Grelles Licht (1982)

A young couple kissing joyfully at the breakfast table, playful, excited, re-embracing, postponing the goodbye for nearly two minutes, before she leaves and he pensively lights a cigarette as the title is superimposed on a blindingly white screen surrounded by a dark circle, suggesting the spot of a projection lamp: The astonishing first shot of Schreiner's debut Grelles Licht is an emblematic moment. Immediately, there's an abundance of this special feeling of natural spontaneity, yet also the insistence that things take time. "You can't chase after things," Schreiner declares categorically, "you have to let them become. You have to be long enough in a place for something lasting to emerge, even with the most banal things. It takes time. And it will be beautiful, if you take the time." Part of the disarming beauty of this first shot is that it both evokes vital ecstasy and hope, some unconscious, irretrievable happiness-in this case, of young love-but it applies to Schreiner's notion of living in general. Yet for all the time it takes, this potentially endless state of bliss eventually is over, making one painfully aware of the finiteness of things, felt in disappointments and alienation(...) One thing that is so miraculous about his films is the ease of his subjects in front of the camera, "who seem to approach it (like a mirror image), and not the other way round," as Barbara Wurm has noted. Schreiner himself says that he tries "to let things happen, not watch them, which may be a provocation: as a filmmaker you seem doomed to watch. But you have to mobilize all mental strength to adjust your attitude to escape watching, to be able to approach the other and dive into him."