Florence Ostende: Untitled (Vampire) is a 10-minute silent film about the daily life of a vampire in the secluded mountains. Dragons, trolls, wizards… your work often features characters and figures from a distant past. Why are you interested in these cultural archetypes of the pre-modern world? Is it a form of escapism?

Peter Wächtler: I am not sure these characters are really escapists, but this term was very important for my early videos. Those were about social dynamics in relatively hermetic groups, like live roleplayers, esoterics or rockers or vendors at arts & crafts markets. I filmed conventions of fans, seminars and manager coachings, hoping to find material to prove my point about a neglected, escapists’ present time, in some Biedermeier sense of the word. The idea then was to have a clean, almost sterile workspace, where you would edit away on this collected material with the main tool being distrust: distrust of images, costumes, the fake, the real, the hands, the figurative, the pleasurable. I can still relate to that somehow, but it dragged me down obviously and it felt like working on one big application for a grant or a small “Thank You for Sorting it out” by society at large. The alternative to escapism became a strange rank and file way of working, very dry and detached. Although meant critical, it just felt Prussian at some point. Maybe that is why I kind of overindulge in wizards, vampires, dragons, etc., as per se they inhabit a forbidden zone (picture a crashed starship on a planet of forest and swamp only) for me, highly charged, vulnerable and powerful, generic and nondescript at the same time. Yet the return home, the comedown, seems to be part of the work too, the draining sensation, the empty imageries, unemployed wizards, patched-up dragons, and the certainty that your wings will not spread again that soon.  

FO: What can you see from your window? 

PW: We live on the 14th floor and I look down onto Berlin, I think it is South-West, there is a lot of sky to see which is nice and I also overlook the park. It feels slightly remote at times. The building will be renovated next year and everybody has to move out.

FO: The elaborated fantastical landscape in the film recalls the atmospheric scenery and romantic sensibility of pre-cinematic dioramas. Could you describe the craft involved in the making of the set and why you felt the story didn’t need any sound? 

PW: The technique for the backgrounds is called “Cloud Tank”, it is an effect to create clouds or supernatural sky situations. It was used in Indiana Jones for example, when the Nazis dig out the lost ark and the sky turns grey and stormy, or in Independence Day. We filled a fish tank with a layer of saltwater and a layer of non-salted water. I did not know it, but you can put these two layers of water on top of each other, like milk onto coffee in your latte macchiato. I built some forms, relatively abstract shapes, out of a waxed cloth, plaster and wood and submerged them into the tank. The salty and non-salty waters do not mix so you can put a sort of horizon line in the water. Then we shot milk and cream with a syringe into the water and that makes these clouds. It was a little mesmerizing. Adam Milburn, who filmed it, and myself just sat and watched the fogs and clouds creep through the whole tank. After we had built everything else in the video in a kind of 1:1 scale, these backdrops were somehow animating themselves, which was very enjoyable. The set for the other scenes were mainly panels of wall and simple architectural elements like the archway. We recombined the panels for the different settings, for indoor walls or outdoor walls, everything very much like a stage design. I wish I could say these fluids mixing and flooding the fake mountains was what brought the silence into the film. But it was more that I wanted to keep the spheres apart, have the whole video sealed-off by silence, mute discussions with the monk, or writing letters, kissing, many means of communications, but blanketed or overwritten.  

FO: The film is interspersed with brief title cards written as a first-person narrative. Which parts would you describe as autobiographical?

PW: I thought of the text as a poem evolving very loosely around the not-so-loose and coded imagery. The text came last. I was writing it when the rest of the video was being rendered. When I was preparing the video, I told everybody that of course the text would deal with anything but the imagery, contradicting it or ignoring it. But after I’ve started writing, this approach felt like I would betray the material, acting like a cold fish towards it. I am certain that something biographical might translate into images of a vampire in his vampire castle with his vampire lover, his vampire friends and his vampire dreams, waiting for somebody to drive a wooden stick through his cold heart to put an end to his bloodthirsty days, consuming people, years and happiness. However, I cannot really trace back this transformation to biographical facts, or not to the ones I would like to link it to. The fact that I never acted or wore a costume before could have a more profound link to a possible biography than that I was raised in a mouldy castle in Lower Saxony. For that reason, I am very thankful to Ida Michel, who made all the costumes and the make-up, that both add different notions to the video and its discussion about the personal. 

FO: What is your favourite film and why?

PW: Very difficult for me to say. I like to go to the cinema and see big extensive sets, like caves, pathways through magical woods, dripping grottos, thick fog, volcanos, explosions. But I also admire thrillers with agents and not too many special effects. Like the  Jason Bourne films, for example, this scene at the Liverpool Street Station in London, in which the journalist with his leather briefcase gets shot by the sniper, because he did not follow the instructions by JB. Back then that was too much for me. I really like that cinematic period when the movies skipped the Godzilla CGI of the time and instead turned towards these dry, urban scenes, very techy and rushed, stressful.

FO: Although the film was made in 2019 before the pandemic, this existential tale of a vampire's self-isolation is deeply reminiscent of lockdown life. A kiss and a warm blanket, is that all we need after all? 

PW: Yes, it is very isolated. It might be because this domestic life seems so staged and artificial. This might suggest an audience, a before or an outside to these (styrofoam) walls. Yet it is an inward negotiation about judgement and how to fit in a warming blanket with a tacky leopard-guardian into your self-representation of an autonomous being in total charge of the bats circling its brains. These reassuring rituals of self-protection gained importance for me during the lockdown, but of course they remained relatively helpless attempts to deal with the lack of perspective, the pandemic’s harm and the many layers or non-layers of quarantine. 

FO: Buster Keaton, Slavoj Žižek, Donna Haraway, Rodney Graham, Marshall McLuhan, Kara Walker… among the living and the dead, who would you like to spend a virtual dinner with?

PW: For me it would be really nice to meet the haunting Ghosts of Personal Past for a virtual dinner, I really do not know how they are doing in these times, how they are keeping up and I thought about them a lot during the last year. Not all of them at once, of course, but one or two that still are important to me. We would all cook a simple recipe easy and fast to prepare, maybe one by Jamie Oliver.

Credits