As far as the so-called Berlin School is concerned, the films of Ulrich Köhler have mostly led a somewhat peripheral existence — which is less to comment on their popularity with general audiences or accolades among festival juries and critics than on their jaggedness of genre, tone, and scope. Yet irrespective of how one feels about Köhler’s œuvre, through it runs an aspiration to treat cinema as a testing ground that connects our very present with the vastness of film history and its innumerable nodes of departure. Gavagai, his first solo feature after the peculiar last-man-on-earth reworking In My Room (2018), adds yet another “experiment” to Köhler’s filmography, presenting us with a premise seemingly familiar yet difficult enough to find a precedent for: a film about the making of a previous film by the same director (Tom DiCillo’s anarchic makeshift-diptych Johnny Suede (1991) and Living in Oblivion (1995) did not so much “come to mind” as they represent the sparse results of this specific research prompt). In the case of Gavagai, meanwhile, this means that we find ourselves in the film’s initial scenes on the African continent, where a middle-aged white female French filmmaker — a réalisatrice — attempts a reverse adaptation of the Medea myth, with a white Medea ostracized by Black Africans.
If this alone were the premise of Gavagai, the recognizable parallels to Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness would be vacuous at best. Yet, it was precisely this attempt at a postcolonial feature loosely based on his parents’ work as NGO development workers, as well as its subsequent premiere at the 2011 Berlinale — where it won him the Silver Bear for Best Director — that lingered with Köhler, reverberating as a kind of self-inflicted and multifarious embarrassment that stays much longer in the conscientious mind than the fleeting moments of success. Not wholly unlike an ethnographer who attempts to represent a process in its entirety, Köhler’s intradiegetic creation of a contemporary Medea adaptation does not end with finalizing the shoot of that film, but progresses, through Köhler’s typical ellipsis, from the sunny shores of Dakar into the ever-gray cold of the Berlin winter.
There, in front of a characteristically uncharacteristic InterContinental, we see Jean-Christophe Folly as Nourou, the actor playing Jason of Corinth, Medea’s husband, in the now premiering film. A security man, displaying casual racism, blocks his entry into the hotel. Enter Medea actor and German co-star Maja (played by Maren Eggert), with whom Nourou enjoyed an extramarital affair during the shoot in Senegal. And along with Maja (and Medea, if you will), enter Köhler. For the following scene is, as Köhler and Folly recounted at NYFF in conversation with director of programming Dennis Lim, more or less directly taken from an incident surrounding the premiere of Sleeping Sickness in 2011, when Köhler reported the hotel security person who, extrapolating from Folly’s skin color to the validity of his presence, initially refused the Paris-born actor entrance to the festival-affiliated hotel. Folly, after receiving an apology from the festival, was subsequently lodged in a sumptuous hotel with complimentary champagne — though by this point, quite obviously, the enjoyment of these cuvées was spoiled beyond vintage.
As far as this anecdote goes, it seems to have produced only losers. As you would expect for a scene which, for so long, has lived rent-free in Köhler’s mind and, to no small extent, instigated the making of this film, there is some centrality to it. Overcharged with meaning and complexity, we have, for one, the German actor who, guilt-ridden by the sheer presence of Nourou as the embodiment of her infidelity, turns the situation into a personal mission of revenge. Then there is the security man who, far from admitting his own wrongdoing, turns out to be an outsourced subcontractor, which not only means that the hotel cannot so easily dismiss him, but that said dismissal, if carried through, will eventually hit the economically most precarious. Conscious of this, Nourou sees all this transpire before his eyes. Without any say in it, he is involuntarily dragged from victimhood into the role of someone on whose seeming behest another person loses their job — which, granted, deprives him, the person of color, of his agency — one of the many racism-adjacent phenomena against which, ironically, every film festival so eagerly positions itself.
Nonchalantly, one might summarize this background information as follows: if you know, you know. But if you don’t know, this scene might not achieve quite the same effects, its perspicacity leaving behind a taste of discoursal staleness. Which is not to say that such situations do not still frequently happen every day (Folly, in fact, evoked ample recent examples on stage), but rather that Köhler’s rendition of them has little claim to originality and rests, in fact, much more on our knowledge about its extratextual origins. By obscuring these autobiographical inspirations — starting with the overbearing French female filmmaker Caroline (Nathalie Richard), whose resemblance to Claire Denis, though apparently not intended, wasn’t and will not go by unnoticed, and continuing with Maja, who assumes Köhler’s erstwhile white-savior role at the hotel reception desk — Köhler might, in fact, nourish rather than deflect the idea of a roman à clef. It’s a kind of raw self-flagellation, a referentiality to actuality, which distinguishes Köhler’s project from the intricately aloof meta-elaborations of, say, Fellini or Kaufman.
“From the outside, filmmaking is an absurdly comical process – but for people working on a film, it is often an existential drama,” Köhler is quoted in a recent interview. Watching Gavagai, it quickly becomes clear that Köhler at no point is interested in balancing these two sides of the coin. In the first part of the film, set along the coast of Dakar, we see the obnoxious yet undoubtedly passionate fictional French director increasingly lose control over her cast and crew, with Medea actor Maja actively revolting against her director’s abusive practices and one of the Black stars about to abscond from set as crew members mistake him for one of the Black extras, suggesting that his driver may as well fill in for him since no white person was able to tell the difference anyway.
Deliberately, in contrast, Köhler stresses the repetitions and differences as they occur in the reality of his fiction and the fiction thereof. As would seem apt for a Medea adaptation of postmodern impetus, his director stand-in Caroline, at one point, sees the two children — Medea’s children — drive away in the motorboat aboard which we earlier saw Medea move ashore. Struck by the image of the seemingly autarchic children, she urges her crew to film. A little later, we find ourselves amidst the romantic plays of the lead couple Maja and Nourou, whose somewhat histrionic dialogue is little later recontextualized through its repetition, indicated primarily through the changed lighting, which consequently reframes the foreseen scene as playful rehearsal.
Considering the film’s title, Gavagai — the metalinguistic thought experiment borrowed from the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine that describes the impossibility for a linguist to infer the meaning of a word uttered in an entirely foreign language solely from that utterance and its minimal context — it does not surprise to find such scenes in the film. There appears to be an interest, albeit of limited vigor and insight, in exploring the malleability of a given scene, of its rules, its genre. Take the Berlinale press conference scene, in which we see the answers given by the cast and crew translated in real time as the camera tracks along the different translation cabins erected to the side of the hall. In said press conference, moments later, we briefly take on Nourou’s perspective as his mind transposes, quite literally, the discursive “elephant in the room” onto Caroline’s head. While surprising in style, this resort to absurdity — interrupting the press conference just as Caroline and her cast face a staccato of charged questions regarding the film’s politics — links back to an oft-cited Köhler essay from 2007 titled “Warum ich keine ‘politischen’ Filme mache” (“Why I don’t make ‘political’ films,” the translated version of which appeared in issue 38 of Cinema Scope, for those who remember). Therein, Köhler bemoans the underchallenging didacticism of many overtly political, state-funded films and insists on the subversive potential of l’art pour l’art.
A longstanding admirer of filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lisandro Alonso, and Lucrecia Martel, Köhler’s kinship to them is most pronounced as the narrative lapses into instability. Upon learning that the complaint brought forth in his name at the hotel reception has led to the dismissal of the security man, Nourou seeks him out to talk. He joins him and his boss (played by Thomas Arslan Muse and crowd-pleaser Mišel Matičević) for a car ride, which slowly but surely steers the vehicle that is Gavagai into thriller territory: dusky realms in which heretofore unthinkable actions seem suddenly not only possible, but increasingly inescapable. It is precisely this kind of shift, such reevaluations and recalibrations of seemingly fixed constellations, that illuminates Köhler’s preoccupations. And while these, through most of Gavagai, remain just tenuous echoes resounding from earlier works, we do end on this brief moment, which we saw Caroline observe earlier, the children driving off toward the horizon on their captured motorboat, leaving us wondering about the ways in which the image finds the frame.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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