15 Juliane Lorenz
I talked to Juliane in the café of the Literatur Haus in Berlin. She was the editor for Rainer Werner Fassbinder during his highly productive last phase. Since his death she has combined running The Fassbinder Foundation with editing for a number of eminent directors including Werner Schroeter.
RC:So, to begin at the beginning – where you were born, what your parents did.
JL:I was not born into a really ‘gutbürgerliche family situation’. But it would have been, if …! My father Wilhelm Waitzmann met my mother during his studies in Freiburg in Breisgau, a very interesting, although very catholic university city in the southwest of Germany, in the so-called Higher Black Forest. My mother, Frieda Ketterer, was an apprentice in fashion design. My mother told me I was the gift of her great love and so she treated me in my childhood like a treasure. As my parents didn’t marry, I was born as Juliane Maria Ketterer. When I was two years old, my mother left her home village near Freiburg and went to Stuttgart, where she met her first husband Dieter Lorenz. He gave me his name, and as I felt he was my father, I would say that from then on there was nothing preventing me from feeling I had an ordinary family background. My stepfather and my mother had two children, so I have a seven years younger brother and a ten years younger sister.
My stepfather was making little short films, which didn’t really make money, so he was looking for a solid job to earn more. He then started to work as a projectionist and always took me to the cinemas he was working for. This is the reason I saw a lot of films from the age of five, sitting beside the projector and looking through the little viewing window into the screening room, like in ‘Cinema Paradiso’.1 I would not say that I saw in those years highly sophisticated films – they were mostly German and American B-pictures of the 1960s, but I was taken from this time on into the experience of seeing movies. After some years in Stuttgart we moved to Wiesbaden, where my stepfather got a very good position at the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) a state institution which was founded after the war, and where all films shown in Germany had to pass through a commission to be approved for public screening. As I often visited my stepfather, in the castle of Wiesbaden-Biebrich where FSK, the Murnau Stiftung and other film institutions were located, and as he was now projecting for approval all the beautiful foreign films which were shown in Germany as well – films from the Nouvelle Vague and the New Italian Cinema – I learned from now on more about the art of cinema. Now I discovered film-makers: Luchino Visconti, who became my favourite alongside Renoir, Melville, Resnais and Pasolini.
I learned more from films than from any other medium. For example, when I saw ‘Death in Venice’2 it made me to read the original novel, and then to read more books by Thomas Mann. When I was finding something in a novel, which really touched me and made me think, I looked for a film, which showed a similar story and this lead to other territories. These experiences inspired my whole early life; discovering literature, painting, music and cinema.
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Then Hans-Wilhelm and Gertrud Lavies came into my life. They were friends of my family. Hans-Wilhelm Lavies was the founder of the first German Film Institute (Deutsches Filminstitut), which was also located at that time in Wiesbaden-Biebrich. He had donated his collection of early writings about silent films and film stills to the institution he founded and his wife was collecting art. When I was between the ages of ten and fifteen they took me under their wing, guided and trained me to see films, to see art, to learn and respond to these forms and to train my visual knowledge. And as I was often invited for weekends to their home near Wiesbaden, I also discovered their huge library. I was reading nearly all the books they had of Schiller, Goethe, Böll and Grass, just to mention the range in their collection. Some titles I never got to, others I really was absorbing into my brain and heart.
My mother divorced when I was fifteen, and we moved from Wiesbaden to a little spa village near Munich: Bad Wörishofen. There I had the first crisis of my life. I was no longer very good at school. The Bavarian school system was much stronger than the one I came from in Wiesbaden which belonged to the Federal District of Hessen. Suddenly I got sick, I got childhood diseases which I must have caught from my brother and sister, and I missed some months of school.
When I went back to school I quit after finishing the tenth class and went to Munich for six months to be an apprentice in a film laboratory, where I learned all about film materials, developing negatives, making rushes, negative cutting and the basic information about colour grading. I learned how a film negative gets from being exposed in the camera through processing on to the editing table. After six months I regained my self-confidence and went back to school. Now my mother started to develop herself. She was still young, forty years old, and wanted to learn something about synchronisation of foreign films and started to work as a dubbing editor.
In the next two years I finished school, while my mother was in Munich and visited us on her free weekends. This time, beginning of the 1970s, I remember as a very positive and fruitful period. It was a time of discovering the world and the experience of being totally free and self-determined and to be responsible for my family, as I cared for my brother and sister during the week. Then my mother decided we should move to Munich. I finished school and started to study political science in evening classes. Now I wanted to be really free, and not be financial supported by my mother. She suggested that I go to Bavaria Studios, and to the chief production manager and ask him if I could learn about making films and start as a director’s assistant for example. At this time I was thinking of becoming a director or a scriptwriter. I wasn’t that sure, to be honest, what I really wanted to be.
I ended up meeting him and he said if I want to be a director I have to go to a film school. But I thought: No, I want to learn to make films by working on them. He said: ‘Well, our chief editor, needs a second assistant.’ I had an interview with Margot von Schlieffen and she accepted me. At that time, Bavaria was a very interesting film production centre of Germany. They produced for example ‘Fedora’3 of Billy Wilder, and Bergman did ‘The Serpent’s Egg’,4 and the new German film was getting more and more known. After six months I decided I wanted to quickly become a film editor, but I couldn’t get the position of a first assistant, which would have been the next step. There were long lines of second assistants waiting years until getting to be a first assistant, and to edit you needed to wait at least five or six years, maybe more. This was not my speed!
So I quit and Mrs von Schliefen was angry because I didn’t dare tell her to her face. When she met the studio manager who told her I was leaving, she said: ‘If you think you are ready, you will see!’ (laughs) I mean, I didn’t have any idea how to edit a film at that time. Sometimes I went behind the curtain, where Margot von Schliefen was sitting at her editing table, and then she asked me very quickly to leave. The curtain was closed! Sometimes I peeped again and she looked at me as if to say, ‘Don’t you have any work?’ You see, it was very difficult to get on. So I left and worked briefly as a freelance first assistant.
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Then my fate came and found me. I met an editor and he recommended me to the editor Ila von Hasperg.5 She was going to edit a film Rainer backed, a film of Michael Fengler,6 who used to be a co-producer of some early Fassbinder-films and belonged to the so-called Fassbinder group. But Ila and Michael Fengler didn’t get along very well, so Ila quit after five weeks. I quit too, as I agreed with her decision, beside I was also very loyal. Then Ila said: ‘By the way I’m going to do the next film of “Mary” – and I said: ‘who’s “Mary”? She said: ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder!’7 I thought, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, how interesting. I had no idea about him, I had only heard people saying: ‘He’s crazy, he’s a genius’. I’d only seen one of his films at that time: ‘Ali, Fear Eats the Soul’.8
The first film I was involved in was ‘Chinese Roulette’9 and I was first assistant editor. Ila was starting to edit while the film was shot and Rainer came once to the editing room. I was very shy at that time, maybe one cannot imagine this today. And I adored and loved him from the first moment on. He was a person who came into a room, he didn’t have to say anything, but he was really there. He was physically and mentally totally present. When the music score was prepared, he came again into the editing room when the recorded music was synched on to the film. He was really not often with us, I remember. Rainer was not a ‘discusser’ – he simply expressed his thoughts in a way we were able to follow. I would say that being an editor for Rainer Werner Fassbinder at that time (it was the summer of 1976, ‘Chinese Roulette’ was his twenty fifth film) was easy. He really created the films very precisely. Every shot was his shot – the cameraman Michael Ballhaus10 followed his advice on the camera angles and framing, and Michael was concentrating on lightning and camera movement. I remember Rainer once said, referring to the editing: Even two frames more or less are very important for the rhythm of a scene. ‘Chinese Roulette’ was fully post-synchronized in the end, because they shot with a noisy Arriflex camera and I was more and more involved in the creation of the sound.
Juliane Lorenz with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (© Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin)
We finished editing in around six weeks, dialogue dubbing, effects and preparation for the mixing took four weeks, the film was ready by the end of August. Rainer was meanwhile preparing his next film, ‘The Stationmaster’s Wife’,11 a two part TV-production, produced by Bavaria Studios, after the novel ‘The marriage of Mr. Bolwieser’ of Oskar-Maria Graf, a Bavarian writer who emigrated to the USA in 1938. At that time I still thought I would go back to my studies, but when Ila asked me if I was going to do the next film for Rainer, I agreed. We really were working wonderfully together, and I was getting more and more involved in the editing processes, into sound design. I loved ‘ Bolwieser’, and when we finished the TV-version, at the end of November, Rainer asked me to work with him on a version from the TV-material for theatrical release. During this work I noticed how much he started to concentrate on me. He asked me about my studies, my life, my personal feelings about life, and we discussed cinema and art a lot, and about his life and feelings.
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After we mixed the theatrical version of ‘Bolwieser’, Rainer started to prepare the shooting of ‘Despair’,12 his first English language film, and the most expensive film at that time in Germany. Then Ila had decided to leave Germany for the USA, and Rainer was looking for a new editor. He chose Reginald Beck,13 Joesph Losey’s and Alain Resnais’ editor. Rainer thought Reginald Beck would be the best editor, because he would love the main character, played by Dirk Bogarde. He thought Reginald Beck knows him as an actor very well from the films he edited with him. Rainer couldn’t know at that time Reginald Beck didn’t love Dirk Bogarde at all! However that was Rainer, the glorious, wonderful, sometimes also naïve person who also chose his team members from a very practical point of view. Then he asked me to be the first assistant of Reginald Beck, and a day later the production manager called me and said: ‘Mr Fassbinder says you are the first assistant!’ As I was getting more and more self-confident, I told Rainer that this was going to be my last assistant job. Rainer smiled and said: Mr Beck will teach us a lot.
RC:Did Fassbinder admire film editors?
JL:Rainer loved editors. He felt himself to be an editor. He used to say: ‘I do my job on the set and you do yours in the editing room. You are a second director. You have to finish the film, it’s your responsibility’ He inflamed me with that idea and that’s how I grew up.
Just to finish the story with Reginald Beck: He was a lovely person, but another generation and the way Rainer did his films was totally confusing for him. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all. Then I said: ‘But you must know his films’, and I took him to private screenings. I will never forget Mr Beck once looking at me and saying, ‘You must love him, I don’t think he’s a great director!’ (laughs).
I wasn’t aware at that time about my passion and future dedication for Rainer’s films, and my love and passion for him as well. I loved how we worked together, how we understood each other without talking too much. I learned from him to be well organised – like him – to be aware of the responsibilities as an editor, to be a co-creator. I was taken by his great intelligence and adored his respect for people who did their craft really well; editors, cameraman, sound engineers, costume designers and so one. During ‘Despair’ we learned from English sound engineers the art of original sound. At that time the qualities in this aspect were not on a high level in Germany. Dirk Bogarde, whom we loved and whom Rainer and I adored since Losey’s ‘The Servant’14 and Visconti’s ‘Death of Venice’ and ‘The Damned’,15 was absolutely adorable.
RC:Why was ‘Despair’ so important a film?
JL:‘Despair’ was a kind of ‘step forward’ in Rainers own development – he was always looking for more challenges to work with actors whom he didn’t create from the very beginning. ‘Despair’ had a budget of around $2,000,000 which was a lot at that time and we had fifty-four shooting days, which also was a lot. I was very happy. Suddenly Rainer called me the youngest ‘star editor’ of Germany, and I was thinking: Well then I have to be good! When I recall the new experience of Rainer, the different way he directed, I remember mainly the way he shot: He shot more material than usual. Rainer was hoping Reginald Beck would really ‘use’ his material, and create something, which he couldn’t even imagine would be possible. Unfortunately this kind of freedom Rainer hoped Reginald Beck would take, being creative with the material, was not the way Mr Beck was used to working I guess. Maybe Losey and Resnais were all the time in the editing room and said what they thought it should be. So, Reginald Beck’s first version was about three hours. When Rainer came and saw it, he knew if he was going to show that long version it would have been thumbs down for him from the producers. At this time no commercial film in Germany was longer then two hours at the most.
RC:So would you say Reginald Beck was cutting in a different rhythm?
JL:No, he didn’t create his own rhythm. When Rainer came to see this first version he said, we have to edit the film anew, and because Reginald Beck didn’t want to be present for the screening of the cut, Rainer said to me after Reginald Beck had left: ‘Now we really start to edit the film’ My first thought was: am I allowed to do that? I’m the assistant of Mr Beck. And Rainer looked at me and said, ‘but it’s my film, and it’s my future’.
So, in one night we re-edited the whole film. We had two editing tables – two Steenbecks. Rainer didn’t talk, I didn’t talk, all decisions we did in a way of silent understanding. I learned how to use material, how to propose new directions in the story-telling. After this night we had this magic connection, and we never lost it. I was very happy the following morning, an experience I never had in my life before. It’s a kind of happiness, which comes from the power of creation. Mr Beck came at ten o’clock and saw the results. He was very sophisticated, gentleman, and said, ‘Well, I suppose I have to go’, and he left. When the producers saw our film version, they said: ‘Wow! What a film.’ Now they thought they had to look for another editor for Mr Fassbinder – I must add, I was just twenty-one years old – but Rainer said: ‘Why? I have an editor. Juliane is going to do all my films from now on.’ I thought he’s just joking. That’s the story of my beginning as an editor, and we finished six-and-a-half years later with our last film ‘Querelle’,16 his forty third film, and my number 14 of the Fassbinder films.
RC:Is it possible to describe what was happening that night in terms of the mutual understanding of the way of editing?
JL:First of all you have the material, which you have in your head or not. You should know every take, every frame exactly. You should know the story. You try to rethink the story, when you feel something is not working well as you see the edited scenes on the editing table. We moved for example a scene from another part of the script to the beginning, we changed developments of scenes. Some scenes which were much longer in the first version were edited in another order, because we tried other connections of dialogue, of movement. I should show you now scene by scene what exactly happened – what was in the first Beck version and what we changed – but I remember more the results of our mutual understanding. If you are in connection with yourself – I am often deciding things in a more subconscious way, then in a so-called logical way – you do not remember creative actions very well. Rainer and I were working through these subconscious understandings permanently. And at the same time he was the ‘guider’, but not telling me exactly what really I should do. This was the way. I felt, he gave me strength because he trusted my courage plus this magic RWF touch and my response to this ‘touch’, and my talent I hope as well. All these components made it work.
Rainer was able to give you freedom and I had the luck to be the recipient of his desire to give freedom. Later sometimes I became afraid about this ‘freedom’ and was trembling and shaking during the editing periods and at the same time amazed, that I was doing it. Rainer never gave me the feeling that I am making mistakes and if he didn’t like something, he just said: think about it again. And immediately I thought about it and knew what to do. The older I got, the more films we did together, and more confident I was.
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Although I was a so-called ‘star editor’ in Germany, I noticed after Rainers death, German directors didn’t really understand that I was a film editor who had the gift of creating a film. Maybe this is a very German story, or let’s better say: it was a very German story. Thank God two years after Rainer died, in 1984, Werner Schroeter,17 asked me to work with him, and I asked him if I can edit without him and offer him the result. He was totally open to this way and we did six films until today. It’s totally different to work for Werner Schroeter, but in a way it’s equal to Rainer. Werner has his own filmic language, and I am able to add something what he mostly calls: ‘A new aspect has developed during the editing, and I like it’. Of course I need the opinion of the director, the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for a direction I am following. Of course editors need the director, but I do not need an explanation of how to develop the story through editing. Werner Schroeter’s films mostly do not have a concrete story-line and so I have the responsibility to create the story in a way the spectator can follow. When we first did ‘The King of Roses’ Werner said to me: ‘No editor has ever made this proposal to me’ and I said: ‘Well, there is always a first time’.
RC:I wonder how significant the Reginald Beck experience is, because the English editors I have chosen to interview for the book, I have tried to choose those who have worked both with what I would call English/Hollywood films and with European films, but still most of the time I think the films that are made in England are more Hollywood than they are European.
JL:You are perfectly right.
RC:Losey is a very particular, intelligent – a real man of cinema. I wouldn’t have called him your average Hollywood film-maker.
JL:No.
RC:So you would have thought that Reginald Beck could have adapted. What I don’t know is the way that Losey shot. I suppose if he didn’t like Fassbinder’s style then he couldn’t connect with it.
JL:Reginald Beck was a very sincere and a very polite person. Again: I think it is a question of generation. Also Rainer was a melodramatic, very passionate film-maker although he was an intellectual, sometimes you could say, a cool director. Maybe there was no connection to the stories Rainer was working on in his films, and to the themes Reginald Beck was interested in. I think this point of view is also important.
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RC:So how did you adapt to working after Fassbinder died?
JL:My experiences from the time with Rainer, were still the standard I wished to work with. In Rainers time, I was involved from the very beginning that he started to prepare a film. When he wrote the script, sometimes I typed them or shared typing with his mother, I did researches in the archives, I shared discussions with Rainer and the script writers, I was really involved in all parts of the creating of his films. So, more out of this lack of fulfilment I started after Rainer died creating my own film projects. In 1983 I shot a little short film, in 1985 I was co-producer of ‘The King of Roses’18 and I wrote documentary scripts. My last film ‘Life, Love & Celluloid’19 was an old dream to make a film about the connections of the art of films of the early German film period, which influenced Hollywood. So I also had experiences of other disciplines of film-making.
RC:Going back to Fassbinder – did his approach evolve during the period you worked together?
JL:‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’20 for example: Rainer started to shoot only one take, so there were no takes to choose between any more. I edited, for example a scene, which was shot yesterday today, and presented it at the daily evening screenings. Every evening the whole team saw the edited version of the scenes which were just shot two days before. This was a perfect production machine, going on for nine months during shooting, and after the last shooting day – we had altogether 152 shooting days – my final cut of the 15½ hours and fourteen parts were presented two weeks later. The way Rainer shot his films in the last years was to me the most acceptable way. So, this is a little bit also a reason I later tried to push directors I worked with in the way I was used to working with Rainer. Some directors were ‘etouffe’ (smothered) as the French say, they were trying to escape me, they didn’t want to be the director I wanted to have! So, I had to learn to calm down and to say: ’Go your way, it’s also a possibility. I will follow you, and make new experiences.’
Now I am very relaxed. Since 1992 I am not doing one film after the other, and when I did last year ‘Deux’21 with Werner Schroeter, I got the feeling, I would like to start to edit a film on the new AVID-media. Oskar Roehler22 has just offered me to do his film, on AVID, and I see this coming experience as a new challenge. I’m thankful that someone of the new New German Cinema period is asking me to do his film. The new younger directors are much more open, I have the feeling. Oskar Roehler doesn’t have any problem with my proposal to edit the film without him, and then showing him a first draft. When we spoke about the way I would like to work, he said: I always wanted to make a film where I have nothing to do with the editing. I’m still a little bit afraid of the new technical experience, but I hope the fucking AVID machine doesn’t fight against me!
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RC:Are editors born or made? I personally don’t think you can make an editor if it isn’t in you.
JL:I think so too.
RC:You still have to be lucky – to have the opportunity. I think there are a lot of competent editors and not so many who have the opportunity to be brilliant.
JL:Rainer once said to me that there are editors who do good work and some are better. You have to find your own way and make it visible to the director and producers, that they trust you.
RC:The trust is so important that gives you the courage. At least one person has said to me that it’s often the courage NOT to cut.
JL:That is an old wise sentence. Editing is sometimes also not doing a lot of cuts. Editing is to see the whole. I feel myself always like a writer, who sees a theme, who creates sentences and brings a whole story together at the end. With Werner Schroeter it’s very funny. He likes to forget to give the spectator an idea of the subject, the theme of the film. So I usually start the editing by finding a scene for the beginning – for an introduction. And Rainer and I had this situation as well with the beginning of ‘Querelle’. I asked him: ‘How does the film start?‘ He said: ‘You’re right!’ And we put a scene at the beginning, which wasn’t meant for the beginning, like a prologue.
I’m coming from the storyteller-idea background but I also ask, what does the film tell me, when I do documentaries. Like a film I did with Werner ‘À la recherche du Soleil’ about the theatre of Arianne Mnouchkine.23 It was a beautiful and fruitful experience, as I was searching for the story-telling line from the very beginning, during shooting. Werner offered me to be co-director, and this ‘official’ title is matching my co-director/co-script writer idea of an editor very much. When we did a film about the passion in opera music and singers ‘Poussières d’amour’, I found myself again in this position.
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RC:Going back to that night of ‘Despair’.
JL:Isn’t it a beautiful line ‘The Night of Despair’? It could be the beginning of a poem.
RC:I’m sure it could, with despair in every line! From that moment on do you feel you were learning your craft through his films?
JL:Yes.
RC:But were you to any extent stimulated to examine cinema itself in a different way or was it always through the films you did with Fassbinder?
JL:Not only through the films we did together. We saw films together, and his way of seeing taught me to see films from his point of view as well. But I always added my view, and we combined the results of seeing them. He also liked to have a partner with whom he could share experiences, and we learned by seeing films, but never in a way like: I am the master, and you are the student. I have to add: I didn’t have too much time to see films alone as Mr Fassbinder was always making films, so there were no gaps between, but after Rainer died I started to see films he had spoken about, and which I didn’t see until then. I remember when we saw the German premiere of ‘Apocalypse Now!’ or when we saw films in TV from the time we were living together, I always wanted to see them again, because I remember his opinion and my feelings when first seeing them with him. The result is: I don’t know today what I learnt from him and what was my own experience. What I really can say he taught me was structuring my ideas, structuring a film story, combining the result of the ideas of myself and the film-maker’s idea about his story.
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What else can I say about my special way? I think I wouldn’t be able to do a big Hollywood film. I met once Richard Marks,24 when I was in Los Angeles, and he was so sweet and said: Oh, what an honour to meet the editor of ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’. I was honoured, but I thought for a moment he is the ‘bigger’ editor, the more ‘important’ one, as he does films costing millions of dollars.
RC:One of the editors I’ve interviewed talks about a film which was a dreadful experience. He knew from the first rushes that it was going to be awful and he spent nearly eighteen months of his life on that film.
JL:I can say: All of the films I edited I stand behind them. One film I did with a very right wing German director, I would say I did it because I needed this experience – and the money! And I did it well. From a professional point of view I was very proud of the result at the end. The production and the director hired me because my name was giving the project more status. I remember the score was supposed to be by Michael Nyman25 and he came and was clever enough not to do it, so they hired Elmer Bernstein,26 and I was very thankful to meet him. He was very professional and I learned from him another way to use a music score. It reminded me again of Rainer who always asked us to do our profession, and referred to the idea that real artists have discipline, and do their profession with dignity.
An artist uses his craft, otherwise he loses it. Concerning this film I remember the director once said, ‘Don’t forget you do a big budget film and it’s not the normal thing for you anymore – you don’t have your Fassbinder behind you anymore’. I smiled and said: ‘My dear friend, the budget for ‘In a Year with Thirteen Moons’27 was only 600,000DM, but it’s a masterpiece’.
After Fassbinder’s death there were directors in Germany who said to me you’ll never do a film with him again, now you have to learn editing! I was sad about this kind of rudeness, but I always was very, very proud of the gift Rainer drew out of me, which obviously must have been hidden in me. I know today: The luck of having had a wonderful professional and personal experience can be short, but will fulfil your whole life.
RC:What do you think were the things in your background that made you available to be able to make that journey or if someone can’t find a master what qualities do you think are valuable – aside from cinema in a way you talked about loving poetry and literature and so on – you didn’t mention a lot about music.
JL:Oh, of course I have to add it.
RC:But you weren’t a musician.
JL:No, I was a reader – I read, and I discovered music through the films of Rainer and later through Werner, beside my own experiences. When I saw ‘Death in Venice’ of course I started to hear Mahler. Mahler from dawn to night – Mahler, Mahler, Mahler. I love very much Camille Saint-Saens, or Mendlesohn-Bartholdy, all these passionate people. Without loving and knowing something about music you can’t be an editor – you have to have a musical ear.
Another basis of my education was and still is – beside reading – seeing and studying painting. I go a lot to museums. When I am standing in front of a painting or an old print, in front of Turner’s early phase or of a painting of Rembrandt, or George De la Tour, or Caravaggio I am happy. I am studying again and again: How did he create shadows, light and expressions. You can transform these experiences and the inspiration your get out of it. Some painters are very simple, but Da Vinci wasn’t! And I think you have to force yourself to be a great painter, or a great musician, or a great writer, or a good filmmaker or a good editor; by forcing yourself to go further on in your experiences of learning.
I have the great honour to be a friend of Susan Sontag as I know her since a long time, but never dared to talk to her directly, we just met recently in New York, and suddenly there was no ‘way out’, and I start now to learn from her. She adores Fassbinder films, she sees them again and again, and she knows a lot of other European films, she loves music, editors, film-makers, cameramen, painters and photographers. She writes poetry, she writes brilliant novels and essays. She knows such a lot of things and her spectrum of crafts is immensely wide. You see, this is, what I want to express: The craft of an editor is also a part of a wide spectrum. You can open more and more your spectrum, and learn more and more, and be a master in different aspects.
My only real problem is: I am sometimes too passionate and the films and their stories sometimes ‘eat me up’. So I have to calm down after I finish a film, and try to do just normal things. And in these phases I rest and relax with literature, and studying paintings, I listen to music and I see new films or films again, and I go to theatre. Then I start again to create something new. This is a very healthy circle.
Notes
1. Cinema Paradiso – Guiseppi Tornatore, with Philippe Noiret, 1989.
2. Death in Venice – Luchino Visconti, with Dirk Bogarde, 1970.
3. Fedora (1978) – Billy Wilder, Viennese born director who made ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in 1950.
4. The Serpent’s Egg – Ingmar Bergman, 1977.
5. Ila von Hasperg – Editor, also actress.
6. Michael Fengler – Born 1940, writer, producer, director.
7. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82) – One of the main motors behind the resurgence of German cinema in the 1970s. Prolific and fascinating director of disturbing and thought provoking films.
8. Ali, Fear Eats the Soul – Fassbinder, 1973.
9. Chinese Roulette – Fassbinder, 1976.
10. Michael Ballhaus – Born 1935, multi-award winning cinematographer who shot many of Fassbinder’s films and has established an exclusive working relationship with Martin Scorsese in recent years.
11. The Stationmaster’s Wife (Bolwieser) Fassbinder, 1976.
12. Despair – Fassbinder, 1977.
13. Reginald Beck – Born 1902. Began his career as an editor in the 1940s, utting ‘Henry V’ (1944) for Laurence Olivier. Became Joseph Losey’s editor in the 60s and worked with him almost exclusively until the director’s death.
14. The Servant – Losey, with Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles, 1963.
15. The Damned – Visconti, edited by Ruggero Mastroianni, 1969.
16. Querelle – Fassbinder, 1982.
17. Werner Schroeter – Born 1945, director, notably ‘Malina’ (1991), with Isabelle Huppert.
18. The King of Roses (Der Rosenkonig), (1986), Schroeter.
19. Life, Love & Celluloid – Juliane Lorenz – a very personal tribute to the spirit of Fassbinder, 1998.
20. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979–80) – Fassbinder’s epic thirteen part series.
21. Deux – Schroeter, 2002.
22. Oskar Roehler – Born 1959, writer, director.
23. Arianne Mnouchkine – Born 1938, stage director and proponent of collaborative theatre – founded Theatre du Soleil in 1963.
24. Richard Marks – Born 1943, New York, editor who was one of those lucky enough to be a trainee with Dede Allen. First credit as editor was ‘Little Big Man’ (1970), Arthur Penn.
25. Michael Nyman – Born 1944, pianist, composer, notably scores for the films of Peter Greenaway.
26. Elmer Bernstein – Born 1922, protégé of Aaron Copland. Prolific composer of film scores over 250 to date.
27. In a Year with Thirteen Moons – Fassbinder, 1978.