I thought what I did
made sense, but there were many moments where I asked what I was doing here. So,
I started to think about other ways to show what can happen, to be concentrated
completely on what happens, to show nothing else. It was not so much later when
I stopped acting.
Filmmaker:
Bresson can be really dangerous for filmmakers, because he’s such a strong
voice that there’s a worry about being too influenced by him in a way that’s
too visible. Did that cause you any anxiety when you started to make your own
work?
Schanelec:
No, not at all, because what I saw was much more about questions than answers.
When I went to film school, I forgot about Bresson. I didn’t go to make films
like Bresson did. Seeing L’Argent was just one point which influenced this
change in my wish [about] what I do. I started to write, I thought about what a
camera can frame, what is natural light, I wrote dialogues, and nothing of this
was directly influenced. And then, after many, many years, in a way, I came to
the wish to shoot a hand, a foot, but then it was my wish. I discovered it by
myself. I mean, for sure it was clear that Bresson did that. I never saw reason
to hide my interest—interest is a weak word, in a way—but also I was not afraid
at all, because I came to that point, to shoot images which remind people of
Bresson, but I didn’t care. But this was 15 years later.
Filmmaker:
There’s many different kinds of performances in I Was at Home, But… When you
work with an actor on a gesture, like them taking off their shoes or whatever,
do you just have them do it until they’re unconsciously expressive? Do you
explain any of this to them?
Schanelec:
No, it doesn’t make sense to explain anything, because an actor is not able to
let himself go because I ask him. The way to come to the point that something
happens to the actor—if it’s a child, adult, professional, non-professional, it
doesn’t matter—what I want is that the gesture makes something. When I say,
“You move your hand from there to there,” he’s doing it, and he doesn’t know
why he’s doing it. It’s just because I told him. Whether he’s able to fulfill
that I try to find out before, in casting. When I read these descriptions of
how Bresson worked with the actors, that he said, “Say without expression”—to
be honest I can hardly imagine how that works. It’s not important for me how he
did it. I think I do something different but probably with the same aim.
Filmmaker:
In the screenplays, what does that kind of action look like? Do you describe
the gestures?
Schanelec:
Yes, only [gestures]. Now I’ve come to the point where a screenplay, every line
is one shot. I write down what you see without emotion. That is very central
for me: to find out what I want to show and what I want to do. So they are
often very short, shorter than normal scripts, because there is no description
of what a scene is, what a scene means. But for me, it’s a way to find out, to
be as sure as possible what I want to do. Also writing a script is mostly about
imagining as exactly as possible what shall happen. You cannot be sure, but I’m
quite sure what I want to shoot works.
Filmmaker:
When you’re auditioning actors, what do you do?
Schanelec:
I take a text from the script and give it to the one I want to cast. I let them
read it, or I say it and he repeats it if it’s a child. For example, with the
Shakespeare texts, I read it and then they repeated it, so I can hear what they
do. I don’t explain, and also with adults I don’t explain, because it doesn’t
help.
Filmmaker:
Is it the same on set? You don’t explain there either?
Schanelec:
Yes, I don’t explain. But in the casting I find out with whom it’s possible and
with whom not. When I worked as an actress, it was normal that the director
explained. But already at that time, I asked myself what our conversation
brings, because it just fills your mind with aims which you want to do—you have
a plan then. When I started to make films for sure in the first years I
explained, because I was used to explanations in the work between director and actor.
But that was always so helpless and senseless! I don’t believe in this. I
stopped step by step.
Filmmaker:
It seems like you have an affinity for people performing songs. There’s “The
Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which they sing at the beginning of The Dreamed Path, and
the hospital dance sequence in this. Is there something about somebody
responding to, or performing, music that helps get to the unconscious?
Schanelec:
Sure, it does. If there is music and I make the actors dance to the music, it’s
difficult for them to hide. They are not dancers, so you can see how their
bodies move, and they start to get vulnerable. And when they sing, you hear
their voice differently. Not when you have a professional singer, maybe, but
there are also professional singers who kept, through their profession, a very
personal voice. In The Dreamed Path, [the protagonist, played by Thorbjörn
Björnsson] a singer, but it’s his voice, he kept it. I can recognize him when
he sings.
Filmmaker:
Do you know how many times you shot the dance in the hospital?
Schanelec:
Maybe three or four times.
Filmmaker:
Is that generally your preference?
Schanelec:
Yes, and some things I do only one or two times. The dance was rehearsed a lot,
they had to learn. It was choreographed by a dancer.
Filmmaker:
I was going to ask about the long speech on the street. The idea of her
delivering such a long speech goes against the performances of the rest of the
film. But she’s articulating something important to you, even though she admits
she hasn’t seen the whole film that she’s talking about, and it’s a centerpiece
in some ways.
Schanelec:
Yes, it’s true. But for me it was interesting to have the possibility to say
something. It’s interesting, in my eyes, what she’s saying, but at the same
moment it’s clear that if I [thought] that, I could not work. The most
important thing, for me, was, I wanted to see her in another moment where she
cannot control herself. I was not so interested—OK, I’m interested in what she
says, but the important thing is that she cannot stop herself. In another way,
the same thing happened when the children did Hamlet. When I give her a text
like that, she just follows the text. It’s not possible to direct that, because
it was 13 minutes or whatever. I cannot fill her brain with, “At minute two,
the sentence should be like that,” the only way is to let herself go. That’s
what she did, so it worked automatically.
For
sure, she’s an actress. I don’t think this is possible to do with a
non-professional. Maybe it is, but then I have to do casting with a thousand
people. Anyway, something happens to her in that scene. When she starts, she is
concentrated only on the first step, and the first sentence, but then it’s
everything in the moment. She listens to him, he listens to her. I worked a lot
on that dialogue—on every point, comma, whatever. She reads it, learns it,
understands it without interpretation. I moved with the camera and the street
wasn’t blocked [off]. It was on a Sunday. It wouldn’t have been possible on a
weekday. Even though the shops are closed, the urbanity of the place is
present. There are some people, but less. The whole team moved with the actors.
I’m very used to shooting on unblocked streets. I’m also interested in normal
people, and I don’t like to work with extras.
Filmmaker:
Where did you find the gentleman who sells her the bicycle?
Schanelec:
He’s an English actor who played the father in The Dreamed Path. I did not find
a German actor. It was very difficult—actually, it was not difficult, because
he’s extremely good as an actor, but [also] as a person. He’s a good person
(laughs), a good being. I didn’t want to have the cliche of a poor, old,
half-sick person, so that he speaks through that thing [the mechanical layrnx]
was my chance to use an actor who doesn’t speak German. Because then he just
learned to speak through that thing, and because it’s so mechanical we didn’t
hear any accent.
Filmmaker:
Would you still have used that thing if you could have found a German actor?
Because also that’s funny.
Schanelec:
No, no, that was written in the script. I couldn’t find anyone. I don’t know,
this character, for me, is really important, because he’s so patient and calm
and good. I really like him as a character. I don’t know why I couldn’t find [a
German actor]. Maybe that’s my problem with the German…nationality.
Filmmaker:
Could you expand on that?
Schanelec:
How can I explain this? A German actor is a German actor. Being a German actor
is influenced by what an actor in Germany does. That means: in Germany you have
a theater landscape, theaters which receive a lot of money. So, that is very
developed. At the same time, in Germany there are not many interesting films
made. If actors [of] that age work, they have a lot of experience, either in
theater or doing bad movies and television. Both are probably a problem. An
English actor is something very different, because English theater’s different,
and also in England other films are made. [There is] another tradition. Also,
what is strange with German actors, they often see a job less as handwork, as
something you learn and then you do it. It’s more an artistic ability, where
you create a feeling and express it, and this is also sometimes a problem for
me. Because I’m not interested in the ability of the actor to express
something. I’m interested in the human being (laughs), and if the actor sees,
more or less, his profession as changing himself, it’s less helpful for me.
Filmmaker:
Because you don’t want them to actually change themselves.
Schanelec:
No. I’m interested in what they are. For sure, you can find professionals like
Marin who stay themselves.
“It
Doesn’t Make Sense to Explain Anything”: Angela Schanelec on I Was at Home,
But… and Robert Bresson. By Vadim Rizov.Filmmaker, October 2, 2019.
“Angela Schanelec has spent the past 20 years rethinking the bounds of narrative cinema,” writes Jordan Cronk in our January/February issue. “With her latest feature, The Dreamed Path, the German director, at once the most radical and least known of the celebrated Berlin School of filmmakers, continues to reduce her films to only their most vital components. In Schanelec’s work, every movement every gesture, every glance exists as an isolated yet codependent element in a gradually accumulating visual and narrative framework. The Dreamed Path follows two simple stories, set over 30 years part, about two couples: one on vacation in early-’80s Greece and the other in modern-day Berlin. Within this severely constricted narrative, numerous objects and sensory details reveal themselves as unlikely conduits for experiential development. Like her most noted forebears (Bresson, Godard, Denis), Schanelec seeks to activate thought and sensation through economic, medium-specific methods, leaving explication by the wayside. Very little in contemporary cinema looks or operates like this.”
In
Angela Schanelec’’s third feature,
Passing Summer (2001), there is a scene in which one of the
characters—you might call her the central character, though it seems misleading
to refer to a “center” in one of Schanelec’s films—a young woman, Valerie,
played by Ursini Lardi, asks an older male authority figure for feedback on
some short stories she has written. His analysis: “Rather nice, when you let
yourself go, when you’re not trying to express too much through style alone. .
. . To put it plainly, whole sentences are generally better than fragments. . .
. Reading it, you start wishing for something more normal.”
It is worth mentioning that the authority figure is unidentified—context clues suggest a current or former professor—and that up to this point, an hour into the film, we’ve had no indication that Valerie is an author of fiction aside from a couple of stray shots of her tapping away at a laptop. Schanelec’s cinema is very much a cinema of fragments, a mosaic of moments, usually taken from the lives of a more-or-less loosely connected collection of middle-class Europeans who will, through the course of any given film, unexpectedly pick up and wander off with what there is of a narrative. Along with pinball shifts of perspective, Schanelec’s work is distinguished by some of the most chasmic and elliptical ruptures this side of Maurice Pialat, rifts that open without warning and trust that the viewer is spry enough to span the breach. A bracing example of both tendencies is found in Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path (2016), which commences in 1989 with two young lovers who part after a romance in Greece, and then, with a single unceremonious cut a little less than halfway through, enters the home of a couple in contemporary Berlin whose marriage has begun to unravel.
The woman in the modern-day couple, Ariane, is played by one of Schanelec’s favorite actresses, Maren Eggert—she starred in Schanelec’s Marseille (2004), in which she’s an amateur photographer who escapes Berlin and an undisclosed emotional disturbance by traveling to the south of France, and has the greatest share of screen time in Schanelec’s latest, I Was at Home, But..., which won her the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival. In this film, Eggert plays Astrid, a single mother of a thirteen-year-old son and a younger daughter, strained to the point of snapping by the pressures of motherhood in the aftermath of her partner’s death two years’ prior, its circumstances as mysterious as those surrounding the brief disappearance of her son, whose reemergence opens the film. I Was at Home, But... will open at Film at Lincoln Center on February 14, preceded by a complete retrospective of Schanelec’s body of work and a director-curated carte blanche sidebar of films influential to her work, including Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972).
Described as a “structuralist sketch,” the earliest work by Schanelec in the series is a 1991 short called Lovely Yellow Color, an auspicious title, for Schanelec is one of the most delicate and attentive colorists in contemporary cinema. Her palette is generally muted, lending an especial emphasis to the occasional splashes of bold primaries—the lemony button-up dress provided to Eggert by the police station house at the end of Marseille, or the bright red top that identifies Miriam Jakob’s character after the passage of some twenty-five years in The Dreamed Path. Schanelec can create boudoir scenes with an ineffable, Hopper-esque tension. She is particularly good in the gloaming, that hour when the last of the light still holds but the streetlights have come on. In The Dreamed Path, there is a brief sequence of shots involving a woman boarding a bus—yellow, against a cobalt dusk—in the suburbs, then turning to look out the window. It is one of the most moving things I have seen in recent cinema, and I can’t even begin to tell you why.
Born in 1962 in southwest Germany, in the city of Aalen, Schanelec initially studied and worked as an actress, appearing at Berlin’s Schaubühne and Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, with which Eggert has a longtime involvement. Schanelec has performed in several films, including her own Passing Summer and Afternoon (2007), and in the American filmmaker Matthew Porterfield’s 2015 short Take What You Can Carry. Acting, professional and otherwise, plays a prominent role in her work. In The Dreamed Path, Ariane is an actress, seen shooting what appears to be a television police show—a nod perhaps to Eggert’s recurring role on the (incredibly) long-running procedural drama Tatort (1970–). In Marseille, Eggert’s character has a tetchy relationship with her sister, an actress (Marie-Lou Sellem), who is appearing in a Chekhovian stage production. (“You’re not really unhappy, it’s just an act,” says Eggert to sis. “You’re acting because you can’t stop acting.”) The spirit of Chekhov also hangs over Afternoon, which opens with a curtain raise as viewed from backstage, and which finds its form as a loose reworking of The Seagull. Shakespeare, too, is an abiding presence (with her late husband, the theater director Jürgen Gosch, Schanelec has published translations of Shakespeare), from a minor character called Desdemona in Marseille to the significance of Hamlet in I Was at Home, But..., which intersperses scenes of Astrid’s adolescent son and schoolmates rehearsing for a classroom performance of the play.
The production is downright experimental, grade school epic theater, and the performances are measured, drained of emphasis, not outwardly emotive. It is probably Schanelec’s move away from naturalistic performances—along with an increasing usage of synecdochic close-ups—that has led some to draw comparisons between her work and that of Robert Bresson, an influence that Schanelec doesn’t deny. (I Was at Home, But... is bookended by a fable-like sequence featuring only animal performers, including a donkey that can’t but evoke Balthazar.) Bresson is a hard taskmaster; everyone ought to study him, but no one ought to emulate him, for like most truly original styles, his doesn’t award imitation. Fortunately, Schanelec uses Bresson not as a template but as a point of departure from which to follow her own erratic path. (Having eventually studied film under Harun Farocki at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, she has sometimes been lumped in with the so-called Berlin School, but this already vague group designation does no favors to a talent so cussedly individual.)
While a certain affectlessness is the baseline for performance in I Was at Home, But..., the film achieves some of its most striking moments by breaking its own rules, such as a quietly bravura walk-and-talk in the middle of the movie in which an increasingly impassioned and indignant Astrid breathlessly berates a filmmaker colleague, Jorge (Dane Komljen), for what she believes was a disingenuous scene in one of his films, as he looks on, mute, pained, and more than a little concerned for her mental well-being. The unobtrusively elaborate following shot, running some nine minutes, the torrent of dialogue, Astrid’s thrusts (“Unbearably bad cinema. Do you understand?”) and Jorge’s hapless parries (“I understood that some time ago”): We’re closer to Preston Sturges in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) than to Bresson here—and Schanelec can be disarmingly funny, as elsewhere in a running subplot involving Astrid’s purchase and return of a used bicycle and the difficulties of communicating via electrolarynx.
There is an autobiographical handle to I Was at Home, But...—Gosch, the father of Schanelec’s two children, died in 2009—though an evident fascination with the particular textures of loneliness, and the lengths to which people will go to be free of it, can be found in her work well before this date. In this, too, she is Bressonian, for any discussion of the Frenchman’s late work that doesn’t touch on suicidal ideation is necessarily incomplete; like Eugène Green, the other great descendant of the Bresson tradition, Schanelec is preoccupied with the problem of isolation in an atomized modern world. The family may act as a bulwark against solitude, but an imperfect one, a breeding ground of pathologies. The deaths of parents loom large in Passing Summer and The Dreamed Path, and practically every moment of I Was at Home, But..., a film redolent with the rot of autumn, is haunted by a knowledge of mortality. The comforts of home and hearth, too, are vulnerable to contingency: A mordantly comic scene from The Dreamed Path has Ariane’s ex, played by Phil Hayes, being shown around the bleakest furnished bachelor flat imaginable by a realtor, who introduces him to the barren bedroom by proclaiming: “It more or less has everything.”
While Schanelec’s films evince an enormous tenderness for children, to her characters these children can serve as vexing reminders of loves lost in time, distance, death. While I Was at Home, But... is less prone to leaping between parallel plotlines than most of the director’s movies, and it gives significant space to the romance between one of Astrid’s son’s teachers (Franz Rogowski) and a young woman (Lilith Stangenberg), last seen together during a pained breakup in the darkness before dawn, initiated by her refusal of motherhood: “In this mass of senseless creatures, a child. One that exists only because you and I wanted it. It seems crazy.”
If not quite presenting a senseless mass, Schanelec’s outspreading, disjunctive multicharacter narratives, demanding a vigilant engagement from the viewer who doesn’t want to be left behind completely, are very far in methodology and philosophy from those awful, coddling multicharacter dramas that proliferated in the aughts—Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), for example. The difference is that between receiving the homiletic reassurance “We are all connected” and being handed the jagged fragments—the broken dish or glass is a favorite Schanelec motif—and told to put the thing back together for yourself, and too bad if your fingers get cut while you do.
The rewards for the effort are a sensorial awakening, a sharpening of awareness to the world, and even brief glimpses of bliss—as much as Bernardo Bertolucci or Claire Denis, Schanelec loves a dance scene, and hers can elevate even the wet-blanket vocal stylings of M. Ward, heard in I Was at Home, But... Always an interesting filmmaker, Schanelec has with The Dreamed Path and I Was at Home, But... become something much more, making in middle age the strongest films of her career, at once rigorous and absolutely free. “Schools” and influences are only relevant now as approximate descriptors—she’s in a class by herself.
Perchance to dream. By Nick Pinkerton. Artforum , February 6, 2020.
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