Buy tickets for Transit (GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox, Oct 14 only)
The autobiography of Georg K. Glaser contains a wonderful sentence: “Suddenly, as my flight came to an end, I found myself surrounded by something I termed ‘historical silence.’” Georg K. Glaser was a German communist during the time in which the novel “Transit” by Anna Seghers was set. He fled to France and then to its unoccupied “free zone,” or “zone libre,” to
which Marseille belonged.
Historical silence is akin to windlessness or still air: the breeze ceases to propel the sailboat, which is enveloped by the vast nothingness of the sea. The passengers have been expunged —from history and from life. They’re cornered in space and in time.
The people in TRANSIT have been cornered in Marseille, waiting for ships, visas, and further passage. They’re on the run—there’s no way back for them, and no way forward. Nobody will take them in or care for them. They go unnoticed—except by the police, the collaborators, and security cameras.
They’re borderline phantoms, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow. The present flashes by without acknowledging them.
Cinema loves phantoms. Perhaps because it, too, is a space of transit, an interim realm in which we, the viewers, are
concurrently absent and present. The people in TRANSIT long to be taken by the stream, the breeze, put into motion. They long
for a story of their own and discover the fragment of a novel left behind by an author, the fragment of a narrative about flight, love, guilt, and loyalty.
TRANSIT is a story about how these people turn this narrative into their own.
— Christian Petzold
How did the idea come about of having the story of “Transit,” which takes place in 1940, take place in modern-day Marseille?
I’d already made PHOENIX as a historical film, where we exist during that time and reconstruct that time, that situation, those feelings. Harun Farocki and I had also written our first treatment for TRANSIT where the whole thing was conceptualized as a historical film in the Marseille of 1940.
After Harun passed away [in 2014...], it hit me that
I had absolutely no desire to make a historical film. I didn’t want to reconstruct the past. There are refugees all over the world, and we live in a Europe of renationalization, so
I don’t want to revert to the safe zone of historical filmmaking.
The reason I returned to “Transit” came down to two things:
I was talking to an architect who explained to me that the wonderful thing about GDR architecture was that the old stuff hadn’t been demolished, but the new stuff had just been built alongside it. Its history isn’t hidden in layers but is rather side by side, where it remains visible. There was a debate in Munich over the
Stolpersteine, brass-plated cobblestones set into sidewalks to remind us of the Jewish residents who had been deported to extermination camps. For me, these are some of the greatest artworks of the modern era:
we witness the past as we pass though the present. There’s something ghostly about them, and that suddenly reminded me of “Transit.” A transit zone is by definition transitional. Like the boarding gate at an airport: you hand over your
luggage, but you haven’t even gone anywhere yet.
Anna Seghers describes this transit zone as one between Europe and Mexico, but it can also be historical—as with the Stolpersteine, or architecture—a transit zone between the past and present.
Were the colliding worlds of 1940 and today’s Marseille difficult to depict when writing?
Before I began writing the script, I just tried to imagine how depicting the movements of refugees in today’s Marseille might look, without commenting on the issues. And I didn’t find that unsettling. I was totally fine just imagining someone in a suit with a duffel bag walking along Marseille’s harbour, booking a hotel room and saying, “The fascists will be here in three days, I have to get out of here.”
I didn’t find that unsettling at all, and maybe that in itself is unsettling. I immediately understood the refugee movements, the fears, traumas, and the history of the people that were once so prevalent in Marseille. It surprised me that I didn’t feel the need to explain those things.
P.S. Congratulations to Christian Petzold, who just received the German Order of Merit for “always pointing back to German history.”
image: Franz Rogowski in Transit photo Hans Fromm courtesy Films We Like
