She has often experienced how the audience breathes with the film. He, on the other hand, can’t imagine anything. Yes, she replies, you can feel that in the cinema.
He would have liked to be more specific, more concrete: Can you tell from his laughter? No, she says, you just feel it. That doesn’t entirely convince him. Mysterious, he growls.
Two principles run through the conversations between Erika and Ulrich Gregor, which the documentary film “Come with me into the cinema” captures. She brings clever emotion into play, he a tentative reason.
There is no contradiction in this, because their thinking about cinema ultimately runs in parallel. The interviews that Alice Agneskirchner conducts with them are dialogues that actually don’t require any questioners. For the most part, the director took them to the cinema – the two of them enthusiastically accept this documentary film convention – but almost as often in the kitchen. There you put things on the table, tackle the day or let it end. Both cinema and kitchen are places of sustenance for the Gregors. They don’t have to draw a line between privacy and work.
Their shared and not consuming passion aims to show films that would otherwise have remained invisible. When they start doing it, in the late 1950s, the Federal Republic appears to them as a cinematographic desert. This can only be fruitful by virtue of cosmopolitan vigour.
They initiate the Berlin audience into world cinema. Initially mainly from Eastern Europe and Asia, over the decades they have practically wiped out all the white spots on the cinematic globe. As co-founders of the “Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek” they also teach the audience to become more discerning.
With its title, Agneskirchner’s film creates a gentle inner tension. At the beginning, Ulrich Gregor quotes, at the behest of his wife, Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem of the same name about going to the cinema as a lovemaker. Admittedly, the poetess conjures up a completely different kind of exotic screen magic than the Gregors had in mind.
They are committed to films that are made out of inner conviction, beyond propaganda and commerce. In the “Arsenal” cinema and the Berlinale section “International Forum for Young Films” invented by them, a lush avant-garde finds a home that is chronically ignored by German distributors. On the other hand, they are the ones who make the Marx Brothers accessible to the German audience, which meets with resistance at the first attempt: a moviegoer complains about the destructive Jewish comedy.
With their tireless love of discovery, the Gregors have rendered invaluable services to the local film culture. “Come with me to the cinema” is therefore a film that absolutely had to be made at least once. That’s the catch: Alice Agneskirchner’s only choice is to kneel or bow to her protagonists.
In more than two and a half hours of running time, not a single critical word is mentioned; even if one had searched for it, one would probably not have found anyone who spits in the soup. The epic length, the coup to win Senta Berger as a commentator and a squad of prominent, top-class interviewees (they were often filmed in their kitchen) show the portrait film as a project of engaging systemic relevance. There is an astonishing gap in the line-up of companions: the successors, who have managed the “Arsenal” since the turn of the millennium, do not appear on the scene.
It’s about an inheritance, not about what comes after: The film orders the house of the Gregors. They are self-confident informants about their own history. Not only in hindsight does it appear as a chronicle of certainties. The confidence they place in their judgment is disarming. They were pilot fish who could accurately assess which are the important films of the present and historical.
The Gregors hardly disagree; even if Erika argues more personally and Ulrich more abstractly, more conceptually. This “we” is indissoluble. They carry the film as a wondrous team: you, the opinion leader, he, the prudent formulator, in whose composure occasionally flashes an irony that perhaps isn’t really ironic at all.
In addition to the biographical bookkeeping, the Kurzweil is Agneskirchner’s second concern. She sends her protagonists on a scavenger hunt through her life and work. The everyday observations are not lacking in quiet situation comedy. Pretty finds from the archives and lively intertitles tell of an enterprising spirit, which is seconded by Max Knoth’s jazz score with verve.
A second theme of the film persistently gains contours: the Gregors not only write film history, but also testify to contemporary history in the Federal Republic of Germany. Of course, the shocks of 1968 are not missing. But Agneskirchner digs deeper. A central motif of the much-maligned German post-war film emerges: the absent father.
The Gregors represent the generation that experienced continuity and rupture at the same time. Ulrich’s father played the Hammond organ in the local film “Grün ist die Heide”, Erikas was killed in the war. In the manner of its protagonists, the film depicts struggling with a conflict-ridden legacy without sentimentality. It is Claude Lanzmann, whose “Shoah” the Gregors helped to achieve, who redeems Erika: “Sister, you have every right to mourn.”
