18 - An Interview with Klaus Lemke: “Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films”

Summary

Few directors in German film history have enjoyed as long and prolific a career as Klaus Lemke. With almost fifty films to his name, Lemke, born in 1940, is still going strong. His most recent feature, Bad Girl Avenue (2018), premiered at the Munich Film Festival, fifty years after his debut feature, 48 Stunden bis Acapulco (48 Hours to Acapulco, 1967), screened in Munich’s Filmcasino on November 30, 1967. Over the course of his long career, Lemke has increasingly established himself as one of German cinema’s great Einzelkämpfer—a lone warrior who acts as a veritable gadfly to the German film industry, which he never tires of attacking with public stunts (such as baring his behind on the red carpet at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival to show what he thought of the festival after it once more rejected one of his films) and polemic salvos that target industry functionaries as well as his peers with gleeful irreverence.

One does not have to agree with each of Lemke’s positions vis-à-vis the history of German cinema to appreciate the relentlessness with which he has been trying simultaneously to realize his singular vision of cinema and life—where one is inextricable from the other and both are deeply embedded in a (fever) dream of America and its cinema of physis—and to fight what in his view is a well-codified left-liberal attitude that has dominated (West) German film at least since Alexander Kluge and others penned the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962). Both his films and his polemics seek to clear the path for a different cinema, for a different life—a cinema and a life dominated not by a politically correct consensus but by dissensus, especially with regard to the state as a regulator of an aesthetic regime that ends up delimiting what can and cannot be seen and sensed.Instead of making films of representative value—films whose value derives from the fact that they are about a more or less weighty topic about which they seek to edify their viewers—Lemke, from his earliest short films on, preferred to make films about nothing else but an attitude towards life, towards how to live life.