Barbara Wurm: Katharina, was your life situation and experience really the starting point for REPRODUKTION? Or did some trail first lead to your person?
Katharina Pethke: It was a three-stage process. To begin with, I studied at the place the film is about, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, the University of Fine Arts. Then many years later, I became a professor there, in the film department, which had only a few months previously moved into the building of the former maternity hospital next door, where I was born. I did actually ask myself if that had some significance or if that significance might be the start of something. But the real starting point came when I became pregnant with twins and then returned to the university, back to work, to a place of work. I had had a beautiful, life-changing experience whose explosiveness and scale I couldn’t have predicted beforehand. Suddenly, the stories of mother and my grandmother were appearing before my eyes and I felt like a character from L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD (LETZTES JAHR IN MARIENBAD). The film is about a sanatorium through which the main characters move, as if caught in a constant present tense. You never know whether they’re actually talking about the past and which particular past that might be if they are. That inspired me, because I felt exactly the same. I saw my grandmother, my mother, myself walking through this building at the age of 21. As a professor, I was also responsible for the new student intake, so I had a lot to do with people in the first years of their studies, who were also of a similar age. I had to do something with all this. For me, it wasn’t about navel-gazing though, it was more about taking my own life as the starting point for my interest.
Carolin Weidner: Is this the first time in your work that you’ve focused on something so autobiographical?
KP: No, my first film IN LIEBE – BRITTA SCHMIDT from 2007, which is essayistic too and explores how my best friend took her life, also contains autobiographical elements. My theory is that every film is personal anyway – whether directly or indirectly – and the differences here are more in terms of degree. REPRODUKTION could also be described as a portrait film: a portrait of four women that were at this place. And I’m one of them.
It’s about understanding that positions and counter-positions have been being developed here for 100 years
CW: REPRODUKTION is also a portrait of a place and how it has transformed over time. We find out right at the end that you only started the film once your professorship was already over. Did you begin the research process beforehand despite that? And if not, to what extent did your view of things then change again?
KP: When those six years were over, it was the third time that I was “leaving” that place – it felt like a true farewell. When I returned there to shoot, I then really did feel like a ghost in those corridors. It was important for me to make the film from a new position, with a degree of distance to my own time there and the pressure I used to feel there from different directions. This was to do with autobiographical aspects, but also with the political situation at the university. Certain structures continue being in place in exactly the way as they’ve always been.
CW: What role did the students play for you? Did you see them differently from the perspective of an observer?
KP: It’s almost an ethnographic perspective, because my entry point there is entirely personal. They were largely people I was close to. I accompanied them through their studies and thus also forged relationships with them. It was important for me to capture that sort of observation on location or make it able to be grasped in the first place via cinema, because it’s about understanding that positions and counter-positions have been being developed here for 100 years. That it’s a place where society is questioned and work is carried out to change things. I wanted to bring that into the frame.
Developing a feminist stance also means having the space to do so
CW: You already mentioned the corridors which you moved through like a ghost. In the tracking shots, they almost seem to change in line with a particular mood, as if they themselves were communicating.
KP: Yes, the corridors have several meanings. On the one hand, the central perspective is important, as I “travel along” the biographies and repeatedly look at the wall I come up against in so doing. From a feminist perspective, I also work through the privileges my protagonists undoubtedly had – each in their own way. When my grandmother had the idea of studying art in 1946, directly after the Second World War, that was something unusual as a woman. It bears witness to the extent to which she saw herself as bourgeois. For her part, my mother wanted to be rid of her bourgeois background, to negate it. That is also a privileged position. Developing a feminist stance also means having the space to do so. As we move through the generations, I was able to achieve even more, I ultimately even got a professorship. Then I reached a limit: today, the pre-determined breaking point for feminism is motherhood, even if I’m expressing that in an exaggerated way. I may have gone far, but that was the moment where I felt I couldn’t go any further. I was either now a mother or an artist, whether in terms of how the world saw me or how I saw myself, of course; I clearly couldn’t be both.
BW: Did your mother resist at all when it came to your creating a portrait of her?
KP: On the contrary. My mother was so grateful for the direct engagement I had with her. We produced the film over five years and tried many different points of entry, carrying out interviews and having conversations, including in front of the camera. The essence of this can be seen in the film. It’s not about confrontation, but rather wanting to understand, to grasp motives and circumstances. The subject of motherhood is always seen as very personal, with the expectation quickly arising that this should result in a very emotional film. My producer and I agreed that it was important to have everything play out and be negotiated at a place of work – in order to bring the structural questions to the fore. My mother and our relationship play a big role. And maybe I’ll return here to the travelling shots, which are also heavily inspired by L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD. The camera repeatedly moves along these 100-year-old corridors through which new generations stride again and again – with new hopes and desires – in order to be welcomed in the assembly hall at the start of their studies. And the male genius looks down at them from the painting on the wall. This portrayal of the “ideal” artist on the one hand and what happens below him in real life on the other – that was what interested me.
I create relationships between things that perhaps seem unrelated on the surface
CW: You edit and compose in a very matter of fact, intelligent way, but a feeling of pain often comes to the fore, a gloominess.
KP: You’re describing your feelings by saying that, I’m happy to hear it, as that means something is working: that something is creating a charge, not just on my side, but rather on yours. I didn’t want to tell the audience how they are supposed to feel.
BW: There are several leitmotifs in REPRODUKTION that leave their mark on the viewer, whether linguistic constructions or other forms of media. The most striking is perhaps “female destiny” – a concept, a sculpture. Did these motifs fit in easily? They’re astounding.
KP: I have a motto, which comes from John Baldessari, I think: “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” When I pass this mother and child sculpture at my place of work, I feel a sense of disquiet, I have contradictory feelings. I see how this perfect, idealised mother sits there and envelops her child in her arms, staring into space, selfless, stony, day and night, whatever the weather, while my children are in day care because I go to work. And that produces different feelings, contradictions and thoughts in me. I think about my mother and about us, but my theoretical interest is also piqued: what sort of figure is she, where does she come from? Why is the maternity hospital next to the art university? Why is the sculpture here? What does it have to do with the painting of the genius in the assembly hall, which is expensively maintained like a memorial? I create relationships between things that perhaps seem unrelated on the surface. That’s my essayistic approach. So I keep going and come across, for example, this story of a female artist who first created the sculpture of a woman as a mother as a contradiction. Two years later, her husband creates a counter-interpretation: a woman as a happy mother, in the prime of life. His sculpture was erected by the arts university 100 years ago and is there to this day. Hers disappeared into the Kunsthalle’s depot. Finding out all that was an exciting, almost archaeological task.
I see the idea of reproduction in art as hugely important, for art should actually be a refuge, a counter-moment for thought within society
CW: The idea of “female destiny” runs through the entire film, did you ever think about using it as the title of the film? The title ended up as REPRODUKTION, what do you associate with that?
KP: It would have been fatal to call the film “female destiny”. For me, that’s just one aspect of the whole thing. My approach demands work from the viewer to grasp all the connections and follow them. It’s about images and assumptions that are reproduced, about ideals that seem immovable – to this day. It’s obviously about how each generation follows the next at the small, personal level, but also at a larger one: how does art react to its surroundings? I see the idea of reproduction in art as hugely important, for art should actually be a refuge, a counter-moment for thought within society. And then it’s this idea of genius of all things that is reproduced to this day, which I also link to a neo-liberal, successful, male-connotated figure who seems to be this era’s ideal. Isn’t that obsolete? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to think in terms of the collective? I ultimately also make reference to biology in REPRODUKTION. During the montage, it was a clear decision not to argue in a particular direction. It’s about the structural analysis of states and circumstances, with this specific place serving as exemplary to this end
CW: Reproduction also takes place in material terms by way of the reproduction of the “Female Destiny” sculpture? It’s so unbelievable that it can hardly be a coincidence.
KP: Yes, it was really a gift, also because it was important to provide a counterpoint to the rest with something more corporeal. I reproduced the creation process in haptic fashion. I came across “Female Destiny” while walking in the Stadtpark in 2019. It’s a very white sculpture and looks new, although it’s from 1912. I thought that it couldn’t be true. Then I heard about an article about it in “Die Zeit” and tracked down the couple who were responsible for the reproduction. They made a second reproduction for the film and I’m really happy with it. The film would have been less rich without it.
This meta-engagement has always meant a great deal to me in my films
BW: You worked with a great deal of different media, also looking at photos and photo albums. Were they all familiar techniques for you or did you set off in new directions for this film?
KP: For IN LIEBE – BRITTA SCHMIDT, I had to grapple with my friend’s photographs because I had so many of them. They were left behind from that relationship. It’s important for me to engage with the medium and it’s something that’s there in all of my works to a greater or smaller degree. In REPRODUKTION, I spend a lot of time in the past and it was clear that there would be many reference materials. So it’s also actually an archive film. I wanted to make it possible to experience the archive, which is why I also show how I look at these materials or sort them on a table. This meta-engagement has always meant a great deal to me in my films.
BW: Are there things that you deliberately left out? The Nazi history of the institution, for example?
KP: Yes, of course. With a multicausal approach, it’s inevitable that things will be left out. I deliberately left out National Socialism because it would have been a whole subject of its own. The concept of the national in the wall painting by Willy von Beckerath as opposed to sculptor Richard Luksch. Some political debates are being conducted about that right now. I also left out internal matters relating to the university. The film was made in collaboration with my partner, who did the camerawork. Although the set-up wasn’t without tension, it was important, as he experienced the inverted role during my professorship – which also isn’t the solution. There are some exciting developments and initiatives on the theme, such as the “More Mothers for Art” manifesto. While editing, there were phases when I had the need to work more directly, to put forward hypotheses, get worked up about things, to argue or to get angry in the voiceover. But then we decided against it. The artistic work was about first dealing with this contradiction, representing it and calling it by its name. The next step is to talk about it after the film.
Translation: James Lattimer
