When
we were doing research for my film My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein (right), one of the first things I did was looking for archive
footage of the riots in Frankfurt in the 70's. Hans-Joachim Klein had
been in numerous of these riots. He had been throwing stones at the
police and he had been fighting with them.
The most famous scene, that
of Klein beating up a policeman together with former German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, was easy to get. But the "ordinary
riots" were hard to find. We made a request to the Hessische Rundfunk,
the broadcaster of Hessen, Germany. Nothing came out of that. By the
time we needed to finish the film we gave up.
We had found footage of
riots from the same period across Europe: Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam. The
scenes were good and they wouldn't be too different from the Frankfurt
material. There was police and demonstrators just like anywhere else.
There was teargas, stones, watercannons and all the other riot material
that was customary at the time. It was just a matter of different
streets, buildings and police uniforms. And besides that, riots were
universal: everywhere in the world the causes of the riots were the
same: the Vietnam war, the military regimes in Greece or Chile.
Then,
after we finished the editing, my researcher showed me a piece of paper
that had just come in: it was a printout from an archive in Frankfurt.
It said: riot scenes in Frankfurt in the 1970's. Precisely the stuff
which we had been looking for for months. No way to get the footage in
time before the film would be shown at the documentary film festival
IDFA in Amsterdam.
I had the feeling that something was lacking to the
film now, even though the scenes that were in it were good and served
the purpose. A month later German television asked me to do a German
version, one with narration and with some more scenes which would be
more informative to the german audience. I agreed and they told me that
they had a lot of footage of riots in Frankfurt...
So finally I got to
see the real thing. There they were: the authentic rioters, the real
policemen and the original water cannons. But as I had expected, the
'soul' of the material was pretty similar to the footage I already had.
I used the new found footage for the German version but I didn't have
the feeling that only now the film was "complete." It was not the way
the riots looked like, it was the way people felt when they were angry
and went out on the streets to demonstrate against things they felt as
unjust. The real thing was real alright but not anymore real than the
french or the Dutch footage. The anger of the other Europeans was real
enough.
This
experience made it all the more clear to me that although documentaries
should always be real, it's the soul of the footage that counts and
even if the scenes look different the footage can serve the purpose
well and doesn't necessarily lie. Dangerous thoughts, I know...
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