Ostend, 3 PM

In “Ostende 3 Uhr nachmittags” (Ostend 3 p.m.), Quinka Stoehr intertwines Klaus Wildenhahn's life story with his cinematic work. Observations of his everyday life and puzzle pieces of his memories are woven together with excerpts from his films, his texts on documentary film, and personal poems and prose recited by himself.
In fragmentary memories, Wildenhahn recounts his winding path to filmmaking: first, he dropped out of college, then worked as a nurse in London. In 1959, he applied to work in television with two poems and was accepted. His encounter with American documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock in the 1960s changed his life. Klaus Wildenhahn found his calling: making documentaries using the “uncontrolled” or “direct cinema” method.
Finally, the personal portrait takes us to a place where many things began for Klaus Wildenhahn: Ostend, his retirement home. During World War I, his mother worked here as a military hospital nurse for the German occupation forces. She had enlisted at the front as a patriot and returned from the war as a pacifist. According to Wildenhahn, his mother's experiences shaped his life.
In the film, the shooting process is revealed as a dialogue between the author and Klaus Wildenhahn: Klaus Wildenhahn repeatedly involves the camera and gives directing instructions. Nevertheless, Quinka Stoehr makes her own film. Thus, Klaus Wildenhahn is not, as he initially postulated, a marginal figure in his own portrait, but the main character: he explains himself and his work, revealing an important piece of film and television history embedded in the context of his time. The result is a multi-layered and touching snapshot of a man who had a lasting influence on documentary film in Germany and who, as he himself says, is “intangible” and for the most part already “gone.” His films remain—they were a milestone in the history of German documentary film.

epd medien online, July 19, 2010 No 47

Too close to reality
Portraits of artists always look similar on German television, whether it's "My Life" or "Germany's Artists." The camera accompanies the protagonists for a few days. There is a bit of home story, a look at the photo album, scenes of public activity, some friends and companions who provide information. Quinka F. Stoehr's film about the documentary director
Klaus Wildenhahn has something of all this. The view into the kitchen, the black Bakelite telephone with a dial and the mechanical typewriter. The encounter with a school friend, the memory of his mother. And yet "Ostend, 3 PM" is different - more open, more questioning, with room for one's own thoughts. Actually, that goes without saying. A film about a documentary filmmaker who has understood reality as something to be conquered, always convinced of the fragility of cinematic observation, oriented towards the open-endedness of the cinematic process, a master of casual observation: no formatted cover fits on it. This already begins with the opening. Klaus Wildenhahn immediately takes his turn to introduce himself. With a wink at the camera
he offers the camera the arrangements he has already selected and puts himself into perspective. After all, he is only the secondary matter of the film, not really tangible, in fact, people themselves are not really tangible. Cinema as an experiment. " Everything is theater," he ironizes himself, who has always felt more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it.
In between, Wildenhahn will repeatedly enter into dialogue with the camera and the director, playing a light, confident game, but one that deals with serious matters concerning filmmaking.
Documentary film, he says, is something "that is beyond your control." The control over the people who work in television is also at the same time the control over what happens to the audience. "Uncontrolled cinema," the "direct cinema" he introduced in Germany, could "make the viewer form their own opinion." The film should not be predetermined by its format.
Wildenhahn himself has survived a skin cancer, sometimes wears bandages. The rough traces of the transplantation of the scalp are clearly visible. He talks about it quietly. Then he goes to the barber and has the little bit of hair on this battered head sheared off, at a barber in Ostend. The scene could be from one of Wildenhahn's films.
The author largely leaves the pace of the film to her protagonist; she cleverly assembles subjective elements with film clips, speaks in passages from theoretical texts by Wildenhahn, and does not force the protagonist and his story into a straight line.
"Ostend, 3 PM," the title also already announces such an uncontrolled moment, of chance, of the moment, of the eloquent moment. In the Belgian coastal town with its beautiful cafés, Klaus Wildenhahn has a second apartment with his wife, overlooking the sea. Ostend also gives depth to the biographical view. In Ostend, Wildenhahn's mother was a nurse during World War I and when she returned from the war she was a pacifist. She passed on that attitude to her son. You can see once again in the clips how he looks at the old photos, what they say, but also what they conceal.
Two key scenes. One is a letter to the British documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, whom he considers his teacher and role model. He had, Wildenhahn writes in it, probably never told him that he, Leacock, had saved his life "and freed him from a certain German, petty and pedantic way of looking at things." He was a bit awkward, he writes further, to say such a thing directly to someone. Hence the letter. Of course, he never sent it. So it is now preserved in this film, as a gift for film archivists. Then there is the documentary five-part film "Emden Goes to the USA" from 1975/76, a study from the early days of globalization. The VW plant in Emden is threatened with closure, fears for jobs are rife. The industrial workers in the poor rural region of East Frisia had just become industrial workers; Wildenhahn also tells this social history.

Union officials, store representatives, works councils have their say. "There can be no question," Wildenhahn wrote, "that documentary film must be a platform for those who otherwise don't get a chance to speak, and in a language that is otherwise not heard in the medium." The film caused a great controversy at the time - another piece of the history of the TV program. There were protests, including from the VW workers, which Wildenhahn and his camerawoman Gisela Tuchtenhagen took on with great sympathy. NDR even scheduled a panel discussion in which the authors had to justify their film. The NDR program director distanced himself from Wildenhahn's work, and when the film was awarded the Grimme Prize, the WDR program director also let it be known that he would not have awarded this prize (see editorial in this issue). Incidentally, the filmmaker was unable to find a recording of this discussion in the NDR archives; but one of those involved recorded the broadcast and kept it.
After the controversy over "Emden Goes to USA", Wildenhahn's gradual relegation to third programs began. In the meantime, the films have long since disappeared from the Third Programs as well. When Pina Bausch died, no one thought of showing Wildenhahn's beautiful film about the choreographer. And on Wildenhahn's 80th birthday, NDR could only muster up the courage to show "Emden Goes to the USA" once again, but only the fifth part and of course after midnight. The film was produced by ZDF, not NDR, where Wildenhahn was a full-time editor for 32 years. Today, Wildenhahn says, the method of "direct cinema" is treated "like a dismissed fashion." In times of formatted glossy documentaries and super-sharp image surfaces, Wildenhahn's films are apparently too dirty, too messy, too prone to contradiction - too close to reality.
*Fritz Wolf