Bergamo Film Meeting: interview with director Christian Petzold

At the 43rd BFM FRED Film Radio interviewed Christian Petzold, a leading exponent of the “Berlin School”, featured in Europe, Now!, the section of the Bergamo Film Meeting dedicated to contemporary European cinema.

The role on cinema in a divided Europe

Christian Petzold is the son of emigrants from East Germany and in his first short films he told the story of the changes brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today Europe is crossed by great divisions, what role does he think cinema can have? “Some days ago I had a panel in Berlin between an East German filmmaker and me as a West German filmmaker whose parents are immigrants. We talked about cinema and the perspective we have had on our own countries on the East and on the West side and how we wew thinking about the other side behind the wall.And I think this conversation was fantastic because we have one language, we are living in the same country, but we have totally different perspectives. Europe is something based on different perspectives and we have to be aware of these different perspectives and not to have just one”.

The contemporaneity of past history

History has always been present in Christian Petzold‘s movies. An element through which to reflect on our past and memory. “I don’t like historical movies so much when they try to make a reenactment of something from the past. I don’t like actors who are playing Napoleon or so”, says the director. “For me the things which have happened in the past are just in our contemporary times too. I think cinema is a little bit like a city. We have old houses, new houses, we have ruins and scares, and we have contemporary times with their utopian things and their desires. My historical movies are always contemporary movies. The people from the past and the ideas of the past are a little bit like ghosts who want to come to communicate with us”.

Women are survivors

Women often play a central role in his movies. What do they allow Christian Petzold to explore? “Some years ago, before Claude Chabrol died, I was in Venice and met him”, remember the director. “I watched an interview he had given in which they asked him why there were always female characters in his movies? He said: ‘Men are living and women are surviving. And cinema is always about surviving’. I think female characters are survivors and cinema is always interested in survivors”.

The lesson of Neorealism

One of the directors featured in Europe, Now! at the Bergamo Film Meeting, Christian Petzold is one of the leading ones of contemporary European cinema. But when he was an aspiring director, who were the ones who inspired him? “I had lived in Sesto San Giovanni, in Milan, when I was a young student”, remember the director. “In this time one of my favorite movies was ‘La Notte’ by Michelangelo Antonioni. And in this movie he is remembering himself to the times of Neorealism, a movement where Italy, after the fascism, tried to understand who we are, what we are, where we are living, why we are living. And cinema it’s the art to understand what is happening, what we are dreaming of, what is our desire, what we have done. Neo realism is for me the most important time of cinema”. 

A new film

After “Afire”, Christian Petzold is back behind the camera for a new film that he has just finished shooting. “It’s about a young student and she is in a depression crisis. Then she has an accident with her boyfriend and he dies. And there was an older woman near this accident place. She is living in a house by her own and she takes this girl with her to her house and they are living together like a mother and daughter. But something is wrong with their relationship”.