Tag: German cinema

ROMMEL, PATRICIA

Patricia Rommel

Born 1956

Patricia Rommel has earned over sixty-five editing credits since she began her career in 1982. She was an early collaborator of director Uwe Janson (Verfolgte Wege, Herz in der Hand) before editing Caroline Link’s Beyond Silence. Rommel and Link have become frequent collaborators and have worked together on Nowhere in Africa, Annaluise & Anton, and A Year Ago in Winter. Rommel has also edited several films for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others, The Tourist, Never Look Away), and Angelina Jolie (In the Land of Blood and Honey, By the Sea and First They Killed My Father). Rommel’s editing has earned numerous honors and awards. She received Lola nominations for The Lives of Others and A Year Ago in Winter, won German Film Critics Association awards for The Lives of Others and Hendrik Hölzemann’s Off Beat, and earned two German Camera nominations (winning for Off Beat) as well as two Film Plus nominations (winning again for Off Beat).

“Editing is quite similar to writing. A writer has his thoughts and his words. As an editor I work with the shots, the sound, the music and my thoughts. I string takes together, play around with the space of time or displace the intended order of the shots and the meaning will be completely different. There are endless possibilities of how a story can be told. When things become challenging my ambition is fueled because, all the more so, I have to use my creativity and think out of the box.”
—“Filmmaker Interview: Editor Patricia Rommel Speaks to Fashion Designer Paula Immich” by Paula Immich. The full text can be found in the Appendix.

 

LORENZ, JULIANE

Juliane Lorenz

Born 1957

Juliane Lorenz was nineteen when she was hired to assist Ila von Hasperg (*) on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette. Beginning with Despair, she edited most of Fassbinder’s films thereafter, including Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronica Voss and Querelle, which she finished after his death. When she was twenty-four, she found him dead in their apartment (they were married). Lorenz then became the editor for Werner Schroeter (Malina, The Rose King), and since 1992, she has been head of The Fassbinder Foundation, producing and directing a feature documentary on him along with other projects.

(*) Ila von Hasperg, it should be noted, also edited Fassbinder’s The Stationmaster’s Wife as well as Werner Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran, Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, and Bette Gordon’s Variety, along with many other films.

“Rainer loved editors. He felt himself to be an editor. He used to say: ‘I do my job on the set and you do yours in the editing room. You are a second director. You have to finish the film, it’s
your responsibility.’ He inflamed me with that idea and that’s how I grew up.”
—Juliane Lorenz interviewed by Roger Crittenden in “Fine Cuts: The Art of European Film Editing.” The full interview can be found in the Appendix.