He wouldn't shoot the scene like that today. It just seemed “artistically compelling” to him at the time. Wim Wenders explained this several times after it became known in May that the actress Nastassja Kinski had asked him to remove a scene from his film “False Movement” that showed her bare-chested as a thirteen-year-old. This explanation was not enough for the actress or the public critics of the film scene. At the end of July, Wenders finally announced that he had deleted the scene “as an expression of my changed perspective and out of respect for Nastassja Kinski.”
That was a mistake, says director Jutta Brückner. By cutting out the images in which Kinski's character Mignon is first slapped in the face and then caressed by the film's main actor, the story is missing "a crucial dimension: that of Wilhelm's problematic sexuality." For Brückner, who was born in 1941 and therefore belongs to the same generation as Wenders, the contemporary historical value of “False Movement” lies in the depiction of this sexuality characterized by immaturity and insecurity. In addition to its allusions to National Socialism, the film also tells a key story about gender relations in the post-war period from a male perspective. By removing the Mignon nude scene, he is now reduced to “the old story of fathers and sons.”
Jutta Brückner spoke at an event that Wenders himself had suggested at this year's German Film Prize. If he shortened his film, he threatened during his appearance at the reception of the Film Academy's honorary award for his life's work, it would be "a precedent that affects all of you." “All of you” – that is, the film industry, the entire German film heritage and all those who protect and manage it.
One of these guardians is the Deutsche Kinemathek, and the discussion evening took place at its headquarters in Berlin's E-Werk on Thursday, at which Brückner made her plea for the original version of “Falsche Movement”. Sitting on the podium next to her and the moderator Chris Wahl were the publicist Ronen Steinke, the film scholar Lisa Gotto and the cinema library director Heleen Gerritsen. They formed two parties that consistently talked past each other. Because while Steinke alone emphasized the criminality of Wenders' sexualized portrayal of a thirteen-year-old according to today's legal standards ("we have an iron limit at 14") and underpinned his moral judgment ("that was shit back then") with oblique comparisons from the publishing world (the N-word in "Pippi Longstocking"), urban space (renaming of streets) and churches (the removal or warning labeling of "Judensau" reliefs). the three discussants dealt with the precedent thesis from different perspectives.
The “difficult, disturbing, almost unbearable” are part of it
Gerritsen highlighted the legal hurdles for subsequent interventions on film negatives: “If you don’t have film rights, you’re not allowed to do anything.” But even those who own these rights are not allowed to change anything, at least in the film copy that all state-funded productions must deposit in the Federal Archives - which also applies to “False Movement”, because the film was created as a co-production with WDR, but its restoration in 2016 was supported by the Film Fund. There are also the commercially unusable “reservation films” from the Nazi era; and there are those Defa fairy tale films from whose YouTube versions the nude scenes with child actors were cut out after irritating experiences with certain user groups.
But the archives have no knowledge of censorship. And the film professor Gotto would like to prohibit such a thing, because “the difficult, disturbing, almost unbearable” is part of the film heritage because one can study “the distortions of the past” in it. This fit with Brückner's analysis that social conflicts in the cinema were often carried out on bodies - and in earlier times these were "almost always women's bodies".
Ronen Steinke would like to completely remove these bodies from the film archives, as long as they belong to minors, as he announced in the subsequent discussion: “If this hasn’t been done before, it has to be done.” Is this the consequence of the “Wrong Movement” case? It was heard in conversation that Steinke had not seen the film himself - as had probably the majority of those who commented on it in the public debate. The fact that he will no longer see it in the version criticized by Nastassja Kinski can be seen as a piece of moral compensation. It is certainly not progress in the process of finding truth in film history. The truth is now in the archives. She must be allowed to stay there.
