BILDER AUS DEM ALLTAG

Interview with Händl Klaus

Your film MARCH concentrates on the families, the relatives of three young men who have killed themselves in a suicide pact. How did you arrive at this subject?

15 years ago I was visiting friends in South Tyrol for a few days when this actually happened. It came as such a blow: the people could hardly talk about it. And there was no apparent motive, there were no suicide notes. One of my friends had known the three men involved since they were children; they went to school together, and then they worked in a factory and in various small companies. Afterwards I went back to the village a number of times, but I didn`t want to bother the families involved. I just wandered around the village again and again, and I met my old friend. I tried to understand what in the end is beyond understanding. From the outside it looks like a denial of this existence, and the others have to continue living with this denial.

In your film the three young men are students. In real life, however, they were working men. Why did you make that change?

I wanted to open up the village to the city - to make Innsbruck and the university there a possible point of escape - and in the film one of the young men is from a completely different city. He is the least accessible of them, because we don`t see his family; we only meet his landlord in the village. He is an empty space, of which there are so many here.

You adopt a realistic approach to telling your story; you have your protagonists speak in Tyrol dialect, you show them performing everyday tasks like putting away socks and frying schnitzels...

Those are scenes from everyday life. That`s what life consists of, even after a tragedy like this. It is as though everyday life has been dislocated, however, and the dislocation continues for a long time, and then takes over at times. But you still have to put away socks, eat and sleep. And you ask yourself questions, or perhaps you don`t. In the end we have seen nothing that provides us with a key; there is nothing that can give any explanation for what has happened.

You also employ formal techniques to depict the abyss in the everyday lives of the protagonists which has been opened up by the suicide of the three young men. This is especially apparent in the editing, where the most significant feature is what you omit. This makes everything very stylised, composed.

Yes, editing is composition, the material becomes rhythmicised; I`m particularly fond of this phase. And I was very fortunate to have a wonderful editor working alongside me: Joana Scrinzi. In the vast majority of cases we saw eye to eye almost immediately. We tried to shape the narrative by means of the omissions. To make it possible to perceive what is missing, many things are only implied - and later, in another context, they are picked up on. There are thematic sequences, objects as leitmotif, and it is similar on the sound level. And we really had an immense amount of material to draw on, 90 hours of it. The editing process was spread out over two years, with very long pauses, and this was also helpful.

On the one hand the film seems composed and stylised, while on the other hand the individual scenes come across as very realistic. How was it possible to achieve this integration of realism and stylisation?

In the first place the point is to capture something like authenticity of life, to get performances from the actors that you can really believe in. It has to feel "right"; it has to "strike a chord". This might mean modifying the dialogue depending on the actual location you are using, or that part of the script has to move in another direction because earlier scenes have been changed. The stylisation derives on the one hand from Gerald Kerkletz`s camerawork; the way he composed the shots did a great deal to create the omissions that were so important to us. And then in the editing room the "plausible material" was cut again and again; we were looking for places with associations between scenes, or dissociations.

Your ensemble contained both professional actors and ordinary people. How did you work together with them in order to achieve this authenticity?

We collaborated to get the feel of each individual situation. The people who were not actors had an instinctive feeling for it, and I was very lucky there. And sometimes I asked the actors not to think so much about their interpretation of the part - and instead to let themselves go.

You are yourself a trained actor. Did you also show the actors what you meant by demonstrating how they should play a scene sometimes?

No, I wanted it to come from within themselves. If they seemed to be stuck I would simply think out loud and suggest possible motivations, to give them something they might be able to use as a jumping-off point, or I would suggest a change of direction.

Since your film takes place over various times of the year, you filmed in sections, a total of 14 weeks spread out across different seasons. Did this fragmentary approach to the shooting also have an effect on the form and content of the film?

There was a dramatic structure of colour - in the first part, after the prologue, yellow is predominant, in the winter section it is blue, and in the second summer section it is red - and since we were not shooting chronologically, our props department was always prepared for all the colours. But after the first three weeks, when we shot interior scenes independent of the weather, some of which followed on from each other, we made our first attempt at editing and realised that our concept of deliberate omission rather than exhaustive narrative could actually work. The script, which initially would have resulted in a three-hour film, was therefore thinned out; we gained the confidence to omit significantly more from the very beginning.

Händl Klaus was talking to Anna Katharina Wohlgenannt, April 2008