14  Peter Przygodda

I talked with Peter in his editing suite at the Bavarian Studios outside Munich. Peter worked with Wim Wenders from the latter’s film school graduation film onwards. Before I could settle to the agenda he launched a scathing attack on the state of German Cinema.

PP:… and such a country with such a heritage of film making – doing only bullshit here – just to make more money.

RC:I think with some exceptions – its not just Germany.

PP:That’s a whole European situation – I mean, but in Germany it’s worse. The English Cinema, there are some people – it’s not that way – in France too – you can have some hope. So many national cinemas with so many film languages – its such a richness. It will be destroyed by globalisation – everybody in Germany, students in Film School – they try to be like the Americans (shouting). But leave it to them, they’re doing it perfectly, so there is a loss of identity!

I can only tell stories where I come from, what I know – that’s totally missing. I count myself as a tiny little part in a working machine.

RC:So let’s go back to the beginning.

PP:I was born in Berlin on 26th October 1941 – just before the disaster of Stalingrad – that doesn’t mean anything. My parents had some problems with the Nazis because of the name, Pryzgodda. We had to prove our racial purity. In East Prussia they found some people from the beginning of the 18th century. So we are German but my mother has a passport ‘Eastern Baltic with a Nordic influence’ – absurd!

So my parents were good Nazis or ‘yes’ sayers.

Father was a kind of engineer and then he went to the Reichsarbeitsdeinst – military formation – to build the autobahns. After that the war – wounded in 1942. Then after the war father and mother split-up. They divorced and I grew up with my grandparents.

I went to school and afterwards I wanted to study architecture, and then I gave up and stayed at the construction company. A lot of friends in Berlin – painters, artists – I was in that scene. I went to France – stayed there for a year. I painted and sold paintings at the Cannes Festival in the restaurants. ‘Aux Bel Assise’¹ – there’s one hanging there. It was 1967 and then I was a kind of cineaste, but I never had the idea of getting into the business. Until twenty-five years old I really didn’t know what to do with my life, but I knew the French New Wave. I loved ‘Last year in Marienbad’² – the formality. In 1967 I went back to Berlin and I needed money. A friend of mine was a screenwriter. He said go to CCC Film Studios. You can earn 90 marks a week. I went there and worked the numbers. There was no machine – on the positive, on the rushes – and that was my start!

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My first editing job was my own short film I made in 1969. It was not bad. I was an assistant at that time. It was a moment – The New Wave – the German New Wave. ‘Grandfather Cinema is dead!’ was the slogan, and that was the right time and the right location. I was in Munich, which was really the capital of German Cinema. Everybody knew everybody. One of the last I met was Wim Wenders.

I’d just edited three or four feature films and then he asked me, through somebody else, if I can help him with his last film at the Munich Film School. So I worked with him. Then he came out of Film School and made his first feature film ‘The Goalkeepers Fear of the Penalty’.³ Then we became friends.

RC:What was his Film School film like?

PP:You don’t know that film – ‘Summer in the City’?⁴ He was learning more than me at this point. ‘Oh it’s so lovely, I like this shot’. ‘Wim, okay that’s enough, let’s cut it there – it’s too much – you have to think about the proportions’.

I think he was learning until the last films. Everybody needs everybody. Every film starts new. If somebody tells me he is a pro then I only can say forget it. You are learning continuously. If you are stopping to learn and you think you are ready, then stop totally – you are closed.

The young Peter Przygodda in Wim Wenders ‘The American Friend’ (Courtesy of Peter Przygodda)

In Germany they started to have ‘sound editors’. I think Germans don’t like their language anymore. It’s to show we are international. I was used to doing all the sound editing for ourselves and I am very proud of ‘American Friend’⁵ and ‘Paris Texas’⁶ in this respect. If you can’t cut some bars out of music then you are not a picture editor!

RC:Were you musical when you were young?

PP:I played the banjo because we couldn’t afford a piano. It was hard times. I played in a Dixieland combo. Musically I’m normal – doing the picture cut you have to love music anyway. If you are not musical I think it is very hard to cut picture. I have to work on two tracks from the beginning even to let the dialogue breathe.

The disadvantage of working on Avid is that the screen ‘flatness’ is deceiving. Not seeing on film is a mistake for features.

That fascination of the first years is the tension (I found it out later) to make a scene work like I haven’t seen it before in a film, and that brought me to another idea; that my generation was just at the point when there was no new film. We just made it out of a deja-vu process, because every film was ‘tort’ at that time too. It was just to make it work like we have seen before. We are not the inventors of cinema and it fascinates me. I was trying and trying and later I worked out that I was just trying to make it work like in films I had seen before. That’s a learning process how images can breathe – can tell a story – not imitation – a process of making it work in the same way, becomes deja-vu.

There’s a feeling in your stomach that it works even if it is ridiculous. There’s one example: in ‘The Goalkeeper ‘ we had a problem with continuity. I said to Wim, no way, we can’t cut out but it’s boring. We have no way to put the two shots together. Then I had an idea. Wim – he’s a good guy – he’s shooting some inserts – out of his stomach – he doesn’t know for what – an impulse. It was a closeup of an apple on a tree. I put that in between and it worked. It worked in that kind of deja-vu process, but with a different method, and you have to feel it.

You have to work on Avid completely linearly. For example if you think a cut is okay go back four cuts and look at the whole scene – how it’s running. You can only judge it in the combination of four cuts.

My method is to first to do a rough cut according to the script but continuously real cuts, otherwise you have no idea what is working. Then fine cuts with manipulations, that is, structural changes.

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The real crazy people are not working in the cinema anymore they are in the Internet video business. We have just opportunists. All their fantasy goes into their careers not their films. The surface is everything. It sometimes seems to me that the younger directors are older than me.

My advice to people who want to be editors is that the job of editing is to avoid cutting. You must first look and then cut as little as possible. The need of a cut belongs to the story. Go to a museum and stand in front of a painting, read into it. Now the process is making one image out of many – MTV.

Editing is about trains – toys – playing – back and forth. Study ‘F for Fake’⁷ – there’s everything in it. Playing makes it fun and enjoying it is essential.

I’m living partly in Brazil, which I have known since 1976 when I was on a lecture tour for the Goethe Institute. We have a house down there near Salvador. I have been married to a Brazilian for twenty-two years. My daughter has two nationalities and if there is no work in Germany or the world I am back in Brazil.

I made a documentary in 1979 – ‘Born as a Diesel’ – two hours long. It was shown in the Edinburgh Festival at that time. I cut it myself – it was horrible. To fight with yourself is not the best situation. I also made a documentary on a woman taxi driver in Los Angeles.

Peter Przygodda at the Steenbeck and in front of a digital machine (Courtesy of Peter Przygodda)

‘Nick’s Film’ (‘Lightning over Water’⁸) – my version was too strong for Wim. Then he made his own version, which was much smoother with lots of changes and his own voice over.

RC:Yann Dedet believes that an editor has to be amoral to avoid taking an attitude to the film so that you only react to the material as it is.

PP:Completely right – you have to stay with the film to react to it. You have to change for every film. Someone is saying tell me about your special style. I am saying ‘What?!’ There is no style because I have to get the style that is already in the material. I have to purify it. If I had my own style I wouldn’t be working anymore.

When I’m not editing, for years I have done my own visual notes. I also do photography and collages. I seldom go to the cinema, but I read – at the moment on the Renaissance. I write poems as a reaction to something. My language is a wonderful playground – it is my home.

Notes

1.  Aux Bel Assise (?) – sadly no restaurant of this name can now be located in Cannes.

2.  Last year in Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais’ elegant conundrum of a film, starring Delphine Seyrig.

3.  The Goalkeepers Fear of the Penalty – Wim Wenders, 1972.

4.  Summer in the City – Wenders, (1970). Peter worked with Wenders from this point. It is one of the most impressive collaborations between director and editor that I have ever come across. This director is very committed to European Cinema in particular. For instance he is President of the European Film Academy.

5.  American Friend – Wenders, 1977.

6.  Paris Texas – Wenders, 1984.

7.  F for Fake – Orson Welles, 1976.

8.  Lightning over Water (Nick’s Film) – Wenders, 1980.