Peter Nestler: 01

30 March, 2017 - 19:00
KASKcinema

Jean-Marie Straub once strikingly characterized Peter Nestler as a “Documentarian Not Reconciled”. Here is a filmmaker, he suggested, who does not seek to capture reality to make it correspond to preconceived conceptions. He simply attends to what is before him: to people and their everyday environment, their roles in processes of production and change, their testimonies of injustice and resistance. Most of all, he lets people speak, rather than speaking for them, putting confidence in what they have to say, rather than reiterating what they are expected to say. This is how the filmmaker succeeds in framing the world anew: by paying the utmost attention to concrete realities and voices that are all too often ignored or discarded. Hartmut Bitomsky, another avowed admirer of Nestler’s work, described this approach as one of Finden, Zeigen, Halten (finding, showing, holding): like an archaeologist patiently and meticulously digging into the soil of material life, uncovering and preserving traces of histories that continue to haunt the present.

In the presence of Peter Nestler.

Am Siel / By the Dike Sluice

Peter Nestler
,
DE
,
1962
,
35mm
,
b&w
,
12'

Peter Nestler’s first film, made in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich, is a portrait of a small and quiet seaside village in East Frisia in Germany, seen from the perspective of an old dike sluice. The text, written and narrated by poet and artist Robert Wolfgang Schnell, speaks with candour about the history and life of the village and the toil of the fishermen, subtly evoking the transformation brought by war and the inevitable change caused by the disappearance of traditional livelihoods. “This is something fundamental: the concrete is so foreign to us; the viewer is no longer the subject of the images, no one is. We can only take possession through fantasy, which is external to things. The commentary — with its impossible self — is still trying, but the dike sluice in the image is only one thing among others.” (Hartmut Bitomsky)

Itinéraire de Jean Bricard

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
,
FR
,
2008
,
35mm
,
b&w
,
40'

Based on the eponymous book by Jean-Yves Petiteau, Itinéraire de Jean Bricard is composed of long journeys along the Loire River, shot in silvery black-and-white. This is the place where Bricard grew up during the German occupation. Observations of the land and the water accompany Bricard’s narration, recorded by Petiteau in 1994, about the rich history of the region, from commercial fishing and farming in the 1930s, though the Occupation, the Resistance and its brutal suppression. The  film is dedicated to Peter Nestler.

Die Donau rauf / Up the Danube

Peter Nestler & Zsóka Nestler
,
DE
,
1969
,
16mm
,
colour
,
31'

Peter and Zsóka Nestler’s films are history lessons relating the past to the present, the old to the new. At the beginning of this film, we listen to a traditional Hungarian song about the history of the Danube (“...the wind blows from the Danube...”), set against images of a potter’s hands shaping a vase on a wheel. We hear a young boy in a classroom describing in detail the facts related to the Battle of Mohács, in 1526. The film was shot in the summer of 1969, in beautiful colour, and documents a series of journeys up the river on a steamboat. Many-layered narratives unearthed from the ancient and recent past blend with the slow progression of the riverboat, the moving landscape and images of people at work. The film addresses the cultural, social and political history of the river by bringing together scattered histories, from remains found on the riverbanks to the history of shipbuilding and commerce between the two world wars, the peasants’ revolt in the 17th century and the horror of the Holocaust (through a poem by Miklós Radnóti read by Zsóka Nestler). The archaeological dimension of the work by these filmmakers is summarized by one of the first images in this film, in which a boy is playing with a small heap of bones he digs from the soil, and which prompted the filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky to describe the main gesture of Peter Nestler’s films as one of “finding, showing, and holding”.