Conversation with Eckart Stein
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Conversation with Eckart Stein Mercè Ibarz Eckart Stein led the international television workshop famed for innovation and creation, “Das kleine Fernsehspiel”, part of Germany’s second public network, ZDF, for 26 years from 1974 to 2000. The program has been going for 40 years continuously and is currently directed by Heike Hempel. There is no other non-news program that has lasted so long on TV. During these four decades, “Das kleine Fernsehspiel” has left a decisive mark on the renovation of independent cinema and television across much of Europe, North and South America, Africa and the Middle East. It produced the early films of Teo Angelopoulus, Chantal Akerman, Jim Jarmusch and Atom Egoyan and helped Rainer M. Fasssbinder, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard when nobody else was interested. Its work methods were used in the structure of the early years of Britain’s Channel Four and some of its proposals, such as theme-based nights, form an essential part of the German-French cultural channel, Arte. It could be said that Eckart Stein and his teams revolutionized the very idea of the production of images as well as programming. In the political and philosophical sense of images, “Das kleine Fernsehspiel” tested and created formulas, introduced light technologies to TV and avoided closed formats. Its professional commitment changed production into a close cooperation between program-makers and partners and promoted alternative forms of independent funding that made TV accessible to cultures and attitudes excluded from prevailing circuits. The program has an international reputation, consolidated by a good number of retrospectives, and was awarded the Galileo Prize by the Council of Europe in 1988. Thanks to Eckard Stein’s fighting spirit, the program’s extensive network of collaborators and the federal, non-centralist, control of German public television, “Das kleine Fernsehspiel” survived the retirement of its director in the year 2000. Eckart Stein has also formed part of other innovative structures, such as INPUT and the European producers’ training network, EAVE, since their earliest days. This conversation took place in Barcelona in August. Mercè Ibarz is an associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Pompeu Fabra University, where she gives classes on documentary genres and contemporary art. She organized and coordinated the academic program of the university’s first Masters in Documentary Creation (1998-2000). She is currently engaged in researching the documentary gaze and the history of the image. She is a journalist and writer. Her latest books are the research work, Buñuel documental and the book of short stories, A la ciutat en obres. Mercè Ibarz (M.I.). After 40 years of continual activity, “Das de la TV” or “La petite Lucarne de la TV” are good because kleine Fernsehspiel” is a surprising TV classic: an they contain the idea that it is a window or an open court, international laboratory, an audiovisual workshop committed which is what it is. The adjective “kleine” (little) has not been both to the pluralism of public right and the singularity and suitable for some time now. It comes from the early days diversity of creation. Not much is known about its history or when we were doing 25-minute broadcasts. Now they can its films in this country. I even found it hard to translate the be three hours or more, but “Das kleine Fernsehspiel” is an name because it is so precise... internationally recognized name and so it has stayed. You Eckart Stein (E.S.). It is precise and open… It covers the say it is surprising and I would add it is also paradoxical, first idea, i.e., to make television drama, or writing in the because we have always been the dreamers, the court broad sense, rather than televised theater. In English it jesters, and yet we are the longest-lasting ongoing program would translate as “The Little TV Play” - at least that is the and we are still the only international workshop for creation literal translation. The French translations “La petite Fenetre and innovation. No other television station has anything like 45 Observatori: Conversation with Eckart Stein it...we would have been thrilled, and it is still necessary for about networking. They were friends who recommended television stations to have something like it. projects to us or who worked in very close cooperation with German film festivals and schools, as well as people from M.I. What type of fictional work did you begin with? Lodz (Poland) and other countries. From the beginning, we E.S. With very subjective writing, a cinema style that the worked a lot with women, which wasn’t very well accepted French later called ‘author’s own’, that had the nature or back then, and in general with young people who were psychology of a personal diary. We followed the great rebels within their own cultures and couldn’t find funding in literature, the works of Robert Walser, Kafka and Musil. It their own countries. was a very personal type of fiction, with a spirit of experimentation and poetry. Most were first films, a criterion M.I. You also had an important budget from ZDF... we have upheld over the years, and included friends’ films E.S. Before the days of what I would call market that did not form part of what was called German culture, totalitarianism, during the 1960s, public TV was very i.e., they were foreign. We worked firstly with Eastern pampered, especially in Germany, but also in other places. Europe and then with East Germany, even though it was But, let’s not kid ourselves, even then there was a feeling of difficult. It was never easy, we have never followed the rules competition and the need to get the biggest audience of what we could call mutual complacency. shares possible. At the very beginning the budget was quite big, but they shortly began to establish a relationship M.I. You did and continue to do what the rest of ZDF and between big budgets and high numbers of viewers. This is ARD would not... a type of math that has nothing to do with political or E.S. We have had that privilege. We have had many aesthetic (i.e., humanist) math. Our budgets were tiny then privileges, except for budgetary ones. But we were able to and today they are even smaller by comparison. Today the work with foreigners, and for post-war Germans it was budget stands at 5 million euros. For a broadcaster that extremely important to know what was happening in the rest makes around thirty new productions per year that is of the world, because we were living in a ghost world... one extremely small. So, we had to be very modest in our that was post-historic. ambition of making films that were more expensive than our usual ones. We made very, very cheap films which were M.I. Tell me about the original team. Who were they and sometimes very well accepted in different countries. what were they trying to do? E.S. We were a group of friends. Our ambition was to have M.I. That was the case of Jim Jarmush’s first two films, plus this free space once a week for 25 minutes from seven in Chantal Ackerman’s Les rendezvous d’Anna and News from the evening. Our goals, both political and aesthetic, were Home, and Calendar by Atom Egoyan. Other big films somewhat extreme, a spirit of contradiction. We were a include Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons, Teo multidisciplinary group, about 12 men (more women would Angelopoulus’s first two films, Godard’s Every Man for join later), some of us coming from the theater, others from Himself and Daguerreotypes by Agnes Varda. writing or production and two were intellectuals. We were a E.S. We usually only do a filmmaker’s first film so they can pre-1968 group in fact, without any experience in the media. find better funding for their second. In some cases we have I myself came from the theater. I would have to say that the helped more and we are very happy to have done that. group’s honor lay in its spirit of utopia and the need to create Lately we have been very proud of having created, if you a different future. could put it that way, new Turkish-German cinema. Today it is very successful and doesn’t need money from “Das kleine M.I. You began at the same time as ZDF and with the Fernsehspiel” but at the beginning it did. Each age decision to make works by young people. Where did the first corresponds to a young cinema which is difficult to create program-makers come from? and get onto the screen. E.S. From a network of friends, which is why I talk so often 46 Quaderns del CAC: Issue 13 M.I. Angelopoulus, Jarmusch, Ackerman and Egoyan, I year and is also a museum piece. Well, it had a very have to say, were good bets. Maybe they would have made unusual supporter in the cardinal of Bethlehem, without it without you, but... whose help we could not have got it made. He was the one E.S. Or maybe not. Wim Wenders recommended Jarmusch who said, “The film must be made!” and with a cardinal to us. Wenders is a friend of the program, like Godard and practically standing behind the filmmaker, the police said, Angelopoulus. We don’t work with them anymore but they “Okay, that must be alright then...” During apartheid we advise us on who we should help.