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eduard’s promise / kino, 91min, 35mm farbe
Excerpts of an interview
with the director Andreas Wunderlich (II):
... measured by the film, or rather the idea behind the film. The team has to be very flexible and as a whole willing to turn to radical solutions. Using
that kind of potential friction in a constructive way with such a low-budget production is real mastery in itself. Not just the two actors turned into Eduard and Julia on the spot. The shoots themselves assimilated incredibly quickly with their story and turned into an odysee with an open end. Eduard’s Promise was like a German „Living in Oblivion“. From what I remember, and that memory is starting to get transfigured, it was like an endless journey through the wilderness, on the backseat a bunch of scratching, screaming and crying kids, who keep bugging you with stuff like „I’m hungry“, and „Are we going to be there soon?“ You have to have your act together as director and producer, especially if you are both at the same time. No one takes pity on you and who is always responsible in the end? The producer, in other words the director, in other words the producer, - nobody else.
Taking a look at your first film „Schneegestöber in der Ukraine / Snowstorm in the
Ukraina“ I see radically different camera work than in „Eduard’s Promise“. The camera is searching something and develops things out of curiosity. In „Eduard’s Promise“, your first feature film in which you are not the camerman, I see a
camera that already knows what’s ahead. It looks for positions from which it has the best access of seeing what will happen. The camera work is tableau-like, it looks down form a raised position,- which however has nothing to do with the
actual height.- Why did you decide to use such a static camera, while the story itself repeatetly keeps developing in a wave-like fashion and very dynamically.
In Eduard’s Promise I wanted a camera which is already there, like an irrefutable law. The
camera is supposed to describe the vacuum which this country develops, which sucks up everyone in a cold system - and then they’re gone, sucked up. In order to express this threat, the camera
had to stay outside so it could show the two of them in their vulnerability, protectionless in the dimension of this vast expanse. Using a camera like that allows you to let them move on very thin ice atmospherically without the film having to recount it on the plot level. The camera
looks down from its raised position as if trying to get the best place in order to watch them fall through. It should have something conspirative and you’re not supposed to know whether it’s their falling
through the ice, which is conspirative or whether it’s the strength both protagonists have. You’re not supposed to find out whose side the camera is on: On the side of the antagonistic environment, which is about to suck them up,
or on the side of both the heros. - That’s the principle. However, time and again the camera gives up its distance and lets itself get carried away by the two of them, suddenly is really close to them.
There’s a world of difference between the films on the German market right now and yours.
Does that make it especially difficult for you to assert yourself with a film like „Eduard’s Promise“. Or does it offer you the chance to make use of a niche which isn’t already full?
In Germany the co-existence of film genres is not something that is cultivated the way it is
in other countries. There’s only either or. It used to be the mouse grey problem film, now it’s pure entertainment, which is being supported vehemently by the people behind the grants. A film is, for heaven’s sake, not allowed to make a
statement these days. The people who make the decisions have begun burning out the comedies and have gotten rid of the so-called „watering principle“. That’s the contemptuous way of describing the principle of diversity and the doling out
of grants to small projects instead of just the big ones. That way films like Eduard’s Promise don’t „bother“ the monolithic entertainment scene any more. The big foundations hold their rule in an absolutistic way. As a
small producer you’re treated like a serf. And yet, as muchas these people jet around the world, sucking up to themselves and pretending to be important, on international ground the motto today more than ever is: „Life is too short to watch a German film“. Which German film stands comparison with Hana-Bi, The Sweet Hereafter or Live Flesh? And commercially speaking the German film continues to be attached to the financial drip, but now in a bigger way. Filmmakers who are willing to take a risk and could create a basis for clinking in artistically in the international film scene, systematically are stifled in their creativity.
During the Bosnia climax the director of „Diva“, Jean-Jacques Beineix, told me in times
like these he couldn’t make films any more. The only thing he would do was build up relief programs. And if he were to make films again then only documentaries. What is your view on making films in times like these?
Films don’t have to look like Diva. In times like these there are also films like Hana-Bi or
The Sweet Hereafter. Those aren’t sentimental, distorted images of our affluent world: They show crises around us. Films can’t replace relief programs in Bosnia, however they can remind us what it all boils down to: Finding a common
language. I think Eduard’s Promise can also do that.
Mette Juellund / Danske Filminstitute / 1999
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