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Interview | interview

DEATH, OBSESSION + CINEMA, an interview with MB
by Steff Ulbrich, March 4th and 12th, 1989


Steff Ulbrich:
Over the years I've noticed an increasing use of the skull in your films. This began as a series of xeroxed passport photos where repeated enlargements revealed a skull waiting in your eye. Then there was »Testamento Memori«, the first of your »Death Dances« (»Totentanze«), which shows you fucking a skull, and in each of the succeeding »Death Dances« you use the skull in some way.

MB:
Death is a theme that emerged quite early and runs through nearly all my films. For me the skull is especially interesting because its symbolic character is charged by different parties. 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 - rockers, skins or punks. It's difficult to define exactly, it provokes, but also quotes a condition which defies explanation: the subject of death.

Steff Ulbrich:
How do you develop the ideas for your »Death Dances«?

MB:
For me super8 favors a fragmentary procedure. It's not script writing or preparing a film for three years and shooting it in 14 days. You collect your material with your handy camera. Or you just walk into the world for a day to shoot things you've just thought of, something you've just conceived. Then you outline a small story, an episode, that fits into super8. The »Death Dances« are all episodes or chapters based on a single performer. Like Ichgola (main actor in »Death Dances 6«) for example. I've seen her stage act and we know each other privately quite well. She has similar things in mind, grotesque and weird things but funny at the same time. We'd thought about making a dirty little movie, a Death Dance with a lot of meat and blood and a strange guy collecting it. Of course I'd 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, but we didn't 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 couldn't find it. It seemed to be a printing mistake on the map. We asked around and later came up with a pond between buildings. Though this wasn't on the map, we shot it, and if you watch the footage it seems to be total solitude, marshland, endless nature before the horizon. In fact we had to cut out poles and wires by finding clever angles. That's how Ichgola's Death Dance was produced. The story developed at the location, more or less. And the other »Death Dances« are similar: each shows the interaction of a protagonist with a surround which includes the skull.

Steff Ulbrich:
Your work foregrounds das Deutsche (Germanness). Why insist on your German past?

MB:
In »Der Rhein - Ein Deutsches Marchen« (»The Rhine - A German Fairytale«) I didn't make a statement on National Socialism but on the Germany of the economic miracle'. It's that time which has shaped us and in which we grew up. That belongs to my person and to the present time. I can't imagine reappraising an aspect of German history, not even the persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich, even in the form of documentary fiction. I regard it as completely unnecessary to present my opinion on that; I don't consider myself competent to do so. There are other things which are closer to myself and more concrete. Persecution of homosexuals still exists today and I think it's important to report this as I've experienced it myself.

Steff Ulbrich:
But you don't seem to deal with homosexuality apart from a certain attitude.

MB:
I think it's clear that my films have been made by a gay filmmaker. Without making explicitly gay films, my work includes certain gay moments. Take the »Stummfilm«, for example. You see these cards which introduce sign language for the deaf when suddenly and inexplicably the sign representing homosexuality appears. This is one level. The »Tabufilm« is much more personal. I speak a lot about my own coming-out. Or the »Death Dances«, I consider them very gay, especially in the age of AIDS.

Steff Ulbrich:
What was your aim with the »Tabufilme« (Taboo Films)?

MB:
The Tabufilme don't ask, "What did Michael Brynntrup do on the 12th of May, 1989?" They are concerned with what a diary is. Does it include taboos? What are the conditions for diary writing? What is already predetermined by the diary medium? It seems that only in retrospect, through history, that events gain meaning and become categorized. This is the main point in my »Tabu I-IV« films. »Tabu I«, the first diary, focuses on my surgery. The second gathers material under a separate theme, confusion and coming out. The third diary makes it clear that the Tabufilm is a film, just that, the single pages of the diary become animated, something is moving inside the diary itself, and in the fourth diary, a concrete situation is recorded as in screenplays. Its long ending brings the viewer back to the present, to the act of watching the film. I think the act of the diary is important, that history is made in the present. You don't organize your life by means of a diary, you create a diary and your life as well, again and again.

Steff Ulbrich:
You presented your diary as a guestbook at the premiere party, but no one wanted to write anything in it.

MB:
Privacy is one of the last taboos. I wanted to confront people with it when I asked them to write in my diary. Finally it's always you who sets the taboo. You decide how far you want to go: to respect privacy or leaf through the diary or even write something in it. This play happened in front of a mirror. My work is never easy-going or purely sympathetic. Those who watch my movies always have to reflect on themselves as well. Take the long ending as an example: they realize the movie isn't over yet, that they are sitting on a hard chair getting a sore butt. I drag them out of the illusion which every film creates, away from fascination. I try to work on a structure which returns people to themselves. I don't offer figures of identification. The viewer can only identify with him/herself.

Steff Ulbrich:
So you don't make entertaining movies?

MB:
Well, I don't want to make films without an edge, which will be forgotten in a minute. My films require work while watching them.

Steff Ulbrich:
Is that why you use these coded, mysterious symbols?

MB:
Symbols always show two faces. Their history accumulates different meanings, so in the present their meaning is both particular and open to interpretation. For example, the hand is a theme that runs through most of my work. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my hand came into consciousness as my first body part. And in puberty, a friend I desired sexually made a remark about my beautiful hand. The hand is a medium, something intellectual, it leaves behind a sign, a mark of its passing, like the markings of the palm. Maybe the hand is only a microcosm representing the entire body, the entire life, the entire world. The skull is another story. It's linked for me to the awakening consciousness of individualism. This also explains my preference for mannerism, which is the period in history when the event of the individual occurred. Especially interesting is the rejection of formalism, the rejection of theories which tried to cover nature and vision by law. It's interesting that mannerism defined itself by what it rejected, which means it was negative first of all. But at the same time it managed to show all that a centralized perspective left behind, its free spirit of fantasy lived in the borders, the margins of this perspective. And my work is the same. Something outrageous and comic happens. You might follow the storyline with interest, but after the film's done you just shake your head and wonder: What the hell was that? And this is the point, to guide people on a complicated path to another state of mind, a path they'll understand much later on. I don't want to make a statement here and now, which you might answer somehow with arguments, and then this would have to be discussed, and we'd have to come up with a joint resolution. Not all that crap which 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.

interview PART ONE: Brynntrup and Hoolboom

(Steff Ulbrich, "Death, Obsession + Cinema (part two)", interview with Michael Brynntrup, printed in: Independent Eye, N°11, Toronto, Spring 1990)

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Interview | interview
Steff Ulbrich, Interview mit Michael Brynntrup, März 1989, translated and printed in: BERLIN - Images in Progress, Contemporary Berlin Filmmaking, Buffalo, 1989


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