I wanted to make something different from what I keep seeing in today’s AI-film trend. Not another end of the world, more robots, futuristic cities or spectacular destruction. Many of those films are technically impressive, but this time I was not interested in the future. Quite the opposite: I wanted to go back somewhere.
The idea for HERTZ found me in a very ordinary way. I was looking around on Google Maps when, through the little yellow Pegman, I suddenly set off for the town where I was born. I travelled along old streets, looked in on some of the main settings of my life, and eventually reached the building where my grandparents had lived.
I walked around the building, or at least as far as Google allowed me to. Pegman could not take me through the gate and upstairs into the flat, but by then I no longer needed him to. Seeing the building was enough: somewhere inside me, the door opened by itself.
The memories returned. Not only images, but smells, sounds and feelings buried long ago. Details I had not thought about for years were still there, unchanged, somewhere in my subconscious. On the screen I could see only a building; meanwhile, I was already walking through the old flat.
I was about twenty the last time I went there, after my grandparents had died. A great deal of time has passed since then, yet I can still recall the entire interior almost centimetre by centimetre. I know where the furniture stood, how the rooms opened into one another, what the light looked like and which way to turn in the corridor.
Why has it remained so precise inside me? Probably because that flat still belongs to me, even though it has not been mine for a very long time.
As a child, I spent my summers and part of my school holidays with my grandparents. Almost nothing tangible from that world remains in my possession today. I do not have the furniture, the porcelain or the old household objects. I keep only a few worn photographs. Yet all I have to do is close my eyes, and the entire flat is there again.
My grandfather was born in 1900. He was a handsome gentleman, always neat, well-groomed and elegant. I remember not only his face and clothes, but also the sound of his made-to-measure leather shoes. The leather creaked with every step, while the metal heel struck sharply against the floor. I can still hear that sound.
My grandmother was born in 1911. She was a beautiful and kind young woman. Theirs was a great love, even though she had originally been given in marriage to my grandfather with a dowry of two wagonloads of wheat. They lived a prosperous bourgeois life and owned both a shop and a restaurant. As a child, I still managed to catch a few images, sounds and gestures from that world before everything slowly disappeared.
In old age, my grandmother fractured her hip and never fully recovered. She walked with crutches, and my grandfather looked after her. As the years passed, this became increasingly difficult for him. They often got on each other’s nerves, argued and grew tired of one another, yet they still loved each other. By then their love no longer showed itself through grand gestures, but through the fact that my grandfather remained beside her and continued to care for her.
The story of HERTZ has a basis in reality, but I did not freeze my imagination. I am not making a documentary, nor do I want to tell my family’s history in exact chronological order. Beside my memories, I placed everything my imagination attached to them. I mixed real places and emotions with invented situations, tension and moments that may never have happened, but could have.
This is one small part of my life. Who might be interested in it? Obviously not everyone. But many of us carry an old flat inside us, a vanished world, or a sound that no one else can hear any longer. It might be the creak of a leather shoe, a key turning in a lock, a grandparent’s voice or the smell of a familiar building.
I dreamed this memory into a short film. On this blog, I will show parts of HERTZ, the creation of its scenes, its visual world and the way in which what truly happened becomes intertwined with what my imagination added.
Enjoy reading and exploring.