There is no doubt that Christian Petzold is one of Europe’s most influential working filmmakers. The German director takes pride in making ghost stories that continually delve into trauma and memory, with the likes of Yella, Phoenix, Transit, and Undine among the standouts in his work. His latest film, Miroirs No. 3, follows Laura, who, out in the German countryside, has a car crash and is quickly taken in by a local woman, as they bond over their grievances.
Oscar Trinick sat down with the director to discuss his newest work, the implications it has for his wider filmography, and how he navigates German history, whether that be new or old.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
OT: I’m finding now that there are so many directors out there who kind of seem to take pride in making films that are really drastically different film to film in a flashy way, but you are the opposite of that. You are never afraid to go back to the ideas that you love most. What is it that keeps bringing you back to the ideas of trauma and memory?
CP: I think it’s something to do with Germany. At the end of the 60s, when I had to go to elementary school, we had new teachers in Germany, young teachers. Most of them learned something about German history during the ’68 student opposition; anti-Vietnam and anti-Iran or Persian. Then they asked us questions about Germany, about fascism, about the time between ’33 and ’45 and so on. All these pupils would go home and ask their parents about this time. That is when we knew that there was something they couldn’t explain, they didn’t want to talk about.
My parents were too young to be part of the fascist system. They were very young children, but grandfathers and grandmothers, they are guilty. Nobody wants to talk about that. I think that I grew up in a country where everything seemed so ordinary: a car, a small house, a school, and a father who had a job from nine to five, and a mother who stayed home. In this ordinary world, something is in the underground; it’s not okay. I think all movies had something to do with my own life, to live in a world where something’s in subcutaneous, which is not okay.
At this time [when I was sixteen], each evening after school, I went to Cologne to see Hitchcock movies. There was a retrospective in the cinema, and I’ve seen them all. I think they have something to do with me. In all of Hitchcock’s movies, there are questions of innocence and guilt, and about dreams and nightmares.
OT: I found with Miroirs No. 3, the way that you translate your films into a ghost story, it feels very natural a lot of the time. Is this landscape of German history so vast that you feel like you could make films on it forever? Or do you ever feel like you’re repeating yourself?
CP: No, I think that there are so many questions which came out after ‘89, after the fall of the wall. I was living in Berlin. It was an island. We’re surrounded by the Communist German Democratic Republic, and when the world broke down, for me, it was a little bit like Sir Francis Drake, going out into this sea or this new country I don’t know so much about.
This part of Germany, where, for example, Mirow is, is something I haven’t seen before. I was so surprised that there were small villages with American names. There is a New Boston, a Philadelphia, and some of the houses have porches to the street and not porches in the back. I thought some American desire was in this country. I don’t know where it’s coming from because it was Russian before.
Then I do research in the libraries there, and then I read that all other countries have had revolutions…. In 1848, there was a revolution in Germany, which was completely defeated. So many people, craftsmen, had to leave Germany. Most of them want to go to the USA to build a new life after their defeat in Germany, and some of them stayed in Germany because they received money from Prussia…They wanted to go to the USA, but they stayed, and they stayed for money. They lost their dreams. So the only thing that reminds them of their dreams is that they gave names to their villages, which are the villages in the USA.
When you are in a country, in the countryside, where everything is broken desire, I think this is a fantastic studio for filmmaking.
OT: What makes you want to turn history into this dreamy and comforting aesthetic that is found in Miroirs No. 3?
CP: I mentioned Hitchcock, and there was one thing I liked so much. There’s a movie, it’s not so popular in the work of Hitchcock, it’s Rebecca. In Rebecca, there is a young woman coming to a castle. In this castle, there is the ghost or the phantom of a dead woman, and there is an older woman, like a female servant. Black dress, and she wants to throw the new woman out because she’s in the hands of the ghost. Sometimes my old collaborator, Harun Farocki, who died 10 years ago, said, perhaps we don’t have to make new movies, we have to change our positions.
So, for me, Miroirs No. 3 is a change of position. I’m not telling the story from the position of the young girl or Laura. I’m also telling the story from the position of the house and the family there. These two positions, the Hitchcock position and my position, build the room of the story, the space of the story. Like in Phoenix, Harun and I talked about Vertigo. We said, Jimmy Stewart, okay, he’s a castrated man, he wants to get his erection back, but he has to kill a woman for that. You can read it like this. It’s a fantastic movie, my favourite movie of all time, but it’s also a perverted movie. But why not tell the story from the position of Kim Novak? What is changing then?
OT: This comfort in dark times, is it something that comes naturally to you, or is it something that you feel like you have to confront head-on?
CP: Yeah, I mentioned it in some other interviews that it reminds me of the thing which happened many, many years ago when my daughter was four years old. I was alone with her at home. My wife was with my son at another place for the holidays, and during the holidays, I had to stay home with her. When the kid is sleeping, I can watch horror movies. I love them, really hard horror movies. I think, at 9 pm, she came in, four years old, and said, “I can’t sleep, can I watch TV with you?” and so I had to change from horror to something on an ordinary TV channel, and that was a James Bond movie. I said, “OK, you can see a James Bond movie for 20 minutes, and then I’ll bring you back to bed”. Then she watched James Bond with me for 20 minutes, and I don’t like James Bond movies. I like the music, and I like the style at the beginning, the opening sequences.
Then, after 20 minutes, she said, “I love James Bond movies”, and I was a little bit disappointed about my four-year-old daughter. And I said, “Why?” and aggressively asked the question. She said, “He can destroy everything and never have to clean it up.”
I remember when I started working on Miroirs. It’s a movie about the cleanup. We have movies that destroy, and sometimes you need movies to destroy. You need a Godard movie at the end of the 50s. You need something to bring fresh wind and fresh air into societies which are like stone. But nowadays, in this time, in the last years, I feel in my own work that I’m more interested not in destruction, but in the cleanup. I’m interested in how we can repair our world. So to repair a traumatised family, it’s a very political thing.
OT: You are someone who loves to work with the same actors across your films. Is it always important to you to have the same actors in your films? Do you feel like you’re telling an overarching story with that?
CP: I’m not a big fan of theater in combination with movies, because theater and movies have nothing to do with each other. The theater actor is not a film actor, especially in Germany, where theater is very important for our society. To be an actor for theater, we have fantastic schools here, really fantastic schools, and they are important. These are the elite of the German actors, but film acting is completely different, and they mix it up in Germany in the last few years, and I can’t stand it.
But the only thing I love about theatre is the ensemble. So when you see the history of movies, you see Hitchcock and his team, his cast, John Ford and his cast, Rossellini and his cast, you see that people are working together because cinema is a collective art. It’s an art based on discourse and not based on some genius who has ideas in his head and wants to realise them.
So this ensemble I have with Nina Hoss and Paula Beer and the guys, and also the people behind the camera, we are a group who are talking with each other about this movie we want to make, about the work. This is something that I like very much. There is a fantastic essay by Heinrich von Kleist, which I remember because I studied literature before. In this essay, Heinrich von Kleist says something about talking during reading. You are talking, you’re getting more intelligent than if you were just sitting there by yourself and reflecting. You have the others at the same moment. So you have a discourse in the best meaning of the word.
When we are making a movie, we are talking about the next one. When we made Afire, I was sitting there at the table in the garden with the actors, and I talked about Miroirs with them, and my idea of a family under pressure who is traumatised, and someone is coming to this family who’s also traumatised, and how both traumatised positions find a space and a room where they can live on the inside.
OT: When I watch your films, I’m always drawn back to one of my favourite American filmmakers, James Benning, and in particular a film of his called Landscape Suicide, which is one of my favourites. He touches on the idea of pain and place in that film, which I think is very relevant to Miroirs No. 3. Is there a connection between these two things for you?
CP: At the end of the 90s, I stayed in Los Angeles at the place of my friend Hartmut Bitomsky, who was the Dean of CalArts, and he was a friend of James Benning, and he came there with his motorbike for a cigarette and a coffee. I saw him, but my English was so bad that I was too shy to talk to him. After two hours, he left the porch and went away on his bike.
I have seen Landscape Suicide, and for me, cinema loves places which are a little bit like ruins. There could be a crime scene, you see an innocent apartment, an innocent flat, or an innocent porch, an innocent house, and a voice says, “someone was killed here, something had happened here.” So you can see the past and the present in the same moment. You feel that there is something in the walls and something in the windows and something in the garden. So, imagination starts. I love the movies by James Benning, I must say.
I love it that every two years he comes to the Berlinale and you can see a movie by him. I have a friend who is a film critic. He’s a fantastic film critic. He made a critique of James Benning’s movie, 13 Lakes. He said, “The fourth lake is a total surprise” because it’s fantastic. It’s really fantastic.
OT: This is a film that’s about our need to find a fix and replace things, whether that’s human or machine. Do you see replacement as an automatic human response, or is it something else for you?
As I mentioned, I have two kids. So then, after Miroir, they said to me, “When do you want to make a political movie again?” And I said, “This is a political movie”. Phoenix, Barbara, Transit, these are political movies or Afire too with an ecological disaster.
And I, so I have to explain it. The capitalistic system is a system which destroys the world because every three years we have to buy a new iPhone, every five years we have to buy a new car. We have everything that is broken, so we have to throw it away and have to buy something new. This completely destroys our world.
Then, when you start to repair, you are a little bit anti-capitalistic because you don’t want to give new money into the market. On the other hand, when you want to repair something, you have to understand it. We lost everything, we don’t know how artificial intelligence works, we can’t repair our cars, nor repair our souls. We have to buy and to buy and to buy. When we have problems, we have to go to a gym or to therapy. We can’t understand what is happening. To understand what is happening is like repairing things. This is something I’m interested in.
This is political, to say these people in this movie try to repair the washing machine and the dishwasher, and they want to repair their cars and their fences, their gardens, their house, but also they try to repair their connections to each other, their souls and minds and their lives. To see someone make a portrait of people who try to repair themselves is something very political, I think. Especially nowadays, when we are surrounded by wars and really, really, really bad people.
OT: There are quite a lot of glances toward empty spaces. The idea of kind of someone not being where they should be. For you, are these empty spaces more powerful than an occupied one?
CP: When we started to make the movie, the DOP Hans Fromm asked me, “What style will our movie have?” I love him so much because he just asked me one question at the beginning of the movie, and when I gave him an answer, we didn’t have to talk about these things again. I said, “It’s a Western movie”. He understands immediately what this movie is about.
I think Western movies are mostly movies about a catastrophe that happened. Mostly, it’s a civil war in the USA. You have abandoned houses, lonely searchers, lonely people who don’t find their room, their home. They were in a transit room, and sometimes they find a house, a dream of a house, a farm they could rebuild, which means they want to come back to civilisation. Like the soldiers who came from war, they couldn’t find their way back into a civilised world.
So we always see this house there, with a porch and the garden and the fences, a little bit like a house in a John Ford movie. There’s the wind, there’s the loneliness, there seems to be abandonment, and the film is a portrait of trying to reoccupy this house by human beings.
Interview Courtesy of Oscar Trinick
Feature Image Courtesy of New Wave Films