René Frölke - Of the Salamamder's Espousal with the Green Snake
The trailer of my friend René Frölke's long feature documentary, soon to be screened in one of Germany's major documentary festival. A few weeks ago, walking in Midtown Manhattan with René, I asked him: "What prompted you to make this movie?" He replied: "We met this family. We loved them, and they loved us." And that was it. He told me he was fascinated by the way that man - the painter - moves. He wanted to make a movie about the way he moves. A movie about a movement. Whether he was painting or passing the floor cloth, he had the same kind of careful, intense, and systematic movement. But then as the shooting went on, the movie opened up to embrace the whole of that man's life: his family, his mother, his town... Here is something else he told me: that in a movie, every single shot (plan) is, and should remain, a fragment. The fragment of a life that's bigger than the movie. By joining up shots in such a way that they flow with a kind of fluid continuity, most of the time editors just create illusion, and they use music as a finishing that makes up for the imperfections of that building process. That's not what René's movie is about. In line with the Dardenne Brothers, van der Keuken or Depardon, his camera is but a window, the bold and humble mediator of an encounter...