Documentary Positions: Pavel Schnabel
His eye for detail and people's everyday, often unconscious behaviors is unique, and his interest in contradictions and complex relationships is fascinating. Born in Olomouc and raised in Liberec in northern Bohemia, Pavel Schnabel began studying cinematography at the renowned FAMU film and television academy in Prague in the mid-1960s. But just three years later, when Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and cracked down on the reform goals of “socialism with a human face,” Schnabel saw no future in his homeland. He left Prague and headed west.
Upon arriving in West Germany, Pavel Schnabel contacts Alexander Kluge, whom he sees as a kindred spirit in film, and who introduces him to students at the Institute of Film Design in Ulm. Shortly thereafter, the accomplished cinematographer from the East becomes a member of the Frankfurt film collective Eppelwoi Motion Pictures. Alongside Jeanine Meerapfel, Ingeborg Nödinger, Rolf Scheimeister, Klaus Werner, and Marion Zemann, four joint film projects were created based on screenplays by Reinhard Kahn and Michel Leiner.
Filmed in 1977, this homage to August Sander is Schnabel's first independent production: a short film whose artistic signature and documentary method would shape his later work. Ordinary people as bearers of (micro- and macro-)history; filmed in their everyday environments; conversations that reveal mentalities; memories of repressed history, of exclusion, persecution, and murder, especially during the Nazi era.
From the end of the 1970s onwards, he produced mainly for public television, either in collaboration with other authors or alone, all of them “labor of love” projects by the headstrong documentary filmmaker. They focus on East-West relations, political upheavals, the history of European Jews, and the continuities of anti-Semitism after the Shoah. In these precisely composed films, occasionally featuring profound visual and montage humor, everything seems to have its exact place. Schnabel's protagonists in front of his camera thank him with unusual openness and a willingness to show their own worlds—past, present, or possible. (Borjana Gaković)
Borjana Gaković is a film scholar, curator, and author. She works for film festivals, among other things, and is a member of CineGraph Babelsberg.
