Narrative Cinema

I wouldn't be making films if it weren't for the cinema of the 1920s, the silent era. Since I have been making films it has been in reference to this classical tradition. Telling stories, this is precisely my conception of narrative cinema; and what else is the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories.

Montage-Film

This means montage. There can be no doubt that the narrative of an individual fate, unfolded in ninety minutes, can convey historical material only at the price of dramaturgical incest. The fictional threat displaces experience from the film. In the history of film, montage is the ‘morphology of relations’ ('die Formenweli des Zusammenhangs’). Then there is also the artificial opposition of documentary and mise-en-scene. Mere documentation cuts off relations: nothing exists objectively without the emotions, actions and desires, that is, without the eyes and the senses of the people involved. I have never understood why the depiction of such acts (most of which have to be staged) is called fiction, fiction-film. But it is equally ideological to assume that individuals could determine history. Therefore, no narrative succeeds without a certain proportion of authentic material, i.e. documentation. Such use of documentation establishes a point of reference for the eyes and senses: real conditions clear the view for the action.

Auteur Film-Cooperative Film

I have always believed in the auteur film, in the continuation of early film history: Dovshenko, Griffith, Dreyer, Rosselini, Godard (if you like, Costard), Schroeter, and others. I find myself in good company among them. With delight I discover that Woody Allen (MANHATTAN) and Frank Coppola - representatives of a completely different cinematic tradition - take recourse to the same vigorous principles; their editing style is associative, they appeal to film history, it is never a risk to make personal films, or to make compact films: ‘You got to rely on people.'

For the auteur there is no way back to the ready-made film (Konfektions-film). Nor can auteur cinema remain in its present state. It can not incessantly deliver single works, each of which individually reinvent film history. Cinema is a programme that is a relationship of production - if for no other reason than that this relationship exists in the experiences of the spectators which constantly recreate the cinema's experiential horizon.