It’s a Battle of Stories: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler about The City Below, The Lies of the Victors, and Political Cinema
by Marco Abel

Es geht los (“and so it begins” or “it is starting”)—we also hear these mysterious last words of German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s Unter dir die Stadt (The City Below, 2010) spoken in what is to date his fifth and most recent feature film, Die Lügen der Sieger (The Lies of the Victors, 2014). This occurs when, at an expensive restaurant, Mr. Dellbrück (Karl Fischer), a high-ranking German government minister, tells his interlocutor, a lobbyist for the country’s chemical industry, “Es geht los.” In The City Below, which is set in Frankfurt (Germany’s banking hub), it is the female protagonist, Svenja (Nicolette Krebitz), who voices this sentence in the film’s closing seconds while watching from her hotel room, in which she spent the night with a powerful bank manager, a group of white-collar workers frantically running and yelling on the street. As the film cuts to black, viewers inevitably are left with the very question that Mr. Nailly (Gottfried Breitfuss), the lobbyist in The Lies of the Victors, poses in response to Dellbrück’s claim: “Was geht los?” (“What is starting?”). In other words, what the earlier film instills extradiegetically—namely in the viewer’s mind—as a question without relying on a screen surrogate to formulate it for us, Hochhäusler’s latest film explicitly verbalizes on the diegetic level; more, whereas in The City Below it’s impossible to provide with any certainty a referent for the indeterminate pronoun “es,” in The Lies of the Victors Dellbrück quickly supplies one—“The soup”—as an attractive young waitress approaches their table to serve it.

In The Lies of the Victors, in contrast, the same utterance is not only delivered by someone who is an agent of contemporary (macro-) power but also emptied of any utopian promise that its first, utterly indeterminate occurrence can be said to have borne. What remains undecidable and indeterminate in The City Below—and what was issued as a demand on and of the viewer—no longer carries the same affective impact: the speech act’s valence and direction—its vector of force—has fundamentally changed from The City Below to The Lies of the Victors.

Does this cinematic instance—subtle as it admittedly may be—also mark a shift in Hochhäusler’s view of (the possibilities of) radical politics? Has his, or at least his films’, (formerly utopian?) outlook become more realistic, more realpolitik-like? It is, in any case, hard to ignore that The Lies of the Victors ends on a considerably more pessimistic note than The City Below (or for that matter Low Profile, which leaves us with the protagonist smiling directly at us from behind the backseat window of a police car as he is about to be driven away for having committed a crime to which he has falsely confessed). Whereas in his earlier films the director always managed to render sensible for his viewers a moment of utopia, in The Lies of the Victors that utopian promise, tentative though it may have been in those earlier films, seems to have completely vanished; it is as if his most recent film puts into question the very presence of the utopian moments of its predecessors and questions their viability. If the previous films still allowed the viewer to be affected by a sensation of utopia, no matter how indeterminate that sensation might have been, then now we might say that things have gone from bad to worse insofar that we are left to confront the distinct sense that even in our imagination we can no longer imagine or sense utopia: we can no longer even dream of an alternative, can no longer imagine an end, to the prevailing neoliberal system (Petzold’s Yella [2007] makes a similar point). One could of course chalk this shift up to the director’s increasing maturity; or, less autobiographically, one could historicize this shift by calling attention to these films’ years of release: 2005, 2010, and 2014, respectively. It is a shift, then, from a moment prior to the onset of the most recent global financial crisis in 2008, to one from its immediate aftermath, to, finally, one from the present when we find ourselves once again forced with the need to face the fact that not much has changed for the better since the liquidity crisis seemed to threaten the entire capitalist edifice and to promise, for a brief moment, its undoing.

*****

The film clearly breaks the common template of two people being meant for each other. We have all the ingredients for an amour fou story, yet it never quite materializes. The characters fail to believe in their love, and all that remains is addiction—to the old stories they no longer believe in, to the promise of love (as a drug?). Their lives have been infected by a system that is beyond the body. But to be honest: I’m not sure if this description is accurate. After all, The City Below is a king’s story. It’s not the story of a servant; it’s not told from a servant’s perspective. So I have to doubt my own theory.

Cineaste: This opening scene works differently than the one in The City Below. In the latter we first see the banking towers that dominate the skyline of Frankfurt and then Svenja walking past shopping windows that reflect her image and that of her surroundings in ways that immediately foreground the cityscape and how it tends to encroach upon the human figure. The film doesn’t give us much “domestic” information.

Hochhäusler: On the contrary: what we see in The City Below is that all appearances, and first impressions, are deceptions. Her reflection is not what it seems, so we remain totally in the dark about who she is, whereas with Fabian we do get a fairly accurate impression of what he does and who he is.

Cineaste: Both films play with this notion of seeming transparency that is so characteristic of modern institutional spaces—the postmodern banking towers or the interior workspaces of office buildings: we can easily see the characters through the windows, just as we can look into these spaces as we walk on the streets in major cities. These buildings seem to suggest there’s nothing hidden in these spaces, but obviously this is far from the truth.

Hochhäusler: For me the most seductive conspiracy theory today is predicated on the idea that all-important things are invisible. Cinema, however, is all about what you can see. And cinema has formed our society and our beliefs in that direction: we still hold this very high opinion of visibility and think we can access truth if we can only see what, say, the parliament is doing, as is the case with the German Parliament’s glass dome: you can climb up there and look down through the glass ceiling to see the politicians debating.

This glass roof insinuates to the citizens that they can actually control parliament by seeing what politicians are doing—that seeing means control, that visibility equals transparency, and that transparency is ultimately a good thing. And if you now say that power today is invisible, then you have this very seductive conspiracy theory that you actually can’t show anything, that what you do see is not what it’s all about. I’m very interested in this, and of course I’m also a bit desperate about this phenomenon because as a filmmaker you have no choice: you can film only physical reality. Of course, you can use voice-over and other techniques to suggest interiority. But ultimately you film physical beings and actions existing in space. And this limits our ability to show a world that is to an ever-increasing degree shaped by algorithms and computer designs that we can’t see. We tried to show some of this in the film, but how do you film someone hacking? At one time, you see this dark office, and suddenly the monitor switches on. It’s a naïve image: after all, if someone hacks into a computer, we don’t see it.

Cineaste: I’m still trying to think about what constitutes the transition from The City Below to The Lies of the Victors in terms of how the latter tries to use narrative and visual detours to discover ways for rendering visible what cannot necessarily be made visible.

Hochhäusler: Take, for example, what I call “scan-tracking.” The scan-tracking movement is found throughout the film. It’s mostly a left-to-right, sometimes a right-to-left scan-tracking shot that repeats itself. It has no obvious connection to what’s happening at any given time, so in a way it’s a machine eye. What does it mean? What does it do to the viewer? I’m not sure if it works in the way I imagined it to work. But I was trying to have a camera that ends up establishing for the viewer that something is happening even though it doesn’t care about what is going on. It’s like with the phenomenon in news footage: images that appear as if by accident are imbued with a different truth quality than those that are clearly staged. You feel that something really transpired. If the camera is slightly “off,” so to speak, the viewer feels that this is all the more proof that something is going on: a camera that is “off” seemingly proves that what it shows was not made “for” its, and thus our, purview. Another aspect of this scan-tracking concept is that it’s a fleeting movement and that you can’t be sure you get the most important part of the action. The privilege cinema usually grants viewers is that we get to see the decisive moment; it’s a bit like with historical painting in this regard (Caesar crossing the Rubicon, etc.). But with this scan-tracking technique, which basically imitates an automated eye, you don’t exactly see what’s important; rather, you see the aftermath of, or the lead-up to, what might ultimately turn out to be most important but remains invisible and thus largely unknown to us (or what can be known by us only through insights into what happened before and after the omission, before and after that which transpires while the scan-tracking moves away from and toward it). You thus have the feeling that what you see isn’t made for you, that it’s not made for mankind but for a machine. And I thought this would be interesting because so many of the things that shape our lives today are no longer predicated on human logic.

Cineaste: You say that viewers might feel that what they see might actually be happening—and that sometimes the scanning eye catches what’s happening and sometimes it doesn’t. But it is this scanning movement that also creates for the viewer a sense of a “before” and “after”: there was something going on before the mechanical eye “accidentally” catches hold of something, and there is something going on after the eye has moved past that which seems to be going on “accidentally.” A sense of temporality is thereby rendered sensible for us. At the same time, these “accidental” images are noticeably staged. The camera movement is so relentless that I could imagine some viewers becoming annoyed by it, in the same way that my students feel annoyed by Jean-Luc Godard’s relentless tracking back and forth during the famous scene in Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) when Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille (Brigitte Bardot) discuss their relationship while sitting at opposite ends of a table in their apartment: similar to how you shoot the scene when Fabian and Nadja finally write their cover story for Die Woche, the weekly news magazine for which they work as investigative reporters (she as a new intern who’s been assigned to him, the more experienced journalist), Godard pans seemingly willy-nilly back and forth, as if the camera were indifferent to who’s speaking and who’s reacting. (The difference is that whereas in Godard’s film the effect is to enhance our sense of the couple’s emotional disconnect, in your scene the technique renders sensible the very moment when Fabian and Nadja “click” the most: it’s almost like they’re having sex before they actually end up sleeping with each other!) In any case, the sheer relentlessness of the scanning throughout the film is used in a way that the viewer can neither ignore nor make immediately sense of.

Hochhäusler: We had already used this technique in The City Below, albeit to a lesser degree. We might have overdone it this time. [Laughs] Our use of this technique in The Lies of the Victors certainly exceeds the level of sheer functionality; and that’s what I think is interesting.

Cineaste: I think this ultimately prevents the viewer from comfortably settling on the notion that the fleeting moments that are captured by the camera are actually moments that are happening right then and there; and I think it’s important for the film to ensure that we can feel that what seems to be really happening is actually not at all happening precisely because it is through this contradictory sensation with which the film affects us that the lie of “transparency” is rendered sensible for us: the very technique that affects us so that we feel things are transparent concurrently affects us so that we gain the idea that the assertion that things are transparent is actually just that—an unsubstantiated proposition that demands to be interrogated by us. In a way, this technique renders palpable the very mediating processes that govern the visible, that create the effect of transparency, without themselves being visible. But The Lies of the Victors uses this technique in ways that are much more visible than you did in The City Below.

Cineaste: I find the composition of the images in The City Below—their clarity—actually quite beautiful. In The Lies of the Victors you put arguably much more “pressure” on the images. Take, for example, the constant scanning in the office space, which is visually further intensified by how the camera mostly remains behind cubicle windows and their blinds. Or when they are sitting in the lounge area: the camera hardly ever moves above the edge of the couch, which has the effect that everything we see is partly obscured by the furniture.

Hochhäusler: Yes, and you have all these blurs, flares, and all kinds of other visual distractions.

Cineaste: And when we get moments of clarity, when the images are (seemingly) clear, then it’s a long shot where the point of view remains actually quite far from the characters, from the action. I’m thinking here of the wonderful moment when we see the lobbyists—who are a bit like invisible puppet masters—in their modern office space behind glass windows, with the camera gradually zooming out until we behold the entire building from a wide-shot point of view that, however, renders the lobbyists far away and thus barely visible: we see them alright yet have no real access to them.

Hochhäusler: Which in a way is true for our lives: we don’t have access to a wide-shot perspective on our lives; only others may have it.

Cineaste: The Lies of the Victors includes narrative elements that one could cut out because they do not seem necessary for the plot’s main thrust. The gambling scenes, for example, seem to constitute a detour leading us away from the main story. Yet I think viewers likely wonder whether the French men who run the illegal gambling activities might turn out to be connected to the main conspiracy.

Cineaste: One scene puts this very idea center stage: namely, the one in which we see the lobbyists rehearse for a meeting with an influential politician whose help they try to secure in their efforts to block legislation that would tighten governmental oversight of Germany’s chemical industry. So playing occurs on a number of levels in the film, and at times these moments might lead nowhere. While this may possibly frustrate some viewers, it’s worth pointing out that the film is ultimately about one big dead end, is it not?

Hochhäusler: Yes, indeed.

Hochhäusler: Doing research with PR people, lobbyists, and communication agencies, I was surprised to learn that they are not only more advanced than their journalistic counterparts in technological terms but also more progressive on other fronts. There are more women in lobbying than in political journalism; pay equality seems to be established; the terms of sharing parenting “off time,” etc., are more advanced. The “bad” sleep well, do Yoga, and eat vegan. The von May character is smart, well paid, and in command. Whereas in journalism, things seem rather old school: long hours, red meat, beer, and football—no women around. If you happen to be one of the few women in this environment, your strongest weapon is getting your male colleagues to underestimate you. This is Nadja’s strategy. But I have to admit I’ve always been skeptical of the assertion that in order to advance society we need “strong women” in movies. What we need are strong characters of all sexes, sexual orientations, or ethnic backgrounds; but strong characters are real people with flaws. I don’t want to see even more “good people” in films—strong women, happy gay people, extremely talented Native Americans, or, in German films about the Nazi era, all the Jewish “saints.” I don’t want to advertise how life should be. I believe affirmative action is harmful in movies: it not only harms the films but also is counterproductive for our perception of the real world because people will find out that we are all human. Even victims have flaws, and they deserve to have them.

Cineaste: At one time, Fabian tells Nadja that “One has to tell a story”; and earlier in the film, the importance of telling stories is directly dramatized when the lobbyists rehearse for their meeting with Mr. Dellbrück (Karl Fischer), the minister whose support they try to solicit. The telling of stories plays an important role in all of your films.

Hochhäusler: That’s an interesting comment. In fact, I often talk to my editor and cinematographer about how we could possibly make molecular kitchen in cinema: to offer bites or bits that are not necessarily part of the story but that will become the story once you digest them. That said, The Lies of the Victors actually does offer a fairly conventional story frame. If you want to have a wider commercial release for your film you have to find a form that will be recognized as something people know. It’s within this recognizable framework that you can try to change as much as you think you can get away with; it’s always a very unstable equilibrium.

Cineaste: This gets us back to the question of the political, of how the cinema can encounter the contemporary conditions of living, of power, of biopower, if you will. And your film tries to take seriously what contemporary power is, or, rather, how it works: it consists of an endless series of microstories and the process of their telling and dissemination. It is telling, for example, how the lobbyists respond the moment they find out that Fabian and Nadja are digging up information that has the potential to undermine their lobbying efforts. Whereas Mr. Nailly, who works as a direct representative of the German chemical industry, has one of his choleric fits, Frau von May calmly points out that the very fact that they are able to inform him about Fabian and Nadja’s activities means they can control the situation. And the way they proceed to control it is precisely by planting another story—one that ultimately ends up constituting the lie that, as Fabian discovers only when it’s too late, forms the core of his and Nadja’s cover story.

Hochhäusler: I once read about the idea of “fractal strategy,” which says that it’s not important whether people do or do not know about a particular event; what’s important, however, is that they don’t know for sure. For example, some powerful group secretly engineers a regime change, but then the truth comes out. What do you do? Well, you don’t deny it; instead, you produce a range of other versions of what happened that are similar but not identical. Fractal strategy theory suggests that its implementation will eventually undo the truth because now people can choose from multiple narratives that all have a reasonable degree of viability: every segment of the “audience” can choose a story that suits them best. Thus, the left will choose one story, the right another. So you have multiple competing stories, yet none of them is actually true. But, according to this theory, this is exactly what you should do as someone in power. I think this is pretty close to how reality works today: we end up with so many competing stories that every tiny subset of the larger population will find their story; thus, there is no longer any unified story.

Cineaste: In The Lies of the Victors, this is directly dramatized time and again. Crucially, for instance, it comes to the fore that the cover story our protagonists researched turns out to be based on false information. As reported, the story is simply incorrect. Yet, when Fabian reveals this to his editor, the latter refuses to call headquarters in Hamburg and justifies his decision not to publish a correction to this (false) story by saying that the story’s impact affected the “right ones” (“Es hat die Richtigen getroffen”)—meaning, a group he deems worthy of the political consequences triggered by the story’s revelations. Thus, he asks, who cares whether the story is really true or not?

Hochhäusler: Yes, to him it’s more important that the readers believe the story than that what they (are made to) believe is actually true. The editor believes in his magazine’s brand, and the brand says they are always right.

Cineaste: He says, “Wir schreiben für Nostalgiker, die glauben, Papier lügt nie” (“We write for nostalgic people who believe that paper never lies”). Therefore it’s crucial for the magazine to maintain its ethos, its reputation, which he thinks would be undermined if he were to publish a correction.

Hochhäusler: And this is really pretty accurate. In all its storied history, Der Spiegel, the model for Die Woche, has never disavowed a title story. Yet, while they do have good fact checkers and relatively high standards in terms of pure reporting, over the course of its history Der Spiegel has often been wrong in how it connected the dots. And this is the real story, the story, isn’t it: the story is about the connecting of the dots, rather than the dots themselves. When I asked people working at Der Spiegel why they never admit to their errors they said it would harm their brand and that their readers don’t want it! [Laughs] Of course, they would never say this on the record. Remember what happened with The New York Times and the scandal they had with a fabricated story about events in Afghanistan. They went to great lengths to re-establish their reputation and published pages and pages reporting the results of their investigation into that fraud. Yet something remained: You can’t undo a story once it’s published. And I think that’s fascinating. Stories stay: you can’t undo a story. Or, rather, the only way to undo a story is by creating another. But I’m not saying that lobbyism always succeeds, since there are also other lobbyists who want to push another, different—their—story. It’s thus a question of which story carries more force: it’s a battle of stories!

Hochhäusler: I agree: this scene is totally about animals. And funnily enough, the actual dynamic between these two actors had an animal-like quality: there was a fair bit of competition between them, and I liked that. But it’s true: the lobby agency employees and especially Frau von May are actually the most modern people in the whole film. First of all, gender equality is there, and they have more taste; they probably eat wholesome food, too. In so many ways, they’re really the avant-garde of the mainstream. They’re very advanced in their use of computers and technology in general, yet they deal with structures that are still much less advanced, which is journalism and industry. [Laughs] And I thought that’s ironic. When I sat down with some of those players in Berlin, it became clear to me that they basically take any assignment, whether it comes from the conservatives, the Social Democrats, or the Greens: for them it’s not about ideology. Theirs is a really pragmatic approach: they see themselves as troubleshooters. For them it’s really about how to spin a story—that’s what it’s about. But I’m always interested in rehearsal situations. There’s one in Low Profile as well. Rehearsal scenes reveal so much about people’s concept of reality; and then, of course, reality unfolds differently than how they imagined it would.

Cineaste: It’s an interesting dialectical relation. There’s the image of reality, or how one imagines a future reality to unfold based on one’s present knowledge. And one tells a story about it. One puts together the dots one has gleaned from empirical observation and then says: this is what is going to happen, and we can control this by preparing properly for it. But then, reality actually happens—in this case, pure “old school” heterosexual male desire kicks in, demanding to be served by a beautiful woman!

Hochhäusler: Whom he already knows and trusts. There’s a very nice analogous scene in the HBO series K Street [2003, Steven Soderbergh]. Howard Dean, the real person, participates in such a rehearsal meeting. I liked that a lot.

Cineaste: Given that The Lies of the Victors is a conspiracy thriller—certainly a film that plays with generic elements of the conspiracy film tradition—I assume you’ve seen the famous conspiracy films of the 1970s.

Cineaste: Your use of the brief moment in which Ed says something like, “That’s the press for you, baby”—

Hochhäusler: He says, “That’s the press, baby, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He’s on the phone with the mafia boss who demands that he stop the story. Ed says, “That’s the press,” as he holds the phone up in the air so his interlocutor can hear the noise of the printing press in the background running the morning paper. The sound of the press serves as proof that truth will prevail. But it’s very questionable that truth will ultimately prevail, and in any case this is not the end of the story. It’s like whistling in the dark. It’s a bit like the end of Three Days of the Condor: will they really print the story? At this moment Ed says that they are printing it, but what happens afterwards? Who knows?

Hochhäusler: This is probably more like the same reference to The Conversation.

Cineaste: This Conversation-like moment, as well as the clip from Deadline USA, clearly takes the viewers out of the film. Why do that?

Hochhäusler: I’m not sure. I liked it. I think it’s not a bad thing to realize that we are watching a film. I don’t want to cite Brecht here, but in principle I think it doesn’t hurt at this point in the story, when the Bogart clip occurs, that we realize it’s all made: not only the story Fabian and Nadja write for and will get to publish in Die Woche, but also the film. It’s all done by someone to suggest something, so I thought that’s an appropriate moment to call attention to this fact. As for the use of the black-and-white footage, I used it in order to mark that there is someone who is observing. After all, both journalism and espionage are about observing what happens and then interpreting what one saw. We create meaning by connecting two events without necessarily knowing that they are in fact related.

Hochhäusler: Yes, and these images also show that there are many more stories out there. I’ve always admired American cinema’s ability to include in their fictions bits and pieces of reality. At least in the cinema of the 1970s there’s a tradition of including documentary shots of street life and so on, even if the story itself is totally artificial. Integrating real life into their stories this way lends these films a certain amount of believability. I always liked this because when you look back at a film decades later, some of the things that are most interesting are those that reveal how people lived at the time: they show what was there, give insight into what the atmosphere of the time was like, and so on.

Hochhäusler: I like the idea that the most valuable thing you may create with your film might be totally beyond your original intention. Your sensibility may be a strong filter, but how the resulting artifact will be read is unknowable. This puts your effort in perspective. Stories are fragile arrangements, which is why they need so much care. It’s a very human, necessary, but ultimately hopeless fight to arrange objects and persons in a way that make “story sense”: the universe stays indifferent to our desires.

Cineaste: When using the cinema to engage and shed light on contemporary political realities, do you also have to take into consideration the “political economy” of filmmaking itself? In other words, how does the fact that you depend on a budget to make your film affect how you make a film about a political issue like the banking milieu in The City Below or the political lobbyist milieu in The Lies of the Victors? It’s not just a question of aesthetics, is it, given that there’s a “real reality” there, as it were?

Hochhäusler: Of course there’s a relation. After all, what’s considered suitable for theatrical distribution is only a fraction of what’s possible in this art form. So, aesthetically you’re very restricted. But to a certain degree that’s a restriction of my own choosing. In terms of what you can show, the limits are less obvious. Interestingly, one funding institution wanted proof that a story like that could happen. We sent them a couple of articles about some of the real events that inspired our story, and this satisfied them. But this kind of question would not have happened with any other story. In terms of industry or lobbies, I don’t think we were identified as a threat in any way, and we certainly aren’t, simply because art cinema is so marginal. But of course there are legal restrictions with regard to our ability to name names and so on. For a while I was contemplating to narrate a real case. I’m quite sure this would’ve been much more difficult to get produced.

Cineaste: Your desire to make this kind of film expresses your desire for the cinema to have some real-life impact, no?

Hochhäusler: Well, ideally a film helps you to sharpen your vision of what’s happening. What I like about movies is the process of talking about them. Of course, in talking about them you have to deal with the same translation problem all over again: how do you talk about what you have seen in a film? But people talk about films all the time, and I’m not talking about cinephiles or professional critics. I’m talking about people in the subway and in bars. They tell their friends about a film they’ve seen, and then they have to grapple with the problem of what they can say about the film—how to describe what they’ve seen. And I think this process is interesting, in terms of how this re-telling of what someone saw in a film ends up affecting our perception of the world. But of course the danger is always that people only see and believe what they already know or believe—that they will always discover themselves in whatever you do, no matter how clear you think you are as a filmmaker.

Cineaste: It seems one of the biggest delusions of the Enlightenment is precisely that we think that we only have to shed light on something for us to know the truth, and that knowing the truth will produce the kind of action that ends up changing circumstances “for the better.” This isn’t exactly how things work.

Hochhäusler: Well, I think it works like this to some extent, but this isn’t the whole truth. But yes, for a long time we thought that if we only knew the truth and if we “can handle the truth,” to misappropriate what Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men [Rob Reiner, 1992]—he of course yells at Tom Cruise that he can’t handle the truth—then everything will be fine. I don’t think this is true. What’s interesting about, for example, the current crisis in Europe involving Greece’s difficulties is that pretty much everyone agrees that imposing austerity on the country is an economic mistake. But it’s not about economics; it’s about a story people can believe in. Even if it’s against everything we know about economy: people believe that if you spend too much you have to behave and get better. And I think German Chancellor Angela Merkel is catering to that very story. She wanted to establish a simple narrative of the Greek people having lived beyond their means so that they now have to walk in a “hair shirt.” We know that this kind of story isn’t true, and that it’s dangerous to buy into it; yet, it’s a story with which people can connect, to which they can relate. It’s so much about storytelling these days. I wonder whether it was ever any different, though.

Cineaste: Yes, surely storytelling has always played an important part for people, though the degree to which it affects how power works seems to have changed—that is, the sheer degree to which power is now, more than anything, a matter of storytelling and thus communication might be new. In any case, it seems that the way films have represented how power works has changed over time. Power seems to work differently in films from, say, the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s: in those films the representatives of capitalism are often physically unattractive, smoke cigars, and drink whiskey, generally act in ruthless ways, and often have their henchmen do their dirty work. In your film, in contrast, the capitalists are fairly attractive, have good taste, don’t seem to be “bad” people, and they don’t really engage in violence. Indeed, the most violent moment we see is done to Fabian, but this really has nothing at all to do with his job and instead happens because he likes to frequent illegal gambling events.

Hochhäusler: And the other moment of violence occurs when the former soldier commits suicide. I think most of the violence is being inflicted by the victims themselves, which is like a dream come true for “power” because “power” doesn’t even have to send their henchman anymore: people will kill themselves.

Cineaste: Speaking of storytelling, though, what might be difficult for viewers to accept is that in the end it’s not clear who we are supposed to blame for the bad things that the film suggests are in fact happening: the film doesn’t authorize us to point to the Chancellor or some military general, for example. And even worse than not authorizing us to blame someone in particular might be the fact that The Lies of the Victors reveals how the “victims” are playing a huge role in all of this bad stuff: or, more broadly speaking, that the film shows that those who are really not in power (in the traditional sense) nevertheless actively participate in these insidious operations.

Hochhäusler: In theater there is this exercise of “playing King.” It means that the King is doing nothing; it’s the others who make the King. And this is how power works, I think. The center is empty and totally exchangeable. Of course, people “in power” believe that it’s all about them, but this is an illusion [Laughs]: we make them! And we need them so that we can blame them. I think it’s a very complex pathology of our societies. Still, my film does show that some things occur that are clearly wrong and that we should identify as such. For example, in one year alone, the chemical industry in Germany spent one billion Euros to soften the reach of a law about dangerous chemicals, and many believe they succeeded. This is clearly bad for the ordinary citizen. So there’s a real danger here, and the film makes this clear. But admittedly this isn’t the film’s main focus. I also wonder whether this phenomenon is really new. We all tend to believe that we live in a new era. But every generation believes that its time is worse than any other—that its time is more sophisticated, more complicated, more complex, and so on. I somehow doubt this is actually true. However, I do think it is true that today we have a machinery running that is mostly invisible in its reliance on computer networks with their algorithms and so on. And how to address this phenomenon through cinematic storytelling remains unanswered.

Cineaste: Are there any contemporary filmmakers that you see as grappling with this question?

Hochhäusler: I haven’t seen the latest Michael Mann film, Blackhat [2015], but I think he’s interested in a similar problem. I don’t think it’s a good idea to show electrons running through your computer and then revert to a physical story, however. It’s a bit like Wall Street [Oliver Stone, 1987]. You have a system—high finance—that’s exceeding the personal level, but you have a story that’s all personal: two fathers, one son, and a fist fight in Central Park. This surely can’t be the answer. And Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps [2010] was no improvement over this formula. I much admire the approach of David Simon’s The Wire [2002–2008], which very much stands in the tradition of Sidney Lumet’s and Frederick Wiseman’s work and their desire to portray complex structures or institutions. I think it’s important to use the cinema to take a close look at these institutional structures and systems, and I think both Lumet and Wiseman, in their different ways, succeeded quite well. And I already mentioned that I thought K Street was quite interesting. I’m a bit skeptical of the hype that television series in general receive these days, but clearly a series does afford you the chance to establish more than one protagonist and more than one central relationship. The ability to do so can lead to more complexity, even though in actuality I don’t think this happens in most cases. We, too, had originally tried to do The Lies of the Victors as a television series. We had considerably more story material, so we offered it. But there was no interest, and I was impatient to make the film and did not want to spend another five years in development without a guarantee, or at least a probability, that it would happen.

Cineaste: After having made films set in the banking milieu and now the lobbying and journalism milieus, are you interested in making more films along these lines?

Cineaste: It might be a hard sell to make a feature film about EU bureaucracy, though—

Hochhäusler: That’s true. [Laughs]

End Notes:

1. Made between The City Below and The Lies of the Victors, One Minute of Darkness is the final “episode” of Dreileben’s three parts. The other two films comprising this triptych of films, which take the same narrative event—the escape of an alleged murderer—as their point of departure, are Christian Petzold’s Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011) and Dominik Graf’s Komm mir nicht nach (Don’t Follow Me Around, 2011). For a discussion of this remarkable collaborative experiment, see Marco Abel and Christina Gerhardt, eds., “The Berlin School (1): The DREILEBEN Experiment,” German Studies Review 36.3 (Summer 2013): 603–642.
    
2. Petzold, as Jaimey Fisher has convincingly argued, has always made films that are grounded in and work with genre elements. See Fisher’s Christian Petzold (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
    
3. The first part of the exchange between the three directors was published in the German film magazine, Revolver, of which Hochhäusler is one of the founding editors, while the second part was subsequently made available on the journal’s Web site. See “Mailwechsel ‘Berliner Schule’: Graf, Petzold, Hochhäusler,” Revolver 16 (2007): 7–39; and http://www.revolver-film.de/Inhalte/Rev16/html/Berliner.htm. For a discussion of this conversation see Marco Abel, “The Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project,” German Studies Review 36.3 (Summer 2013): 607-616.
    
4. Marco Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester: Camden House, 2013): 185. My book offers a more elaborate reading of the utopian force of not only The City Below’s ending but also Hochhäusler’s work prior to The Lies of the Victors and the Berlin School films in general.
    
5. Christoph Hochhäusler, “Right to Reply: A Cinema of Challenge,” quoted in Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School: 163.
    
6. Thank you to Barbara Starks for producing a raw transcript of the interview.
    
7. Marco Abel. “Tender Speaking: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler.” Senses of Cinema 42 (January-March 2007). http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/cinema-engage/christoph-hochhausler/.
    
8. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) famously offers a perspective on “Big History” from the kitchen. Hochhäusler voted for Renoir’s masterpiece as one the ten greatest films of all time in the Sight & Sound 2012 “The Greatest Films Poll.” www.explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/914, accessed June 24, 2015.
    
9. Tellingly, Hochhäusler has expressed his hesitations about Laura Poitras’s acclaimed documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour (2014), precisely for not having offered enough of these “mundane things” that would have helped the film’s audience to “measure the impact” the Snowden story has on us. As reported by The New Yorker, at a private screening in Berlin, Hochhäusler told those present, including Poitras, that he would have liked for the film to have more “gravity”: Snowden’s story, he argued, “is so crazy and big and unhealthy,” which is why “I need the consequences of all this very abstract information for people, for us, and you [as the filmmaker] are our stand-in, you are our eyes.…Because most of the people think, Yes, but it won’t happen to me, and anyway, I have nothing to hide. It’s always the same argument.” Quoted in George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets,” The New Yorker October 20, 2014. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/holder-secrets, accessed July 3, 2015.
    
10. This is a not-so-veiled critique of the many German film productions that engage the “big” issues of German history, whether that of the Nazi years, of East Germany’s Stasi, or the history of internal terrorism that affected West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
     
11. This basic triangular narrative dynamic presents us with an update of the Biblical story of King David, inflected, film historically, by Raoul Walsh’s Silver River (1948).
     
12. Vorschneider is one of German cinema’s premiere cinematographers. In addition to the two films he shot for Hochhäusler (he helmed One Minute of Darkness as well), Vorschneider has worked with Angela Schanelec, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Thomas Arslan, all of whom are regularly associated with the Berlin School, as well as with Maria Speth, who is also occasionally considered affiliated with this group. He received the Marburger Kamerapreis in 2013—Germany’s most prestigious award for cinematographers (the list of awardees since 2001 includes Raoul Coutard, Robby Müller, Slawomir Idziak, and Agnès Godard).
     
13.  Florian David Fitz is best known for his roles in commercially successful films such as Simon Verhoeven’s blockbusters Männerherzen (Men in the City, 2009) and its sequel, Männerherzen…und die ganz große Liebe (Men in the City 2, 2011), Ralf Huettner’s Vincent will Meer (Vincent Wants to Sea, 2010), Detlev Buck’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2012), as well as in numerous television productions.
     
14. Hochhäusler had previously worked with Keller on both Low Profile and his brilliant short film, Séance, which concludes the thirteen films comprising the omnibus film Deutschland 09: 13 Kurzfilme zur Lage der Nation (Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation, 2009).
     
15. Christoph Hochhäusler, “Goldene Regel (12).” http://parallelfilm.blogspot.de/2011/05/goldene-regel-12.html, accessed June 29, 2015. Commenting on a shot sequence from Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), Hochhäusler writes in this blog entry: “Wir bleiben Kinder—aber vegessen, dass wir spielen” (We remain children—but forget that we play).
     
16. The “Critics Week” was a weeklong event conceived as a critical counterevent to the Berlin Film Festival, which at least some German film critics view as too industry-oriented and as lacking interest in promoting a critical encounter with world cinema today. See www.wochederkritik.de/en_US/critics-week, accessed June 25, 2015.
     
17. In her 1968 novel, Nachdenken über Christa T., Christa Wolf wrote: “Wie man es erzählen kann, so ist es nicht gewesen. Wenn man es aber erzählen kann, dann ist man nicht dabei gewesen, oder die Geschichte ist lange her, so daß einem Unbefangenheit leichtfällt” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007: 79). (“It didn’t happen the way one can tell it; but if one can tell it as it was, then one wasn’t in on it, or it all happened so long ago that candor comes too easily.” The Quest for Christa T., trans. Christopher Middleton, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979: 64.)
     
18.  http://www.pablopicasso.org/quotes.jsp, accessed June 29, 2015.
     
19. Ferran Adrià’s restaurant el Bulli was a three-star Michelin restaurant and during its existence was widely considered one, if not the, best in the world. Diners would be presented with mindboggling meals consisting of thirty-five (!) courses.
     
20. See especially Jodi Dean’s Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
     
21. See “Moderne Problems,” www.parallelfilm.blogspot.com/2014/04/deadline-usa-richard-brooks-usa-1952.html, April 30, 2014, accessed 26 June 2015.
     
22. Heisenberg co-wrote Hochhäusler’s debut feature, This Very Moment, and co-founded with him Revolver, which played an important role in giving many of the directors associated with the Berlin School a voice. For more on its history, see chapter 4 of The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School.
     
23. This is perhaps not surprising for a filmmaker who once studied architecture.
     
24. For Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of movement-images and “any spaces whatever” see, respectively, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
     
25. Ruttmann is of course most famous for Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927).
     
26. Schiefer has scored all of Hochhäusler’s films but One Minute of Darkness.
     
27. Siegfried Kracauer, The Theory of Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 71.
     
28. Peltzer is an acclaimed German novelist. His most recent novels, Teil der Lösung (S. Fischer Verlag, 2007; Part of the Solution, 2012) and Das bessere Leben (S. Fischer Verlag, 2015) intriguingly resonate with the films he has co-written with Hochhäusler.
     
29. One of the problems, as Hochhäusler explained in my conversation, is that “filmmaking or media-making is, in Europe, still mostly a national affair.” In Germany, for example, a film production is required to spend more money than it receives in the federal states whose tax-based subsidies it relies on in order to get off the ground in the first place. This makes it difficult, even with European co-productions, to cross borders.

Distribution Sources:

Several Hochhäusler films are available in English-subtitled DVDs on amazon.com, including The City Below, I Am Guilty, and This Very Moment (Milchwald), and Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation. For those who don’t need subtitles, all of his films are readily available on amazon.de.

The Lies of the Victors has yet to be acquired for release in the United States, but the DVD will be available in December in Germany.

Marco Abel is professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and currently chair of the Department of English. His most recent book is The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Camden House, 2013), which was awarded the German Studies Association’s award for Best Book (2014).

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