New Documentary at IDFA + New Interview: Mr. Bachmann and His Class
A new interview + good movies from the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam
Dear readers,
This week I did a podcast with Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image, about new and notable documentary at IDFA, the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam.
So consider this a special dispatch, with an exclusive new interview. I spoke with the director of a film that shouldn’t be overlooked in 2021, Mr. Bachmann and His Class. It’s about a diverse classroom in a German town, observing 13-year-old students and their teacher—more on that below in my chat with filmmaker Maria Speth. It screened at IDFA, and originally premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
If you like the podcast, the interview, this whole thing, why not subscribe? I’m extending the “You’re Great” special offer because, as far as I know, you are still great.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Nic
NEW PODCAST NOTES
Eric Hynes on New Documentary at IDFA (Episode 87)
Eric Hynes is a critic, journalist, and curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image.
For more information on the podcast’s theme music by The Minarets (gratefully used with permission):
Follow the band on Instagram
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twitter.com/MinaretsMusic
NEW WRITING
Interview with Mr. Bachmann and His Class director Maria Speth
One of my film highlights this year was Mr. Bachmann and His Class, which I first watched as a selection of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival. Director Maria Speth chronicles a multinational sixth-grade class and their empathetic middle-aged teacher (in signature beanie knit cap) in Stadtallendorf, Germany. It’s a vital addition to the subgenre of classroom documentaries, and one that truly takes the time to sit with these energetic 13-year-olds as they learn to see the world in new ways. This is Speth’s second documentary in a career of both fiction and nonfiction film, and as far as I know, it is still available for U.S. distribution. I spoke with Speth through a translator during her trip to New York for DOCNYC, which was followed by screenings at IDFA.
What was your starting point for documenting the class?
It took a long time to prepare for this movie and lots of research went into it. What I wanted to do was make the town the protagonist of the movie. That was also Mr. Bachmann’s idea. We have been friends for many, many years. He talked about how the city was created by the Nazis to build those factories for weapons and arms.
That was my point of departure. The question arose, how do I get the history of the town and the presence of the town? How can I combine that in a movie? I wanted to show the reality of people who live there. Seventy percent of the population of the town are from immigrant backgrounds. The school seemed to be the perfect location to shoot such a movie because everybody has to go to school. That’s where they all sit together shoulder to shoulder.
So for me the question was, how does the multicultural composition of this class work out and how do the teaching and the learning work? The class was anything but homogeneous. Some students had been born in Germany or had been there for two or three generations. Others were more recent immigrants and didn’t speak German, so that was definitely a challenge for the teacher. And I was curious to find out how that would work when it came to teaching and keeping the class together.
What was particularly interesting to me was that normally in Germany you have these multicultural populations in large cities or metropolitan areas. But this was in a small town basically in the country. So I was very interested in finding out how it would function.
How long was the shoot? Did you edit while shooting?
The shooting of the film took six months from January 2017 to June 2017, which happened to be the last six months of Mr. Bachmann’s teaching. After that, he retired. And we were there seven times, each time several days, 30 days total. I didn’t cut at the same time . We were a small team, only five people: two camerapeople, myself, a sound technician, and an assistant. So we needed six months just to shoot.
We had 200 hours of shooting material. And it’s a challenge to structure that, to organize that. The cutting took three years. The first rough cut was 20 hours. Then we reduced it to eight, then to five and a half, then to the four and half it is now.
How did you build up a sense of trust with the students? They’re really still changing in how they look at the world, and even in their personalities. Did that affect how you chose what to shoot?
We took the time to build up a relationship with the kids. These are young people. They didn’t feel any pressure to show who they were or self-embellish. They thought it was funny that we were going to make a movie about our school because they thought their school was boring. But interestingly they cooperated and embraced us and integrated us into their circle, their class. We spent whole days in the classroom. We talked to them, we ate with them, we made music with them, . Sometimes we were shooting, sometimes we were not. That helped us build a relationship with them.
During these six months we could watch how the kids developed, how they changed. Rabia was a very good example. At first she was hiding behind her hood and didn’t want to be seen or heard. But over time she opened up and found the courage to talk about herself, her dreams and expectations. So the kids developed trust. Mr. Bachmann of course created this environment where they felt comfortable to open up because every opinion was heard and respected. He focused on the abilities of the kids and not on their deficiencies.
How would you describe Herr Bachmann’s teaching style? He’s almost a mentor and therapist too.
I was fascinated because I know him privately but I’d never experienced him as a teacher. I was impressed by the space he created for extracurricular activities and other things which were important for the kids. He did that in addition to his regular school teaching. IN a way he was a model as a whole person, with all his strengths and weaknesses, which in turn motivated the kids to have enough trust in him and in the school to talk about their problems, their issues, their dreams, their worries.
I was impressed by the structure of his teaching and his presence, and how important it was for him to create solidarity and empathy within the children. And that all this is possible in a regular German public school. For these kids, that was incredibly important. Hassan didn’t speak German very well and had no self-respect in the beginning, but because he learned to play the drums he gained this self-esteem. At one point he approached me, and he said, “In Bulgaria, I was good, and now I’m a bad student.” But through the music he was able to find himself.
When did you first meet Mr. Bachmann?
I met Mr. Bachmann 30 years ago. He studied together with this film’s cameraman, Reinhold Vorschneider.
How do you view the structure of the film? Partly it’s a chronology of part of the school year, but do you see it having sections or movements?
There was a natural dramaturgical path I followed from winter to summer. I also tried to create teaching units through the subject matter and themes. Then I showed the development of the protagonist. Then as I said earlier, for me at the beginning, the most important thing was the city, the town itself, its history. I wanted to tell the story of this town in images and pictures. I showed roofs of the factories, railroad tracks, bunkers in the forest where some of the weapons and explosives had been hidden by the Nazis. Those were my impressions when I first visited the town, and they were really important. I wanted these images to flow into the present, with the new factories, the new immigrants, et cetera.
It was very interesting for me to watch the kids’ reaction to the history of the town. There’s an information center which works together with the school. One day the class visited this center to learn about the history of the town, and it was fascinating to watch Regina’s reaction, when she said that 80 years ago, she could have been one of these young kids who were brought here to work by the Nazis in these factories. [in English] She came from Kazakhstan.
It’s interesting when Mr. Bachmann shares his own family background, how his family came to Germany from Poland in an earlier wave of immigration, before the war, and how they were made to change their name. What were the echoes for you with immigration today?
I didn’t want to make a movie about the story of immigration. I just wanted to capture the situation in this particular small town where so many different people of so many different backgrounds came together. This is a unique situation. I don’t know much about the general situation and I didn’t want to develop a theory or a thesis. I didn’t want to make a movie about a school either. I just wanted to make a movie about this town and these people.
Where are you based?
[in English] In Berlin.
Another aspect of Mr. Bachmann’s classroom is how the students feel comfortable to talk about subjects they’re still figuring out. For example, about gender and sexual identity—Mr. Bachmann turns Steffi’s negative comments into a dialogue. Could you talk about shooting all of that?
Early on I decided that, as the camera and the director, I would be strictly observing. We never knew when we entered the classroom what was going to happen, what subject matter was going to be touched upon. That made it very exciting and it was also very interesting to see that the kids developed enough trust in us and of course in Mr. Bachmann to talk about intimate, private matters, like same-sex relationships. They had enough trust and self-confidence just to talk about their own feelings and impressions. This subject matter was very important to the kids, and they wanted to discuss it with Bachmann. Mr. Bachmann created the space and time for the kids to talk about these issues.
Children feel when they are being taken seriously and treated as equals. Hassan for instance asked questions. He wanted to find out more from Mr. Bachmann, and it was exciting for us that we could participate in this discussion. With Steffi, obviously, you don’t talk at home about same-sex relationships, and we could watch the struggle Steffi had with the fact that her teacher had this opinion that he had nothing against same-sex relationships. She always asked again and again, because she was irritated and she told me and the team.
Mr. Bachmann keeps trying, and the children do absorb things.
[in English] Yeah, it’s special that Mr. Bachmann always asks. He gives time to think about why. He keeps asking why, why, why. It was very interesting to see what happens if you just give time for them to think about it.
What did Mr. Bachmann think about the movie, and what for example did Rabia think about it?
I think Herr Bachmann loves the movie. He’s very happy that there’s a documentation of his time as a teacher. And he was very helpful with the movie—he gave a lot of interviews to promote the movie. Rabia I think was okay with the movie. We all saw the movie four years later because there were delays for all sorts of reasons. By this time the kids were not kids, they were all adults. It was a happy reunion.
THIS CRITIC’S PICKS
Delectable selections for home viewing.
Rocco and His Brothers (Criterion)
THE END
Here I may end with a song.
ABOUT ME
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw!
Besides this podcast, I’m a writer and an editor. My features, interviews, festival dispatches, and reviews have been published in The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Filmmaker, and W Magazine (as well as dearly departed publications such as The Village Voice, Stop Smiling, The New York Sun, and The L Magazine).
I worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment, where I was for 15 years. I assigned and edited both the web and print editorial, hosted its podcast and talks and screenings, learned from brilliant writers, curated Film Comment Selects, and wrote a lot, including interviews with Spike Lee, Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and Frederick Wiseman.
Film Comment was subsequently awarded the Film Heritage Award by the National Society of Film Critics (an honor historically awarded to the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions).
Feel free to get in touch re: writing, editing, moderating, programming, podcasting, etc.
nicolas.rapold@gmail.com