Film Festival – Fragile Images at the DOK Leipzig

“I don’t give a damn what you do in Leipzig,” said Hartmut Bitomsky. This is how the film journalist and curator Ralph Eue remembered it at this year’s DOK Leipzig. Eue had wanted to convince the director to show his film “Staub” (2007) at the DOK, but he politely declined at the time. Overall, the Marxist filmmakers from the Federal Republic of Germany – of which Bitomsky is one – were not particularly interested in the East and the real socialist conditions that existed there, says Eue. A phenomenon that apparently continued even after 1990. At least during the GDR era, the ignorance was mutual: for the most part no effort was made to reach out to the comrades from the West. Were they too non-conformist, too sarcastic and analytically too radical, as this year’s DOK program suggests? In any case, they seemed rather unwanted.

A few films by Bitomsky and Harun Farocki have already been screened in Leipzig – but there is obviously still a lot of catching up to do. As part of the retrospective »Third ways in a divided world. Utopias and Infiltrations” now saw the premiere of their joint work “One thing that understands itself (15x)” (1971). Aesthetically a little out of date, but fundamentally still very clear, this educational film clearly conveys basic concepts from Karl Marx’s “Capital”. With the series in which it was shown, the DOK Leipzig also worked on its own history: which films were shown here during the GDR era – and which were not? What were the political reasons for this? It was also the Leipzig premiere for the other films shown that evening, made by Želimir Žilnik, Krzysztof Kieślowski and John Smith.

One person who, conversely, did not want to go from the East to the West was Thomas Heise. This year, the DOK Leipzig organized a memorial evening for the director, who died in Berlin at the end of May after a short, serious illness. His connection to the festival was close: twelve of Heise’s films were shown in various sections. Now friends and companions came together to explore him and his work from different perspectives. Among other things, film footage could also be seen in which Heise talks about himself and his work. Many filmmakers from the GDR went to the West, he says, and he too could have easily found a connection there, but: “Just wait and see, I said, this is going to be the most exciting country in the world.” Heise stayed – and created the “Neustadt Trilogy” – three films that document the lives of several families in Halle-Neustadt between 1992 and 2007, or “Material” (2009), a film in which fragments from the from the early 80s to the present, come together to form a mosaic about the social and social reality of the (former) GDR.

Based on these and other works, Heise has often been described as a chronicler of the East. But his artistic activity and his interests, as is also clear this evening, went far beyond this role. He saw points of connection everywhere, something could be told everywhere.

Bernhard Sallmann, also a documentary filmmaker, emphasized that Heise’s images were often imperfect – something that many directors tried to get rid of. Thomas Heise, on the other hand, also showed brittle, fragile, porous photographs – because he understood that they were taken from a reality that was also inherently brittle, fragile and porous. It was the discarded, remote, unfinished that interested him. This is also evident in the film “Barluschke” (1997), which won one of the main prizes at the DOK Leipzig in the year it was released with the Silver Dove and has now been shown again as one of five Heise films. In it, Heise portrays the Stasi and later BND agent Bertolt Barluschke and is himself confronted with his diversionary tactics. In the end, the viewer realizes that, even though Barluschke had been listening to him for a while, he remained a mystery to her.

How complex reality is and that the images we see can never convey everything to us was also the subject of the 34-minute film “We Had Fun Yesterday” (2024), which was screened in the “International Documentary Film Competition” section. The French director Marion Guillard is a trained wildlife filmmaker. “We Had Fun Yesterday” also contains landscape and animal shots, but Guillard’s voice that overlays it tells of something else: the director’s relationship to her family, her body and her sexuality. She was bulimic as a teenager, says Guillard somewhat laconically – this applies both to the “McChicken” sandwiches from McDonald’s and to the animal and landscape photos that she took en masse. We see footage from a trip to the USA that Guillard once took with her family. The camera focuses on everything that is generally considered worth seeing and filming: the Grand Canyon, forests, the evening sky, a squirrel. But Guillard’s voice, added afterwards, tells us that none of these recordings touched her emotionally. Except for this one, which came about by chance: Guillard was sitting in the car filming a beetle crawling on the window pane, with the scenery of the national park passing by behind it. In the past, Guillard says, she abhorred imperfection – digital images, for example, that decompose due to aging processes, frightened her. Today she thinks she is beautiful. It’s amazing how this film manages to link mental processes and thoughts with the camera’s outward gaze. Ultimately, it raises many questions: What is nature, and to what extent is our view of it not always already shaped by culture? How do we control nature, both outside and within us?

There was no prize for Guillard’s film – other films won it that year (see box). The Golden Dove for the best international documentary, for example, was awarded to the French director Dominique Cabrera for her film “La Jetée, the Fifth Shot” (2024). In it, Cabrera places Chris Marker’s famous sci-fi short film “La Jetée” (1962), which consists of still images, in its historical context, which also touches on her own family history. It is a film about how images are created and what lies behind them – and as such it is probably representative of the entire festival.