A Different Kind of Love Story: An Interview with Dustin Guy Defa Brigitta Wagner May 2023 Interviews Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a prolific German screenwriter from the former East, once told me that cinematic realism was to him like the view out the kitchen window of one’s childhood home. What struck me at the time w...
The Creative Leap to Fluid Consciousness: An Encounter with Ashley McKenzie Brigitta Wagner May 2022 Interviews In Corona’s third winter, it was hard to care about cinema as one should. The kind of cinema that requires one’s physical presence in theatres and at festivals. Gathering indoors with strangers has become a cha...
Women’s Cinematic Heights in Times of Covid: An Interview with Eliza Hittman Brigitta Wagner April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe A million years ago, or what feels about that long, Berlin got away with one of the last major film festivals before Covid-19 halted not just life as we know it, but also the film industry’s long-established pr...
Recovering the Phantom Limb: An Interview with Jennifer Reeder Brigitta Wagner March 2019 Interviews 2019 was the year that the Berlin International Film Festival wanted us all to know that it takes gender parity seriously. Not only did the festival expand, in its 69th edition, the gender statistics it keeps o...
Sustaining a Cinema of Modest Means: An Interview with Ted Fendt, Ricky D’Ambrose and Graham Swon Brigitta Wagner March 2018 Feature Articles Despite the controversy surrounding Dieter Kosslick’s imminent departure after a long tenure as director of the Berlin International Film Festival and German filmmakers’ open letter last November calling for mo...
Intuition and the Search for Deep Emotion: An Interview with Nana & Simon Brigitta Wagner March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews In order to understand what the collaborative filmmaking couple Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groβ, known simply as Nana & Simon, do so beautifully in their new feature, Chemi Bedinieri Ojakhi (My Happy Fami...
A Shared Space at Eye Level: An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Philip Scheffner Brigitta Wagner March 2016 Feature Articles There is something prescient about the films of Philip Scheffner. While news teams chase down the stories of the moment and documentary opportunists vie to be the first at the hot-topic buffet, Scheffner is the...
The Art of Citational Cinema: An Interview with Alex Ross Perry Brigitta Wagner March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry, 2015) As a historian of German cinema, I used to cringe when people said, “German cinema? Oh, like Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog.” As if there were no othe...
Uncanny, Haptic Encounters and the Importance of Play: An Interview with Josephine Decker, Filmmaker Brigitta Wagner March 2014 Feature Articles Not all actors are filmmakers, and not all filmmakers can act. And certainly not all actor-filmmakers walk in slow motion in Times Square with cans of oil poised on their heads (in performance protest of the 20...
The Porterfield Touch: An Interview with Matthew Porterfield Brigitta Wagner July 2013 Feature Articles When can a filmmaker be said to have ‘a touch’? Ernst Lubitsch had a touch, but what exactly was this? A penchant for comic timing, for finding just the right way to stage a visual punch line or to tickle spect...
Accidental Cinema and the YouTube Sublime: An Interview with Joe Swanberg Brigitta Wagner June 2011 Feature Articles Often seen as the figurehead of the so-called “mumblecore” cineastes, Joe Swanberg discusses the aesthetic and technological practices that inform this indie phenomenon.
New Old Visions: The 27th Giornate del Cinema Muto Brigitta Wagner March 2009 Festival Reports 4-11 October 2008 Pordenone, Italy: A student of mine recently referred to silent films as “movies without speaking”. When I screened two silents in two consecutive weeks, his classmates groaned, “Anothe...
