THE MASTER AND MAX

Klopfenstein’s 70th birthday seemed to us to be the ideal occasion to put people in the mood to (re)discover one of Switzerland’s most original and idiosyncratic directors. In doing so we have tried something that has never been seen before in the history of film: using material from Klopfenstein’s complete cinematic oeuvre, films that were shot long ago, we have weaved a new, original story with its own plot, a clearly defined central protagonist, its own suspense and drama, and newly created conflicts and resolutions resulting from the editing of the material. At the same time we have brought together Klopfenstein’s films in a dialog, filtered out predominant themes and topics, and brought the very essence of Klopfenstein’s creative universe to light.
Even after extensive research and numerous discussions with film historians we have been unable to find a single film that has attempted a venture of this nature. The two works that come closest to ours are “The Clock”, an art installation by video artist Christian Marclay that attracted a great deal of attention in the art world, and the compilation film “Final Cut” by Hungarian filmmaker György Palfi. However, both of these films use works from countless filmmakers. Marclay’s film does not tell a new story, but simply uses the time of day – moving forward in real time and always visible on screen – as the unifying element of his film. It is also impossible to identify with any of the characters in “Final Cut”, as throughout the film the faces change every couple of seconds, and the same faces are shown at most three or four times. The aims of the film – which include making the narrative conventions of boy-meets-girl stories visible – forced the filmmaker to use a story that feeds off cinematic stereotypes and is hence extremely banal.
Our good fortune is that Clemens Klopfenstein – similar to François Truffaut with Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel – has always had the same actor play the role of his alter ego, and, with him at the center, has arranged a trio whose other two parts are also always portrayed by the same actors. This makes it possible for us to use material from a whole range of films in which the main characters never change. In order to weave together the scenes, fragments, and atmospheric shots from Klopfenstein’s works into a new story, the risk we had to take was, of course, that in one scene a character might be 20, in the next 50, then again 30, sometimes with dark hair, then blonde, at one point with long and later with short hair. A similar effect – in much more extreme form – was tried by Oscar-winning director Todd Haynes in “I’m Not There” (2007) and met with huge critical acclaim, or by Todd Solondz in his “Palindromes” project (2004). Both films were written as original works and not, as in our case, filtered from existing films.
The choice of this form of montage originated, as mentioned above, in our idea of an homage to Clemens Klopfenstein, that unique oddball character in Swiss filmmaking. The fragments of his films used here fuse together to create an incomparable Klopfenstein cosmos. They unveil not only the topics on which his work consistently focuses, but manifest his unique sense of humor and the enchanting poetic quality that permeates his work, as well as his singular use of sounds, colors, music, atmosphere, and recurring motifs.
We hope that this engaging approach will encourage others to discover the work of this eminent Swiss artist. Thanks to the refreshingly avant-garde style with which he shot low-budget films à la Dogma long before Dogma was filmed, or the way he tried out improvisation without a fixed script years before Jim Jarmusch or Mike Leigh, he can be described as a precursor of the Dogma as well as the Mumblecore movement, in a sense the grandfather of Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig & co. However, Klopfenstein also owes his unique position in Swiss cinema to the unabashed way in which he has always held a mirror up to Swiss society with its bourgeois shallowness and narrow-mindedness – symbolically representing the same phenomena in many other countries – and has done so without ever losing his sense of humor or his love for his characters.