"The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"
was really my first film.
And to fly with it to New York and present it at the MoMA
do my very first interviews in English
and stay in New York for the very first time,
that was... unbelievable.
I think I was here for four days.
I don’t think I slept for one second.
It had a short life that film, because...
I had put all the music I loved into it.
And you see I was quite naïve and made it
for German theatrical use, and television in Germany.
So all the music rights I had only acquired for Germany
and theatre for a number of years.
I didn’t think the film was...
Nobody thought films had a longer life.
So I acquired Elvis and Roy Orbison,
Van Morrison and Creedence Clearwater
for just a couple of years.
And after that the film was practically dead.
It had a glorious time in New York
and was shown for a while.
It even got distribution later on.
But then we had to stop it, because...
to reacquire all those rights for international territories
would have cost more than the entire film.
So it is only now, 40 years later,
that we freed the film again.
I had always produced my films myself
so I always owned them,
which is of course great, you can control them.
But the drawback is that...
anything you own you can also lose.
And in 2000 I actually lost possession of my entire work.
Long, sad story.
Then for ten years,
I watched the movies that were still distributed
but they were owned by big commercial companies.
These commercial entities are not so much interested in restoration.
Because that means to invest and they rather exploit it.
And then after ten years, finally...
my wife and I, we had the cool idea
not to buy it back because I wasn’t so interested
in personally owning my work again.
That had gone wrong already twice.
I don’t think it’s an ideal form
for movies to survive to be owned by somebody.
I think it’s better if they own themselves.
And the only form that allows work
to own itself is a foundation.
So it took us two years to...
collect all that money,
with the foundation to acquire each and every movie back.
Now they’re all owned by the foundation,
and the foundation so far has already restored eight.
When you get into restoration and you really...
realize it’s a whole craft
and you realize the mistakes you can do
you can over-restore it, so all of a sudden
it looks as if it was shot today and it was digital
and that of course is not what we wanted.
So the basic idea was to make it look
as good as it could have looked in the first print.
So any hairs in the gate that were in the first print
I left them in because I figured...
well, we could take them out
but in that first print they were there.
So we kept all the grain,
we stabilized the image a little bit because the 16mm image...
always jumps a little bit, especially every cut.
So we stabilized it. I thought that was...
an improvement that was pleasant for the eye.
And every scratch and stuff...
of course we did our best to take it out.
But on the other hand, we still liked to give it that...
film look, not work against it,
what really bring it out as good as possible.
Scanned it in 4K but as it’s 16,
we finished it in 2K
because there’s not more information on it.
And I think it now looks as good as it can possibly look.
It was a great pleasure to see it reanimated.
Our inspiration was Walker Evans, strictly,
and we looked at a lot of his stuff.
Our inspiration wasn’t any other black and white films
but strictly photography.
Framing-wise, but also aesthetics.
Whenever I found anything in corrugated iron,
we stopped and shot.
Because I thought that was the coolest thing in black and white.
And of course for Alice,
that was the first time I was actually able to shoot in America.
It was quite an improvised shoot, we were a tiny little crew.
And I wanted to start it somewhere in the South
and we didn’t really have the money to go all the way to Florida.
So we traveled down and I said,
“When we see the first palm trees, we’ll start shooting.”
And that became North Carolina.
So for some reason it starts in Surf City, North Carolina.
It was also the first road movie that I shot.
That little film "Alice in the Cities" was...
a way for me to discover that there was a genre
where I could feel like a fish in the water.
It was very liberating to shoot with such a little crew,
and direct sound...
And on the road traveling,
and stopping wherever I saw something that I liked
and we invent the scene there.
Did you take a lot of still photographs on that trip?
I was still a Polaroid photographer.
And "Alice in the Cities" of course is the film
where people saw for the first time the I-670 land camera.
We got a prototype from them.
And even when the film came out
most people had never seen this camera where...
the picture came out, and then you saw nothing
and slowly it would develop in front of your eyes.
So that was the big fetish of the film.
But you were interested in Polaroids before that.
What drew you to Polaroids as opposed to Leicas
or printing in a darkroom?
I loved the idea that they only existed one.
I liked the idea that...
you took a picture and it only existed once.
Of course you could make copies
but I never did, and I liked the idea that it was...
You took it once and it existed once,
and it was just one piece that was...
entirely related to that second that you took it.
There was so much truth about the act,
and there is nothing phony about a Polaroid.
Because you can’t fake anything.
You can’t interfere with the process.
And once it’s there, that’s what it is, that’s all you get.
I really liked that; for years, I didn’t do anything else.
Later on, I went to a larger form and negatives,
and took photography more seriously.
But at the time,
that was the first camera you could actually do selfies with.
The first camera you can really be very spontaneous.
Also give those pictures away,
sometimes people just didn’t know...
you could do something and then hand it over to them
and say, “Keep it.”