After The View From our House and Four Parts of a Folding Screen, Alarm Notes is your third feature film to focus on the lives of individuals in Germany under the Nazi regime. How did this project come about? Why dedicate a film to the life and work of Ludwig Koch?
The personal element regarding Ludwig Koch as a subject—Koch was the grandfather of Anthea—is important and creates a continuity with the subjects of our previous two films also based on memories and events linked to the same family. So, in a sense, this film completes a loose trilogy. Ludwig Koch’s connection, however tangential, to a specific historical event, the Reichstag Fire, that made the Nazis’ grip on power inevitable, also made him, for us, a compelling subject. Koch’s development of the new media form of the “sound-book” within his work at a leading gramophone company is also culturally significant. He recognised the potential of recorded sound, in terms of the new insights it offered into nature and beyond, and in terms of its wider creative and educational possibilities. That he suffered persecution and was ultimately forced into exile as a refugee also makes his experience relevant considered in a contemporary context. Our film is not a biography, so we only deal with particular events in Koch’s life relevant to the concerns indicated above.
We wondered how the varied themes related to Koch’s experience in Germany and Britain—his difficult life under the Nazis in Germany (due to his loose association with communism as much as to his Jewish heritage) and his life in exile, recording the songs of birds in British landscape—could work together. We wanted to find a way to express all these themes and concerns and their convergence as well as to foreground Koch’s sound archive to give it a new life. This is why it seemed relevant and necessary for us to make this film.
From the moment Koch’s name appears in connection with the burning of the Reichstag, the film follows the pattern of his life: a long period in Nazi Germany, followed by a shorter period in England, where he fled to escape Nazism. The narrative therefore follows a strict chronological principle. Can you explain this principle and structure? What interested you in this intertwining of the course of a personal life and history?
Although the structure is largely chronological there are moments that jump forward or backward in time—small historical details that might not directly relate to Koch’s life, that relate to other people or events. The emphasis on chronology allows these interruptions, often foregrounding small events in history, to be more surprising, creating a kind of jolt. The second part of the film, which covers two decades, in contrast to the three years of the first part, is more personal in that it concentrates on Koch’s obsessive work recording wildlife sounds. His association with the BBC and the fact that this work was developed during his first years in Britain, leading up to and after WW2, also places Koch and his experiences in direct relation to history. In a sense, it is difficult to disassociate the personal from history.
The first part is constructed like a meticulous historical investigation, reconstructing day by day the lives of Koch and his family, the upheaval of these lives involuntarily mixed up with the Reichstag fire. In the second part, the chronology becomes more vague, and the voice over becomes rarer in favour of Koch’s recordings of birdsong in the English countryside. It’s as if by fleeing Nazism and going into exile in England, both Koch and the film were escaping from history, to find refuge in landscapes, among birds and field recordings. Can you comment on this? On this shift in the way the film is written, from one part to the next?
Although you see hardly any people in the film, the first part is full of the intrigues of people, of ideologies, of Nazi horrors, of human noise, including the voice over. Most of the spaces and buildings seen, including Koch’s street and house, are either not safe or are places of danger or horror. The second part of the film depicts landscape, birds, animals as a kind of refuge, an escape from history, as you say. But there is a sense of melancholy in this section, because of the fissure in Koch’s life. We tried to enhance this feeling by including again a couple of small pieces of sound from the first part of the film with the intention of bringing the film back momentarily to Koch’s time in Berlin. Whilst Koch’s voice is not heard in the first part of the film, we do hear it in the second part—it comes as a shock. In the general absence of voice over (the voice over is certainly sparser in the second half of the film) Koch’s voice is heard in an out-of-time kind of way, over shots of woodland and other landscapes. Koch is also heard singing a Schubert song in German over images of Shetland. The remoteness of Shetland and its landscape accentuates Koch’s sense of exile—out-of-place as well as out-of-time. But there is also a sense in the second part of the film that Koch does create a place for himself within his work—within his single-minded and excited pursuit of sound. His recordings evidence this.
The film weaves together the present and the past, showing the chronological account of events against contemporary views of the places where they took place. This linkage reveals the vestiges of the past, but also its erasure. Most of the shots of today’s locations are close, fragmenting the space and the places. The editing of these fragments is rapid, in tune with the continuous narration of events by the voice-over. Can you shed some light on this choice of fragmentation, both in the shooting and the editing?
We show a fragmented version of space and place in order to get beyond the present to the past. The fragments are the shots of different details and views, mostly closely framed, of the same or related space or place—space or place relevant to Koch or the events of the film. There is an element of fiction that emerges from our process of editing together these shots that counters the simple documentary nature of the individual images. There is a limit to what the straight-forwardly documentary image can truly show regarding place, or what it can say about time. Our editing is not intended to reassemble the fragmented whole—but instead we construct a different place, both spatially and temporally. Through this “fictionalisation” space and place become more abstract and open. Aided by the voice and other sounds, such sequences of visually reconstituted time and place are intended to allow the past, for example events that occurred at Koch’s house, to become graspable, or at least felt, in the viewed present.
In addition to the locations of past actions (Koch’s life, Nazi persecutions, naturalistic recordings), the editing combines numerous archive elements: written and printed documents, as well as numerous objects. The archives are also filmed in a highly fragmented way. Can you talk about the place of these objects and the way you use archives in the narrative?
Archival documents and objects are used in the film as a form of evidence, ostensibly to prove that something really happened. At the same time, some of these objects and their imaging, often perhaps due to the close-up nature of the filming, take on a spurious quality, questioning the veracity of the archive. So some of them are perhaps one thing and also its opposite—real but with the potential of being fiction. For example, the true provenance of some of the personal effects seen in the film must at least be doubtful (a comb, a suit jacket …)—we take these archived objects, playfully, on trust. These varied examples of archive material, regardless of their form or status, also serve as markers and delineate themes within the film’s narrative. The bureaucratic and authoritarian nature of the formal typed police statements that appear in the first part of the film are contradicted, in terms of mood, by Koch’s florid handwriting seen scrawled across the pages of radio script and his notebook in the second part of the film.
The voice-over is distinctive for at least two reasons: first a very neutral, monotonous tone, then writing in the second person, addressing Koch to tell him about his life, beyond time, in a moving fusion of past and present. Can you explain these two approaches?
The voice had to be neutral—its neutrality hopefully allows the feeling in the film to come through the “cracks”, through the joins between shots, through the combination of images and sounds, which of course includes the voice. We felt that the events of the film, whether mundanities like Koch’s journey to his place of work, or horrors such as suicides and murders, had to be recounted in a similar way. The matter-of-fact delivery creates an equality between events, placing the terror on the level of the mundane, thus making it more shocking.
We like your description of the voice addressing Koch in the second person as being “beyond time”. It’s as if the voice is, at times, trying to raise Koch from the dead, perhaps to tell him of discoveries made that he couldn’t have known about in his lifetime—for example, that he was mentioned by the judge during the Reichstag Fire Trial and was nearly called to testify.
The writing of the voice-over is remarkable, both for the precision of the factual information, which must have required long and meticulous research, and for the way it reconstructs the very course of life, not hesitating to use suspense and dramaturgical effects which belong to fiction. Can you tell us a bit about your writing style?
Much of the writing of the voice in the film’s first part is based on statements the police took from Koch, his family and their maid, all found in German archives. In the second part we primarily drew on Koch’s autobiography. The film and subsequently the voice writing did require a lot of research—in fact we researched way beyond what is shown in the film. We would edit sequences of images and then write and rewrite and re-edit many times. And sometimes re-film. We wanted the writing to work with the rhythm of the images, with the cuts, for the voice itself to be rhythmical. It was a question of paring down the writing of the voice as much as possible but without losing the small details of events and lives that are usually ignored by history.
We don’t see the film as documentary or as fiction, but it refers to both, hence the use of suspense and dramaturgical effects. We thought about German Expressionist cinema whilst making this film, the use of shadows, the old Siemens telephone and Erika typewriter, for example. The telephone even has a crackling sound on it that we stole from the soundtrack of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. We also thought about Muriel by Alain Resnais and replicated a short shot of the telephone receiver directly from that film. So our references tend to be from fiction.
You make extensive use of Koch’s sound archives, following the development of his pioneering work. The film’s soundtrack is a skilful weaving of these archives with contemporary sound material collected by yourself. How did you approach the film’s sound design? What approach did you take? How did you work with Philippe Ciompi on the mixing?
We wanted to showcase Koch’s recordings in the film, especially of course in the second part so we had to find a way to mix in our own contemporary sound that didn’t disturb or detract from his recordings. We recorded atmosphere tracks within the various landscapes, avoiding birdsong as much as possible—we didn’t want our sound to compete with his. We also wanted to keep the surface noise and imperfections of Koch’s old recordings. Philippe helped us to be more courageous with the soundtrack of the film in general, and with Koch’s recordings in particular. He also wanted to emphasise the surface noise and was quite bold and daring with this. Philippe is also very musical—his strong background in music often helped us to improve various sound and music placements and cuts in the film to make them more rhythmical.
A film which started as a singular chronicle of Nazi horrors ends as a restitution of Koch’s sound treasure. The final credits start with a list of all the animals and birds heard in the film. Can you comment on that?
We wanted to acknowledge the creatures that Koch recorded and that appear in the film. Koch often referred to the birds he recorded as “songsters” or even “feathered mastersingers” as though they were recording stars. It seemed polite to credit these “stars”, even though they are all dead, of course. We often thought about the deathly nature of Koch’s recordings—these ghosts of birds whose sound we tried to put back into the landscapes from which they originated.
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
