Jesus Der Film

The 80’s were even called the “Super-80’s” because there was a big movement of young artists who were (discovering and) seizing the Super-8 as their medium of choice.There were not only visual artists, but also musicians and performers, and I would say more, there was a political movement that had seized this medium as their own way of documenting their struggles for the occupation of disused buildings or their actions against Atomkraft (the equivalent of Areva in France) in an independent way.

This wave of the “Super-80’s” was international: the effervescence was common in other metropolises, like London, Paris, or New York. From the mid-1980s onwards, these different circles met through Super 8 film festivals or through program tours (the new term for which would probably be “networking”). Even in East Berlin there were a few people working with Super 8, but obviously under different conditions: for example, there was no sound film. Super 8 was considered an amateur format (as in the West), which had the advantage, in the East, of no state control over it.

When I arrived in this microcosm that is West Berlin, I was very intrigued by the strangeness of this city cut in two, which led me to travel a lot to East Berlin where I made many friends. I also met some filmmakers there, to whom I proposed to participate in the Jesus Der Film project.

During the 1980s, in the midst of post-modernism, not only was authority deconstructed, but the very notion of authorship. When I arrived in Berlin in 1982, I worked with friends in a collective, the Oyko-Group. In this group, we tried various methods of collective creation. My goal was to make a film that was both the work of a number of filmmakers (all of whom were present with their own subjectivity and sometimes different ideas) and a feature-length narrative film with a single story line. My Christian upbringing of course led me to Jesus, “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (to use the title of another movie about Jesus).

The specificity of this story was that it was constructed in episodes, which made it perfect material for a collective film. When I started talking about it to my future collaborators I was very pleasantly surprised by the very positive reactions of these young secular artists.

I think that this idea brought about other things, like the revolt against authority and a deep desire for total creative freedom. The feeling at the time was “anything goes [Anything Goes].

I was quite familiar with the big Super 8 scene, whether it was at festivals or just in Berlin. In fact, I didn’t ask so many filmmakers, I only asked friends who were a bit “special”: those who had the same humorous spirit, and those who appreciated the dirtiness of Super 8. I even asked non-filmmakers, like critics or editors, because I appreciated their interest in underground culture. I think it was quite important for the success of the project that one person oversee the whole thing. And the participating filmmakers accepted that as a way to get the film done. As a result, there was not much discussion between the filmmakers, especially because the surrealist invention of automatic writing was an integral part of the project: no one knew about the other episodes made, except for the few links between them, which were indicated by myself.

The shooting took place all over Germany: Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, other cities and especially Berlin (East and West). The first shots were taken in the winter of 1984, and the last ones were done two weeks before the premiere of the film at the Berlinale in February 1986. In 2014 a book on the genesis of Jesus Der Film1was published, in which we reproduced the diary kept during the whole project: it can be noted that I spent, during the year and a half that the project took, almost every second of my days preparing, shooting, editing and finishing the film.

The film had no budget; I smuggled inexpensive Super 8 cartridges from East Berlin to distribute them to the various filmmakers. Some reels were developed by hand in my kitchen. At the end of the project I was a really poor filmmaker. When the film was selected at the Berlinale, a public institution gave us some money to print a copy (about 2400€), which allowed me to organize a tour of the film in about 40 German cities. After this tour I was still not rich, but at least I was debt free.

After the Berlinale and during the film’s tour there were various reactions: a Catholic magazine referred to my film as “made by the devil”, while other newspapers presented the film as “revolutionary”. You could say that the film was controversial to say the least.

There is no homogeneous reaction from religious audiences - Christians these days have learned from the debates about religious cartoons, especially in relation to Islam and the Islamic State. It would seem that in our Western culture today, freedom of expression has a higher value than religious faith and feeling.

I make quite varied films; each film must be different from the previous ones. In retrospect, I notice that depending on the period, I was interested in certain themes. My first films were linked to my family and German heritage; I could for example make a film about the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Jesus Der Film belongs to that theme. Then I made some films about homosexuality, for example about AIDS, starting around 1989 with a film cycle called Death Dances, and other films with comic “gay content”. At the beginning of this millennium, and for more than ten years, I traveled a lot to Asia where I made a lot of installations and films related to the life and culture of this continent. I am always interested in technological innovations (I have made “interactive” films on the internet, for example).

Overall, I would say that my films are very personal since they are very clearly made by an identifiable human being, and all my films try to reach and transgress boundaries, whether they are technical or psychic.