Ain’t Nothing Without You
1988, narrative, 35mm, color, 83 min.
Written, directed, produced, and starring: Pia Frankenberg
Camera: Thomas Mauch
Starring: Klaus Bueb, Alfred Edel
Broadcast on BR, ARD, and 3Sat.
Festivals: Venice Biennale, Berlinale, Hof, and others; Max Ophüls Prize 1986 for best young filmmaker.
Distribution: Filmwelt
International sales: Exportfilm Bischoff (Deutsche Kinemathek Frankenberg archive)
“Destiny put her on the wrong side of the tracks,” says a friend, “She’s rich and wants to be poor. So she can finally belong to those who are poor and hence be against the rich.” She herself thinks her biggest problem is that she’s shallow. Martha lives with her young son in Hamburg. She makes films.
She has moved in with Portuguese friends “to be closer to the pulse of society.” Teresa helps foreigners dealing with German bureaucracy. Martha, meanwhile, embarks on a love affair with Alfred, who is also not particularly great at coping with life. In his late thirties, he’s still studying architecture, and he clings to Martha like a lifeline.
The two are a mirror of West German realities, captured spontaneously and parodied with great sarcasm, sometimes verging on the absurd. Amid the bureaucratic chaos of the immigration office, faulty circuits lead to a mix-up of fortunes. In order to meld “high tech” with “high spirits,” a commercial broadcaster takes aim against the wet blankets of cultural criticism.
And running through it all as a leitmotiv are interviews with Martha as a woman, caught on film. Female solidarity? A feminine aesthetic? Film theory reasoning? Neither Martha nor Pia Frankenberg will lose a wink of sleep over them. And neither of them loves a bombshell ending. Martha and Alfred meet up finally in an open-ended happy ending. He is still seeking support; she is still seeking problems.
“Martha basically chafes at everything. She questions everything constantly. It is an incredibly strenuous way to live – and that makes it funny, too.”Pia Frankenberg
Reviews
“… And the winner is a girl: Pia Frankenberg received the Ophüls Prize for her theatrical debut “Ain’t Nothing Without You.” The best film in competition came out victorious – a magnificent black-and-white comedy about the city and its resident neurotics. If you are living, you are improvising. That’s what the film is about. The jury saw it. As if wishing might have helped …”Die Zeit
“… Most young filmmakers offer resistance by adapting to granddad’s cinema. But Pia Frankenberg stands well apart from those movements. She shoots as if the invention of cinema were just around the corner, and as if the inventor’s name was sure to be Pia Frankenberg. And so she piques our curiosity …”Süddeutsche Zeitung
Film stills
Reviews
“Pia Frankenberg’s theatrical debut is an ironic self-portrait of a German filmmaker. The film won the Max Ophüls Prize in January – rightly so … This is not one of the many nice, dutiful, well-adapted, lukewarm German film debuts, and not the oversized audience pleaser or the streamlined Hollywood clone, but rather consistently personal and in rigorous opposition to the hackneyed narrative film tradition – those, she says, just bore her. In its best moments, when it radically realizes the author’s subjective experiences and observations, the film documents the blubbering zeitgeist and is thus somehow full of real, weighty problems. Martha hits pay dirt with cunning and guile.”Der Tip