Ostend, 3 PM

This film is about a film legend, Klaus Wildenhahn, a man responsible for reinventing documentary film in Germany. The film is an approach to a long, eventful life. Right from the start, you are caught in the middle: The old man's apartment serves as an archive, a treasure trove, saturated with time. Books, paintings, photos pulled from shelves, stories told ... each of them leads out into the distance, back into a time that has been long lost ... the viewer ventures through Quinka Stoehr's film as a traveler, a discoverer. Hamburg, Berlin, Oostende, Belgium ... the old man gives lectures here, has events there ... experiments about cinema, art, life, how it all comes together ... how powerful images can be, and why they move in the way they do, how they connect with the distant. Klaus Wildenhahn combines cinematic narration with jazz and African American music. He uses documentary films as a means to stir up the rural population as well as local media institutions.
Quinka Stoehr captures everything on film, adds her own discoveries, and turns all of this into an intimate, moving cinematic portrait. Then an illness turns the tides ... forming the man ... how does it go on ... but Wildenhahn tells his story unbroken, goes his own way, and continues to embody cinema. The film comes across as something from the yellow press. An expectation which Quinka Stoehr most delightfully unfulfilled.

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