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Jeden Monat nähern sich unsere Kolumnisten, die Berliner Filmemacher Dominik und Benjamin Reding, dem jeweiligen Heftthema
auf ihre ganz eigene Art und Weise. Geboren wurden die Zwillinge am 3. Januar 1969 in Dortmund. Während Dominik Architektur
in Aachen und Film in Hamburg studierte, absolvierte Benjamin ein Schauspielstudium in Stuttgart. 1997 begann die Arbeit an ihrem
ersten gemeinsamen Kinofilm „Oi! Warning“. Seitdem arbeiten sie für Fernseh- und Kinofilmprojekte zusammen.

Each month our columnists, Berlin-based filmmakers Dominik and Benjamin Reding, approach the respective issue-specific theme
in their very personal way. The twins were born on January 3, 1969 in Dortmund. Whilst Dominik studied architecture in Aachen
and film in Hamburg, Benjamin graduated in acting studies in Stuttgart. They started working on their first joint motion picture “Oi!
Warning“ in 1997. Since then they have tightly collaborated for TV and cinema film projects.

J ürgen Prochnow on the Rhine, standing on a car ferry near Cologne. Peaceful land- own films, press- and festival screenings that I got to know cinemas: The Majestic in
scape, pensioners, day trippers, morning fog, a proper postcard idyll. Not quite:
Leeds, a real Nickelodeon, tiny, musty, overly warm, in a brick lane, a typical British
the young, innocent-looking Prochnow is being observed, filmed, his car registration working-class side street. A cinema box office with little curtains and a chubby lady
number is being noted. The pensioners: officials from the Federal Intelligence Service, behind them. She sold the tickets in hearty Cockney English. Six paying visitors. I
the day trippers: police officers, Prochnow: a left-wing radical terrorist on the run. thought Jack the Ripper was among the guests. The State Cinema in Sydney, cinema
These are the first minutes of the film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Directed architecture like a film set, oversized, marble-monumental, designed, to put it mildly,
by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, based on the novel of the same in the Ben-Hur look or Moorish historicism or Art Deco rococo. Hans Poelzig’s Babylon
name by Heinrich Böll. The feature film, shot in 1975, will be screened in the My Film Cinema in Berlin, during a test screening with the WDR editor in charge. He visited it
series in a matinée at Kurfürstendamm. The film academy invites you to the event. In together with his wife. In the matter-of-fact anteroom, a short, equally matter-of-fact
My Film, public figures show their very favourite films. People such as Anne Will, An- conversation. And only now in the light did I see, his wife had cried during our film.
gela Merkel, Paul Breitner, Judith Holofernes, Sir David Chipperfield, Jean Paul Gaul- The cinema was always the most modern building around, a deliberate symbiosis of
tier. Today, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth. The the zeitgeist of the latest films and the zeitgeist of the latest architecture. In the 1920s:
cinema, a plush thing from the 1950s, is well attended. Invited guests. Among them, Nosferatu, Caligari, Metropolis, hence spikes and points, “expressionist” architectural
as far as they have been successfully contacted by the academy, the film protagonists decoration, pyramids of light bulbs; in the 1930s: New Objectivity á la M. a city Looks
from back then: Angela Winkler, playing the disgraced Katharina Blum delicately at for a Murderer, hence strict cubes, window bands, neon lines, emphasising the sharp
the beginning of the film, hard towards the end; Jürgen Prochnow, her film carnival edges and in the 1950s: vaudeville films, curved lines, candy-coloured neon cascades,
acquaintance, quietly and thoughtfully playing the terrorist, deliberately un-“terrori- shiny materials, physical, feminine, almost eroticizing. Then came television and the
stic”; director Volker Schlöndorff, still energetic, polyglot, cinema crisis and the economised multiplex box. Cine-
polite-professional; and, it goes without saying, Minister mas that neither encourage people to look, nor to won-
of State Claudia Roth, cheerful, even a little nervous in der, nor even to marvel. Perhaps one reason for the
front of all the real-life, slightly aged film celebrities. Ac- empty cinema halls of today. “No, he wasn’t pushy. He
tress Alexandra Maria Lara, felt to be the youngest on was tender.” On the My Film screen: the big interrogation
stage, leads through the programme. “Is there any beer?” scene. A brawny male squad of detectives puts Katharina
Theo, looking around uneasily, doesn’t know or recognize under pressure, aggressively pre-wording her statements.
anyone here. “Yes, in the foyer, at the bar”. “Okay if I take Nevertheless, she insists on the word: “Tender. If it says
it inside?” “Yes.” He nods with relief, goes off. Sometimes intrusive, I won’t sign!” I hear no more gurgling of the
I like to do that, take someone to something that doesn’t beer bottle, no more quiet typing on the mobile phone. I
fit or that everyone thinks doesn’t fit. Such as taking Theo Foto: Capitol-Kino, Berlin, Architekt Hans Poelzig, entworfen 1924 turn around: Theo is staring at the screen, highly concen-
along today. He works as a bricklayer, goes to Deep House trated. Now Katharina Blum returns to her flat, which has
parties and, although he has such an old-fashioned name, been trashed by the special police squad, disgusted by
is 24 years young. Every now and then, after his shift, after Fotografie 1933, Sammlung Reding the sight, angrily throws aside the last piece of furniture
dancing the night away, he comes to see me and reports: that is still somehow “straight”. Then the reporter from
“In the morning, on my way to work, at the city-train sta- the “newspaper” arrives. He has questions, but that’s not
tion, I suddenly cried,” he said yesterday, amazed at him- why he came to see her: He gets pushy. Katharina re-
self. “I’m so happy and, at the same time, I think the world is coming to an end.” His claims her lost honour. She shoots him. The lights in the audience are turned on
girlfriend is pregnant, he has known that for a few days, her and his first child. Theo again. Silence for a moment, then applause. Intense, genuine. Later, in the foyer, Eva
met her at a party, in Cologne, when he was there on assembly. “Now she’s in Colo- Mattes leans against the bar with a coffee, talks to Claudia Roth, then smiles invitingly
gne, with her parents, looking for a flat.” And then, gloomy, uncertain: “I’ll go and at me. “This sentence, not pushy, tender, it has always stayed with me, for a long
join her later ... maybe.” In the film, after the turbulent carnival scenes, a first quiet time, since a TV broadcast of the film, many years ago.” Eva Mattes nods. “Films in
moment. Katharina still happy and light-hearted before the dishonouring by police which there is a real concern, a deep need, from which something sticks, a look, a
and the headlines of the “newspaper”, embraces the beloved stranger. Bricklayer gesture, a sentence. Sometimes you don’t realize why until much later.” Theo stands
Theo returns to his seat in the screen light, the beer bottle clinking. “Crack!” Theo apart, staring at his mobile phone, typing a message. I do ask him the question I was
opens the crown cap with his lighter. Two, three matinée guests turn to us, ah, I re- trying to deny myself: “Hey, did you like it?” And look at him expectantly, almost like
cognize Eva Mattes, after a screening of my first film we once talked at length. Now a scientist scrutinizes the test object in a complex experiment. Theo hesitates. “Sure...
she smiles reassuringly at me, at us. I relax, Theo reads messages on his mobile You could drink while you watched.” He senses my discomfort, my disappointment.
phone, I look at the auditorium. A cinema as one imagines a cinema to be: a little bit Then suddenly, with genuine joy, “And that she shot him!” “Yes...? Why?” “Well, he
of the past, a little bit of glinting from bag-shaped lamps, gold strip glitter, economic was impossible with her!” They are still standing in front of the cinema, talking, smo-
miracle stucco. I hardly knew the genre of cinema architecture. I’m not a cineaste like king, waiting for the taxi: Boot film captain “Kaleu” Prochnow, Tatort-thriller commis-
the others in this room, representatives of a time when cinema, the glowing rectangle sioner Mattes, Downfall star Lara, Oscar winner Schlöndorff, in the drizzle, unrecog-
on the wall, was the only opening: into another world, other thoughts, even the illicit nized. Then someone waves from the other side of the street, shouts: “Got your mes-
ones, beyond church, parents and the living room at home. It was only through my sages! Yes, sure I will!” A colleague of Theo’s who is now giving him a lift to Cologne.

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