Frieda Grafe

Daniel comments on his subject: “Painting is supposed to cut one’s fingers.” For him and Rohmer, it’s about bringing the kind of art to life that’s no good for museums. To use an image from the film: vases are primarily there to put flowers in.

The centre of Dreyer’s films does not appear directly. He marks its edge. The images are only scraps of the infinite, the unformed, the possible, hieratic and rigid, to demonstrate their limitations. In Dreyer films, you can never identify with just one character; heroes and villains do not exist. The struggle is more cosmic, but not ahistorical. With him, orders collide, or rather order with disorder.

Neorealist films did not seem more realistic because of the masses, the common people, the everyday life. The bourgeois-novel individuals and their psychological analysis are redundant because stories no longer need to be made convincingly plausible. But the old relationship is not merely reversed; the documentary does not gain the upper hand at the expense of the narrative. Rossellini neither relies on the fantastic coincidences of surrealist aesthetics, nor does he leave everything to devices, as cinéma vérité later did. His gaze and that of the camera are combined. A new reality only comes into view through a new way of perceiving.

Godard’s camera keeps its distance; it registers. Godard refuses to impose an opinion on the spectator through dramaturgical manipulation. The verisimilitude of his art does not rest on faithful imitation of reality but manifests itself in the recognition of its fictional character.

From 1970 to 1986, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung published Frieda Grafe’s Filmtips, short commentaries on Munich’s film offerings, often just one sentence per film, every week. Sabzian selected and translated eight of them.

One could hold against me that the following has only a very remote connection with the individual films shown in Knokke and that it is a postulate rather than a description of reality. Well, that is how it is intended, not as some far-fetched defence of everything that was shown in Knokke. I would not be able to judge these films in any meaningful way: a regular moviegoer so rarely comes into contact with this genre that its strangeness alone is initially confusing.

Films like Bresson’s, which rely on the power of suggestion and are therefore extremely dependent on the spectator’s ability and willingness to react, which represent a tangle of connections, references and forces, cannot possibly be reduced to a linear, unambiguous and irreversible relationship of cause and effect. The freedom Bresson gives his spectators corresponds to his attitude as an artist towards reality. What he captures with the form of his films is only a surface in relief; decisive is what one does not see, and only in the silence and speechlessness behind what one hears does the actual drama of this film emerge in solitude.

Trouble in Paradise is a crook film – and not only because it’s about crooks. It reveals imposture to be the essence of cinema. Film, says Leenhardt, is the art of ellipsis – what else are theft, fraud and imposture? Skipping links, creating seemingly or only outwardly conclusive connections between originally unrelated elements: that is the art of filmmakers and con artists, the essence of their respective means of expression. 

From 1970 to 1986, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung published Frieda Grafe’s Filmtips, short commentaries on Munich’s film offerings, often just one sentence per film, every week. Sabzian selected and translated eight of them.

The awareness of programme makers and especially of television critics about the medium they are dealing with, is still very low. Television blindly exploits what cinema, theatre, politics and other media produce. What could television be? No one is more reluctant to answer this question than television. Unproductive in its own right, it only appropriates film history in order to exploit and rehash it.

With CinemaScope, Eric Rohmer wrote in his review of Preminger’s The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, it is not the style that changes, but the ethics. The correspondence between content and image proportions is not of a physical but of a moral nature.

In the coming months, Sabzian will publish a dozen new translations of the work of the German film critic Frieda Grafe, the “queen of German film criticism”. Frieda Grafe: “Ozu is a Zen filmmaker who, in the position of the one who looks and waits, does not want to change the world, but makes himself flat and indifferent like a surface of water, ready for the impressions of the world. When filming, the camera is always a fraction off from his gaze: the space gives a fragmented impression.”

Vigo’s films belong to surrealism. Not the Breton school with its suridealism, its amour fou and, for all that, its paternalism. Vigo is one of the “enemies from within”, Bataille, Artaud, life above form, eroticism, the hollowed-out subject. The destruction of the social superstructure becomes the basis of all revolutionary action.