THE INTERVIEW

October, 2023

WOLFGANG CHRISTOPH SCHMIEDT

DIRECTORS OF ECHO HOMO

BEST HONORABLE MENTION

Wolfgang, tell us a little more about yourself. Where did your desire to be a director come from?

It was sort of an accident: I started thinking about a sound installation for an exhibition based on the sounds of medical machines.

There’s a certain feeling everybody shares: there are things we find amazing, things for which we feel immensely grateful, but also things with which we personally wish to have as little to do as possible: a PET-Scan, an ONCOR linear accelerator, a single-photon emission tomography scan – even a simple dentist’s drill. None of these devices are silent – some even send acoustic signals that evoke an alarm sound when irregularities are detected. From the metallic and deafening noise of an MRT to the light hum of an infusion pump, we simply can’t help but listen and wonder what may become of us – we are caught between fear and the hope of relief, a hope of being healed or saved. Hearing the “soundtrack” of medical machinery leaves us feeling everything from uninterested to helplessly exposed and reliant.

It was this kind of thinking that inspired me to record and render these sounds, later mixing them with self-composed music and thus bringing this “Rhythm of Medicine” sound installation to life. Unfortunately, the director of the art exhibition was surprised that there were only sounds and no visuals (which, by the way, is the usual form a sound installation takes), so I decided to create a video to accompany the soundtrack. With the help of some great friends and artists, we managed to do this on a shoestring budget, and the third part of the ECHO HOMO trilogy, “HOMO DEUS”, was born – and it was a successful birth. So this spurned me on to think about doing more of this kind of work that I had started to love.

What is your background?

I started my professional life as surgical assistant in hospital. Later, I studied guitar at the “Hanns Eisler” Academy of Music in Berlin. I worked (and still work) as a freelance musician with various musicians and composers all over Europe. Prizes at international competitions, e.g. in Belgium and Leverkusen (duo “inner visuals” with Jörg Huke, “the east berlin guest orchestra”). After the fall of the wall, I studied cultural management. I published several guitar tutorials and released about 25 CDs as a musician and another 25 as a producer. Since the summer semester of 1994, I have served as the acting head of the Popular Music Department at the “Hanns Eisler” Academy of Music in Berlin. I currently teach composing/producing/guitar at the HMT, the Academy of Music and Theatre in Rostock.

I have had the honour of performing with various groups at various gigs, concerts, and festivals around the world.
My particular artistic focus lies in the crossover between old European traditions and contemporary musical languages such as improvised jazz, minimal music, and R&B.

In recent years I have begun to create performances and installations with “non-musical” sounds such as body noises and technical equipment, especially from the field of medicine.
I have also worked as a composer/producer for various theatres.

As an artistic director, I have enjoyed the opportunity to organize and design many festivals, such as “LichtKlangNacht”, “Harbour Symphonies”, “Montagsbalkonies”, and numerous other urban art projects.
s. www.wolfgangschmiedt.de

What were your references for ECHO HOMO – The Evolution of Mankind between Breathing, Hearts, and Eternity?

The idea of a trilogy really fascinates me. In film, for example, there are the “Three Colours Blue/Red/White” by Polish director Krysztof Kieślowski, or the Paradise Trilogy “Faith/Love/Hope” by Austrian director Ulrich Seidl.
The possibility of thinking about the same matter or topic from different points of view allows a great deal of artistic freedom and variety, offering an audience many surprises whilst requiring the strength not to lose focus. That’s what I wanted to test in my own work.

I am also fascinated by the design of old altars in churches; they are often designed as a triptych: two symmetrical side wings with a large central section. The two wings can be folded together so that they completely cover the central section. I have tried to incorporate this symmetry into my trilogy

You won the Best Honorable Mention at the RED MOVIE AWARDS. What does that symbolise?

I am incredibly happy that this trilogy is being seen and appreciated. It is not ‘easy’ material, and you have to be involved: it takes time, courage, and a desire for novel and unusual performances and approaches. It is by no means a matter of course to experience such openness and appreciation. In this respect, I am very grateful to RED MOVIE for giving such a positive assessment, and I hope that a wider audience will also perhaps become curious about the trilogy – and if not at least individual parts of the trilogy.

Your film is part of a trilogy, can you tell us how you built these 3 films in relation to each other?

In the beginning of everything was a breath, in the middle of everything is a heartbeat, and in the future is a prognosis of pain, redemption, and eternity. The film trilogy ECHO HOMO meditates on our humanity across diverse mediums: in music, in dance, in pantomime, in art. It tells a story of the struggle for growth and knowledge, of the struggle for intimacy and relationships, of the struggle for togetherness and unity, of progress and departure – all without a spoken word. I recorded and used sounds for each part that were based on a specific family of sounds (breathing, heartbeats, medical technology). I then combined these with other sounds and (above all) crafted music to create a fitting soundtrack.

Part 1
Homo Erectus – I can Breathe …. fragility and power
Humanity is connected with nature. Breath is the origin of our being. The soundtrack contains around 180 breath-takes – all of which can be heard and distinguished if you listen carefully. (15 minutes)

Part 2
Homo Sapiens – The Beauty of the Heartbeat … between autonomy and attachment
Humanity is connected with humanity – the heartbeat is the center of our being The basic sound of the soundtrack are heartbeats, including from sick hearts, which are also audible when the heart transplantation is shown. (30 minutes)

Part 3
Homo Deus – Slave to the Rhythm of Medicine … between fear and hope
Humanity as interconnected with technology – the sound and beat of technology. (15 minutes)

You are basically a musician, how has your art nourished your cinema and vision as a director?

As I have already described, the origin of my film work was a sound installation. As a result of combining music and sounds into a new synthesis in this way, I began to imagine associative images, scenes, and sequences in similar dramaturgical arcs of tension. But this was different from the music that supports a narrative film. Here, the impulse came from the soundtrack and was then translated into a dramaturgical visualization that was strongly associative and meditative – but not necessarily narrative. All the music was recorded with my direct involvement. Some was created directly before the film, some 10—25 years ago. It was very interesting for me to feel how all the different types of music that I had made in my life were given a completely new coherence and direction through the films and the process of making them, almost as if those recordings had been waiting for this very moment to be brought together in such a way.

In your opinion, how can an experimental film translate the emotion and message of a director in a more singular way than via a work of fiction?

An experimental film – in this case perhaps more of a poetic or meditative film – offers a great deal of freedom for both the audience and the actors in the creative process to enter into their own worlds of thought through a moment of poetry. You don’t have to stringently follow a narrative but can experience your own movie on a meta-level whilst watching it. In our film, it transcends the sounds of breathing, heartbeats, or medical technology that can be heard in the background that reinforced this process.

What was the biggest challenge for this film?

There were numerous complicated situations and problems, as is true of almost all films. But dealing with the corona pandemic created a real test of nerves: we shot the two parts HOMO ERECTUS and HOMO SAPIENS during the corona period. For HOMO SAPIENS, we had planned to film a heart surgery (the replacement of a diseased heart with an artificial heart). It took almost two years for the strict pandemic rules to be relaxed enough to allow such operations to be carried out ‘regularly’ again, in a manner for us as a film crew to obtain permission to enter the operating theater and for all the circumstances to allow us to shoot these sequences in the operating room.

Do you have a particular anecdote to share with us?

The dance scenes for “HOMO DEUS” had to be worked out on the basis of my soundtrack. It’s not always ‘fun’ or ‘easy listening’. After several hours, the dancer and the crew could no longer bear the intense and heavy music and asked me to continue working with lighter pop music. This – perhaps bizarrely – resulted in the incredibly haunting dance scenes with completely different music to what you hear in the actual soundtrack.

What is your next project?

In the field of music and theater, I am currently working on a performance that examines the connection between “homeland” and music. I’m doing this using the example of the life and music of Anton Günther, one of the first “singer/songwriters” in the Erzgebirge region of Germany at around 1900. (Here’s a funny side story: he actually invented merchandising, which has become so crucial for today’s music industry.) In the area of film, I am working on a long-term documentary about two women in my home town of Rostock. One of them is the first woman to become mayor here in 2023 after 800 years of male ‘domination’. The other is the first woman to become Rector of the University of Rostock after 600 years of male rule. I want to follow their work for five years and see whether and how the city and the university change, as well as whether and how the two women themselves change.