The festival has kindly given me much room for the topic and the direction of my introduction. But it has thus also left me a bit at a loss. They have asked me to talk about the quality of documentaries and after a while, I felt that I had to answer questions concerning documentaries in general, their aesthesia, their use and their nature -  an idea that causes a slight feeling of dizziness, a feeling that gives you the impression that you are losing the ground beneath your feet. Looking at the topic of our discussion does not make things easier. It implies the indirect and hidden, but also loud and clear plea, conviction even, that documentaries are so good, so important, so significant, even so essential that it has to be on television; irrespective of television ratings that are achieved or want to be achieved. However, what makes the documentaries important and significant cannot be said in television ratings. I share this conviction and support this plea if it was meant this way. Documentaries draw attention to the fact that the television, at least the public channels, does not see the audience as consumers, but as citizens. This holds even true for those cases in which the viewer does not even want to or is not even able to accept this role – quasi against the facts, to say it in Jürgen Habermas’ words. Only then, the contract between the ones paying the fees and the public television remains valid. But it is within this framework that we have to answer the question: Why do we need documentaries? In the following, I will try not to give the answer, but elements and keywords for answers to this question.

Before I try this, though, I would like to step back a little and sketch the panorama of the current situation. Firstly, there is the surprising development  that documentaries recaptures its place  in the cinemas. Documentaries attract economically relevant parts of cinema audience beyond the culturally protected zones of documentary film festivals and local cinemas – up to the demure retreats in Philipp Gröning’s film on life in a monastery “The Great Calm” (2005).  The re-found hunger for reality of the cinema audience cannot be overestimated for the image, the cultural status of documentaries – not because of their subject matter, but because of the form that the audience is committed to.  I would like to speak of an erotic enthusiasm, including Philipp Gröning, that animates these films and that the audience willingly follows. It is the excitement that infects the audience and that every documentary needs. And it goes without saying that this excitement is beyond the calculus of television ratings: they are the incalculable per se.

Secondly, I want to tackle the issue of the enhancement of the possibilities for showing documentaries on digital TV channels – if only in passing and in all its ambiguity. Thus, the working possibilities, not necessarily the possibilities of expression of documentary directors are enhanced as well.  Thirdly, the new possibilities of showing films on the internet, that, for the first time, put amateurs on a par with professionals, have effects in the contrary direction. I guess that, in the future,  this giant baby that is still in its infancy will absorb all forms of documentary expression that feed on personal concern. That is not little. Documentary directors will have to offer more.

Fourthly and finally, I would like to point to the price reduction for technical equipment and material through the digital technology. It shifts the relation of effort and result in favour of the possibilities of expression and creation of the directors. What will be expensive is what they are willing or able to give in terms of attention, resourcefulness, time, creativity and commitment, including all the deprivations. All in all, the future of the documentary is not unclouded, but still not discouraging. The securities that reliable ordering parties represented diminish, yet the demand is growing – also for documentaries that stand out because they are different. These are the films we need.

Thus I have arrived at the question what makes documentaries important. The examples I have chosen are all from the cinema, even though they have all been co-produced by the television – inevitably as well as luckily. It is still in the cinema where the patterns are set for what film is and what film can be.  My first example is the film “Rhythm is it” – for everyone a surprising hit in the cinema charts, a film with conventional means that step back behind its topic. And still, there is more to this film. It is, first and last, an adorable demonstration of the fact that social and cultural issues, the Berlin philharmonics and the perspectives of youths in Berlin-Neukölln, belong inextricably together. I think that no documentary director, no politician and no TV editor can ignore this knowledge. To me it seems that this not abstractly, but very vividly gained knowledge that makes us feel that we have become a little wiser, belongs to the most important capital of documentaries. We can add another issue that is more hidden yet mentioned in the title of the film: the rhythm, the combination of music, body, work and society.  It may sound strange, but the film suggests that we suffer from arhythms , from rhythm-pathologies. Which leads to the conclusion that “good” documentaries have among others a therapeutic function.

My second example is the film “Our daily bread” by Niklaus Geyrhalter that will be shown in German cinemas in January 2007 and that is about the state of industrialisation and the automation of food production respectively. The film – a montage of  scary as well as highly elaborately composed settings – does not only abstain from all commentary, but also from all language, dialogue or text in general. It makes us feel the denaturalisation of our natural resources even more blatantly, so that it makes us lose our speech as well. But I do not want to talk about the topic of this film, even though it is important. To me, the film represents the courage to a risky communication that distinguishes the important, really relevant documentary. Risky communication means to do without everything that is known, that has been often said and shown and to do without a patronising pedagogy , the authoritarian attitude of the know-it-all. To insist on this quality of documentaries means inevitably to test the limits of what is compatible with TV. That is because television orientates itself at the recognisable, at standards – with the reverse risk that communication might be devoid of all meaning and sense. Maybe TV producers should be more afraid of boredom than of single instances of bad television ratings. However, I am afraid that on the front between TV and documentaries we will see armistices, but no reconciliation.

I have hesitated for a moment considering if I should mention Sönke Wortmann’s “Germany – A Summer’s Tale” because this film is a lucky and a special case. However, talking about the success criteria of documentaries one cannot simply ignore a documentary that attracted 3 million viewers to the cinemas. Three things are remarkable about this film – beyond football and national enthusiasm. Firstly, it bears witness to the fact that there is an insatiable interest to see an event that one participated in in one way or another on the screen, to have it told in pictures all over again. This elementary and maybe magical metamorphosis is and stays an inexhaustible source for documentaries. Secondly, the film lives on its need for closeness, an abolition of distance  - a closeness that is not achieved by the conventions and clichés of media footage as we have seen it in the summer, on the contrary, it seems to have prevented it. We needed a director, Sönke Wortmann, for it. And thirdly: the film is a triumph of a – I should like to call it – guerrilla-like technique that gives it a immediacy and spontaneity that is very appealing. We will experience how other documentaries use these liberties, liberties also in view of the ordering parties, by the way. As far as the happy occasion, the special constellation of individual and collective interest is concerned, including knowing how to snap at the chance: in principle, every film director has to detect, discern or recognise it – but also, and that is where the suffering begins, to push it. The personal intuition without which not a single relevant documentary has ever been made can only be put into objective arguments in a very limited way. Producer and editors have to be more of a connoisseur of human nature than of a administrator of television ratings.

My two last examples are older ones, they are classics; and if there was an opportunity of a common workshop for film directors and TV editors on the quality criteria of documentaries, I would put my main focus on them. However shortly, I would like to talk about Johan van der Keuken’s “The Great Holidays” and Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil – Without Sun”.  One is about what it means to be a documentary director; the other analyses what it means to record the world in cinematic pictures. Johann van der Keuken, a cancer patient, travels around the world to find a remedy against death. And we can see that filming means giving your life. Chris Marker takes us on a journey through pictures that lead deeper and deeper into the inner world of our memory, our understanding, our knowledge and our questioning until we start to marvel at the fact that we can find reality in these pictures, until the glow of the real appears: re-appears. Is that good for television ratings? I am afraid not. But I wish that not only the television ratings, but also the reminiscence of Johann van der Keuken, of the drama of film making, and of Chris Marker, of the revelation of the real, decide on future documentaries.