suspicious. But she was great about the filming. She was so unselfconscious, and
the sort of person who
to be in front of the camera, still or movie. I thought she would be very uptight; I thought she would worry about the way she looked, but she was completely indifferent. She just went about her business, paid no attention to me. One or two times, she said, 'Oh, stop that filming for a minute.' She'd be having a conversation with me, and I'd be behind this big camera grunting and saying, 'Oh yeah? Oh yeah?' and I think after a while she felt uncomfortable with it. But she never refused to let me film anything.
You recorded the tapes later?
No. I did all the interviewing and some shooting on my first
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visit there, but the film was ruined because my filter holder wasn't completely in and the light was coming through. I went back about a month later and shot all the material you see in the film.
I felt really distressed about the project. I had started on it so quickly because I had such a passion about it, but I hadn't really thought it through. I was still insecure. When I saw the ruined footage, I felt
discouraged and almost didn't continue.
How much taping did you do?
I taped for five evenings. I was embarrassed about it. I had originally said to her that we were doing it so that the tapes could be transcribed, so that she could pass on her stories to her children. I was misleading her, and I was afraid that if I pushed certain issues too far, she might wonder what was going on. When I realized how upset she was becoming as a result of the discussions, I was worried. I thought she might just fall to pieces. Maybe suddenly I would say the wrong thing, and it would be the last straw for her, but she came out with a lot more than I expected.
She seems very at ease. She's a good storyteller.
Well, that might be my editing too. I did a lot of editing. There's always a certain artifice in even the most 'natural' footage or sound of someone. For example, my mother became very upset when thinking and talking about certain experiences, and she tended to slow down and have long pauses between passages of a story. At first I thought those pauses should remain so that the viewer would feel her searching through her memories, but I realized that the effect would be boring, rather than moving. So I spent a lot of time cutting out silent passages.
The story itself is interestingthe idea of knowing what it felt like to be anti-Nazi in Germany in the thirties. Even if she wasn't a member of The White Rose [an anti-Nazi underground organization discussed in
], it took nerve to be who she was. The audience can empathize with her and admire her. Is she pleased with the film?
If I ever hear myself on tape, I always think, 'Oh my god, I sound like such a fool!' She had the same reaction at first, and she also felt that a lot of other people had suffered much more than her, or had been a lot more courageous, and that therefore she wasn't appropriate material for such a film. But the last time she saw the film, she seemed pretty comfortable with it.
Before I made
I had such bad feelings about being German, being the daughter of a German; and my father is half German too. I don't think I really trusted the material I had. When I was working on the film, I told myself to stop worrying, to stop thinking I shouldn't
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be doing it, to stop disbelieving her, to trust her. I figured if the film was a failure in the long run I wouldn't show it. At some point I just stopped carrying on about it. It was strange to suddenly be thinking of my mother in this respectful way, to really be admiring her for what she did, for surviving. I had never thought of
.
She's a remarkable person.
Well, it took me a lot of time to figure that out. I think part of being a teenager is that you're so interested in forming your own identity and not being identified with your parents that you only see their bad side. One night when I was making this film, I was talking to Leslie [Thornton] about it, and said, 'It just occurred to me that I learned some really good things from my parents.' I was developing a better sense of myself; I was respecting myself more as a worker. I was proud that I could support myself, and I thought, 'You know, this came from something; somebody taught me how to do this for myself, and it must have been them.'
You said at the screening tonight that you edited
section by section, for seven hundred hours. The subtle interconnections between the imagery, the text, and the sound make it an easy film to see again and again.
