Obituary – Renate Merck: The last cut

Renate Merck (1951–2024)

Photo: Moritz Herbst

“The two were so k. o., They asked me when I moved in 1986 that I would go to the Odenwald, ”recalls the trick filmmaker and author Elke Löwe when it comes to being in the family grave. Renate Merck has returned to Hamburg-Nienstedten in death. She lived for 37 years in the middle of Brombachtal in southern Hesse, in the small village of Birkert. The longest time with her husband Helmut Herbst and many cats.

She was born on July 4, 1951. Since puberty, Renate Merck has been brought up by her mother alone, in a beautiful house with a garden in the middle of Nienstedten. The Elbe is close, Blankenese is the neighboring part of the city, here it can be live. Renate and ethnology studied Renate Merck at the University of Hamburg and wanted to become a teacher. In addition to her studies, she worked in a café in the Grindelviertel that operated as a collective in self -government.

Contacts in Hamburg and Berlin’s film scene were created via German studies seminars. It was not commercial; Many lived precarious from film to film, with other jobs on the side. Little was formally regulated, and so Renate Merck began working as a cut assistant, learned the basics and the understanding of Helmut Herbst’s film montage. They came together in 1979 through working together at the cutting table. It is clear that even when eating, a lot was talked about film. The French director Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at the kitchen table were drinking when I drink tea table when I came over the apartment over the Cinegrafik, in the former factory building in a rocked backyard in Hamburg-Barmbek.

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The film scene was actually one in which there were many friendships and few hostilities. When it went to an ethnological film project together with Manfred Schäfer and Ingrid Kummels in the Amazon region of Peru, it was helpful that all four similar ideas about life and work: fully hanging into research, in the film, but self -determined, Critical towards exploitation and rule.

In the house of Renate Merck and Helmut Herbst in the middle of Birkert there was always a box of cider if a visit comes. Red wine too, plus good cheese, and it was often and elaborately cooked and fed. The house was the retreat, which was also filled up to the top with cartoon technology – and several cutting tables for the analog film cut, as Renate Merck has perfected it for decades.

At Elfi Mikesch she lived in 1979 during the cut of “What should we do without death” on a loft bed in the director’s apartment directly above the cutting table. The white fine gloves dressed, sorted on the gallows the film strips hanging there, the bobbies with the faulted film sequences, scenes, sound tracks placed on the turntables, the cutting and adhesive apparatus. Tone and image had to be cut separately, exactly in parallel when the cut was finished.

Then, together with Helmut Herbst, she cut his documentaries “Happening – Art and Protest” and “Between the pictures” and in 1981 the feature film made in Northern Hesse about Georg Büchner’s life: “A German Revolution”. She has cut many films that found a rather cinematic audience, but they have been marking for the other cinema since the 1980s: “40 sqm Germany” by Tevfik Başer, “Dragon Feed” and “Farewell. Brecht’s last summer “by Jan Schütte,” The virgin machine “and” Seduction: The cruel woman “by Monika Treut,” Scherbentanz “by Chris Kraus,” The cynical body “by Heinz Emiggolz.

When it came to the tension sheet, side -side strands that were too much and confusing and mostly out of the film, it was similar to a book; If the visual language could be worked out, the rhythm more coherent and the narrative flow clearer. The installation of films, the cut, is an indispensable stage in the process of creation. But almost invisible to the viewers.

She lived through the switch from analog to digital film and cut, there was also an Avid cut computer in the house in Birkert. For years, the work phases in Hamburg and Berlin alternated with phases of calm, private life and gardening in Birkert when cutting at the scene at the place of film production. Whereby – things rarely were really private. The cats were used to the fact that visitors came from time to time, and other filmmakers lived in the guest room from time to time and were cut in the house films, mentally disassembled and re -mounted again.

Many students from the University of Design in Offenbach were often guests. Helmut Herbst had a professorship for film there until his retirement in 2000. Renate Merck also liked to support the students with handicraft advice and action. And helped to complete films that were already a project before failure.

As a lecturer, she taught for years at the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg in the assembly/cut course and passed on her knowledge. Monika Preschl, Archive Researcher in the State Film Collection of Baden-Württemberg, sums it up: “I learned a lot about visual language from my editor Renate Merck and found how much energy, love and life can put in archive material.”

For example, Renate Merck ensured almost three years after the death of Helmut Herbst that all films, all material, the entire film technology, specialist literature are archived, used, and used in various locations. When she was done with it and moved to a small apartment in Eckernförde, close to her loved one, there was a serious illness that she had had for a long time. She died on December 24th, now she has been buried. The last cut of the Renate Merck. And the deepest.

Moritz Herbst is the son of Helmut Herbst from first marriage.

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