Peter Nestler: 03

1 April, 2017 - 15:45
Sphinx cinema

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.

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In the presence of Peter Nestler.

Ödenwaldstetten

Peter Nestler
,
DE
,
1964
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
36'

A portrait of the Swabian village of Ödenwaldstetten, made in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich. The film shows the life and work of the inhabitants and documents how the process of industrialisation has impacted the rural culture of the village community. “For me, it is an image of Germany and its history encapsulated in one village. If you broach the subject of history in Ödenwaldstetten, like elsewhere in Germany, you’ll always end up confronting what happened during the Nazi period. But if you brought up this subject in those days, you’d be accused of ‘fouling one’s own nest.’ Therefore the film was controversial because it directly confronted the Nazi past, resulting in the form of the film being criticised as ‘unprofessional’. In Ödenwaldstetten, I only used the farmers’ statements. I lived with an old farmer for a couple of weeks and, whilst drinking beers during the evenings, I’d take note of his comments, which word for word became the so-called commentary... Before it was aired I was asked to make some modifications to it, with the argument that the public wouldn’t understand the film. The farmers’ statements couldn’t be presented on their own, they needed to be explained. I refused to make any changes to it and interpreted such a request as disdainful towards the viewers.” (Peter Nestler)

Die Judengasse / The Jewish Lane

Peter Nestler
,
DE
,
1988
,
16mm
,
colour
,
44'

The discovery of remains of the Judengasse in Frankfurt motivated Peter Nestler to reconstruct the history of the Jews in the city. During 800 years of Jewish history in Frankfurt, there were three communities. The first two fell victim to pogroms in the 13th and 14th century. The third existed for many centuries and became a spiritual center for many Jews around the world. The Jewish Lane — the city’s ghetto — was the workplace for many rabbis and philosophers of religion who are still admired today. Many famous court factors and Jewish bankers, like the Oppenheimers and the Rothschilds, came from there. But it was also a jail, unbearable in its gloomy narrowness, with its entanglement of houses, facades, annexes, the surrounding ghetto wall, and the stench of the sewer. It’s not for nothing that the locals called the ghetto ‘hell’. During the difficult Jewish emancipation in the first half of the 19th century, the Judengasse became both a tourist attraction and an eyesore for the city. The alley was finally torn down in the period between 1870 and 1890. Despite the murderous period of German fascism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust an astonishing amount of historic evidence of Frankfurt’s Jews remains. Nestler’s film traces this history from the middle ages up until the present day. Die Judengasse does not end with the demolition of the buildings. An important, harrowing chapter addresses the demise of the third community that still counted 30.000 members in 1932.