Hardly any movement, a lot of water, a refugee boat: An interview with the Berlin director Philip Scheffner about his film
Havarie, on view at the Goethe-Institut Toronto this spring.
taz:
Mr. Scheffner, a tourist is filming a refugee boat from a cruise ship. You lengthen the YouTube video to 90 minutes in Havarie. Why?
Philip Scheffner: First of all, we wanted to find out what we’re actually seeing when we watch this video. And to attempt, for a few moments, to scratch at the very brutal hierarchy of viewing that exists at the image level in the film so that for a brief moment we are seeing things as equals – but without negating that this hierarchical perspective basically exists at the political level.
The YouTube video was the impetus for your investigations.
To start with, we wanted to find out who’s shooting that video? What’s happening here? So we contacted Terry Diamond, the Irishman who filmed the video, and we went to Ireland. We talked about the “baggage” underlying his making the video. He grew up during The Troubles, the Northern Ireland conflict, and witnessed his best friend being shot dead as a 13-year-old. Then we conducted a wide-ranging investigation. Spoke on location with the Spanish maritime rescue service.
We also researched who the people on the boat were and learned that after a month in Spain, they were deported back to Algeria.
At this point, we didn’t do any further research about this, because we couldn’t foresee whether our investigation might cause problems for the people there. Then we discovered a protagonist who had made the same journey from Algeria to Spain eight times.
In addition, we met and filmed several people who often take the same route and theoretically might have encountered the boat.
You had your material. What happened then?
Our plan was to make an essay film. We wanted to create links at the visual level between the different protagonists in the different countries. But when we returned, we had the feeling that times had changed. 2015 was the peak of the so-called refugee crisis, and pictures of boats with refugees were seen in living rooms every night. Although we were happy with our scenes, they didn’t open any new space for reflection. We had the feeling that it’s too easy to lose yourself in the individual stories.
This was a tendency we also noticed in the media reaction to the many dead in the Mediterranean. Attempts were being made to report with empathy and contrast the anonymity of the numbers with personal stories, which I totally understand. But the accumulation of such stories at that time had a very strange effect. It made it easier for me to distance myself. It made it so easy to identify with them that I didn’t have to think about myself; that I’m sitting at my own breakfast table with the newspaper in Berlin. I didn’t question the fact that I’m also part of the problem and not just looking at it from outside.
So you scrapped the footage?
We used all our footage, just not the pictures, only the sound. You can hear that too, it’s a very cinematic sound. You can hear people moving from one room to another, sometimes saying nothing, pauses. We edited the sound as if the pictures were there. This created unusual lengths. But they are what trigger the cinematic aspect and create images in the mind.
How did the film’s protagonists react to your decision to just use the sound? You followed people around with a camera for quite a while.
From the very beginning, we wanted to represent this film together with the protagonists at the Berlinale. We held a long Skype conference and tried to explain it. I know that Terry Diamond didn’t like it at all at first. But
we repeatedly explained to the people that their visual absence in the picture doesn’t make them any less present in the film. You’re not distracted by the setting, the clothes or what the people look like. You fully concentrate on the voice, on the similarities between the people. Because they are always looking at the same thing from different perspectives. The protagonists were then almost all present at the Berlinale and represented the film. That was almost a shock to the audience to see the real people standing there after the abstract film.
Havarie demands a lot from the audience. Ninety minutes of pixelated images, little movement.
Havarie is absolutely a cinema film. It requires a big screen and also being in a room with other people. The film also plays with the expectations we have in the cinema; our willingness to see a movie. Of course, we were worried that people would walk out during the screening. That’s why we put the protagonists in the front row at the Berlinale screening, so they wouldn’t have to see it when a hundred people walk out. But that didn’t happen.
The background story in the sound consists of the radio messages between the ship and the sea rescue service. Did you plan to include that in the film from the beginning?
We planned for the temporal structure to be specified from the beginning by the radio messages. And we knew that the film would be ninety minutes long because these sound recordings enabled us to reconstruct that the people really looked at each other for ninety minutes. When they say in the film, “Thirty minutes to go,” that means that there are thirty minutes of film left as well.
Did you ever consider trying to make the film more suitable for the mass market?
I can’t think in those terms. That’s not our concern. We were trying to ponder something using cinematic means. The film allows people to indulge in their own thoughts every now and then. At best, it sensitizes viewers to the images that we encounter every day. The image of the refugee boat is our ordinary horror, everyday violence. But nothing happens, nobody falls into the water.
In what way does Merle Kröger’s accompanying novel Collision differ from the film?
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize a lot of it in it; a great deal is also added to it based on our investigations. Before we began, we planned to have a book and a film. By going into fiction, it can also incorporate things that could not be accommodated in the film. For example, it can create a fictional character made up of several people. Some people may go to the cinema expecting to see an adaptation of the novel, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’ll still recognize things, but will be faced with a kind of film they’re not prepared for.
In the meantime, has anything changed again in the way things are portrayed by the media?
Yes, right now we aren’t seeing any more boats on the evening news. That’s also because it’s winter, but of course people are still crossing the Mediterranean. But the pictures aren’t there anymore. They were extremely pervasive, then they were replaced by people coming via the Balkan route, and now we’re seeing refugee shelters and people are talking about crime and deportation. Now the film has acquired a new intensity. It ends with Terry Diamond losing sight of the boat and we only see him searching for it. It’s an open ending. This way, we can imagine that they are still out there. Now it almost seems like a memory of the image of refugees in the Mediterranean. But those people are still out there.
abridged and translated from "Die Menschen sind immer noch da“ by Linda Gerner, taz 3 February 2017
image of Havarie courtesy of Pong Film
