17/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Katharina Pethke’s extensive, multi-generational research establishes a link between art, sculpture, architecture, and women’s professional and personal decisions

In Katharina Pethke’s debut feature-length documentary, Reproduction, world-premiering in the Berlinale Forum, the director retraces the biographies of her mother and grandmother, finding many points in common between their paths and her own life choices. Moreover, the DoP is Pethke’s partner, Christoph Rohrscheidt, making Reproduction a deeply personal work. A family affair, if you will.

The focus is on women constantly tackling the dilemma between pursuing an artistic career and handling motherhood – at least on paper. Somehow, the fates of the women get lost when the film fixates too much on the architecture and history of the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Yes, the daughter, the mother and the grandmother studied there (Pethke also worked there). Yes, the fixation on the building, both in the narration and in the camera work, is logically grounded. But this logic seems far-fetched.

A building with its statues and murals overshadows the humans (especially in the first half of the film). And when the humans talk, their past and aspirations are retold in a perfectionistic, very correct way. This correctness might be the regalia of the school’s smartest kid, but in cinema, it feels stiff. Reproduction is stuck between wanting to be an architectural film and a biographical documentary/family study. Like a SAGE academic paper, it tests too many hypotheses to be able to connect both arguments.

Additionally, the narrator (Pethke) ponders authenticity, genius and the male/female gaze in the arts. Valid questions. In-depth analysis. Precision of facts. Years. More years. Surnames. More surnames. Perhaps that’s the only suitable approach, yet why do these philosophically factual examinations resemble the Louvre’s audio guide?

Reproduction doesn’t let the viewer in; it’s sleek and detached. Watching the film feels like visiting your art- and architecture-loving acquaintance in his minimalistic downtown apartment, where no one offers you a cosy blanket and you are terrified to stain the beige couch. 

What causes this estranged sensation? The narrowness of the topic? The fine-arts university? The abundance of facts? No, because it’s normal to learn specific and introspective stories through documentaries. In the case of Reproduction, it’s the asceticism of the picture, the academic approach (references, facts, explanations), the lack of dramatic variety, the slow pacing and the difficulty in fully immersing us in the story. Intentionally or not, the film is an example of Brechtian alienation.

It’s puzzling because by flipping through family albums and showing archival footage – even something as intimate as an ultrasound – the film attempts to let the viewer in, yet it doesn’t grant the actual permission to sit on the beige couch. 

Let’s come back to the matter of women. The reflections on “professional ambitions post-maternity leave” gain momentum rather late in the film. In Feminism Is for Everybody, bell hooks argues that “women at work” is a complex subject. Partly, the complexity is due to the status quo of work offering liberation to privileged women. Nevertheless, hooks discloses: “No matter her class, the woman who stayed at home working as a housewife was often isolated. […] When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort and pleasure.” We see this notion manifesting through Rosemarie (the grandmother), who stepped away from a potential artistic career to take care of the kids.

Despite the objections expressed, Reproduction is a contribution to the domain of motherhood studies, which, according to researcher Andrea O'Reilly, are still at the periphery of feminism studies.

Reproduction was produced by Germany’s Fünferfilm. The world sales are handled by Pluto Film.