Timon Koulmasis

When I called on Nelly in her spacious apartment located on the Lycabetus hill, hundreds of papers lay about on the tables, chairs, canapés, the piano, on the floor... "These are letters from your father", she told me outright. She had found them behind a wardrobe in a cardboard, whose existence she had forgotten about for sixty years, and saved them from the water. "They are yours."  These daily letters, written in fine handwriting between 1939 and 1944 - there are over thousand pages -, tell not only the story of their love but unveil an extraordinary picture of two young people's everyday life during the German Occupation of Greece. And finally, my father leaving to Germany at the end of the war, they describe literally the end of a world.  

It seemed to me that the story of their love and their friendship with this strange figure Rudolf Fahrner, as expressed in these letters, would eventually represent the complexity of human experience in a little known historical period, that in a way my father and Nelly could give these historical events a distinctive face. 

The analysis of individual and collective memory seems to be at the centre of your considerations as a filmmaker.  

Yes. In my work Portrait of my father in times of war stands in a series of films where I confront personal reminiscences concerning my family history with the collective memory of a historical event or epoch.

My first documentary film Ulrike Marie Meinhof (1994) starts from experiences during childhood and youth  - my friendship with the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, the mastermind of Germany's notorious Red Army Faction - in order to uncover the unknown, human side of this woman who had become a myth after her gruesome death, and to elucidate certain aspects of the political history of the armed struggle in Germany, in the seventies.  

In Words of Resistance (2010) our family's exile in the sixties - my mother was engaged in the resistance movements against the Greek dictatorship - forms the initial point of a filmic analysis of what remained in people's consciousness of this fascist episode in their country and of the hope and promises brought about by its fall.  

Portrait of my father in times of war works in the same way. The personal closeness to the witnesses and our mutual confidence made it possible for me to try to fathom through the film the relation between personal retrospection and collective memory.   

How would you define this relation?  

It is very complex. For Proust memory consists of a perception that constitutes a sign. Several signs, even disconnected or distant one from another, will eventually make sense. Saint Augustine considers memory to be a force of one's soul that envisions knowledge and perceptions of the past and thus confers a meaning to one's life.

But memory has its own logic that eludes our volition and our intelligence. It is subject to our emotions. It preserves our present mental balance and does not represent the past in an objective way. Contrary to what one might suppose, the main function of memory is not to recall but to forget. Memory covers the past and lets rise to the surface of our consciousness only what is useful or only bearable for us.   

Then the notion of a historic truth is just a fiction?  

Of course. Memories - testimonies in general - need to be completed by a global, synthetic vision. In this respect, to incorporate them in a work of art (a film, a novel...) seems to be an appropriate method to approach not an unfathomable truth of an epoch but its characteristic aspects and to shed a light on its intrinsic complexity.  

In Portrait of my father in times of war you deal with a historical break: World War II, Ausschwitz and the destruction of the European humanistic culture. That puts into question the possibility of representing historical reality and thereby the term of an adequate cinematographic language.

I agree. Distance in time is certainly a factor. But the difficulty consists mainly in the simultaneity of History, of each history. To put it in another way: one cannot tell things as they took place, because in order to tell them one has to separate and align what in reality is inextricably intertwined.  

The challenge then consists to find a language that tells the story but integrates and represents visually on another level the silence and the void that the story contains. It seems to me that the fragmentation of a polyphonic narration, the visual treatment of the archive material and a kind of discontinuity produced by the editing could be a kind of solution.  

Discontinuity avoids a biased representation of historical events. In this way History can be comprehended as a continuous process and not as a causality. It is not just quotation but becomes a subject of reflection. the films isn't perceived as a chronicle of "historical" events, but as a series of moments that were lived and experienced in the course of time.

This applies also to the archive material.  

I think so. In order to enter the field of History, we have to reappropriate the archive material in a new way.

  

Is that the reason why you have  «treated»  the archive material?  

Yes. Some of the archive material in Portrait of my father in times of war has been altered experimentally. Solarizing and reversal processing (of images before the war,  of a already disappearing world) are one example; I also acted on film speed, color and grain and produced gradual alterations of the image texture and the time lapse. The idea is to push the images to the limit of their legibility, to practice an archaeology of the visible, to try to discover what they hide, what is hidden behind the representation, to capture the presence of live (even of things past). 

Directors with a background from the art scene - Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, for example, or Peter Forgasz - have created fascinating works in this domain. And Harun Farocki has pointed out again and again the decisive importance of the conditions of production of an image. 

In Portrait of my father in times of war I have edited previously unreleased images of the German occupation of Greece, filmed by German soldiers. Shot at the same place and in the same historical moment, these images do not show the same things as, for example, the poignant shots that Angelos Papathanassiou had filmed at the risk of his life between 1941 and 1944, more or less the only images we knew until now. It is interesting to shed light on the relation between them.   

The soundtrack of your film is extraordinary suggestive. In your films you generally attach great importance to sound and music.  

Yes, Aurique Delannoy who edit all my films and I permanently work and experiment on that. The  "hors champ sonore", as we call it here in France, gives the audience the possibility of a perceptive, sensorial experience of this space of memory that I try to construct in my films. Its purpose is not to illustrate images or to accentuate dramatic scenes. It should create tension, reflect resonances, create atmospheres. It should form a space of sound that ties the different levels of time and significance in the narration. In Portrait of my father in times of war melodies and noises, snippets of conversation and folksongs, the rumble of tanks, sounds of the big city and classical or contemporary succession of notes are assembled into a complete, new composition.   

Portrait of my father in times of war tells a rather tragic story -the lovers survive but the war separates them- but it's not a sad film. 

I think this is due to Nelly Andrikopoulou's extraordinary presence in the film. She was over 90 years old when we shot, and after all she - she, my father, their generation - has suffered and lived to see, she concludes the film with these incredible words that she adresses to my late father: « What can I say? That's just how it was. But it was beautiful, Timon! You can tell him that. » 

In your film you reflect this beauty in shots of the Aegean light.  

I believe in the permanence of things, an ethical principle if  you like. I am still an optimist.  

 

Could you give a résumé of your film in a few words?

Portrait of my father in times of war tells a story of love and resistance, reflects the mechanism of individual and collective memory and poses a simple, unfortunately still relevant question: how to resist barbarism through poetry and thought?