SMALL RIPS
„« … in Kurzer Abriss film director Ulrike Knorr documents the work in a factory which may not exist for much longer. She lets employees describe their work in daringly long and often fixed shots. They mention words like “flottation cells”, “degree of whiteness” and “structural texture”. The concepts of the protagonists are as important to the director as the world of machines they live in. With spot-on precison, she films rolls and hoses. In her shots, they quite irritatingly seem to take on life as if they formed an immense organism. But apart from wood pulp, merely artificial chemicals flow through them, explains an employee who, like most paper makers, has become hard of hearing because because of the deafening machine noise.
Ulrike Knorr contemplates the work in the mill with a thoroughly critical gaze and succeeds in unveiling the fascinating beauty of a disappearing world without nostalgically distorting it.
Elias Schafroth, Visions du Réel, April 2004
“At the end of the 19th century, Kübler und Niethammer Papierfabrik Kriebstein AG was one of the largest paper mills in Germany. It exploited a considerable mass of workers running up to nine gigantic machines. Today, having survived the upheavals of the post modern era, it is just keeping its head above water, painfully adopting the new European norms of production, with a regularly decreasing manpower on only one machine.
Small Rips, Ulrike Knorr’s latest film portrays the mill as if she were filming the disappearance of a entire world, the end of a social order. Devoid of indulgence for a dismal failure, her film is a thorough study of the inescapable disappearance of the past. In long sequences it captures what has become obsolete and been reduced to mere traces, signs and memories of a bygone age. As early as the first scene, the situation is set. A vast sheet of paper is winding on a speeding cylinder. Relentlessly, the paper tears up, springing like violent crumpled waves in an unfurling storm that invades the screen before a few almost indifferent workers.
Endowed with an extraordinary visual power, this first scene evokes a shipwreck, a total collapse, as if nobody cared. Still, in a very particular personal way, Ulrike Knorr undertakes and succeeds a film that contradicts this indifference. If she shows the mill as a closed place, suffocating in an inhuman mechanical monstrousness, it is only to bring together those who work and live there day after day. From the devouring mechanical Moloch to the chains of servitude, her eye catches the repeated movements of the men who hesitate between tiredness and automatism in a state of unending toil and exhaustion.
Beyond her skill in rendering almost palpable the stifling oppression of the place, what strikes most is her ability to create an empathy between us viewers and those she is filming and watching. Her entire film as well as her whole process of a film maker seem to lead to this sharing, our possible aptitude to briefly assume the life of others. Not a sentimental or directly emotional sharing, but physical, at first sensual, that brings about a complicity, a connivance where all forms of indifference have vanished.
A human film to a high degree, Small Rips is permeated from beginning to end with the concept of death and our reluctance to accept it. The propelling forces in these workers’ life become ours in a frightening contradiction : on the one hand the death-carrying exploitation, on the other hand the anguishing prospect of living through its end. In both cases, death is just unacceptable. It is precisely this visceral refusal, this far more incomprehensible rending that Ulrike Knorr makes us go through the time of her film. And this opens out to our comprehension, i. e. our capability to “take with”.
Nothing less, nothing more. No moralising or ideological oration, no desire to distinguish right from wrong, no turnkey solution but an attention to be close to lives that are different from ours. A cinema of consciousness as much as underlying emotion, Small Rips is essential, not only because of what it conveys but also because, to the very end, Ulrike Knorr has held the risk of a perilous writing. Her unyielding editing allows each scene a physical duration where time stretches and leaves an open space to the power of what is unexpressed, the intimate word the spectator invents, a word that in the glaucous light where everything is swaying seems to light it up and push darkness back.”
Philippe Simon, Cinergie (B), October 2003
„... Die erste Einstellung des Films war zugleich eine der ersten Aufnahmen die gedreht wurden. Ab der Situation, in der das Papier reißt, war die Regisseurin fasziniert vom Papier und der Maschine. Diese Einstellung entspricht auch in etwa einem Resümee des Filmes: Es geht um Funktionieren / Nicht Funktionieren der Maschine und um die Menschen, die im Bild auftauchen.“
„... Wie funktioniert für Knorr diese Diskrepanz Monster/Maschine – weißes Papier? Von Anfang an war das ein Kontrapunkt, so Knorr. Das Vergängliche, das Zerbrechliche des weißen Papiers hat sie bewegt. Geschichten werden auf Papier fest geschrieben. Irgendwann wird dieses beschriebene Papier dann als Altpapier wiederverwertet, um neues Papier herzustellen – und es entstehen neue Geschichten auf recyceltem Papier...“
Protokollauszüge, Podiumsgespräch der Duisburger Filmwoche, November 2004
„Ulrike Knorr est née en 1978 à Dresde. Après des études de photographie à La Cambre, elle réalise un premier film au sein de l’atelier de l’AJC !, Grenzsteine (2001), où elle promenait sa caméra sur la ligne de l’ancienne frontière entre les deux Allemagne. C’était un film aux paysages superbement photographiés.
Avec Petite Déchirure, elle construit un récit également marqué par l’histoire allemande en filmant le travail dans une fabrique de papier, fondée en 1856, avant sa faillite en 2003. Elle réussit un attachant portrait collectif des ouvriers de l’usine, et, par-delà, d’un monde du travail en voie de mutation.
C’est davantage encore sa manière de filmer la chaîne de production du papierqui emporte l’admiration lorsque l’on sait que la cinéaste tourna sans moyens, assurant seule l’image et le son.”
Serge Meurant, Filmer à tout Prix, Novembre 2004
„Dans une fabrique de papier, une rotative s’emballe, projetant des mètres et des mètres de papier en l’air sous le regard indiffèrent et passif des ouvriers. Habitués aux caprices de leur machine, ils la réparent avec une attention très touchante, comme des fourmis ouvrières soigneraient leur reine. Entre épure et burlesque, les premières images du film d’Ulrike Knorr nous emportent dans l’univers décalé de cette usine décalée d’ex-RDA.”
Le P’tit Ciné, Septembre 2003
„At the end of the 19th century, Kübler und Niethammer Papierfabrik Kriebstein AG was one of the largest paper mills in Germany. It exploited a considerable mass of workers running up to nine gigantic machines. Today, having survived the upheavals of the post modern era, it is just keeping its head above water, painfully adopting the new European norms of production, with a regularly decreasing manpower on only one machine.
Small Rips, Ulrike Knorr’s latest film portrays the mill as if she were filming the disappearance of a entire world, the end of a social order. Devoid of indulgence for a dismal failure, her film is a thorough study of the inescapable disappearance of the past. In long sequences it captures what has become obsolete and been reduced to mere traces, signs and memories of a bygone age. As early as the first scene, the situation is set. A vast sheet of paper is winding on a speeding cylinder. Relentlessly, the paper tears up, springing like violent crumpled waves in an unfurling storm that invades the screen before a few almost indifferent workers.
Endowed with an extraordinary visual power, this first scene evokes a shipwreck, a total collapse, as if nobody cared. Still, in a very particular personal way, Ulrike Knorr undertakes and succeeds a film that contradicts this indifference. If she shows the mill as a closed place, suffocating in an inhuman mechanical monstrousness, it is only to bring together those who work and live there day after day. From the devouring mechanical Moloch to the chains of servitude, her eye catches the repeated movements of the men who hesitate between tiredness and automatism in a state of unending toil and exhaustion.
Beyond her skill in rendering almost palpable the stifling oppression of the place, what strikes most is her ability to create an empathy between us viewers and those she is filming and watching. Her entire film as well as her whole process of a film maker seem to lead to this sharing, our possible aptitude to briefly assume the life of others. Not a sentimental or directly emotional sharing, but physical, at first sensual, that brings about a complicity, a connivance where all forms of indifference have vanished.
A human film to a high degree, Small Rips is permeated from beginning to end with the concept of death and our reluctance to accept it. The propelling forces in these workers’ life become ours in a frightening contradiction : on the one hand the death-carrying exploitation, on the other hand the anguishing prospect of living through its end. In both cases, death is just unacceptable. It is precisely this visceral refusal, this far more incomprehensible rending that Ulrike Knorr makes us go through the time of her film. And this opens out to our comprehension, i. e. our capability to “take with”.
Nothing less, nothing more. No moralising or ideological oration, no desire to distinguish right from wrong, no turnkey solution but an attention to be close to lives that are different from ours. A cinema of consciousness as much as underlying emotion, Small Rips is essential, not only because of what it conveys but also because, to the very end, Ulrike Knorr has held the risk of a perilous writing. Her unyielding editing allows each scene a physical duration where time stretches and leaves an open space to the power of what is unexpressed, the intimate word the spectator invents, a word that in the glaucous light where everything is swaying seems to light it up and push darkness back.”
Philippe Simon, Cinergie (B), October 2003
