Other Times Are Coming | Es nahen andere Zeiten. The films of Peter Nestler

This programme is an introduction to the work of filmmaker Peter Nestler. Its title is borrowed from a poem by the Communist German poet Johannes R. Becher, written in exile in 1941-44, and quoted by Nestler in a text about the responsibility of the filmmaker and the political crisis in Chile in the 1970s. The call to resistance, hope and change has been a constant in Nestler's work since he began making films in the early 1960s.

As Nestler wrote, the greatest responsibility of the filmmaker should be “to acknowledge, to recognise and to say with others: this must be changed, or that must be preserved, or not overlooked.” From his early portraits of rural and industrial communities in Germany and England fallen by the wayside of the ‘economic miracle’, to his ‘biographies of objects’ documenting the lives of materials and their production processes, to his numerous investigations into the histories of persecution, oppression and resistance, of fascism and its frightful continuation, the films of Peter Nestler have never stopped digging and unveiling what is commonly overlooked or wilfully suppressed, in defiance of historical amnesia and political inertia.

From the 1960s until today, Nestler has directed over sixty films, many of them in collaboration with his wife Zsóka Nestler, as well as with other filmmakers and artists. Nestler studied painting and printing, worked as a merchant sailor and a forester and was an actor in feature films. His first film, Am Siel, from 1962, was the first of a series of works about the transformations of the rural world in Germany. The films from the 1960s show how the lives of the working class were affected by the changes brought about by economic and industrial policies in West Germany. They deal with the violent legacies of Nazi Germany, their continuation and consequences in the postwar social-democratic Germany, as well as with the histories of political resistance and labour movements.

Formally, his filmmaking practice went against the principles of direct cinema which defined much of the documentary filmmaking of his time, also in Germany —the films take a step back to research, dig deep and analyse each situation for what it entails. In 1965/66, together with Reinald Schnell, Nestler made a film in Greece, Von Griechenland, pressaging the emergence of the military dictatorship only two years before it was established. The clearly expressed political positions in his films went against the political consensus and anti-communist sentiment prevalent at the time, which made it difficult for Nestler to continue working in Germany. In 1968 he relocated to Sweden, his mother’s birthplace, where he continued to create most of his work the following decades. He worked for public television, producing, buying and dubbing programmes for children and young adults, and also working on his personal projects in collaboration with Zsóka Nestler.

Many of these films were concerned with the criminal legacies of Nazi Germany (and European collaboration), its past and how they persist in the present. The films reveal narratives of violence, injustice and resistance. Works such as Zigeuner sein (1970), about the persecutions and injustices committed by the Nazis against the Roma and Sinti communities and their resistance are among the most important works made by Peter and Zsóka Nestler. An anti-fascist, anti-war, ecological, internationalist, and humanist stance runs through all the films.

This period also saw Nestler making films focused on international politics and struggles, against the war in Vietnam or on the situation in Chile (often working with the Chilean community in exile in Sweden). Peter and Zsóka Nestler have worked on several films about the working conditions of migrants, political exiles and ethnic minorities (in Sweden and elsewhere). Always working for television, they made a series of documentary essays about the way objects and materials are produced, the histories of capital, manufacturing and industry. These works show the filmmakers' interest in traditional crafts and in the lives of artists who express their politics through their work. As he said in an interview, “visual art and sculpture was for both me and Zsóka a way to understand the world, to live consciously, to enjoy beauty but also to see —to dare seeing— the abysm of human existence.”

Working for young audiences allowed them to develop a didactical, formally clear, informative and engaging film process. The films never cease to explore the complex relations between sound and image through the use of narration, testimonies and music, brought into a dialectical relationship with materials collected from a diverse range of sources (photos, texts, prints, music, extracts from other films). The distinct use of voice-over in Nestler's films rejects the conventions of neutral television documentary narration, offering instead an active involvement with the subjects.

From the end of the 1980s onwards, Peter Nestler again made films in Germany, working for the first time in feature documentaries. These included films about traditional crafts and the history of the people who make them (Zeit, 1992), the centuries-long history and persecution of Jews in Frankfurt (Die Judengasse, 1988) and the histories of resistance against national socialism (Die Verwandlung des guten Nachbarn, 2002). He has also produced a series of finely crafted travelogues, inspired by his strong commitment to the preservation of nature and of local and indigenous cultures (Die Nordkalotte, 1991, Pachamama-Nuestra tierra, 1995). The last years mark a continuity in his work, with remarkable films, for example on the work that Pablo Picasso did during his stay in Vallauris (Picasso in Vallauris, 2021) and even more recently a diptych that takes up the theme of injustice committed against the Roma and Sinti people and their resistance (Unrecht und Widerstand, 2022 and Der offene Blick, 2022).

re-selected Dossier #2

The re-selected Dossier No. 2, Northern Lights, published online by the International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen is dedicated to the conflict-ridden relations between the festival and Sweden and to the special role which Peter Nestler played in these relations. Accompanying the dossier, edited by Tobias Hering, two of Peter Nestler's films can be seen for free for a year on the Short Film Festival Channel, with English subtitles. They represent the relationships, also not always smooth, that connected Peter Nestler to the Kurzfilmtage: the anti-fascist warning call Von Griechenland (From Greece), which caused a scandal in 1966 that indirectly led to Nestler's emigration to Sweden, and the great essay film Ausländer. Teil 1. Schiffe und Kanonen (Foreigners. Part 1. Ships and Cannons), which Oberhausen rejected in 1976.

re-selected is an archive-based program section of the International Short Film festival Oberhausen.