Der Fall “Lovemobil”: Mehr Mut!
My criticism of the criticism of the criticism
On 22 March 2021, a press release from NDR shakes the documentary film industry. The audience reacts with uncertainty or indifference – or they feel vindicated and triumphant: Fake News! Lying press! The mainstream media are manipulating us! We’ve always said so! You can’t believe anything any more!
In its statement, NDR distances itself from a documentary film in which it itself was involved as co-producer. The film “Lovemobil” (R: Elke M. Lehrenkrauss, 2019) purports to depict the real lives of prostitutes who offer their services in caravans on a German country road in an authentic and real way. For this work with supposedly real protagonists, the film was highly praised and won several awards. In audience discussions and master classes, the director was celebrated for getting so close to the women concerned.
Now it turns out: Important protagonists were amateur actors, another woman is a sex worker but does not work in the caravan, the alleged clients and a pimp play a predefined role, the dialogue is largely scripted by the director, and the caravans were rented by her as a backdrop for the filming. All this was done not only without identifying the fictional parts, but also by claiming the opposite.
After the case became known, the director initially said that she had created a “more authentic reality”. In the meantime, she has returned her German Documentary Film Award, and her nomination for the Grimme Award 2021 has been withdrawn.
The waves ran high in the industry. Many filmmakers reacted indignantly. I too feel that “Lovemobil” is a betrayal of the viewer and also a distortion of competition. Most filmmakers invest many months, sometimes years, in finding (real) protagonists. I have had to bury many projects in the development phase because the protagonists could not be found or they dropped out again.
And even if you have finally found the protagonists and convinced them to allow themselves to be filmed for a documentary in often very personal situations, as a filmmaker you have to make many compromises. People may not want to talk about everything, or their statements may be ambivalent and contradictory. Locations are not as you imagined them. Or because you work with real people who express their needs, you don’t have enough time during the shoot to take beautiful pictures. The result is not always perfect, not always beautiful. It is imperfect, but halfway true. And not like in “Lovemobil”: far too good to be true. Sugar icing has been poured over an edgy reality.
But beautiful appearances sometimes win the prizes. I think all colleagues who are outraged by this are not only right to do so, but they also have a duty to do so. As documentary filmmakers, we must clearly distance ourselves from a way of working that invents a comparative of “authentic”. It’s not a matter of putting down a colleague, it’s a matter of principle.
Those who speak of a witch hunt here and place every criticism under the general suspicion of pharisaical excess may be right with regard to the form of criticism – there is a human tragedy behind the case, and decency indeed demands a certain moderation – but they are taking the second step before the first.
It is important to state very clearly what went wrong in “Lovemobile” and that this is a disgraceful fraud. We must not ennoble the film with the euphemistic term “hybrid documentary”. It would only have been that if the hybrid narrative form had been identified as such in some way. No, we must not gloss over anything, precisely because we want to preserve creative freedom in documentary film! It must continue to be allowed to use artistic forms of describing reality. Animations, re-enactments, dramaturgical exaggerations or even hybrid forms in which documentary and fictional parts are combined in a transparent way.
Documentaries are never completely objective. Every film is only a section of reality and to a certain extent interpretation. This fact is as old as mankind. Even the first cave drawings were a cut-out and an interpretation, because the cave wall was not wide enough to document the big world outside. But this age-old dilemma cannot be used to justify every bending of reality to the point of fraud.
Clipping and interpretation – that will always be a tightrope walk. How much personal handwriting can a documentary film take, how much omission, how much condensation – and in what way must this be made clear? The context plays a role here. In a journalistic documentary, it will be the sledgehammer-like overlay (“scene re-enacted”), in a cinema documentary it may be enough that the different levels stand out clearly from each other visually and aesthetically, because a film is received more attentively in the cinema than at home in front of the TV.
Either way, it remains a tightrope walk, and we filmmakers must be able to rely on the trust of the audience. Only when viewers can be sure that a documentary film is genuine at its core, and when agreements are kept, can we push the boundaries of what is permissible – and that is what we want, so as not to remain rigidly stuck in old narrative patterns. All the more tragic that with “Lovemobil” this trust was abused. All the more important that we, as documentary filmmakers, position ourselves clearly.
And only when that has happened can we deal with the questions that are at least as important. Then we can talk about the environment in which a director feels compelled to resort to unfair means. Why does she do this?
In the case of “Lovemobil” one can probably say: the reasons were neither laziness nor greed for money. Nobody gets rich in documentary films anyway, especially not with such difficult, research-intensive material as sex work. And the colleague can’t be accused of laziness either. She worked very hard on her film for years for very little money. Interestingly, she had even filmed with real prostitutes in the beginning, as she says, but these scenes did not make it into the film, instead they were acted. Why?
I know from my own painful experience that editorial offices increasingly want to protect themselves against the impositions of life. The long-time WDR editor Prof. Sabine Rollberg describes this very accurately in a recent article. Even before filming begins, editors demand a detailed treatment, sometimes even called a script, in which the story is outlined from beginning to end, often even exemplary scenes and dialogue have to be described.
Unfortunately – or fortunately! – reality usually does not adhere to such scripts. Stupidly, because in extreme cases this can be a reason for not accepting the film. Fortunately, because new, much more complex and thus more interesting situations can often arise during filming that the filmmakers could not have imagined. It’s just that such situations often don’t make it into the film because they are often ambivalent and contradictory, because they don’t fit into the planned dramaturgy, because they are feared to overwhelm the audience, because they get in the way of a smooth visual aesthetic.
When these circumstances meet a culture of fear prevailing in the broadcasting companies, as described by Sabine Rollberg, and a director fails to adapt her film to reality and not vice versa in her debut film due to lack of standing or overambition – which cannot be excused, only explained – then the mishap is perfect.
In this respect, what is needed now above all is more courage. Courage in the editorial offices to accept that reality cannot always be designed on the drawing board. Courage among us filmmakers to deviate from our original concept when events change during filming, to remain open to the unexpected, because that is often the really exciting thing anyway. And courage on the part of all those involved to trust that our audience is perfectly capable of dealing with ambivalences, contradictions, unresolved conflicts and imperfect images. Let’s stop giving the “monkey” more and more sugar. Too much sugar is not healthy in the long run.
Jan Tenhaven
is a filmmaker for German public television ARD, ZDF und ARTE
AG DOK member und chair of the Documentary section in the German Academy for Television (DAfF)
