When I reflect on the films of Christian Petzold, a host of indelible images return to me. The end of Phoenix (2014), for instance, when Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld) finally catches a glimpse of the serial number on Nelly’s arm (Nina Hoss), and cannot bear to bring himself to face her: the weight of his betrayal and deception, both within and beyond the film, crashing down on him. Or, in Jerichow (2008), when clandestine lovers Laura (Hoss) and Thomas (Benno Fürmann) are forced to embrace by a rose bush in order to obscure their faces from a group of school children walking past, and the gentle breeze that caresses them. In Afire (2023), which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival—where Petzold also won Best Director in 2012 for Barbara—it is the shot of the corpses of gay lovers, who’ve died in a forest fire, wrapped in golden emergency blankets. These images return to me in the realm of dreams, they feel plucked from reality, are portals to the souls of their characters, evoked through sight and sound alone. 

Since the turn of the century, Petzold has cemented his position as a singular, key voice in world cinema. Every film by Petzold is an event to be attended to, even if sung in a minor key, for they drip with their distilled intentions and their classic executions. Across 11 German-language features, each of which are in dialogue with each other, he has established a body of work that is, by turns, reliable, sensual, elegant, and enchanting. The living and the dead; the past and the future; the real and the double; these are the inextricable preoccupations he has been deepening with each of his gem-like constructions, conjuring up cinema magic en route to instances of revelation. In recent years, his attention has turned to the cares and conditions of the contemporary world, from the importance of myths and historical foundations in Undine (2020) to the isolating effects of climate catastrophe and pandemics in Afire. His newest film Miroirs No. 3 is his most subtle and unassumingly devastating. It tells the story Laura (Paula Beer), a music student on the verge of a nervous breakdown who loses her boyfriend in a car accident and then immediately falls into the orbit of a broken family headed by Betty (Barbara Auer). Over a certain period of time, as each member of the family is touched by Laura’s mollifying presence, the entanglement grows complicated, and the enigmatic absence at the centre begins to glow. 

On a balmy afternoon during the Toronto International Film Festival, where Miroirs had its North American premiere, I met with Petzold at a French-inspired restaurant located inside Le Germain Hotel. When I entered the room he placed his spectacles back in their case and, as we waited for the waitress to bring cream for his espresso, I pulled out my copy of filmmaker Robert Bresson’s book Notes on a Cinematograph from my backpack and handed it to him. Awe-struck, he leafed through it, and from behind his glossy, green eyes I could see the gears of a fierce cinephile begin to turn. As much as he is a filmmaker, Petzold is, first and foremost, a student of cinema, his mind a generous archive of indelible images. He returned the book to me and I placed it on the table so that, over the next hour, it remained there between us, an emblem and an anchor. He started to speak about Bresson before I realized the conversation was already under way. When I asked if I could start recording, he playfully pouted and his eyebrows jerked up as if to say: if you so wish.

 

 

 

The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema.

 

 

 

You were saying: a flight over Tokyo? 

Bresson saw this film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, in a French cinema, at the beginning of the 50s I think. It’s footage of a flight over Tokyo by an American interceptor during the war. He said: “Nothing happened. In reality, everything happened.” You know, I’m a Protestant and Robert Bresson is Catholic and it’s very interesting. The Protestants, we have music, we have Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Catholics, they have pictures and colours. For me it’s Bresson who makes Catholic subjects and themes like a Protestant, because they’re clean and clear.

On the other hand, I was in church when I was a very young boy because my parents believed in God until my father lost his job at the beginning of the 70s. He was unemployed and lost everything about his identity, lost his trust in religion as well. But until he lost everything I had to go to church two times a week. I hated church. I hated it completely. But there is one moment in church I loved. It’s at the end of the session when the doors open. You’re sitting and behind you the doors open to the world and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is there. You stand up, turn around and you go back into the world with the music, with something you have seen. This, for me, is cinema. It’s the same moment. 

Therefore, I understand what happens in David Chase’s The Sopranos because he takes the music out of the score. He leaves the songs for the final credits. So in The Sopranos I have the same feeling as in the Protestant church. At the end, the doors open. The music is coming. You have to go back to your life. But something stays inside of you. This was something. 

For me Bresson is doing the same. Mouchette is my favorite film by him. When Mouchette commits suicide the second time, when she’s rolling down into the water, the second time the music starts, it’s Monteverdi. It is as if the Catholic director uses the Protestant view of the world and souls, and this I like very much.

After watching Miroirs No. 3, I actually thought of Mouchette. In her introduction to the New York Review of Books re-issue of George Beranos’ Mouchette, the late poet Fanny Howe writes that “suicide, like little else, makes people aware of chance…Suicide is detachment beyond recognition…Suicide is the answer to one question…Suicide is a lonely surge of unhope.” When I looked back on your recent films, I noticed how often suicide appears as a way for the secondary characters to add pressure to the narrative: in Phoenix, the sister, Lena (Nina Kunzendorf) who has survived the loss of her entire bloodline and faced the horrors of the aftereffects war, suddenly erases herself; in Transit, it is the icy, privileged character played by Barbara Auer, who suddenly slips out of view. In Miroirs, this element is placed into the narrative in a different way. The film opens with the character of Laura—played by Paula Beer, in your fourth consecutive collaboration together—standing on a bridge, contemplating, about what we don’t know, before a man in all black paddles across. It brought to mind Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer as well, meaning that it reads as suicidal ideation. And later, too, we learn about what exactly happened to Yelena, whose absence allows Laura’s presence to exist. Why suicide? 

It’s all in the question. For me, I saw Mouchette for the first time in my life I was 17, 18, and I later read a critic who said that the suicide of Mouchette says the whole world is unjust. The whole world is not right. This suicide says you are all bad, you are mean. I have the feeling that in my movies the suicides are without any morality. The people are just vanishing. This is, I think, because the world doesn’t notice them. So this has something to do with modern societies. Students are on a bridge near water, they see a symbol of the boat with the guy who brings you over the sticks. But he is a sportsman. For her, it’s a guy. 

It is death, I thought, a figure of death, like in a tarot card. 

The Germans, they have images from the 18th and 19th century from their painters. Arnold Berklin was a very famous German painter, he’s a painter of the Romantic period. The German Romantics have something to do with it. We have a modern world which is coming, then industrialization starts, capitalism starts and the German intellectuals and artists want to re-enchant the world. This was something. So Novalis and Frederich Hölderlin, they’re talking about Greece, about the wind, about the flowers and Arnold Berklin made a painting called The Island of Death. There’s an island like a big stone, like a rocket, and there’s the sea and a boat, and on the boat is a white angel with a stick, a paddle. The guy who died is sitting there in the boat. It’s a moment when you’re coming from living to death. It brings you over the sticks. This is a very, very popular painting. When I was a child, I was afraid of this picture. Because this island is like the place you're coming through when you are born, there are two thighs of a woman. In the middle, the vagina, but in the middle is the death in this picture. You’re going back into the...like in the album by Nirvana…you’re going back…

In Utero. 

It’s a little bit like this. It’s in utero. It is as if the romantics want to go back into the mother’s body because the world is too complicated and when people…it’s over-interpreted now. 

No, no, no. 

But I think like this. I’ve never told the actors about this. I don’t want to make them crazy. They come from all over the world and you can’t find a way. You’re reading ten books at the same time, they’re lying on your bed, you have a new idea and then the next idea. It’s the idea that when you have problems and these problems are complex then this romantic picture says to you: “Death is the answer. Go back into the utero of your mother. Then you’ll have the possibility of a restart.” It’s fascistic. It’s a fascistic vision because the fascists, they don’t want to work with the complexity of our world. They want to be like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. There must be a big frame to wash all this shit away and I want to have a clear world. 

So this young woman is standing there under a highway in a very, very ugly place. But the reminiscence of the German romantic is there. I think at this moment, when you make a film, you have to think about all these meanings behind it. You have to think about them, but then when you start shooting you have to also forget them directly. But what was interesting there, you can see it also in the movie, is that when we changed the camera position to the other side of the sticks of the river, where you see the guy with a pedal, and Paula Beer is standing there and he’s passing her you can see, in the back, there’s graffiti there, very old graffiti. 

It says “Beer.” 

“Beer” and “Undine.” And Paula said to me afterwards, “What’s this? Did you do this?” I said, “No, I’m innocent.” It’s very old. It has nothing to do with Paula Beer. It has something to do with the fact that during the world championship of soccer there were poor English hooligans who had lived under the bridge for the two weeks of football and they had beer, and because they were swimming in this ugly water they were thinking about girls and had written down “Undine.” But it was a coincidence. Circling back to the in utero part, when she sees the mother, it’s almost this…when they were driving by, it’s almost this…an escape. She wants to be outside.

 

 

 

It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. 

 

 

 

When she's in the back of the car with her friends, it reminded me of the end of Barbara Loden’s Wanda, which you have previously talked about as a major influence. I want to read you this passage from Nathalie Léger’s Suite For Barbara Loden, which interprets the end of Wanda: “We don’t know what she will lose, or what she is going to find. She is coming back to herself. Perhaps she would prefer to disappear into a life of solitude—exhausting, but her own. At this point Barbara decides to let Wanda take control of her life.” Despite the fact that critics have related the character of Laura in Miroirs No. 3 to the protagonist of films like Yella and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, I saw her as a shadow of Wanda, one who doesn’t belong, isolating her from whatever nucleus she finds herself in, as though she were the ghost of a normal, so-called well-adjusted person. At the start of your film, there is this car accident—you’ve said before that accidents need to happen in cars in order for the narrative to take place—but it is the same way the murdered man in the bar in Wanda caused the plot to swerve. The thing about all of your films is they swerve away from the starting point but then they always swerve back, but with its essence forever altered. 

She’s from method acting, Barbara Loden, but she’s playing the opposite of it. There’s no energy in her. She’s slow and in the final scene when the guy, the bank robber, is dead and she’s sitting there with strange people, she’s looking in the direction of the camera. This is something which impressed me totally. Like with the death of Mouchette. These are things which are deep in my mind when I’m making movies. 

But in this moment, when the car is passing the mother the first time, she is like Wanda: you don’t know where she can go, where she can live, she’s like a leaf on the surface of a river, and in this moment when someone is staring at her I wanted to create the impression as if the mother is taking her. It’s not her who has made the decision to go to this place. It’s the mother who says, “Come to me.” Like a spider, for a moment. “You could be the one.” And she knows: “Oh, this could be a possibility to find an identity. It’s a wrong identity, but it’s mine. To be the wrong daughter.” It’s something. The wrong daughter is better than nothing. It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. 

When the tsunami was in Indonesia and Thailand there were many, many people who vanished. They never found the bodies. So many people who everybody thought was dead tried to find a new biography. They went to another country, to have a new life. Then there was research five years ago that found ten people who everybody thought was dead. Now they lived in another country with another identity but they had recreated and copied their life from before: they had two kids and a woman again, they couldn’t get out of this. But the dream, the desire of people to have new identities, I think, it’s great for Laura to have this wrong identity. The first morning, when she’s coming out of the house and the mother is painting the fence, she says to her: “Yelena.” 

She knows about it, from the very beginning, even if she acts like she didn’t at the end. 

She knows, but she never asks. The mother never asks her, “Where are you coming from? What are you studying? What is your family name? How old are you?” She says, “Here are your clothes. Here is something to eat. Here is the bed. Here is my warm embrace. Here is a wrong name.” “So it fits,” she says. It fits. So it’s something perverted. I like people who say it’s a wrong identity but it’s mine and I’m working with this. I can be deliberate and myself and I can find relief and comfort with wrong things and this thing has something to do with cinema, where everybody’s playing actors, playing the movies, playing with our dreams. It is interesting to me that in 1895 the Lumière brothers made the first movie ever, Workers Leaving the Factory, at the same moment that Sigmund Freud discovered dream work. It’s the same moment in history: dream work and cinema have something to do with each other. 

The content of your films are always informed by outside forces—for instance the suicide of the daughter that happens before the time of the film—but here you also allow all of the events to happen off-screen: the car accident, the dishwasher malfunctioning, the son recording Laura in the public park. I’ve read that you cut out a few scenes from the start of the film; but even in the writing process, how do you go about figuring out what can be removed and what must stay? How do you measure this and create the balance with the ellipses?

It’s something I learned with Harun Farocki in a seminar in 1989, my first year at the German Film Academy in Berlin. We saw the movie The Soft Skin by François Truffaut. In this movie, there is a sequence where the sexual desire of the man begins. He’s a professor of literature and he’s on a plane working like everybody nowadays, with a notebook, but then there is a stewardess. 

Played by Françoise Dorléac. 

Yes, and she’s working there and the flight is going to Lisbon. The captain says: “Now it’s time for landing.” It’s always the same, the stewardesses go to their part of the plane and close the curtains. So she’s closing the curtains and you can see, because there is a gap between the curtain and the floor, you can see how she’s changing her shoes. For a long moment you see her naked feet and the professor is watching, looking at the naked feet and falling into his sexual desire because of a partial object, not because of the stewardess, but because of the naked feet. But it doesn’t work in the movie really, and we asked ourselves why it doesn’t work. 

We read an interview with Truffaut, who said: “I really made a mistake with this scene.” His mistake was that he showed the naked feet for one minute then showed the literature professor for 10 seconds. It must be the other way around. The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema.

I learned this in 1989, a very long time ago. It has something to do with your question. When you see the car passing and you see the woman who’s watching the car and the car is going away then you have to stay on her face and hear the car crash. I’m not interested in this fucking car crash. It’s better if you hear something and you see the face of a woman and you are with her and you understand everything but you don't know it 100% and then she’s running and you see her reaction before you see the object, the car. 

These are things I learned from cinema. When you see a bad movie, they like the car crash, they think this is something. This is, in Marxist terms. This is, in Germany, called the money shot. But it has nothing to do with cinema, the money shot. I like when you see Godzilla destroy these houses in the old movies of 1954, because there’s nobody living there, it’s all very cheap. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Miroirs, the money shot occurs sonically. In the days leading up to watching the film, I played Maurice Ravel’s “Miroirs No. 3” on loop, because I wasn’t familiar with it, and I was on the look out for it. The first time we hear a snippet of it is in the car with the father; the second in the house with the mother; and the third is with the son in the car. The fact that the final scene in the film is a culmination of these brief moments, in which the song acts as a sort of homage, an act of redemption, deeply moved me. We don’t see their reaction to it—how cheap would that be—but the way that the music has changed the air in the room. Like how you said, the Bach music at the end of church, it feels like the doors are opening in the film. For some people, the film might not make sense if you're not familiar with the music, but you build up to this moment. The money shot is a sound. 

You’re totally right. That’s what moved me. This music by Maurice Ravel. The father has the music, the son has the music, and the mother has the music, and at the end my idea was that when she’s playing it, she’s playing it for herself and also for this family. And so, the decision, that when the editor goes back into the house, when they’re preparing eggs and coffee, the final scene, the music is there too. She’s making the music for this family so this family can live on. They’re hurt, they’re wounded, they have scars, but they can live on now. This is a comfort for them. The music says goodbye to them. And so, I can live on my own now, too. I can play my music and it’s also music for you. We can separate in a good way. I could live as a daughter. 

Okay, I must say it like this: the real daughter, Yelena, committed suicide because the mother is too strong. That was the idea. You can feel it. She’s always there at the bed, always staring.

She’s so needy. She’s always asking Laura to come back.

“I need you, I need you.” I showed Barbara Auer the movie Rebecca by Hitchcock because Rebecca was the dead wife, and when John Fontaine is coming to the castle, there is the governess and you never see her moving, she’s always there. When Paula Beer, on the first morning, makes a ding, ding, ding sound she’s like the governess from Rebecca, Barbara Aucher is there. So with the music at the end of the movie, Paula Beer’s Laura can live this life, this independent life the other daughter didn’t reach, who found in her suicide an exit door, but she can live on. This was the idea. The mother and the whole family understand this for the first time. This is just made by music. Therefore, you’re totally right to say this is also a money shot. The money shot, yes. It’s a money shot.

I wanted to ask you about your approach to including “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) in your films. In this film, there is the scene when Betty introduces the men to Laura, but they assume that she has lost it and is speaking of a ghost, so that when Laura does appear, having made dumplings, they are shocked to see her. In a sense she is presented to them as a ghost—which is a representation of a living thing. It also brings up the idea of “the return of the repressed” that marked Phoenix, and it is also in relation with Transit’s conceit of taking over the identity of another man.

So when father and son arrive with their American car, with this green car, what you see is them through the window of the kitchen.

Which you also do at the beginning of Afire, with a shot of Paula Beer on the bicycle the first morning, where she goes through the back of the forest.

But in Afire you see the guy who is watching: in this movie, you don’t know who’s watching. This was the idea. It sounds very intellectual, but it’s like this. For me the whole scene is about these two guys who are invited to the house of a psycho woman, who always thinks: “My daughter is coming tonight.” It’s like the Sigmund Freud story: “I know my daughter’s dead, but she’s coming in five minutes.” This is a dramatic situation. And so, these two guys, they’re coming to this place and they think, “Oh, it’s a dinner like we have seen and we have had in the last two years three or four times, and that means that we have to bring her back into the mental hospital.” Like this. And the first thing you see is their arrival from the point of view of someone. If I make a second shot of Laura, who is watching them coming, it doesn’t work anymore because I wanted to make her a phantom, a ghost. Because I don’t show her, I just show a view. And so I’m on the side of father and son and I’m on their side of the fear when they hear a noise from the kitchen. There’s a plate, there’s a noise from the kitchen and this noise is made from someone whose view we have seen, but who doesn’t have a body.

 

 

 

Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. [...] That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. 

 

 

 

You are a filmmaker who is steeped in literary theory, and have spoken about how you like to liberally bring in constellations of inter-text into your work. Your films have led me to discovering W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Ella Fitzgerald’s “Speak Low,” the novels of Anna Seghers and the short stories of Ingeborg Bachman. This film features a brief anecdote from Tom Sawyer. In the past, you’ve also said that your films are the result of trying to remember the plot of a film you’ve seen, but remembering it like a faint dream. In the past you’ve misremembered with The Postman Always Rings Twice, Carnival of Souls, Eyes Without A Face. When I heard about this film, I thought of Pasolini’s Teorema. In an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment, you mentioned Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room. What are you productively forgetting, or subconsciously referencing here? 

Nanni Moretti was for the actors. I wanted to show them a movie where they can see how death would destroy a whole family and how they can find comfort with someone from the outside. But it has nothing to do with my movie. There’s no suicide and no guiltiness there. 

For me, Teorema was more interesting, and also a movie by Jean Renoir called Boudu Saved from Drowning. It’s about a homeless guy coming into a rich family and everything changes. The girl finds her sexuality, the boy gets into anarchy. There was a remake made with Richard Dreyfus called Down and Out In Beverly Hills. So, for me, it was like someone is coming from the outside into a traumatic structure and this arrival is something like an angel or something like that. And so, the structures are open and can change. 

But on the other hand, because it’s a mirror, I want to show both sides of the mirror. We have the mirror of death on the one side, and the living on the other side. We have the side of death is Yelena and her family, and on the side of living is Laura. Both sides are coming together. This was the mirror theme. Everything is in this movie, I see some people in it I know very well. Everything in this movie is based on two things: the mirror, the picture, the reflection. We have the wind. The wind is sometimes a symbol for ruins. The wind is going through open windows and destroyed doors through a house. Sometimes the wind is refreshing when you open a window. So, you have a house, as if this house of death, like the island of death, the house of death. And on the other side, Laura is bringing a fresh wind into the house and they are rebuilding something. Then you have things that are totally destroyed and they start to repair them. So, their behaviour starts to be like a dance. 

The moment when the two young actors are sitting there with a bottle of beer hearing this Frankie Valli song, I said to them, “OK, there is no dialogue for you. You’re just drinking beer and hearing a song and there is no meaning, nothing, just five minutes for yourself.” This is very hard for actors. Because in this movie, where everything is so built, in this moment, to sit there without any text is very hard. I just knew that after one minute they would start laughing because they’ll feel ashamed to be there by themselves without a character to play. I just wanted this moment because this moment means there is a new breath, the new wind inside. This is freedom. Now they are young. Everything, the whole luggage and baggage is gone for a moment and they can feel what could be. So it was like this. 

The more that I think about your films the more that I realize that, despite the loss that marks them, you are always arguing for the fact that people happen to come into our lives and change them for the good, that it is only through other people that we might find meaning and return to who we were. Unlike your other films, where the politics might be more explicit, the four-part dynamic in this film acts as a metaphor of the desire for re-unification after a central trauma has occurred. Your films have the power to, and are designed to, perhaps, fall to the other side and devastate us, but they don’t. You never let it. In our oppressed times, why do you choose hope?

I think hope is a good word for this because we started with the Protestants and the Catholics. Hope is very deep inside of this. But I think at the end of Wanda, or the end of The Searchers, or a movie like Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, the hope and the relief I feel as part of the audience is not something to do with something that happened on the screen. It’s something to do with having the feeling that now the characters don’t need me anymore. They are for themselves. Charlie Chaplin goes away and the iris is showing him out. In Wanda, it’s a freeze frame. So now it’s hers, and now it’s ours. So we have to go back to our life and they go on in theirs. For me, this is relief. 

It’s a little bit like this crime novel by John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, the first sentence is something like: “What we have to do is to help the people who love us to get independent.” It’s something to do with parents and kids and love affairs. We must help them. Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. We must help the audience to get independent. That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. I love the final scenes. 

I remember when we made Phoenix, the final scene was written by me but the last camera movement was improved at the end. We made this movie chronologically. It was the last day of shooting and the director of photography, Hans Fromm, wanted to follow Nina Hoss when she left the room and went outside. But at this moment I said, “Oh God, we are Germans. We can’t follow. We have to stay. And our work for the future is to stay and to repair and not go to Palestine as if we are guilty. We are the killers. Or sons of killers. And we have to stay.” But Fromm said: “I want to follow her.” Everybody wants to follow her. But we have to stay. This is our position of morality. Therefore the final scene is much better. She’s going out of focus into the light. It’s hers. It’s for her to have.

What are you working on next?

I’m making the fourth movie with the same actors from this series of crime stories for TV. I will make two movies for cinema in two years. One is based on the Bertolt Brecht movie from 1932, Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World? and now in the same era in Berlin. It’s also a fight against capitalism for a small group of people. They work with curses. Very hard curses. I have to write the last sequences and can do it in one and a half years. Then I will make a movie about a group of a theater which will be erased by the government and their opening night and the fight against it. I want to do anti-capitalistic movies. I have all the actors and everything is there. I have to work in the next five years. I want to make a movie with Nina Hoss and Paula Beer together in the next three or four years too. I don’t want to go to festivals anymore. I want to stay home, read and meet the people I want to work with. The company, the distributors, they send me everywhere. It’s stolen time. I lay in the hotel room, like a serial killer, waiting for the call. For me, it’s like this.