Especially two movies stood out on those subjects: Transit by the German director Christian Petzold and the Russian film Dovlatov by Alexey German Jr. These two Berlinale contributions are reminiscent, in a sense, of the movie Casablanca, which became a cult movie after its premiere in1942. Around Rick‘s Café in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, the film offers bizarre entanglements between history and fiction, politics and screen, reality and movie. The lovers Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergmann were not allowed to experience a happy end in this political refugee drama. The legendary melodrama by Austro-Hungarian Director Michael Curtiz shows politically persecuted individuals who, out of Europe, tried to escape the Nazis via French North Africa to America. Emigrants from all over Europe compete on the black market and before corrupt French officials for exit visas to Lisbon.
The writer Anna Seghers lived a similar story. On her flight from the Nazis, she stranded in Marseille in the 1940s and was finally able to reach Mexico. Inspired by her experiences she wrote the novel Transit – the story of people, whose lives are defined by the rift between past and future, the old and the new country, past and new love. In her novel, she calls the refugee’s state of vacillation between persecution, fear, and hope a “transit life”. Seghers raises questions which seem to be, in light of today’s international helplessness around the plight of refugees and the refugee crisis, more relevant than ever: What is home ? Is it the place of birth, a better world, or simply a metaphor for both ?
How pertinent these questions are can be seen in Christian Petzold’s movie adaption of Anna Segher’s novel. He transferred significant parts of Transit into today’s present.
The movie Dovlatov, set in the Soviet Union of the1970s, appears to address similar questions regarding the present. Genius and artistic creativity were considered frightening in the former Soviet Union. To make matters worse, Sergej Dovlatov was unfortunately also of Jewish origin. Like his colleague Joseph Brodsky, who defected to the US and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Dovlatov’s texts as well as Brodskys poems are ironic, equivocal. This is alarming for a state which prefers to control its artists. The Russian director Alexei German, Jr. has now devoted an entire movie to these poets. It is indirectly also a social portrayal of Russia’s present with all its regulations and prohibitions in artistic matters, such as the ban on the movie farce The Death of Stalin.
The Illustrierte Neue Welt has met with the directors Christian Petzold and Alexei German at the Berlinale and interviewed them on their movies’ artistic and political intentions.
Christian Petzold and His Movie ”Transit“
„For me, the characters in Transit were not ghosts of the past, rather, our present seemed ghostlike to me“ said Christian Petzold prior to the presentation of his adaptation of Anna Seghers’ eponymous novel. Petzold has transferred the novel’s plot, set in Marseille at the time of the German occupation, into an unspecified present time. Refugees from then meet contemporary refugees. This confers a new level of meaning to the conflicts of German writers in exile, who were desperately trying to leave Marseille for South
America. The movie tells the story of young George – played by the new German shooting star Franz Rogowski – who fled from the Nazis to the port city of Marseille and assumes the identity of a dead writer. With the deceased’s papers he wants to escape to Mexico. Things happen very fast when he meets the widow of the dead writer, but does not want to confide in her his impersonation.
INW: For your adaptation of Seghers’ novel you chose a very exciting artifice: you left the dead writer, whose identity your protagonist George assumes, in the past – as evidenced by his passport and his mechanical typewriter – while George has to defend this identity in the present. What is true about the rumor that this artifice was born out of necessity, because you allegedly were lacking the money for the sets and costumes of the1940s ?
Christian Petzold: I‘m right now wondering where this rumor comes from and whether my producers are also attending the event. The truth is: they did not want me to transfer this story into the present. I told them that the movie would become much cheaper that way, and they complained and said: no, how should we get
money for such an extravagant project ? It was thus much harder to obtain money with this idea. With this idea to partially transfer the story into the present I wanted to avoid the antiquated character that often comes with literary adaptions.
INW: Are you, in general, dismissive of historical movies ?
C.P.: There are movies like Barry Lyndon which, inspired by the historical ambience, realize their own, very special aesthetic character, for instance through the exclusive use of candlelight throughout the entire movie. But then you see the zoom takes, and the spell is broken. I explained all of this to my producers. In other adaptations, such as Jules et Jim, I notice the studio setting in every scene. The wind, the light, the sun shining on the actors’ faces – all this seems artificial, produced with fans and spotlights, and its noticeable.
INW: And how do you deal with the political background of your movie ?
C.P.: I think that films with political content should, anyway, be staged in a contemporary context. I do not want to look into the past and point at them and at what they did wrong. I want the past to show us what we are doing wrong in the present. The ramifications of the past, which we tell of in Transit – fascism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia – all this is unfortunately, not over. We therefore cannot discount the present when dealing with those topics.
INW: Is the port city of Marseille a good place, even today, to tell “Transit’s“ story?
C.P.: Port cities are places of refuge during the flight, protected transit spaces for those who are stranded. But there are fewer and fewer of such places. These transit areas are disappearing. Today, we are hiding refugees in the woods, in old, abandoned barracks. If they sometimes are seen in pedestrian areas they are deemed downright dangerous for us. We do not want to see them. And when we see them, they make us feel uncomfortable. This refugee existence: That is where I wanted to establish a link to Anna Seghers. Our entire refugee legislation is based on experiences made by people like Anna Seghers. She very, very clearly described what it means that nobody wants you anymore. Therefore we have the Refugee Paragraph in the German Constitution. And anybody attacking the Refugee Paragraph attacks the experiences of these people.
INW: The contemporary context of your film highlights in particular the cruel absurdity of anti-Semitism. In some harbor scenes one sees contemporary refugees, who often come from countries of war in the Middle East and Europe. They are rejected in Europe, using the excuse of the fear of “the stranger”, while, at the same time, German and Austrian Jews are persecuted, who, until that point in time, had been an integral part of German and Austrian culture. Was this your intention when you “modernized” Anna Seghers’ novel ?
C.P.: This was somehow already a given in the novel. Anna Segher‘s uses very expressionistic language. One has the impression that the language itself leaves Germany on a journey into the unknown. Seghers already anticipates in „Transit“ the language of American narrators like Faulkner or Hemingway.
INW: You have assigned the main roles of your movie to two very young actors, Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski - how did you discover those two ?
C.P.: I wanted to work with new faces. It was also important to me to tell the story of people, whose youth is quasi being robbed by cruel politics. Both of them, who even haven’t been completely in the world yet – those two experience, in this exceptional situation of the Marseille transit space, how they become humans who have already seen everything. This humanizing experience includes also loving others – not only oneself –, feeling guilt, wanting to make amends and taking responsibility. Add to this that they even don’t have an identity, because they have assumed another one. It was this dance around identity and becoming human that interested me most.
Alexei German Jr. and „Dovlatov“
Sergei Dovlatov, one of the most widely read authors today, has not lived long enough to enjoy his late fame. He died in 1990 in his New York exile. German’s movie shows how Dovlatov and Joseph Brodsky, considered extremely suspicious representatives of the writers’ guild, are continuously observed by the KGB. Both were additionally “suspicious” due to their Jewish origins. Brodsky, the Russian Nobel Laureate in 1987 had been tried to five years of forced labor for “work-aversion”. Even thereafter he and Dovlatov were constantly threatened by prison and labor camp. He was denaturalized in 1972 and lived in American exile until his death in 1996. As somebody born in 1940 he belonged to a generation who was no longer able to have any illusions about the people or the masses – or about the true nature of men. German’s movie offers a convincing portrayal of this dark period. At the same time, it appears so relevant that one instantly wonders whether the director might have had to contend with the threat of censorship in contemporary Russia.
INW: Why did you want to tell Sergei Dovlatov’s and Joseph Brodsky’s stories only now? Has his life become relevant again today ?
Alexei German JR.: First of all I have to I say that I am a big fan of Dovlatov and Brodsky. I also wanted to tell what happened to the writers at that time, when they did not agree to be used for propaganda purposes. Another important reason is that my parents lived through the 1970s, and I wanted to immerse myself in this period so to better understand them. I grew up in Leningrad – right in the area where Dovlatov lived.
INW: Was there any form of interference or censorship in this movie?
A.G.: Censorship in Russia today is by far not as drastic as it was in Dovlatov’s times. Or it has become so subtle that we do not notice it so easily anymore. In any case, we were not prevented to show the movie in theaters. A total of 500 copies will be shown in Russia after the Berlinale. But this does not mean that the situation might not drastically change over the next five to ten years. There are signs indicating that artistic and journalistic freedom in our country is slowly diminishing.
INW: Would you then - like Brodsky and Dovlatov - emigrate to another country? To the US maybe ?
A.G.: At that time it was easier for writers to emigrate to another country. During the Cold War people were curious about artists and dissidents from the Soviet Union. People wanted to hear their stories. But I wouldn’t know if I had anything interesting to tell to people of other countries. Unless I do a movie on the schemes of the Russian Mafia. Besides, I need Russian culture to be creative.
INW: Is that true even if you will no longer be able to raise funds for your movies? And how difficult was it to finance this one ?
A.G.: I was surprised how easy it was. We received a state subsidy and even the state television shouldered some of the costs. I thus have no reason to complain about the government. Nobody wanted to see the script, and even after the movie’s completion, there was no official viewing.
INW: For the international press you were a favorite for the Golden or Silver Bear. Would it have helped with regard for the funding of future movies, if you had won a price ?
A.G.: Who knows what will be after the movie is shown everywhere in Russia. Maybe I will then be found hanging on a tree ? With a bear in my pocket I only would be heavier than I am already now. n