German filmmaker Maria Speth is one of the few women in the so-called Berlin School. We are happy to have her as a guest of the Goethe-Institut for a retrospective of her feature and documentary work in Waterloo and Toronto in
April 2015. I caught up with her on her way to Canada (and will be live in conversation with Maria Speth and UofT Professor Angelica Fenner on April 22):
Jutta Brendemühl: Maria, your films often revolve around damaged characters, women who won’t conform, won’t live up to external expectations, won’t play by “the rules". Like Rita, the obstinate young mother in MADONNAS, played by the spectacular Sandra Hüller, or Ines in your recent DAUGHTERS, portrayed as petulant yet vulnerable by Kathleen Morgeneyer. What attracts you to showing contemporary women in complex social and private circumstances?
Maria Speth: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” (Kant) The crooked is part of human nature; part of nature in general. An attempt to make things straight is only possible to a limited extent. The crookedness then leads to defiance, non-conformity and vitality.
JB: Your characters are far from “nice” or easily likeable. Still, one walks away thinking if not caring about them.
I saw MADONNAS years ago, yet scenes with Rita still occupy my mind. How do you make them stay with the viewer for so long, perhaps even shift our perspective on the role and place of women in modern society?
MS: My films are neither meant to morally judge nor to emotionalize in a certain way. They are about creating a space that enables the characters to show, to manifest themselves. The space to which the character opens herself is therefore also a space for the viewer. The character is vulnerable in this space, so I have to fight for her, stand up for her, defend her, just the way you attempt to protect your own child, even when she doesn’t behave as you’d like.
JB: Your feature films MADONNAS and DAUGHTERS as well as the related documentary 9 LIVES look at broken mother-child relationships. What makes you go ever deeper down the rabbit hole of
loss, abandonment and child neglect?
MS: The family is the first point of harm. The family is our society in its smallest organizational unit. Everything that affects the life of society also affects that of the family. But the relationships in families are not governed according to the rules and order of society. That is why conditions within them are more loving or more harsh and more heedless. People try to hide their damages.
The injuries lie deep. So you have to dig deep.
JB: In all of your films, the characters are
running and searching --for a father, a daughter, oneself. Can you imagine making a film about finding or arriving?
MS: Searching is so much more interesting than finding. A move of contradictions. And what’s found is merely the basis for generating a new contradiction. After the game is before the game.
JB: Let’s go back for a moment to that recent excursion
from feature to doc in your work. How did it affect the style and aesthetic of DAUGHTERS, which came out of —and three years after— the research of 9 LIVES, your first documentary?
MS: What is found and what is fabricated are always two sides of cinema. How they are weighted depends on the needs of the story. In 9 LIVES, the protagonists are themselves; found on the streets of Berlin. In order to be able to focus entirely on them as unique personalities, they speak in an abstract, white space: finds in a “white cube”. It’s the opposite in DAUGHTERS. A person whose name in her passport is “Corinna Kirchhoff” invents for herself the identity of the character “Agnes” and walks through the streets of Berlin: an artificial character in an existing, urban space.
JB: Your films are often labelled as belonging to the intimate
Berlin School or New German Wave of filmmaking, from Petzold to Hochhäussler.
A correct/welcome/helpful interpretation or appropriation?
MS: The label “Berlin School” was created by film critics or film scholars. If it appears best to these disciplines to assign my films to this category, I accept that. But this categorization plays no role in my narrative or aesthetic decisions.
Maria Speth was born in 1967. She studied at the “Konrad Wolf” University of Film and Television in Babelsberg and worked as an editing and directing assistant on various films and TV programs. Her award-winning films as a writer/director include: BAREFOOT (BARFUSS, short, 1999, 3sat Award Oberhausen), her feature debut THE DAYS BETWEEN (IN DEN TAG HINEIN, 2001, VPRO Tiger Award Rotterdam, Grand Prix du Jury Créteil, MFG Star), MADONNAS (MADONNEN, 2007, Hessian Film Award, Silver Astor Mar del Plata; German
trailer), 9 LIVES (9 LEBEN, 2011, German Director’s Award Metropolis, DEFA Foundation’s Incentive Award, Open Eyes Youth Jury Award; German
trailer), and DAUGHTERS (TÖCHTER, 2013,
trailer). The University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo and the Goethe-Institut Toronto are presenting her first retrospective in Canada.
by
Jutta Brendemühl
image: DAUGHTERS © R.Vorschneider|MadonnenFilm
