“Now, that’s interesting, that one can, after all, create something in the “society of consensus” that rattles that consensus.”
By Joachim Bessing

JOACHIM BESSING: You come to filmmaking from the punk scene. Something you said once: “I have no heroes.” So what do you look to then for orientation?
ROMUALD KARMAKAR: I think what led me to this thought was the fact that I don’t tell stories with the sort of classical heroes one is used to seeing in other films, namely, a character confronted with a hopeless situation. Which he then recognizes and, rising above himself by the end of the film, has mastered.

The fighting hero?
Right. He doesn’t even have to fight. The hero can also make it through using his intelligence or his own methods. Some combination. With some trick, he manages to get on top of the situation. I don’t do that in Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (Nightsongs). These are characters who don’t even realize how hopeless their situation is, who don’t rise above themselves, who aren’t capable of solving this problem. That’s where this idea of “having no heroes” comes from. But that’s the way it is in all my films. I don’t think at all in terms of heroes.

So you really don’t have any heroes?
No.

Where does your artistic creativity come from then?
Ha! I can’t answer that because it’s a completely irrelevant topic for my work. It only matters in discussions with third parties, but not in any inwardly directed discourse. When I discover a story that fascinates me, I don’t sit down and wonder why it interests me or take a step back and ask, “What am I interested in actually?” It’s enough for me if my interest is aroused by a certain story or incident. Or a situation … a constellation! And then I get something going that’s completely automatic. It’s only when it comes to the selling of the product that I’m confronted with these questions: “What interested you about this play?” “Why have you done it in this way?” That’s when I sit down and try to explain, though I haven’t tried to explain it before. This is, by the way, a process of conformity: that I constantly have to explain things merely to satisfy a need that isn’t even my own. I used to be thought of as arrogant because of my refusal to explain – now I try to explain but run into problems anyway.

Because it’s wrong to be arrogant?
No. Because people think I’m politically naïve. That I can’t even grasp my own themes. That I don’t know anything. With my documentary Warheads, it was said: “He’s interested in mercenaries because he’s a mercenary himself.” I was in the French army, after all, and my service in the French army was equated in Germany with my desire to be a legionnaire, even a mercenary, because mercenaries and legionnaires are also said to be the same thing. Soon enough soldiers, mercenaries, legionnaires, and fascists are all said to be one and the same. So I’m a cryptofascist. That was then an expression of an overall discontent at the end of the ’80s. The extent to which I refused to offer new clues has always led to abstruse speculations about me as a person. In the meantime, I get the feeling I shouldn’t give interviews anymore. There’s nothing in it.

But part of punk ideology is the goal of provoking society and ultimately fighting against it.
There are very different sorts of punk feelings. I only became a punk in the early ’80s. One could say that it was already over by then. It was the period of American punk. American punks looked completely different from British punks.

How did American punks look?
Well, like the Dead Kennedys, like Black Flag … They just wore jeans and a T-shirt and played hard music.

They were also healthier.
Sure. British punks at that time had Iroquois spikes, a lot of riveted belts – they were messed up. The American style was much more simplified, while the music was much more extreme. When all that came up, I was living in Munich. Punk was an attitude against society and this attitude was completely different from, for example, being a hippie. There were still Poppers back then who wore Fiorucci and blow-dried their hair – that was the extreme opposite of us. There were also Rockers, Skins, Mods, Psychobillies, and everybody was part of some group that rejected all the others. There were constantly fights between the groups. It was nuts. Twenty years later, you can hardly imagine that anymore. The only thing that’s still around are some forms of right-wing radical Skins who will fight all alternative cultures to the death.

But have no culture to offer themselves.
Well, maybe a culture that we don’t perceive as such. They do have a music culture, certain concerts which you can take part in via the Internet, certain literature that you can order over the Internet or read there, a certain fashion which has hardly changed since the ’80s. Doc Martens shoes, Lonsdale sweaters … In that sense, there’s a culture – how you tie your Doc Martens, that’s there too. But this confrontation with other cultures, that doesn’t exist anymore. Except in Frankfurt an der Oder. A punk was beaten to death there a year ago.

Did you have to be poor to be a punk?
Few of the punks in Munich were social cases. Everyone had a shower at home. I thought it was a complete contradiction, refusing to take a shower even though you had a shower.

Because it was part of punk culture to go without a shower?
Right, that you were dirty and didn’t blow-dry your hair.

An Iroquois Mohawk takes a lot of work.
Exactly! When the Iroquois punks did up their hair with hairspray or sugar water or who knows what all they smeared in their hair … but maybe one shouldn’t look at it that way.

What happened at the Berlinale this February, when your film and even you yourself were laughed at and booed – isn’t that what punk was aiming for?
I think it’s difficult to make a connection to punk these days. My primary concern is this film. Maybe the process, the way it was made or the fact that I would even make such a film has something to do with my youth as a punk. But maybe you have to separate those things. Everything that I’ve done so far – Der Totmacher (Deathmaker) as well – I did because I was interested in it. And I’ve never taken into consideration whether or not it was a bestseller, whether there was an audience for it, whether it fit into certain classical patterns producers consider for a film product aimed at a broad audience. I’ve never worked according to these criteria. In the case of Jan Fosse’s play, written by an author who’s been translated into twenty languages, I thought, “Ok, that’s a good basis for selling the film to foreign territories.” Also, Fosse is more well-known in other countries than he is here. But then I set aside the project for a year because I’d run up against enormous resistance.

Where did this resistance come from?
It was said that the text was too depressing, that there were too many redundancies. One TV producer thought that elliptical narratives would only work in the theater. I slowly began to realize that I was following a subject that no longer fit in the culture. It’s only logical that the completed film would now be rejected because it’s the consequential result of the screenplay that had been rejected everywhere else before. So it’s only right that the resistance is very strong. At the same time: I didn’t realize that, above and beyond the controversy, there would be a total hatred against me as a person. That surprised all of us. Now, one can say that that’s interesting; that one can, after all, create something in the “society of consensus” that rattles that consensus. A lot of people are saying, “Well, of course, when the film’s so bad!” For them, it’s not a product that disturbs the consensus; it’s just plainly and simply a bad product. Bad film. I think, on the other hand, that it’s a product that disturbs certain viewing habits and expectations of a film. My theory is that many journalists no longer bother with the history of cinema because they aren’t required to deal with it anymore. One critic wrote, quite straightforwardly, that he’s not prepared to do any “reception work” when he views a film. Not even a critic! I couldn’t have known that such an attitude had become so widespread. I don’t show up at a press conference in my underwear or show actors strolling naked through the frame. That is, I don’t use the classical means of provocation. But we’re living in a time in which concentration and silence are considered provocations. But that has nothing to do with punk. Punk provoked with noise and brashness. In the meantime, it seems as if you can provoke just as effectively with intellect. People took it as an affront and even went so far as to criticize the camerawork by Fred Schuler, who shot John Cassavetes’s Gloria and Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy – even the work of a man like that is called into question! But at the same time, it’s pretty hard to take as a person. Almost unbearable. My film is dead for the cinema. End of the film. Pretty tough.

Do bad reviews have that much power?
The positive reviews that did appear weren’t strong enough to erase the doubt raised in audiences’ minds – or to arouse enough curiosity in viewers that they’d go see the film anyway. And evidently, the indisposition of audiences, or the hesitancy of audiences when it comes to difficult subject matter is more or less satisfied by bad reviews. If someone says, “This is a difficult film,” and then you read a bad review of it, you feel your decision not to go see it is justified. It’s evidently a more powerful effect than if one were to say, “This is a difficult film, go see it!”

The economic arguments in criticism have become more ubiquitous. In my view, contemporary criticism now deals more with the public knowledge of what a film cost, what it means to be a director. The magic has been taken out of film itself. As a result, the public expects from filmmakers that they deliver. That something happens. And that it’s well made. In this sense, nothing happens in your film – maybe that’s what no one is able to accept.
Knowledge of filmmaking doesn’t go all that deep in my view. I’ve always been asked, for example, about the artificiality of the language in my films. Then I explain that making a film is about the most artificial thing you can do. When I film one set-up twenty times, then rearrange the set for two hours in order to get the reverse shot – and before that, we’ve already filmed the establishing shot – it takes a whole day to create three minutes of the film. This manner of production alone implies artificiality. But all these methods are well known and have been for some time. The fact that my cinematic language, which essentially contradicts the language that’s common now, seems artificial to audiences shows how much we’ve accepted the language of cinema as our own actual language.

There are already instances in which people telling the story of a certain experience cast themselves as active characters. They place themselves as subjects of the author’s narrative perspective. And that’s how they relate those experiences, something like, “So he says to me … And then I say … ”
That comes from American movies.

This fictional perspective has informed the perception of our own behavior, but seems at the same time to have subliminally effected our perception of fictional events.
When actors want to communicate a series of events they’ve experienced, they’ll often act them out for me. And sometimes you just can’t bear it. Because I get the impression then that the actor’s thinking, “As an actor, I have to perform myself in my story particularly well, that is, play me.” My experience is that you can tell a good actor by the fact that that’s precisely what he does not do. Because they know that they don’t have to be impressive in their private lives via acting. The story alone is enough for me – I can flesh it out on my own. At the same time, parodies of certain people often have a comic quality.

But it often goes too far! It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s actually been experienced. Instead, the real is mixed in and distorted just to make it worth the telling, but only under the condition that this self-consciousness for most people is based on the fact that they know: I’m experiencing a life completely absent of experiences. That’s where this constant retelling of film stories that’s replacing personal narratives comes from.
Yes, or one talks about film stories. But this particular kind of speaking, I’ve noticed it quite often. It comes from America. I noticed as long as fifteen years ago in American documentaries that I had the feeling that you could set up a camera anywhere in America and every person there would look like an actor – and talk that way as well. The way we only know from the movies. On the positive side, they all look terrific and have a completely different approach to the medium. And I was always depressed when I couldn’t get such images here with this will to perform, this mastery of the medium.

But the question is: What could someone who’s seen your film say about the film at a dinner with six childless couples?
The first important thing is a story from Germany is being told; about a couple in Germany. The story describes a hopeless situation. It’s about establishing that something like this exists at all.

Does anyone want to know that it exists?
Over time, that’s precisely what I’ve learned, that no one wants to know. A few thousand people out of a population of 90 million. But it’s still interesting to establish that that exists. And that no one else would tell a story about it. That’s one thing. The second thing is the way the story is told. Because for all the hopelessness, the following is described: Every person in this film is in a situation that is simply too much for him or for her. That’s a central point in our society for me: that evidently everyone has the feeling that it’s all more than they can handle – the furnishing of their lives: which telephone company to go with, which health insurance, how and where to save money – a permanent sense of being overwhelmed. All of that is an expression of the fact that we’ve gotten used to something that isn’t immediately understandable. Being overwhelmed also has something to do with fear, that anything that comes along bringing change with it is perceived as a threat.

Why didn’t anyone see this particular quality in the film, that it’s not just a couple being shown but a German family? Those two people have a child and no matter how stressed-out or modern they are, they have nevertheless started a family. But even so, they don’t make any concessions to this way of living; instead, they go right on living very individualistically. That fits absolutely with German reality and this is where something else very interesting comes in; an entirely new societal image, very much on the rise, is shown in this film. The man quite possibly doesn’t have the desire anymore, or moreover, he’s lost the guiding principle by which he could establish his position in this family. Maybe he doesn’t know who to portray! And so a dilemma arises – in both, the woman and the man, one can find the rudimentary elements of their roles as mother and father – from the dichotomy between family tradition and social development, a private way of living develops in which this man is utterly superfluous. Meaningless.
Many years ago, I started observing that, in relationships that simply weren’t going anywhere, it wouldn’t be long before there was a baby on the way. With a child, a relationship that’s grown apathetic can redefine itself. The third corner of the magical triangle has arrived. And so it can keep on spinning, perhaps into nothingness.

Do you feel alone?
I couldn’t say that because I do have a few advocates who’ll always defend my work – for the last fifteen or twenty years, by the way. Otherwise, I would have been long gone. I don’t even want to think about whether I’m alone or not.

Is it a consolation to have been misunderstood?
That’s a comfortable way of dealing with negative criticism. That’s what I always hear: “Oh, they just haven’t caught up. In ten years, then.” To that I say, “With which film and in how many years does one experience the breakthrough?” I can’t focus on that. It doesn’t give me any peace either. I’m 39 now and I’ve been making films for fifteen years. I’ve received a lot – a lot – of recognition for my work. I also have important advocates. But that doesn’t mean I’ve experienced commercial success or that my work will be seen by very many people.

Do you sometimes wish to work with an art form that functions more autocratically than film production?
My dream is to have an exhibit of photographs in New York – the only thing that interests me as much as film is photography. But with photography, I have the feeling that I’m not talented enough, or that my talent isn’t up to the top standards of the world. I photograph various things and photography is the only thing I keep open for myself. As an explanation for my evidently sub-par talent, I secretly tell myself that film production doesn’t leave me enough time for photography. Actually, I ought to make a decision.

Romuald Karmakar was born in 1965 in Wiesbaden to French-Persian parents. Growing up in Athens and Munich, he has been working as an independent, award-winning filmmaker since 1985. Beginning with shorts and documentaries, he directed his first feature film, Der Totmacher, in 1995. His latest movie Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder was an official entry to Berlinale 2004. Romuald Karmakar is currently working on a movie about the employment of Hamburg police battalions in Poland in 1942/43. He lives in Berlin.