Two little girls We’re just two little girls from Little Rock,
We lived on the wrong side of the tracks
But the gentlemen friends who used to call,
They never did seem to mind at all,
They came to the wrong side of the tracks!
(...)
I learned an awful lot in Little Rock,
And here’s some advice I’d like to share
Find a gentlemen who is shy or bold,
Or short or tall, or young or old,
As long as the guy’s a millionaire!
Zwei kleine Mädchen aus Little Rock: Lorelei & Dorothy
(Howard Hawks: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , 1953) If the market researchers at the advertising agency Sterling Cooper were right (and wrong ever since the advertising creates desires that they their target groups is assumed), wanted the American woman in the early 60's the same one of two models: Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe. Or in the words of creative director Don Draper from Mad Men
: She wants to look like one of the two women dream of the men. Already ten years before such "findings" were increasingly the currency of the housewife in the eye receiving U.S. advertising industry, had Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) that each original self-image of women radically negating economy of gender relations already thought to an end and completely transforms could wish for man alleged to be seen solely in them: the curvy blonde and smart brunette who is him dancing, singing, performing, grimacing at the neck throws - as long as he is a millionaire.
The great thing about Hawks' film is that it makes visible the price that the men in such an economy have to pay for it to be so stupid to desire only the particular beauty ideal the women. Rarely was in a movie two such spectacular Girls such selection desolate, unattractive, not a glib, infantile men face in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . The schweinsgesichtige Sir Francis "Piggy" Beekman, the minor and corseted already by the rules of decency Henry Spofford III, the crap out of father son Gus Esmond Jr., they all can not Lorelei hold a candle to be by it but demand because they are rich. The joke is that this is no joke, no-play performer for dizzy the eye of the covetous man, but a real lust for money, the men turned themselves into objects (Diamanten!).
woman could make it even worse, only, if they had not subscribed to wealth, but on good body and medium-sized normality. As the body of the fully on board met U.S. Olympic team of swimmers all have to point 21 clock in the bed, is Dorothy Shaw only the humor-free, schmierlappige, self-righteous sniffer Ernie, the only win in the classic Hawks-scene format, in fill it with the ladies of hard liquor, take off his pants
and put in a nightgown.
the end there is a double wedding, when Lorelei and Dorothy are also totally descend into spectacular white, along the aisle of the church. Before the altar is seen only briefly, right and left their future men before the camera again zooms in closer to the real couple who have come together here, the blonde and brunette, the two girls from Little Rock, who finally made it to the right side of the tracks and hopefully divorced before. For these women is the same as stated for the girls Cristian Petzold Klaus Lemke: "You do not belong to the male gaze, they are entirely for yourself, you can document them only. They say on anything, they play at nothing, the longer you look, the farther they are away. "
The following interview with Christian Petzold for his film Ghost
is first in the online publication
released film text that dahindümpelt between being and non-virtual. What is it all lost in the network, for ever be found? I wish to age me a software that allows websites such as celluloid and book pages, they turn yellow and become porous, can rot, perhaps, so you get a feel for their offense, their aging and possible disappearance.
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Wayward Cloud: Mr. Petzold, how did you get the idea to
ghosts?
Christian Petzold: I do a lot of notes, presentations and writing short stories in which I set things I wait, I might even use. After the last three films that were so real stories, I felt like me to remove something from the plot and to create more of a contemporary sketch. This had to do with my reading Rainald Goetz, of
Rave and
Dekonspiratione . There are scenes in which the time is stopped, the next morning after a party. People sit on the stairs, DJs sort their records, they were beautiful moments that I wanted to film some times. Then I once wrote a story based on the novella
The beautiful summer by Cesare Pavese is based, where there are two girls who get as nude models and lovers in artistic circles. Later, the artists move on and leave the proletarian girl, but which were now infected by this lifestyle. You can not get out of this life and die in it. From these two sources, the idea of a film about two girls. Added to this was that when I travel through France to the start of
Internal security in a post office phantom images of kidnapped girl looked. The parents, who wanted to not give up hope, had can be calculated by computer, as their children look ten years later, when she was still somewhere should be discovered. These photographs really looked ghostly, because the girl had no eyes. They have really scared me. From these two ideas of two girls who spend a summer day and a summer night with each other, and which has a similarity with such a phantom image,
ghosts arose.
Two little girls from Berlin: Toni & Nina
(Christian Petzold: ghosts , 2005) What unites these influences, girls are in a state of suspension, whose identities are not fixed.
There are indeed in Berlin this search after a Berlin novel or a Berlin film, a form of art that gives us an identity at last. These stories of a successful search for identity that was in the German literature, especially with the development and à la Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister
pronounced that it no longer exists. But the desire for these novels is there, and that is what feeds the film. It's about characters in search of a story, not only in the form of the histoire, but a narrative. The girls are indeed stories, but they can no longer hold them. The identity be no more, and that is the horror.
let Besides literary be detected in ghosts
many cinematic influences. The first scene in the park, with its rustling leaves and the lonely figure who watched from a distance, a scene whose meaning is never fully open up strongly evokes Antonioni's Blow Up
.
In
Blow Up me two things have liked. First, that is behind a classic British row houses a park. Between two houses to open a wrought iron gate, someone goes through it and is suddenly in a completely different world with different sounds and a different rhythm. The second is that Antonioni's characters, such as Monica Vitti in L'Eclisse
, Remain common and have a look at things, flag poles or tree tops in the wind. You do not know why it does not take further the plot. The figures are comparable to those moments, people who go to the sea and just watch the waves. This has something incomprehensible and puts people in a sudden emptiness inside. Especially these moments, we have looked at with the team again.
Then it's probably no coincidence that Nina (Julia Hummer) belongs in the park scene just a cleaning squad, finally, is the first person to whom the photographer in Blow Up
met in the park, a paper collector.
Really? That must have been an unconscious Reminszenz be. I was primarily interested in the moment the step out from the world. One has to Antonioni London feel in a very condensed historical moment to participate in which there beats the heart of the pop world, all people are in a stream. And then a two meter goes to the side and do something he will never understand. This falling out of the world I wanted to capture ghosts in
.
Two little girls in LA: Betty & Rita
(David Lynch: Mulholland Drive , 2001) Also in
Mulholland Drive by David Lynch is about two girls whose relationship a constantly changing, there are also casting an eerie scene that occurs in the course of initial alienation great intimacy, only to eventually dissolve into air. samples
When the two women in
Mulholland Dive the scene for the first time is absolutely dead, so a bit like Alzheimer's Tennessee Williams. Then go Naomi Watts ran very close to the man who whispers her lines, and suddenly loads the scene immensely. A really great scene. I had not in mind, but the problem was the same: How to display two girls kissing each other, without which looks after the presented lesbianism, which is only for the male-greedy View is there. So how can I film the physical love between two women without their make for myself? This is something you can learn from David Lynch. In Mulholland Drive
it is important that a woman is processing at the other, which is only a dream figure, a debt. Nevertheless, the love is present.
In
ghosts the love between the two girls at present, where Nina is more familiar as Toni (Sabine Timoteo).
Yes, Sabine Timoteo I explained her character so that she has no memory. You are pure present, I told her that your memories do not interest you, this is just ballast. You're like a predator that comes from the forest to a water hole, watching for the next lame zebra lookout. Who you are and why you're so act, do not be interested. This brutal presence and shamelessness, which is her figure.
Why are your movie like many other women directors often the mysterious figures who, as present in the casting and the party scene, the male gaze and undermine him at once?
Yes, it is somehow, I've made have any thoughts about it. But it's ultimately a story of mothers and daughters to boost memory and grief, as in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. The fathers always die somewhere in the castle, no one cares about them. The King lies in state, and the protagonists are always mothers and daughters. The mothers are the same preserving the suffering and are responsible for the consolation.
Another form of controlling and also ineffective gaze is directed by surveillance cameras on the figures, whose images are recorded twice in the film is a crime, not prevent it or to help clear up.
surveillance cameras do not just take a look at the world, but they are mainly recording apparatus. Something is recorded and stored, and which plays an important role in
ghosts. The Abduction It is the child still see as a recording, while the child vanishes in the pixels of the image. It is believed that it is still present, but it's gone forever. Therefore, this sequence of such brutality. The moment of disappearance, death, one can say almost, is there, but still no one helps. There is a film by Michael Klier,
The giant which I think is great and is only composed of the material from surveillance cameras, all photos are shot from above. Like a giant who looks at our world. And suddenly our world is charged by the look of the giant. A child who is with his dog in a fountain in the pedestrian area in Wuppertal sits reminded, suddenly at the beginning of a movie or a tragedy. At the same time move the tumb surveillance cameras around the world, they are so far up, and your engine only allowed motions. Reminds me of the stupidity of a giant who recognizes the subtleties of human, but also by a god, see everything, but can not participate. This gives the film by Michael Klier an immense sadness, the act of my films.
Two little girls from Hamburg: Anneke Sara & Lisa
(Klaus Lemke: final , 2007) The Haunting in the fixation of the kidnapping is yes also that they are relatively unrelated to the story about floats, its status is ambiguous: Is now a record of the actual kidnapping to a vision of the mother or perhaps an inserted sequence that only a certain similarity described with the above situation has?
I like it gets to see in movies when someone says something that he has seen and experienced the first one after. Man makes himself before an image in mind, and then you see the real image. This difference between his imagination and the real image I find very exciting. In
ghosts the French parent described the abduction in detail, with all the sensations they had. Half an hour later you can see the video with the appropriate scene and the return of the mother to the scene. This combination has really impressed me. The scariest moment
of the film, the disappearance of the shopping cart with the child from the setting that looks almost worse than death, because one is missing any idea what waits beyond the left edge.
Yeah, that's like the pictures of the kids that hang in the post offices in France. Which have not even killed, there is no corpus delicti, no blood, no body. To a Pietà of the mother with her child is not to think that children have vanished. have a comparable effect the images of the surveillance camera: It looks as if something is deleted, as if someone dies.
The father seems to have been completed at the end he says it, the Nina, the daughter is dead.
With Aurelien Recoing, who plays the father, I have previously spoken about the case of a missing boy in Saarbrücken, the abused, raped and killed probably has been. It has not found his body, and therefore there is no perpetrator, but still, everyone knows that the boy must be dead. Parents, the bodies of their children have not seen have not completed their trauma. The father, played by Aurélien this Statements but found for him, he has accepted the death of his daughter so he can continue to live and his wife. Only they can see not, they will suffer as a recurring phantom pain.
But the mother can end their "newly found daughter fall, as if a piece is already listed frequently come to an end.
Yes exactly, she thinks it not turn themselves. I have to Marianne Basler said that presented by her mother is like a junkie. She has actually stopped their drug, and then it does have a relapse. In the end, appeared on the therapist and brings them back to the hospital where they were also without can carry along involuntarily. She thinks himself no doubt that this girl could be of her daughter.
Just to come back to the cameras, who are a particular weakness of the filmmaker Harun Farocki, who advises dramatically in all their films. How is your collaboration?
That is always so incredibly easy and simple that it can not even put into great words. I usually have two or three ideas, as already mentioned earlier, the literary sketches, then I meet with him, and we see if can evolve into something that is a job about a year or two's worth. We walk, I note me our associations, and later I tried it a drama to develop. After four weeks I will go back to him, we spend a few days and think further about the matter. "Story Consultant" is such a cool word, but it is so that I have the whole story with him develop.
Are there differences here that need to be reconciled?
Harun would always write a modern novel. The envision something like the scene in Truffaut's Shoot
take the pianist where gangsters in a car. One of them is lying and says: "If I have lied to my grandmother drop dead" Truffaut and then cuts to a woman who just suffered a heart attack. He will be great and I would never do, but we still talk about it. The next film we turn, it comes to venture capital, which he has just made a film. We have many common interests, which are reflected in my films, such as the Tristan motif in
ghosts plays a role. When you're as close friends, the conversation topics are often part of the scripts.
Two little girls from Paris: Celine & Julie
(Jacques Rivette: Celine et Julie vont en bateau , 1974) also in Jacques Rivette's Céline et Julie vont en
bateau provide two girls of the city and the order of civil life upside down. Was that an influence? I
the last I saw with 16 in the Film Club, I have only schemes like this in my head. But Marianne Basler reminded me of the movie and asked for it. It has in Rivette's latest film
Va savoir played the lead role, where I have also discovered. But I wanted to see the film in any case before.
takes in all these movies with you, with Rivette, with Antonioni, in Lynch, in Godard's Le
mépris on the Mulholland Drive
reference , Women are constantly in motion, try experimenting with emotions and gestures, from wigs, roam the city. The men just sit there, to look at that and try to half-way to keep up.
Yes, the men are always boys. The women have to endure a lot, they have to give birth and then worry about the men who were not born to an end.
And the movies have to do the beautiful women then even good things to talk with Truffaut.
Yes, this is such a beautiful set that is typical of the 60s. At that time, the naked girl magazines left on the title, and you terrible coined phrases like ". A poem must be the appeal of a 17-year-olds have" As a director, is about to break this macho attitude, especially since you can learn a lot from Lynch. One must only look at how he Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive
sets the scene, such a phenomenon, such an elevation is found elsewhere only in Hitchcock blondes. This floating, the light, the make-up that is given out only Lynch. His female characters are not. This also applies to Klaus Lemke, who is filming on the women in
dreaming, Julia same. His girls do not belong to the male gaze, but are quite for yourself, you can document them only. They say on anything, they play at nothing, the longer you look, the farther they are away.
How do you get this down as a director antivoyeuristischen view?
in bad films, there is only a picture of the woman. In good films, there are many pictures of the woman, telling everyone that there is not only one image. The same goes for the male figures. There are movies that revolve around something and can not find it. The circles and leave the mystery is part of these films. The figures do not contain such pictures, but look a little different in each setting should be. This withdrawal is the real subject of many good films.
Is this just a question director, or need for such a staging certain actors?
This is a question of the gap, the co-operation. If you rangeht there with the attitude: "I rent a good face," or "I get myself a good photographer," then not much comes out at. One has to some extent, the meanings and write-ups in the history of the representation of women and make it clear that awareness can be part of the movie, then it will be interesting.
looks like your collaboration with Julia Hummer?
Julia is highly motivated, and that just is not in itself, but on the film. She manages therefore, to draw up the construction of a film within a space that belongs to it alone. It draws boundaries, and it's fun to have someone in front of him who wants to not like one. The collaboration is going well so not only before the camera, but in the development of history. I told Julia the story back in 2000 by Pavese, in artistic circles of the two girls, and from this conversation is always more then the ghosts were
history.
Ironically, on 11 January, my birthday has The Federal Constitutional Court to me a very special gift made by it has declared a material provision of the TSG to be unconstitutional. We are not therefore obliged to let us operate in order to be recognized legally in perceived gender. 
