Steff Ulbrich:
Scene 12, Take 354: So Michael, over the years, I have noticed an increasing use of the skull in your films. This started out as a series of xeroxed passport photos of yours where repeated enlargements revealed a skull in your eye. Then there is »Testamento Memori«, with you fucking a skull, leading to the »Dances of Death« (Totentänze), where you spread the skull among the people. My interpretation is: you are preaching the skull.

MB:
How provoking! But you're really starting at the end.

Steff Ulbrich:
I intended to.

MB:
Well, to me death is a theme, though never the only theme. It emerged quite early and runs through nearly all my films. But there are other things as well, and it is important to me that they appear in every film. Take the hand motif, for example. This appears on purpose in all my films; it symbolizes something to me.

Steff Ulbrich:
Is the skull also a symhol for you?

MB:
It's a symbol as a non-symbol. A symbol is always something very concrete, like the Red Cross. A skull, for example, can mean poison, but wait! I don't regard it only as a symbol representing a mystical philosophy of life. To me the skull is especially interesting because its symbolic character is charged up by different parties. For instance, drawing classes love to use it as a prop. But it's also a sign of fashion; people put them on necklaces. The skull is present in nearly every youth culture like the rockers, the skins or the punks. To me that means that it is a symbol for something which is hard to define otherwise. It is provoking, but on the other hand it worships or quotes a condition which can't be explained any further: the subject of death. Everyone's involved, everyone tries to get hold of it, even if it is only as an earclip. But the preoccupation with death is extensive and comprehensive. I don't use the skull to make a precise statement, I use it to evoke an atmosphere, I play with it. It has this nice ambiguity ranging from dead-serious to not being serious at all. In any case it touches an emotion, but rationalism is also part of the motifs.

Steff Ulbrich:
How do you develop the ideas for your »Dance of Death films«? Are these ideas which are exclusively yours and where you tell people: here, do this so and so, or are they hased on collaboration? Or do you develop them together with actors?...

MB:
(...) If it's an episodic film like »Jesus«, or recently, the »Dances of Death«, I watch the people closely of course. And I get inspired by them as well. Take Ichgola, main character in »Dances of Death 6 « for example. I've seen her stage act and we know each other privately quite well, too. I've figured out that she has similar things in mind, grotesque and weird things but funny at the same time.

So we had thought about making a dirty little movie, a 'Dance of Death' with a lot of meat and blood and a strange guy collecting it. Of course I had been to the slaughterhouse before, getting eyes of pigs and some guts. But the actual film happened quite unexpectedly, like the good weather. We met at Ichgola's. Her room is a real treasure-chest, a collection of curiosities. We got this and that out and ready, and did not know at all where to shoot. We opened the map of the city, but of course everything is pretty limited if you're surrounded by a wall: it's hard to find interesting places to shoot, especially if the theme is nature.

So we picked out the tiny blue dots on the map, little ponds and suchlike. Then we headed directly for one of these dots but we didn't find it. It seemed to be a printing mistake on the map. So we asked around a little and came up with a pond between some buildings. Though this one wasn't marked on the map. And then we shot the thing and if you watch the footage it seems to be total solitude, marshland, endless nature till the horizon. Actually we had to cut out poles and wires by finding clever angles. That's how Ichgola's »Dance of Death« was produced. The story developed at the location, more or less. The other »Dances ofDeath« are similar to that: Location, story and time. That is a situation, a view permitting fantasy. What is this anyway? What does he do there, where does he live, this is not storytelling in a conventional sense, to present persons. Then he meets someone, then they have to fulfill a task together or whatever, so narration does not exist in my films.

Steff Ulbrich:
You are not only a filmmaker, you do copy-art as well and you have studied arthistory. How could you explain the relation between the »Dances of Death« and the medieval Dances of Death?

MB:
With an iconographic topos such as the medieval Dances of Death, everyone somehow knew what it was about. King, farmer, beggerman, their personal death was provided to everyone. This is interesting to me because it could only happen after the awakening of consciousness of individualism. Before that there hadn't been an individual death, only the guild's ranks appeared worth portraying. It was at this point that individual fates were coming into consciousness, this self-reflecting moment. That you are thinking about yourself; not only as a person but also what you are dealing with. In this way I regard experimental film as some kind of meta-film. Every experimental film, and thus the »Dances of Death «, gives evidence about the medium of film. In this way the skull represents individual consciousness and self reflection.

(...)

Steff Ulbrich:
What does gay aesthetics mean to you?

MB:
Or let's say straightout what happens in my films in that direction. Homosexuality is not particularly placed in the foreground. But there is always a variety of themes in my films. A lot of things have an impact on them. And maybe it's just that which makes my films fit together in one program so well. So, when I'm doing a movie I always think about including certain gay moments. Take (...) the »Dances of Death« for example. I consider them as being pretty gay, especially in the age of AIDS. It hadn't occured to me that way, at first. For example »Dance of Death 3« with Antoine Strip-Pickles. But then some people thought about it as a gay love story - though it deals with a skull as well.

Steff Ulbrich:
I didn't mean gay content so much as gay aesthetics.

MB:
Form and content have to presuppose each other. Both have to relate to each other in a sense-ful way and that means: They have to appeal to your senses and make intellectual sense as well. Gay aesthetics is more likely to be seen in the Dances. That is hard to express, trying to describe an image from the »Dances«. There is an effect on another level than a spoken or written word like 'homosexuality'. ...

(...)

MB:
Before I started doing movies I already liked to draw skulls. There is a link to the awakening consciousness of individualism which by the way has interested me as a socio-historical phenomenon for a long time. This also explains my preference for mannerism, as this is exactly the time of the awakening of the individual - to make a long story short. And then there is puberty when a lot of things happened to me. And as time has confronted me with my hand I learned to regard it as my self; as a mirror of my self. It was natural that I started questioning myself: Where does everything lead to? And that's the phase when you start wondering about your death. Personally I have never been confronted with the death of a person I was close to. And this has been the trigger of something, maybe even a philosophical and theoretical idea. A lot of people - especially artists - relate everything they do entirely to their childhood, even when they are sixty. Because the decisive signs have been set there and I guess that applies to me as well.

(...)

Steff Ulbrich:
You just mentioned mannerism briefly.

MB:
I consider mannerism to be the most interesting epoch of art ever. Especially interesting is the rejection of formalism, the rejection of theories which tried to cover nature and vision by law. For example, the imagery: The central perspective, the centrality is suddenly led into absurdity. It is an interesting fact that mannerism has defined itself by what it rejected, which means it was first of all negative. But there is a positive expression in mannerism: its view of the diversity of man and of the world's complexity. This is something the central perspective had excluded, everything had its place in a pre-set structure. Mannerism weighs proportions freely and a free spirit can express itself in fantasy.

Steff Ulbrich:
Where does fantasy come into play in your movies?

MB:
Well, first of all, I hope, in the viewer's head. In my films, well, there is a playfulness, there are puns, free associations. Maybe it gets clearer in the editing, where I like to crash things against each other which are pretty much unrelated.

Steff Ulbrich:
But to me your films get interesting just when they form a very closed unit.

MB:
I always care about breaking things up, to tilt a curve I just built up to. I think about the »Dances of Death« in the same way though they are more like a unit. Only that the editing isn't tilting it. Things are not turned into their opposite by a concrete precise cut. I try to tilt and twist the film in a more emotional way through an elegant convolution of the brain. There is a good example in the »Dance of Death 3«. Two images are dissolved onto each other. One transports the story which can be conceived emotionally. The other one displays a rotating circle of skulls, they turn and turn and turn - actually I think that's pretty funny.

And there is the Ichgola »Dance of Death«. Something outrageous and comic happens. So you might follow the storyline with interest, but after the film is done you just shake your head and wonder: What the hell was that? Whatever that might have been, it has touched me. But I have my head filled up with structures and pre-set patterns. I'm not getting anywhere here. In retrospect the story might appear as trivial trash, and recognizing this triviality the film is merely a joke, and that's queer and that's somehow enough.

Steff Ulbrich:
You think it's important to be funny and queer but is that really enough?

MB:
No, to guide the people to it on a really complicated path, a path they'll understand much later, on a fascinating path to this state of mind. So I don't want to make a statement here now, which you might answer somehow with arguments, and then this still would have to be discussed, and then we'll have to come up with a joint resolution. Not all that crap which somehow represents the stability of the whole system, but simply to point towards a region in every human being, in every subjectivity, where other things count besides words.

Steff Ulbrich:
Thank you.

MB:
You're welcome.

(Interview with Michael Brynntrup, by Steff Ulbrich, printed in: BERLIN - Images in Progress, Contemporary Berlin Filmmaking, Edited by Jürgen Brüning and Andreas Wildfang, Hallwalls / Buffalo, 1989)