Chrisitian Braad Thomsen talks to Kim Laidlaw

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Christian Braad Thomsen photographed by Rolf Konow

Danish filmmaker Christian Braad Thomsen is a man of many talents, with a CV encompassing feature films, documentaries and books about the silver screen. At the last Berlin Film Festival he showed his documentary, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands, examining the life and work of iconic director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was a close friend of Thomsen’s until his death in 1982. Thomsen took time out from promoting the film to talk to Dapper Dan about his approach to filmmaking, his influences and, of course, the legendary work of his old pal Fassbinder.

KIM LAIDLAW: You wear many different hats: filmmaker, director, film historian, author, documentary maker… How would you define yourself?

CHRISTIAN BRAAD THOMSEN: I am a filmmaker, but when I can’t get money to do my films, I write books about films—and about jazz, world music, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Sigmund Freud.

KL: By analysing films and making them yourself, you are on both “sides” of filmmaking—as a critic and as an artist. Do you have an academic approach to your own work?

CBT: I don’t have an academic approach at all to my own films. When I start a new film, this is always the first film in the world. But alas, this feeling does not last for long.

KL: As a film historian who analyses the films of others, how important is the analysis of others of the films that you make? You have won awards and received glowing reviews—how much is the success of your own work determined by the reactions of critics and awards?

CBT: The only thing that matters is the reaction of a few close friends because I know they tell me the truth. I would never trust a critic, because they fail again and again and are mostly interested in a cinema that is “modern” or “in fashion”. The great challenge for any artist is to step into his own time in order to describe it and yet to keep out of his time in order not to be corrupt. Bob Dylan expressed this paradox in the title of one of his best albums: Time Out of Mind.

KL: In the 1960s, the Nouvelle Vague started with the Cahiers du Cinema, the critical review in which Godard and Truffaut both wrote film reviews. As filmmakers who also played analytical roles regarding the films of others, how much have they been an inspiration on your work and career?

CBT: The first films of Godard and Truffaut were the very reason why I decided to become a filmmaker. They showed me that cinema was the most sublime of all art forms, uniting what other art forms only had partially: image, language, music, acting, tempo and silence. From Godard I learnt to improvise and from Truffaut to be prepared.

KL: So Godard and Truffaut influenced your career, but what role did Fassbinder play? You have said that he wasn’t such an influence on you—so what is it that attracts you to his work or to him as a person?

CBT: If I had been influenced by Fassbinder, I would have misunderstood him deeply, because he hated schoolteachers and all kinds of authorities. He insisted that everybody should find his or her own voice, and the most extraordinary thing about him was that he managed to keep his integrity within an art form that was increasingly corrupt. What attracted me to him was his deep honesty—and the fact that he was not only a father figure to all that came closer to him, but also our child.

KL: You say cinema was corrupt when Fassbinder started making films. What do you think of it now— is this still the case?

CBT: Hollywood was in deep crisis when Fassbinder started making films in 1969, and even Hitchcock was fading away. Today the crisis is deeper than ever, and the only hope is if younger directors learn from the motto that Alexandre Astruc gave the young directors of La Nouvelle Vague: make films in hand writing, use your camera as intimately as the poet his pen and the painter his brush.

KL: How has film changed since then and how is it changing now? What is the future of cinema?

CBT: Already the Lumière brothers, who invented cinema, said: “Cinema is an invention without future.” I hope I am equally wrong in fearing that the film industry, hand in hand with the national film institutes, will drown cinema in the deluge of the box office.

KL: You wrote Dreamfilms, the 100 best films of the century in 2002. Are there works that you would add to that now?

CBT: Yes. Kim Ki-duk: The Isle; Tom Tykwer: The Princess and the Warrior; Pernille Fischer Christensen: A Soap; Nils Malmros: Sorrow and Joy; and Jytte Rex: Silk Road, although the latter is unknown outside Denmark due to the boycott of The Danish Film Institute.

KL: Some might argue that, on one hand, there are those directors who are “pedagogical” (Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, yourself…) who create works of fiction as well as documentaries; and then, on the other hand, there are directors who are guided by the artistic ambition of their work, like Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Stanley Kubrick and Fassbinder. Has this been your experience?

CBT: No, I never thought of that, and I do believe that any great artist is utterly non-pedagogical. Bresson and Godard certainly are.

KL: Although Hitchcock could perhaps be in both categories—would you agree?

CBT: Yes, funnily enough! In most of his films he tries to meet the audience, where they are—but in his masterpiece, Vertigo, he asks the audience to meet him, where he is. Hitchcock was, of course, more successful than the audience, since Vertigo was a failure with both the audience and the critics.

KL: You have said that Hitchcock and Fassbinder are the greatest filmmakers—can you tell us why?

CBT: Hitchcock is the only director who is part of the whole journey of cinema—from the early British silent films in the ‘20s, through commercial thrillers in the ‘30s, to great Hollywood films in the ‘50s—and to the first TV series in the ‘60s. Hitchcock started making commercial films and, at the height of his career, he made avant-garde films in Hollywood. Fassbinder’s journey was the opposite: he started making avant-garde films and ended his career by making Hollywood films in Bavaria.

KL: In reference to Fassbinder, you have said, “Being an artist means to have contact with the child in yourself”. Do you mean that an artist is visionary and spontaneous, rather than carefully conceived, intellectual and planned? You love to improvise in your films—as did Godard—whereas Fassbinder was very prepared and precise… How does this affect creativity?

CBT: An artist must be able to do both. He must, like a child, have an unlimited access to his most hidden and unconscious sources. And he must, unlike the child, have the ability to strengthen and structure his sources. As a young director I loved to improvise in order to get as close as possible to a life that I wasn’t part of. Today my work is more stylized in order to withdraw from a life that I don’t feel at ease with.

KL: Fassbinder learned to make films for a larger audience. How important is it to reach a larger audience? You say you don’t like his “great international productions” but prefer his smaller, cheaper films. Are art and mass appeal mutually exclusive?

CBT: Art and mass appeal are not necessarily enemies and they go together for a few directors, mostly from Hollywood, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, Charles Chaplin’s City Lights, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction— and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. It was Fassbinder’s goal to create a new Hollywood around Bavaria Studios in Munich. And, had he not died far too early, I am sure he would have succeeded.

Originally published in Dapper Dan Magazine 13, 2016. Interview by Kim Laidlaw.