“Will it be a film about temples?” The Indian consular officer asks the filmmaker, who comes to him for a filming permit. “No, it’s more of a ghost story,” he replies from behind the camera. Cut: An idyllic river with trees concretizes from a milky, misted surface, while a male voice sings to the crackling of a sound carrier of the illusion and transience of life and announces a “true story”. Then look into a dark, narrow archive room.
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Shellac records with voices are stored here, it is said from the off, over 7,000 in total, recorded during the First World War in the so-called half-moon camp in Wünsdorf near Berlin. There the empire, allied with the Ottomans, wanted to motivate Muslim prisoners of war of the British and French colonial troops to desert and to jihad against their colonial rule. At the same time, scientists used the opportunity for anthropological research, during which the then head of the sound archive of the Prussian State Library recorded “speech files” of the men present in the camp with the newly developed phonograph. These are the basic material of Philip Scheffner’s filmThe Halfmoon Files. They also show, among other things, how some of the speakers used the opportunity to make their own comments that went beyond the standardized format instead of the given sound sequences.
Scheffner has researched his material thoroughly. The self-trained radio play maker finds four years after his first experimental filma/cinThe Halfmoon Filesthe perfect form for a dense and illuminating film essay that enriches the historiography of German colonialism as well as the form of the documentary film. In memory of:The Halfmoon Filescelebrated its premiere in 2007 at the Forum des Junge Films, when today’s virulent preoccupation with the practice and consequences of German colonial policy was largely limited to the academic context.
Philip Scheffner’s next two film works also benefited from the combination of extensive research and self-reflective staging intelligence.The day of the sparrow(2010) concludes the passion and patience in bird observation with the study of German landscapes and unfolds a topography of mental and practical militarization long before the Bundeswehr’s first real missions abroad. The filmmaker’s unsuccessful communication with the institution’s press offices during the production of the film is incorporated as a meta-level.
In the moviesRevision(2012) andAnd-Ek Ghes(2016) the filmmaker also includes his protagonists in the filmmaking process. The occasion is inRevisiona report from the “Miscellaneous” section, which concerned the violent death of two Romanian migrants in 1992 who were hit by bullets in a field on the German-Polish border. A death that raised many questions, but was hardly noticed by the German public. And it was dealt with by the judiciary as a hunting accident without detailed investigation or even questioning of relatives and dropped.
Scheffner’s film is„Revision ”in a double sense: on the one hand, almost twenty years after the incident, by interviewing the victims’ families, he at least partially compensated for the legal failures of that time. On the other hand, it gives relatives the opportunity to listen to and comment on their own statements in a second loop. In addition to the resumption of the case, this creates a resonance space of the most varied of voices from the environment of the two victims – and at the same time a self-determined image of the Roma community concerned. In his spin-offAnd-Ek GhesScheffner then hands over the co-direction and camera to the family of one of the two men killed – the result is a semi-documentary fantasy peppered with Bollywood elements about moments of suffering and happiness in a Roma family in Berlin.
Scheffner’s best films are characterized by the fact that they succeed in bridging the gap between an audience primarily interested in political issues and the specialized film art adepts. This movement does not appear quite as productive and original in his last film so farAveragedealing with the refugee disaster in the Mediterranean.Averageassembles the three-minute clip, stretched to 90 minutes, of an overstaffed nutshell tumbling in the sea with voices and sounds from very diverse sources. This may be convincing as a concept in the gallery context, but for the film viewer it ends in the exhausting effort to somehow contextualize the audio snippets – until the credits provide at least a few explanations. Like all Scheffner’s films it wasThe accident has won multiple awards and was discussed ecstatically. Unfortunately, however, the eulogies often refer to what you can find out about Scheffner’s films in retrospect and less to their effect in the cinema.
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