An epic documentary portrays the Berlin film mediators Ulrich and Erika Gregor – and easily tells the story of independent cinema.
Some people who dedicate their lives to the cinema—“cinephiles,” as they used to say in fake French—privately hope that it will make it cinema itself. After all, you can learn almost everything that makes up life from films.
It sometimes looks different from the outside. The skin becomes pale, the glasses thicker, film books, DVDs and film copies are piled up to the ceiling. Gaspar Noé’s film “Vortex” recently gave a very good impression of how it often looks at home with aging critics. Above all, however, he showed that even in the life of manic film lovers there can still be room for the “true love” of a partnership.
The uplifting documentary “The Gregors” provides the proof with the means of reality. Because even if you watch up to five films a day, you don’t necessarily shut yourself out of life. The prerequisite, however, is the knowledge of how to share the love of cinema.
The film tells a double love story, that of the world-famous couple who founded the Berlinale’s “International Forum” and before that the important “Arsenal” institute, a haven for valuable film art from all over the world, Erika and Ulrich Gregor. And her and our love of cinema. The film narrative covers eight decades and lasts 161 minutes; that’s just two minutes less than Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, one of those films that came to the West through the Arsenal. And it was largely through this mediation that they became classics.
As expected, time flies by. With the Gregory – and again and again for basic facts Senta Berger’s narrator’s voice – the director Alice Agneskirchner conveys nothing less than the history of non-commercial film culture in West Germany since the 1950s: the path from the student film culture movement to the municipal cinemas and a cinephile festival culture .
At the same time, he also talks about the key works of independent film. Films that have had an identity-forming effect on the critical post-war generation are of particular importance. The directorial debut of the Russian Sergey Bondarchuk, “A Human Destiny” (1959), would have been seen only in the eastern part of Berlin without the Gregors. In it, the later “War and Peace” director describes the ordeal of a Russian soldier who survived a German concentration camp and lost his own son on the last day of the war. The Gregors transport film copies through Berlin on a Vespa. Other important chapters are devoted to feminist positions at the time of New German Cinema and Claude Lanzmann’s documentary “Shoah”, which was screened in the Berlinale Forum in 1986.
Amazing finds from television and radio archives let the passionate film mediator Ulrich Gregor shine in all phases of his career – with his own way of camouflaging boyish joy of discovery with precise formulation art. He still succeeds: “The white screen demands that it be exposed to film again,” the 89-year-old once said.
Without saying a word about it, filmmaker Agneskirchner also shows what has been lost today with the apparent professionalization of museum film work. When film festivals are managed by managers and you first have to call yourself a curator in order to show a film, direct communication with the audience is often blocked. But, as I said, this isn’t the kind of film that lapses into cultural pessimism.
Anyone who wants to talk about love usually finds it difficult – especially in documentaries. It helps that Erika Steinhoff, born in 1934, and Ulrich Gregor, born in 1932, actually found each other like in a Nouvelle Vague film.
On December 4, 1957, the student happened to be sitting in a silent film that Ulrich had programmed in the film club at Freie Universität Berlin: “Menschen am Sonntag”, the collective film by Robert and Curt Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Eugen Schüfftan and Fred Zinnemann. The date of the encounter can be reconstructed easily, because all the programmes, there must have been many thousands, were carefully archived.
The rapprochement begins with a productive argument about the film’s image of women, which the 23-year-old finds far less modern than the reputation of this independent film classic deserves. (I recently experienced exactly the same, justified reaction from Dortmund students to whom I showed the film. But of course that is exactly the miracle of cinema: that even images that are almost a hundred years old immediately lead to current discussions.)
In fact, their enthusiasm for debating did not protect the Gregors from briefly being suspected of formalism during the politicized late 1960s. Anyone who saw intrinsic value in film aesthetic experiments at the time quickly found themselves in need of explanation. But the Gregors took advantage of the moment: When the Berlinale broke up in 1970 because of Michael Verhoeven’s anti-Vietnam War film “OK”, the festival had to reposition itself. Only with the International Forum of Young Films, which the Gregors used in their Arsenal cinema programme, did the festival acquire the reputation of a cosmopolitan film festival independent of industry and state interests.
There have been a number of films in recent years that tell film history and open it up to a new audience. The most successful is Mark Cousin’s The Story of Film. But no matter how stimulating commented excerpt montages are, something crucial remains hidden from them: the cinema as a place of film communication.
Maybe it wasn’t even Alice Agneskirchner’s intention when she tackled this film during the Corona period. But she captures what threatens to evaporate most quickly: the social aspect of the film experience. “Film is forever” was once an advertising slogan in the industry. That probably doesn’t apply to the fragile material of the film either, but certainly not to the cinema. Because it needs at least two people for it to exist: someone showing a film and another person coming to see it.
The subtitle of the film is taken from a late poem by Else Lasker-Schüler, which Erika Gregor quotes as the motto of life together: “Come with me to the cinema,/ There you will find what once was:/ Love!” a documentary is hard to find.
Come with me to the cinema – the Gregors. Documentary, Germany 2022. Director: Alice Agneskirchner. 161 mins
