Christian Petzold

Interview with Christian Petzold

Interview with Christian Petzold This interview mainly took place in July 2011, with a shorter followup in October 2012, at Petzold’s office in Berlin. It was conducted in German, so I include a number of original words or phrases that seem important to his cinema. jaimey fisher: Places and spaces, especially in small cities and towns, are consistently important in your films. Where did you grow up? Can you describe the region, the particular place, where you are from? christian petzold: That has to do with my parents, who grew up during the Nazi period. At the end of World War II, they were children—actually, they were refugees, so children of migration. My father is from Saxony [in the former East Germany], and my mother is from what is now the Czech Republic. They met, then, as refugees in a small town in the southern Ruhr region near Dortmund and Düsseldorf [in far western West Germany]. So, we always lived in transit spaces 148 | Christian Petzold [Transitorte], often in something like a bungalow. So where I grew up was a bit like a “trailer park” [said in English]. There were so many buildings that had been destroyed in Germany during the war that there was a significant lack of houses and apartments. So, for the first couple of years, I was really a refugee child in the city where I grew up and also always a bit on the margins. Since that time, when I arrive in a new city, for example in Milan or Madrid, I always go for walks in places far away from the tourist sights; instead I always end up at the trailer parks. I do not know what attracts me to such places. For me, those are the interesting spaces, always kinds of transitional spaces [Durchgangsorte]. I guess I do not have a true home [Heimat]. jf: What was the first film you can remember seeing in a movie theater? I ask because I always think that clarifies the time, the moment, in film history when one is growing up. cp: That was an interesting moment. I was six or seven and in a small town where I went to the cinema with my friends and without our parents—that’s probably why I can remember it. That is why cinema will never die out: it is a place without parents. We went to see The Jungle Book, and there was a trailer beforehand for a film called Liane, the Girl from the Jungle [Liane, das Mädchen aus dem Urwald; 1956]. Liane was rather like Tarzan, and there was a scene with her, this young woman probably twenty-one or twenty-two years old, very beautiful and with hardly any clothes on, and she was being roasted in a cage over an open fire by cannibals. She was screaming for help, and, from that moment on, cinema has always been for me a sexual space. Godard wrote a text about Liane because, for him, this was finally an intriguing film from Germany. Later, Harun Farocki met the woman who played Liane, Marion Michael. Even though he is older than I, it was an important film for him, too, because suddenly, in the middle of all these terrible German movies full of literary adaptations and theatrical styles, there was something out of 1920s and 1930s German cinema—suddenly a cinema of bodies, the erotic, secrets, and forests. That’s really something I can remember, this Liane. jf: So there were not any film societies, clubs, or anything similar for noncommercial or older films? cp: Yes, once a week, there was a film evening. Then, when I was eighteen, I did mandatory civil service instead of military service in the Interview | 149 army. I was in social work [at the German version of the YMCA] that also allowed me to work with film some—I organized a little film club for the young people there. According to the teacher there, I always had to organize a double program, so as to include a film for those who were not as educated. I never liked this kind of division between, for instance, a literary film and then a Bud Spencer film. I really never liked that at all, so I just mixed the program up, which was really fun. It was all on sixteen-millimeter, and we had to do everything ourselves...