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The Seer

About Frank Griebe.

Frank Griebe enjoys watching things. Not just films. Things in general. He likes to observe his environment. He observes landscapes, buildings, rooms, surfaces, textures, colours and forms, light and shadow. The world, in other words.

And he watches people. He watches what they do, and above all, how they appear while they’re doing it. How they move. The effect they have on others. What effect they wish to have on others.

Then he picks up a camera and observes more closely. He senses something in the things he examines and in the people he observes. He probes until he sees something he recognizes, then brings it to light. You might say Frank Griebe is a seer.

A seer in the original, mythological sense. A seer perceives something that others don’t. Even when they are looking right at it. Often it’s just a question of perspective. Or looking at things in a different light. Or from a different angle. Or examining things more closely. And of course it’s almost always a question of your angle on things.

A moving image can serve as a depiction of something or someone, but occasionally it’s also an expression of the subject depicted. With Frank Griebe, it’s always the latter. Why film something if there’s no opportunity to explore the essence of the subject? Its atmosphere, aura or spirit. Its soul, perhaps?

Frank Griebe observes as one who knows that film images can reveal the subject from within. And sometimes reveal what is hidden from us.

At times it’s only a hint, a fleeting indication. Here and there it’s more than that. A look aimed not at its subject but at its core.

I’m unable to be anything but very subjective about Frank Griebe. I’ve known him half my life. I’ve never made a film in which he wasn’t the cameraman. So to be very honest, I don’t know what cameramen who are not called Frank Griebe actually do. Maybe that makes me unqualified to talk about general camera work, but I’m pretty sure I’m qualified to talk about Frank Griebe’s art.

We got to know one another as movie buffs. Up until I was twenty-one I happily inhabited a film fan enclave, where I’d constructed my own little idiosyncratic universe in the world of film. It seemed to me more and more unlikely that I would ever come across someone who not only shared my passion for cinema but also the ritual of watching films the same way I did. Someone who might watch a film by, let’s say, Akira Kurosawa, at midday, a John McTiernan movie in the afternoon and maybe a Wim Wenders film in the evening; effortlessly keeping the impressions separate but at the same time able to make a connection between them. The apparent arbitrariness of the three names in fact followed a principle. The trio could also have been Fellini, Spielberg, Truffaut. Or Peter Greenaway/John Woo/Aki Kaurismäki. Or Jacques Rivette/Clint Eastwood/Andrej Tarkowski. The famous triple feature, Bambi Zombie Gandhi…with Frank Griebe, not a problem.

Of course all this has something compulsive about it, a bit like a runaway train. It has to do with addiction, but also with enjoyment. Above all, a passion for the endless variety of cinematic expression. When I met Frank Griebe in 1986 it seemed to me that I’d finally met the only other person on the planet who shared the same compulsive, derailed and addicted approach to watching films. Who felt the same passionate connection with the screen. And who also spent a lot of time reflecting on it. Especially about how the camera work affected the narrative style of the film.
How do they do that? How does Owen Roizman create suspense? How does Vittorio Storaro influence our emotions? How does Michael Ballhaus involve us with the characters? We often speculated about these things and didn’t even notice that in the course of these conversations we were already hot on the trail of these riddles.

Frank Griebe grew up in Hamburg. There he finished an apprenticeship at the Atlantik Printing Lab before moving to Berlin in 1985, where he took classes at the College of Optometry and worked at the Alhambra cinema in Wedding as a projectionist. His girlfriend worked behind the counter at the Moviemento cinema in Kreuzberg. When I started working there as projectionist I’d see this guy with glasses who would pick his girlfriend up late in the evening and rave with equal enthusiasm over the new James Bond movie or the new Claude Chabrol.

And who – another coincidence – never seemed to be tired. A big advantage. The late show at the Moviemento usually didn’t end before two in the morning but we always craved a ‘good-night’ film. The cinema was closed, and we had the choice of a good two dozen films for a very late night show. We kept the tradition going for years. At some point I began to programme films at Moviemento and countless movies – I can confess this now – were shown for the single reason that Frank and I absolutely had to see them again.

During this time we developed a common language that would prove incredibly useful for our first attempt as filmmakers. Since no sponsors showed any interest in my scripts we decided to bite the bullet in 1990 and finance our first short film by jointly raising the necessary credit. Frank was cameraman, I was director, and we both looked after production, sets, catering, transport – in fact everything for which we hadn’t found someone who would do the job for nothing. The film was not only an economic disaster for us (paying back the loan nearly wiped me out); it was also a salient lesson in the pitfalls of bad planning. (On the supposed last day of shooting we only had half the film in the can) and technical bungling (the half we had shot was underlit by about two aperture stops) – in other words, almost pitch black in places. But somehow, although all that was extremely annoying, I don’t remember a single moment when Frank and I looked at each other in despair. We were far too excited by the fact that we were finally able to shoot our own film. And if we weren’t finished then we just had to borrow more money and keep shooting. At some stage, after countless extra shoots and some pretty much improvised post-production, our film “Because” was finished. It was 35 minutes long instead of the planned 15 minutes and fell right into the gap – neither a short nor a long film – half of it too dark, and a bit verbose to boot. In short, a format that would be difficult to place anywhere. In spite of all that we were proud and excited – and insanely self-confident. So we showed the film to Heinz Badewitz, from the Hof Film Festival, and were invited straight away – which I still find amazing. Since then I’ve been convinced that success is only be achieved through surviving disaster, and with Frank, each disaster felt like happy necessity. However, since that time we’ve gradually succeeded in tackling things with a bit more clarity. Plus at some stage someone else started paying to make the films.

I’m often asked how things work between cameraman and director, in our specific case, and it’s not an easy thing to do. On the one hand, Frank and I share considerable unspoken understanding from working so closely together over the years, which you see in the certainty with which we approach the material. On the other hand, however, no one film is like another. You seem to start from the very beginning each time, and anyway, Frank has never ceased to keep surprising me.

How do we prepare ourselves for a film? Well, certainly the first thing we do is talk about the script together and check whether we agree on the fundamental issues in the script. Whether we find the emotional and intellectual challenges great enough to devote ourselves to the project, to the exclusion of all else, over the next few months of our lives. Everything depends on that. If you don’t agree on the relevance and intensity of the project then you won’t survive the long and exacting period of time terribly well. After that, a very important discussion needs to take place. How should the film feel? What sort of effect should it have? What should be the basic atmosphere? For me, this is one of the most important steps, since a distillation of the film’s character gradually emerges from these initial discussions, which often includes the production designer. The momentum for a particular direction in lighting, colour and mood is created. Because we reach conclusive agreement at this stage, it’s very rare that we need to speak later on location about, for example, lighting details, which must be sufficiently determined in advance. After that, all this is the Griebe domain.

Then, again with the designer and often with the assistant director as well, you begin to strip the film down into its individual artistic and organizational sections, piece by piece. From the whole into chapters, from chapters into sequences and from sequences into scenes. How do we prepare for a scene? The first step is to talk about what happens in a particular scene, the second, to decide how we are going to do it. When we start to tackle the visual rendition of a scene, that is, to divide it into single, sequential perspectives, it’s always a question of which of the infinite possible number of takes is the ‘right’ one? Through Frank I’ve learnt that ‘rightness’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The only way to judge is from the expressive power of the end result, if the choice of a particular image stems from a genuine attempt at an understanding of what is being portrayed. The ‘right’ take respects its subject, it allows the space and time it deserves, while allowing a completely subjective interpretation. In other words, when we do the storyboard, divide the scene up into its images, we inject a subjective dynamic that should ideally reflect the film’s inner ‘voice’. But we are always aware that the actual moment of filming should never be stifled by the planning. An actor is only as inspired as the ‘corset’ in which you place him. When it’s too tight he feels cramped, when it’s too loose, there’s confusion. You tread a very fine line during a production. With Frank Griebe this balancing act attains such a level of serenity and certainty that it is no longer even perceived as such.

Frank Griebe is never sick, tired, exhausted, late, annoyed or bad tempered. He is skeptical, thoughtful, exacting, and above all, reliable, curious, bold, attentive and interested. This has been my salvation on a number of occasions. During the last period of work on HEAVEN, for example, I found myself on the brink of despair at times. The tension between the actors and myself, between monumental exertion and microscopic phrasing, was simply too much. The sheer effort demanded by this challenging project, all those nuances and the constant ambivalence, laid our nerves bare. And through this haze of stress and nerves Frank calmly and clearly organized the surrounding framework, and in an invisible and almost hypnotic way, restored calm, balance, freeing-up our stalled mental processes. When we needed emotions to fly ‘out of control’ to create the effect we wanted – even when only for a split second – we knew it would be captured by Frank’s vigilant camera. These are moments that I’m still very proud of, moments of absolute directness where the actors really pushed the boundaries, because they knew they could rely on a truly creative artist to capture it on film.

The same went for filming of the landscape – with and without actors – which had its own inner voice. We had to seek this voice out and, most importantly, to link it somehow to the characters and their situation. Frank Griebe’s understanding of topography is a consummate fusion of cinematographic legend and close identification with each of the protagonists.

So the landscape of northern Finland in TRAINS 'N ROSES becomes a magical world of mythology through the projection of the film's hero Joachim Król, just like the atmosphere created in the films by Sergio Leone and David Lean. In GIGANTICS, Hamburg is a hometown as intimate as it is ghostly, like Fassbinder’s Frankfurt or Kaurismäki’s Helsinki. And from the still unruly Wuppertal, Frank recreates the fairytale city of my childhood, as much inspired by Tim Burton as by François Truffaut.

Unfortunately Frank Griebe seldom shoots more than one film a year. This has an advantage in that he puts all his effort into the one, carefully chosen project. It has the disadvantage that we are only sparingly granted his unique sense of imagination. I fear, too, that in this country there are only a handful of projects each year that really justify the insanity that a film production entails. For myself I can only hope that I continue to be the beneficiary of one or other of his yearly projects. Thank you, Frank.