“I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life”
wrote Natalia Ginzburg in LE PICOLLE VIRTÙ. Berlin based Renate Sami’s categorization-defying filmmaking on a variety of analogue and digital formats for over four decades drew from a similar conviction, often nudged by something that acted as a flash of inspiration – a memory, a piece of music, a dream, a place, or a text.
ES STIRBT ALLERDINGS EIN JEDER, FRAGT SICH NUR WIE UND WIE DU GELEBT HAST. HOLGER MEINS (1975) © Renate Sami
A film student put a Super-8 camera in Renate Sami’s hands during a student occupation of a hospital marked for demolition. That was 1975, when Sami first held a camera, a few years after Rudi Dutschke was shot at and the 1968 generation with whom Sami socialized in Berlin had factionalized. She was 40 years young then and was sharing a three-room apartment with Dorothea Ridder on Bundesplatz. Prior to filmmaking, Sami worked as a translator of politically conscious French and English writings to German that included authors like Walter Lowenfels, Jean Meynaud, Louise Michel, Serge Depaquit, and Régis Debray among others. Unlike many of her filmmaker-friends at the time, she didn’t go to a film school. Her first film was a bit of an accident.
Before moving to Bundesplatz, Sami used to live at Grunewald 88 which was the social hotspot for many intellectuals, militants, and filmmakers in Berlin—Holger Meins, Philip Sauber, Harun Farocki, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin—all frequented or lived there at some point. It is here that Sami met Holger Meins. While in prison on charges of an attack on the Amerika-haus in Berlin to protest the US invasion of Cambodia, of which she was later acquitted, Sami saw Meins for the last time in person. Holger Meins died in 1974 from a hunger strike against solitary confinement in prison, and by that time, those who wanted to engage directly in political action had gone separate ways from those who wanted to make films politically. Soon after, Renate Sami embarked on her first film ES STIRBT ALLERDINGS EIN JEDER, FRAGT SICH NUR WIE UND WIE DU GELEBT HAST. HOLGER MEINS (1975).
ES STIRBT… a film of radical simplicity that undertakes the difficult but clear objective of dignifying a subject of state, media, and collective persecution by not resorting to counter-history or political rhetoric, but by questioning the very nature of memory-making, an aim not too different from Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings from the late 1980s titled OCTOBER 18, 1977. To do so, Sami assembled a series of modestly staged interviews about personal memories with DFFB alumni who knew Holger Meins either as friends or colleagues. In the film, Ulrike Edschmid recalls Meins’ undemanding nature as a friend, Gerd Conradt speaks of assisting Meins with the camera for his film OSKAR LANGENFELD (1966), Hartmut Bitomsky reminisces about his differences while making 3000 HÄUSER (1967) together. Harun Farocki announces at the beginning of the recorded conversation that he will state merely facts and provide no explanations, but then, funnily enough, does exactly the opposite, to try and explain away how art and politics take different paths to reality. Helke Sander and Günter Peter Straschek recount their experience of making films for target groups with Meins, and Clara Schmidt remembers his last days before going underground. Through these near banal accounts with their stark unsentimentality, Sami audaciously manages to portray Meins as a typical rather than an exceptional figure from a significant historical moment in postwar Germany. ES STIRBT… was one of the first instances where art tried to challenge the mass media monopoly on the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) before many artists like Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, and Gerhard Richter did so on their own terms.
ES STIRBT…, which was printed with the money Sami received as compensation for her year in prison, has an unmistakable proximity to its contemporary films that deployed narration and testimonies to use the medium as a research tool, most notably, ERZÄHLEN(1975, Harun Farocki & Ingemo Engström) and FILMEMIGRATION AUS NAZIDEUTSCHLAND (1975, Günter Peter Straschek).
JACKPOT (1976) © Renate Sami
Though conversations and people talking to the camera would become integral to Sami’s filmmaking over the years, as would the use of still photographs as a narrative device like the ones of Meins at the beginning of the film, ES STIRBT… is far from setting off Sami on a set path of identifiable proclivities. Sami’s filmmaking would continue in its exploratory vein, open to be shaped by the world around her, choosing to be both reflective and responsive rather than being crafty, with an occasional drift towards conventionality like in her next project JACKPOT (1976) – a science fiction film set in Colombia, commissioned by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Soon after though, the freedom and compositional simplicity that marks her practice as a filmmaker will return to the fore and will persist in all the films she made then on. Her (now lost) video work GESCHICHTEN ERZÄHLEN (1978) was praised by filmmaker Rudolf Thome for its concreteness and sensuality. A text Thome wrote about the film signals its adjacency to concerns of second wave feminism, a premonition that sadly cannot be verified anymore.
CESARE PAVESE. TURIN – SANTO STEFANO BELBO (1985, with Petra Seeger), © Renate Sami
Sami’s most significant film from the 1980s is CESARE PAVESE. TURIN – SANTO STEFANO BELBO (1985, with Petra Seeger), an experimental film-adaptation where a text’s provenance within the biography of its author is accounted for. A text is not merely a generator of dramatic scenarios but a material source for motifs that may be rescaled for further improvisations as shown in AMERIKA VOR AUGEN ODER KAFKA IN 43 MIN. 30 SEC. (1978) by Hanns Zischler.
But before CESARE PAVESE, Sami made a somewhat surprising anti-nuclear single-take black and white short film, DIE SCHUTZFOLIE (1983). It was shot in the Jungfernheide park in Berlin where Sami used to take walks with her mother. In an uninterrupted take, we see a man trying to wrap himself in aluminum foil as a woman carrying a bandoneon sings a song about love. Sami’s directness here retains a quality of Lumières’ films, but such theatrical staging doesn’t reappear in her later films.
CESARE PAVESE is a correspondence between Sami and Pavese. Sami was fond of Pavese’s writings and structured the film in two parts, set in two places separately dear to the novelist. Pavese lived and worked in Turin, the setting for his novel TRA DONNE SOLE (Among women only) and was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, the backdrop of LA LUNA E I FALÒ (The moon and the bonfires). Both parts start out in train stations and unfold as quaint portraits of the urban and suburban locations – a café and a hotel in Turin, surroundings of the Belbo river in Langhe, the busy streets of the city, the scant traffic in the exurb. A few lines from the novels, a commentary on the motifs in it, and passages from Pavese’s journals that relate to the two places are recited. The film comprises two interviews with Pavese’s friends, one in each part. Massimo Mila, his friend from the student years in Turin sits in his living room recounting the life of Pavese the city dweller, his political persecution, and how his convictions were sometimes shaped by his love for a woman who worked for the Communist party. The second interview is with Pinolo Scaglione, Pavese’s carpenter-friend, at his workshop in the valley of Santo Stefano Belbo. Scaglione shares the funny anecdote of morphing into the character of Nuto in LA LUNA E I FALÒ and regrets not meeting Pavese in Turin, days before his death.
MIT PYRAMIDEN (1990) © Renate Sami
Back in the 1950s, Renate Sami was married very young to an Egyptian, she moved to Cairo, had a child, divorced, and moved back to Berlin in the 1960s. Around 1984, when she became a grandmother, she would often visit Cairo and was besotted by the city’s history and its daily life. That comes to bear strongly upon the two films she made there – MIT PYRAMIDEN (1990) and DIE FAHRT NACH KAIRO (1990). In MIT PYRAMIDEN Sami counterposes Cairo’s bustling streets, cacophonous marketplaces, and noisy traffic against its somnolent alleys and tranquil cafeterias where small musical troupes practice leisurely. Her interest lies as much in the present as in the archeological and architectural remnants of the past, history sedimenting into the rhythms of daily life. This city-symphony of Cairo and the neighboring ancient city like Memphis is punctuated by shots of a room, perhaps Sami’s, where excerpted historical accounts of the country from al-Maqrizi and Istakhri are narrated over still photographs of mosques and other ancient sites. The film ends with a series of long takes filmed through a car’s rear windshield, a setup that would also generate the hour-long dialogue less travel film DIE FAHRT NACH KAIRO, as the transforming cityscape of Cairo unravels as a moving panorama accompanied by an unsettling recollection of marital rape of a minor, read out from FIVE EGYPTIAN WOMEN TELL THEIR STORIES by Nayra Atiya.
MIT PYRAMIDEN (1990) © Renate Sami
In the late 1970s, being fed up with the climate of political witch-hunting in West Germany, Sami had gone to the United States. There she admiringly discovered THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1975) by James Benning and Bette Gordon in which a camera on the backseat of a car, for the entire duration of the film, recorded the changing scenes of different locations in America through the front windscreen as the car was driven around. One intuits that this encounter had some role in the long shots from the car in her Egyptian films. Both CESARE PAVESE and MIT PYRAMIDEN are diaristic films wrapped within an essayistic form, the latter even showing traits of ethnographic documentary. They poetically articulate an encounter between places and the filmmaker, a process of getting-to-know mediated by the camera. The carefully inserted voice in these films not only densifies the experience of these spaces, but also conveys Sami’s relationship to them without being descriptive. After MIT PYRAMIDEN, the essayistic form is more or less abandoned in favor of the diaristic as her films become increasingly personal – about her surroundings, seasons, friends, and travels.
WENN DU EINE ROSE SIEHST (1995) © Renate Sami
Music substitutes narration and acquires a central role, always functioning evocatively and sometimes emphatically, in short bursts co-mingling with phases of silence, and never to illustrate the images. In WENN DU EINE ROSE SIEHST (1995), brief shots of yellow, white and red roses and other botanical imagery are juxtaposed with Cathy Berberian’s voice from Luciano Berio’s Recital. In BROADWAY MAI 95 (1996), a collage of still frames and pan shots of sidewalks, street vendors, crossings, subway stations, shop windows, bridges, and car parks in the Manhattan neighborhood are collocated with musical spurts from Henry Purcell and Duke Ellington. SARAH SCHUMANN MALT EIN BILD (2015) is an observant portrait of Sami’s painter-friend Sarah Schumann in her studio while Ein Jahr (2011) is a weather diary filmed from Sami’s Kitchen window in Berlin. The crowning jewel of this period is FILMTAGEBUCH 1975–1985 (2005), her most autobiographical film, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of her social life composed of material from her personal archive. Footage from diverse geographies and timelines in different formats are edited together into an impressionistic diary. The penultimate shots in Filmtagebuch are from Turin, its streets, where a girl wanders into a café and later reads a book by Natalia Ginzburg as twilight washes over her, outtakes from CESARE PAVESE that didn’t make it to the film.
FILMTAGEBUCH 1975-1985 (2005) © Renate Sami
Filmmaking was not Sami’s only engagement with film. Along with her friends and filmmakers Ute Aurand and Theo Thiesmeier, she started Filmsamstag in 1997 at the Filmkunsthaus Babylon in Berlin-Mitte. This collective screening initiative lasting ten years mined several minor forms of non-commercial arthouse, documentary, amateur, and experimental films and remains a singular curatorial undertaking of its kind in the 1990s in Germany. Years later, Aurand made a tender portrait film of her friend, RENATE (2021).
My last memory of Sami is with Aurand from a couple of years ago in the foyer of Arsenal Cinema on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, all of us were waiting to see SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE (1992) by Ernie Gehr, a film Sami was fond of. I told her about a silly incident involving the head of a cultural institution in Brussels when I had curated some of her films back in 2019, screenings that she could not attend in person due to her ailing health. This person in question was outraged by the film program since it brought together films on Holger Meins and Cesare Pavese and didn’t feel obliged to camouflage his fury. I remember now that this story was a cause for amusement to her.
Renate Sami passed away in Berlin in December 2023.
Thanks to Ute Aurand for her help during the writing of this text.