Reality Is In the Eye of the Beholder: Ghosts in Berlin

In a recent interview, Director Christian Petzold said “Real life in film is always only a caricature”. This can be reduced even further because the idea that there is any “real” life in the first place is questionable. And in essence, this is what his latest film is very self-consciously about. He talked at the 2005 Berlinale Talent Campus about his film, now screening in competition at the Berlinale.

In GHOSTS, Petzold doesn’t peddle in platitudes or pander to the myth of “normality”. The entire film is infused with the philosophy that reality is in the eye of the beholder.

To hear Petzold talk was absolutely beguiling: you rarely encounter a director who is so articulate about his work, even in translation, and has such emotional intelligence. On the other hand, GHOSTS is so necessarily subtle that too much exposition risks suffocating the film.

The idea for the film had two geneses for Petzold: a group of “missing children” notices in a post office in France, and a Grimm’s fairytale he read to his daughter, called “The Shroud”. In this fable, a woman’s longing for her dead child keeps the ghost somewhere between heaven and earth, in the twilight zone. In GHOSTS, Nina is an itinerant girl who can’t remember her family; Francoise is a mentally strained mother searching for her daughter who was abducted years ago when she was 3. When they find each other in Berlin, the film becomes an overlapping of their different imaginings, and with the power of their longings they each infuse the other with their own “reality”.

In the session Petzold suggested that screen culture reflects society’s longing for a cohesive narrative to make sense of the world. But no such stories exist in film, there are just attempts; a cohesive narrative in film as in the world, is impossible. And so Petzold leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether Nina really is Francoise’s lost daughter. “But I think cinema is full of ghosts in a non-literal sense. They are created by the thoughts of another, but they are not a state of being or idea, but a character, a person; they DO things. They LIVE.”

The film has a voyeuristic undertone: the scenes are shot with steadicam rather than dollies, allowing the camera to get very close to the actors without throwing of the naturalness of their performance; the sound design is such that you feel like you are following Nina when she walks through the park. In one especially provocative sequence Nina and her friend Toni dance together, their intimacy broken by the gaze of a man in the film, but also by our own curiosity.

Although this film works on a cerebral level, it is not essentially a thinking film, but a feeling one. What makes the story work is the emotionally intuitive use of colour, sound, and minimalist cinematography, and the intimacy of the performances. However I think it is better not to be too seduced by the intention behind the film. Is it really worth breaking a beautiful thing to find out how it works?

Dee Jefferson

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2005