{"id":207230,"date":"2025-01-28T20:29:52","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T19:29:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iffr.com\/en\/?p=207230"},"modified":"2025-01-28T20:29:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T19:29:56","slug":"blog-the-art-of-inviting-people-to-see-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iffr.com\/en\/blog-the-art-of-inviting-people-to-see-the-world","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Inviting People to See the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With the retrospective Focus: Katja Raganelli, IFFR 2025 brings an ode to the German filmmaker and film historian whose work spotlighted fellow female filmmakers. IFFR programmer Olaf M\u00f6ller takes a look at Raganelli’s background, methodology and enduring legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

There was a time when television entertained as well as educated its viewers \u2013 which was exactly what they expected from the medium. Mind, few would have said that they switched on the television to learn about the world, but when folks chanced upon a programme that promised to tell them something new they might as well stay and watch. Cinema had done that before, with shorts programmes preceding the features, but these had since deteriorated to commercials and trailers, plus maybe an artistically valuable short that by then felt sadly out of place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In television, you could stumble into smart stuff, as it wasn’t as tightly formatted as it is today, with live programmes allowed to run longer than planned and everything else afterwards starting later or being rescheduled. These informative emissions, though, had one problem: TV magazines and the daily papers said almost nothing specific about them, especially if they were made for a specific slot: what was announced was the slot itself, and maybe the week’s or month’s subject, but not more \u2013 including any information on those who had made them. This is the culture inside which Katja Raganelli made her documentaries from the early 1970s till the late 1990s, and the the reason why she’s barely known even inside the Federal Republic of Germany where all her films were produced and shown on TV, where they were rarely reviewed, and barely ever seen again after their original airing. This was the destiny of these works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raganelli, born November 28th 1938, in Split (Yugoslavia), had imagined her filmmaking future quite differently when she entered the Munich Film and Television Academy as one of the few chosen to be what constituted the institute’s first batch of students: and fewer than a handful of these were women. Glimpses at Raganelli’s original ambitions can be found in her student works which we screened last year as part of Cinema Regained: the mildly Gothic Surrealism of Die Entscheidung<\/strong><\/a> (1969), the genre Pop Art feel of Die Flucht<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>(1970) and El Cigarron<\/strong><\/a> (1971). These were playful exercises with an ironic zeitgeisty edge, political to the core while popular in their formal approaches \u2013 an unusual talent was making itself seen and heard here, one that could develop in myriad directions. It’s telling that these short and medium-length films followed routes similar to those of her fellow students Wim Wenders, Gerhard Theuring, Michael Hild, Bernd Schwamm, Matthias Weiss and R\u00fcdiger N\u00fcchtern, but in a decidedly different register: where the guys were pretty damn serious, her films had a generous sense of humour one would sooner find in the commercial cinema of the period than in anything with artistic ambitions<\/em>. These were astonishingly mature works that reflect Raganelli’s educational as well as vocational background. She had a piano teacher’s diploma, was part of the Split National Theatre’s Youth Ensemble, studied philosophy and letters at the University of Belgrade as well as directing and dramaturgy at the Belgrade Theatre Academy. When she arrived in Munich in 1964, she had already learned and done a lot of things that should have proved useful for her future fiction feature filmmaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only that never happened. After an unpleasant experience with a screenplay she had authored and wanted to direct as well, only to be told that they would hand this fine piece of script writing over to someone more experienced, Raganelli changed tack completely and focused on making documentaries for TV \u2013 which more easily paid the rent, while allowing her to indulge in her insatiable curiosity about the world. Also, it had the added advantage that she could work side by side with her friend (and later second husband) Konrad Wickler, with whom she owned the production company Diorama Film. Her works usually open with: \u201cA Film by Katja Raganelli and Konrad Winkler\u201d, even if the latter was technically speaking only responsible for the camera work \u2013 which is telling about her approach; these films were collaborative efforts where the director is merely one part of the creative crew. Quite quickly, two main fields of research crystallised. Firstly, food \u2013 Raganelli made many episodes for a slot called \u00c0 la carte<\/em> at Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting). And secondly, and for this programme most importantly, cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s step back again for a moment. Depending on where one lived, the 1970s and 1980s were a great time to get crazy about cinema \u2013 thanks to television. The Federal Republic of Germany certainly was one of those places. In hindsight, these decades feel like a paradise lost because of all the directors and film cultures one could discover thanks to the work of some highly dedicated commissioning editors. Programming and producing often went hand in hand, with documentaries like Raganelli’s getting mostly produced to accompany the airing of certain films. In honour of this history, we don’t just show Raganelli’s films in this programme, but always screen them together with works by the filmmakers she portrayed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some cases, a commissioning editor might have bought a few films and would like to contextualise them with a documentary, in others, Raganelli might have met someone and then tried to get a commissioning editor interested in the person, to show something by her (and in Raganelli\u2019s case it was often \u2018her\u2019). In quite a few cases, Raganelli went carpe diem<\/em>, which is to say she shot an interview and other stuff she would need for a documentary without having a commission, as the film Joan Tewkesbury<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>(1982) shows: not all the interviews she conducted became films \u2013 materials for several so-far unmade portraits, of Joan Darling, Martha Coolidge,and Astrid Henning-Jensen, await in her archives their moment to finally shine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The films Raganelli made in these particular circumstances had to be informative above all else, and accessible for everyone \u2013 noble characteristics, as they got people interested in the likes of Agn\u00e8s Varda, Valie Export and M\u00e1rta M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, who otherwise might never have heard about them, and who would then maybe watch one of their films when they aired. Raganelli’s was in many ways an almost anonymous work, but one that made masses of people more knowledgeable, got them to ask questions first about cinema and then the world. It’s difficult to adequately quantify her influence. What we can do now is to discover her as a documentary force, and film historian, whose research created not only primary sources in the shape of her interviews (in the way she uses them in her films as well as raw material in their unedited state) but also offers us a way of thinking about cinema \u2013 for her \u0153uvre as a whole, with its vast thoroughfares and its many detours and sidepaths which all together form a mindscape of ideas, should be read as a massive essay. Here, we only offer a first, partisan and partial survey map. This is only the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

written by Olaf M\u00f6ller<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t

A list with articles<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t