Shift

Schift, Alex Garbaulet, 29′, Germania 2015

Schicht (Shift) is both a reckoning and a search for traces of the past. Layer by layer the film unfolds the portrait of the filmmaker’s family – brought to life by records from private archives – and embarks on a dizzying trip through the shrinking industrial city of Salzgitter, Germany.

[quicktime]https://www.workingtitlefilmfestival.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Shift_excerpt_1_480.mov[/quicktime]

Title Schicht / Shift/ Turno
Duration 28′ 30″
Year 2015
Country Germany
Genre Experimental Documentary
Language German
Subtitle Italian
Director Alex Gerbaulet
Screenwriter Alex Gerbaulet
DOP Alex Gerbaulet, Smina Bluth
Sound Tom Schön
Editing Philip Scheffner
Sound Editing Pascal Capitolin
Music Philip Scheffner
Cast Susanne Sachsse
Production pong Film GmbH
Distribution pong Film GmbH
Festival a.o. International Short Film Fest Oberhausen 2015, FID Marseille 2015, Doclisboa 2015, Filmmaker Festival Milano 2015, transmediale 2016, Bucharest International Experimental Film Fest 2016
Awards 1st Prize German Competition at International Short Film Fest Oberhausen 2015; Fist Film Award FID Marseille 2015; German Film Critics Award 2015
Web Site http://schicht.pong-berlin.de

Synopsis
Schicht (Schift) unfolds the portrait of the filmmaker’s family – brought to life by records from private archives – and embarks on a dizzying trip through the shrinking industrial city of Salzgitter, Germany. A city that is a cyborg with an iron skeleton and a heart beating 1000 metres deep under layers of soil and concrete.
Mining, steel factory, model city. Upon the years 33 and 45, the first post-war generation projects itself into the future. Rudolf Gerbaulet completes his apprenticeship at the Reichswerke AG (formerly known as Hermann-Göring-Werk), works in the mine and at the Volkswagen plant. His wife Doris suffers from multiple sclerosis. Her diary is an expression of her slow disappearance. They name their first daughter after a singer: Alexandra. As a rebellious punk the daughter finds her own rhythm.
Pulsating, sometimes breathless, the film follows the exposed stories. The filmed locations are attacked with archival material: propaganda, news, photos from family albums. Everything is subjected to the filmmaker’s interpretation.
A film between analysis and imagination, composed of the punk of the filmmaker’s youth, accompanied by the roar of the steel mill and the noise of the highway. Interrupted by the cutting silence of abandoned mines, in which from 2020 nuclear waste will be dumped. Half-life of 24,000 years. 685 generations.

Director’s Statement
Schicht (Shift) is a film about attending a death. The film starts at my mother’s grave, jumps then back in time and outlines her slow disappearance. Many of the feelings of my youth – hanger, aggression, feeling defenceless- orchestrated by the film, came from the sharing her suspension between life and death.
The shocking image of this hanging state is the bed in which Doris spent the last years of her life.
A special bed for decubitus patients, that lifts up the mattress by bellows and keeps the patience on balance. The body, that has no strength anymore, has to be kept by the skin with very much pressure. The patiences lose therefore their own body’s boundaries and they can’t perceive themselves in the right way anymore.
In my opinion there’s an analogy between my mother’s hanging state and hanging situation in which the city of Salzgitter find itself nowadays, that’s what I tried to catch through my images.
Salzgitter is dying as an industrial metropolitan area. It’s a shrinking city, the unemployment is high, the young people emigrate, the city becomes less and less populated. That, that once used to be a booming heavy industry, nowadays outsources or produces niche products or works on the service field. It increases the business volumes, but doesn’t create new job places. On the 20th September 2013 The Guardian made a report about Salzgitter: “Analysts say Germany must act before it becomes full of ghost towns”. The tanks are thick enough. But however here is the future, even if it won’t be welcomed as a fresh start in a new age. The post-industrial age means to Salgitter, that it will become the dumping ground of the Republic. Today new fundaments for the city of tomorrow are being put: they’re made of concrete, poured on radioactive waste’s deposits.
The new fundaments, that will bring Salzgitter into the future, will fill up in the previous mine’s uninterrupted tunnels. The maximum security plan of the future final storage is today partially safe.
My film establishes a present archeology in the shrinking city of Salzgitter, so the past is not concluded, but it intersects to the “now”. To Salzgitter this means wounds to examine, the building of the city has been an act of violence, whose blows are visible even now. It means also to show the daily and working proletarian culture, that puts down roots in the “today” of that past.
It’s not enough a pure observation, to make all this visible, it needs to be dug, penetrated, reversed. For this purpose it was used the archive footage.
The overlook on this shrinking city and its revenant makes possible another relation with my mother’s hanging state. Today what last of hers are only the grave, the bed, that continues to “breath”even without her, and the house, where she has never lived. My father built it and he has remained there. Every day he turns around the empty middle of this house. Every day he does again his running around the steelworks, the imaginary and real city centre. The film turns around this central point, that is not a reference point anymore.
The steelworks “breath” and smoke. Especially in the city they mean to listen to the noise of the factory, that here has stabilized the city body from the inside. So what is going to happen to the city, if the factory declines or at least gets smaller and dismisses its workers? Herbert Haschke, a retired, says to the Guardian: “If there are no jobs, there are no homes, and soon there won’t be a town any more.” What’s going to happen to the city, people, soil, if the factory disappears? Will Salzigitter disappear, like my mother did? This is a question, that nowadays is related to many places in the world grown up around a factory.
That’s why Salzgitter’s story is an universal story.
What’s going on to the mine, if it will be filled? What’s going on to my mother’s grave, if it will be levelled? Moves, that are linked to oblivion.

Director’s bio-filmography
Alex Gerbaulet, born 1977 in Salzgitter, Germany. Artist and filmmaker, based in Berlin. Till 2007 she studied Philosophy, Media Science and Fine Arts in Braunschweig (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). 2008 she was awarded with a scholarship by Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, 2011 selected for Berlinale Talent Campus DOC Station, 2012 scholarship by the city of Berlin. From 2007-2011 she was staff member at the University of Arts in Braunschweig, 2012-2014 she teached at the University of Arts in Kassel. Since 2014 she is part of pong film GmbH Berlin. She realized several video-art projects. SCHICHT (SHIFT) is her first cinema film.