In Ferne Stimmen (Distant Voices), we come across a very condensed form of the same questions and obsessions that permeate our film The Diagonal Force. The same directing choices are used, as well as the same working and production processes.
First of all, there’s the choice to shoot in 16mm film, in 4:3 format, usually in black and white with a Bolex camera. Choosing this tool limits the duration of the shot to 2’30” per reel. It’s not just a question of technique or a purely aesthetic preference. This choice profoundly defines our relationship with time and space at the moment of shooting. We look at and listen to a place or person with a different kind of attention, a different kind of intensity.
These days, shooting with film roll involves a different relationship with image. It makes us thrifty. We film sparingly, and each shot is preceded by a long period of location scouting, during which all the choices of frame, lighting and duration are made. In this movie, the 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios glide together and merge before moving apart again. In addition to this is the choice to film mostly without synchronisation so as not to make sound subordinate to image.
As part of our research into Hannah Arendt, while we were on our way to another shoot for The Diagonal Force, we decided to stop off in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Our intention was to film a single 2’30” reel, a condensed perspective of this place.
On June 10th 1944, a Waffen-SS armoured unit entered Oradour, executed 642 men, women and children and then set fire to the houses. After the Liberation, the site was preserved as it was, in memory of the massacre.
First of all, we spent an entire day at the site, completely alone. We wanted to physically experience the place, an experience imbued with the stories we’d read. When the SS arrived, no-one tried to flee. Everyone knew there were no Jews or Resistance fighters in Oradour, so the villagers didn’t think their lives were in danger. Only one schoolchild from the Alsace region ran away in the middle of lessons because his mother had told him always to be wary of the Germans. He was the sole survivor of the Oradour massacre.
The scouting gave us a clearer idea of our intentions and the form we wanted to give the experiment. The next day, we filmed a series of shots along the village’s main street using a number of motifs: blind spot, first person point of view, repetition, altered perspective, surfaces and emptiness, unseen presence and off-screen.
In Ferne Stimmen, Oradour is juxtaposed with another site: an unidentified, narrow room in which a character is trapped. The encounter plays out between these two places and between two major female intellectual figures from the 20th century: the political scientist Hannah Arendt and the journalist and far-left activist Ulrike Meinhof.
A generation separates the two women but both of them experienced state violence in Germany, one during the war and the other during the 1960s. Both of them fought against Nazi ideology, thinking for themselves and speaking out in public. Meinhof, the second woman, however, ended up going underground and waging a violent armed struggle until she was imprisoned and died in custody. Her death was officially recorded as suicide, although everything points to a political assassination.
The place where the headless figure stands is both a mental space and an evocation of the real space where Meinhof was confined and then found dead in her cell, hanged with her bedsheet. Place and character are treated together as a construction of the mind.
This shot is part of the 2007 Meinhof project that presents an intimist and fragmented vision of Ulrike Meinhof via 3 audiovisual installations. As in The Diagonal Force, it involved taking a third path between documentary and fiction to embody a public figure in the image; of drawing on documented research to dramatise a subjective vision.
Ferne Stimmen adds texts with different linguistic registers to the image – here, a literary text is set against a fragment of socio-political analysis. Several voices are also brought together – one ‘fictional’, the other ‘documentary’.
Actor Imme Bode reads the poem W.B. that Arendt wrote in 1942 in homage to her friend Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher. He committed suicide in 1940 in Portbou after trying to cross the French-Spanish border to seek exile in the United States.
The reading of this poem was recorded in an anechoic chamber, and we chose this context to put the actor in a specific physical and mental state: she had to vocalise the text with the sensation that her own voice was stuck on her lips. Isolation in an anechoic chamber and continuous exposure to light are methods of ‘white torture’ that were used against Meinhof during her incarceration.
The voice reading the poem is followed by the voice of Meinhof herself in extracts from a sound archive of an interview she gave for television shortly before she went into hiding.
Annik Leroy & Julie Morel
Brussels, June 9th 2024
