Insights from the Director
Here are some quotes I plucked from various interviews with the director/writer:
Interviewer: The whole film’s existence is predicated on a supreme dramatic risk about Johnny not being able to identify his actual wife. The more literal minded are likely to be resistant to the very structure.
Christian Petzold: We read three or four books by [Austrian essayist] Jean Amery. After he survived Auschwitz, he wrote in one essay, about being in a camp for displaced persons, and how after he came back to Germany, he thought the people there would embrace him and show their interest in forming a new society. He came back and nobody looked at him. Friends didn’t recognize him. His friends had cut him not only of their memories but also out of their senses. He said, “I’m like a ghost.” At this moment, the idea was borne to Harun and I, and we came up with the idea that Johnny can’t recognize her. His body recognizes her a little bit. He wants to touch her, a glance in his eyes, for a little moment, but in his soul, she does not exist anymore.
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Christian Petzold: From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he’s dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it’s that he knows that he’s dead. That’s the only development that the character has, and it was very hard for him.
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Harun Farocki(co-writer): “it’s a metaphorical movie and it’s also not a metaphorical movie.”
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Interviewer: Nelly isn’t just a German woman trying to stay in her own country; she’s also literally trying to climb back into her old life. I feel like Hoss acts the part as if she really believes that she can do this, and that she’ll be able to just jump back over the cut, as you put it.
Christian Petzold: There is the scene where she’s on the boat where she’d hidden herself. She now looks like she did before. She’s made the jump over the cut. She has her hair back, and her skin and her clothes, and there is a man who looks at her a little bit. Her identity is coming back. She can maybe dance a little bit, maybe sing. And then she’s on the ship and she opens the door and she knows that there is no chance to go back in time. Because there is the hole. And then Johnny comes in and asks, “What are you doing?” and you see the fear, as if she is in the camp again. It’s all in Nina’s acting, and it’s something that I was very impressed by.
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Interviewer: I want to address some of the criticisms I’ve heard of the film, either in reviews or even from some of my colleagues, which is that the plot strains credibility. It seems to me that the story in Phoenix is a very movie-ish story, which is the point—it’s a contrived narrative but it hints at a larger and entirely credible reality of denial on a societal level.
Christian Petzold: We had long discussions with producers, and they said, “We have to see the destroyed face.” I said no. This is not the point. There are two questions that people can ask about the movie. One is, “Where is her face?” The other is, “Why didn’t Johnny recognize Nelly?” My answer to both is that people who ask these questions don’t like movies. It’s what Hitchcock called “the plausibles.” There’s a German word for it too, and it’s a bad word. But it’s also a question of morality that he doesn’t see her face.
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Interviewer: I think he does recognize her, but he’s repressing it. It’s too painful to see that the woman he betrayed is still alive. It is safer for him in every way if she’s dead.
Christian Petzold: She’s dead. He’s dead. They’re two ghosts. They can’t recognize each other.
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Interviewer: Do you think that Nelly’s new face—which is Nina Hoss’ face—is more beautiful than her “real one?” We never see her played by another actress, but it’s something that I was wondering about the whole time.
Christian Petzold: Yes, I do. I told Nina that Lauren Bacall was 19 or 20 when she did To Have and Have Not (1944) but it’s not till Written on the Wind (1956) that she’s really an adult, and so she’s pretty in another way. She’s pretty because of the experiences that she’s had. So at the end of Phoenix, we see Nelly, and she’s on her own, she seems to be an adult, and she’s beautiful.
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Interviewer: There's a final detail I wanted to ask about: after Nelly first sees Johnny in the Phoneix nightclub, she runs all the way home. When she leaves, it's night, but when she gets home, suddenly it's day.
Christian Petzold: This was a big decision! Everybody who has read the script has said, “hey what has she done during this time?” But I wanted to make an ellipsis. An ellipsis that is her, that is her reflection. In this time she makes the plan to go on the offensive with Johnny: “I’ll go back to that, I will catch my identity.”