Architect of the Euro

Hans Tietmeyer is the star of Arbeit the new film by the young Irish artist, Duncan Campbell. Johannes (Hans) Tietmeyer was born in 1931 in Metelen, Westphalia. He began his career in the 1960s at the Federal Ministry of Economics in Germany and later became president of the Bundesbank (1993 to 1999). Hans—this is how the narrator of Campbell's film addresses its main character—was one of the most important men to guide the difficult and complex transformation of the European economy in the 1980s and '90s, substantially contributing to the creation of the contemporary financial landscape and the birth of the European currency. A coarse and severe man, Catholic, disciplined and Prussian, he is a visionary and conservative economist and a tireless worker, all at the same time.

"I think of you as a Westphalia oak tree, dear Johannes," the narrator of Campbell's film begins. The narration in black and white by the Irish artist starts with images of the German countryside. A montage of historic photos, newsreels, stills, ad hoc sequences and selections from commercials reconstruct the life of a personality who was decisive for the events of our era in a way that is "not accurate," scientific and analytical but "approximate," progressively putting his life's story into focus.

Tietmeyer is deliberately presented as an historical figure, part of a distant past despite the fact that he still holds public office and is vice president of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. The found footage and manipulation of the grainy film immediately transport us through the protagonist's life in Germany. But that which is History appears to viewers as narrative lost in the folds of time. Formally, the film is a collage of fragments of old film and photographs. The film is intersected by a number of dark sequences in which lights suddenly pop up; lamps turn on and then slowly go off in the eyes of the viewer like flashes of memory or the lighting of a possible set for an interview that never took place.

The voice of the narrator guiding us through the images mounted in sequence has a hard-to-decipher quality. In some cases, he addresses Tietmeyer directly and in others he speaks to the public and in still others he describes facts in an impersonal way. The tone of the story has a taste of theatre and perhaps of the radio but it is confidential at the same time. Economic theories, personal anecdotes, Hans' relationship with the press and fragments of the German social, urban and political scene mix and mingle almost to compose a blurry stream of memories and recollections reaching today's dramatic crisis. From academic studies to policies for reunification up to the 1988 attack by the Red Army Faction, the film episodes, while focusing only on Tietmeyer, deliberately seem to avoid producing a logical theory, a sequence of facts and events that can give answers and narrate the truth.

The story has a Beckett-like quality. It is suspended in time; perhaps it has no beginning and no end, and perhaps, almost paradoxically, the succession of events seems not to have taken place. Campbell's investigation is a collage of history and fiction that offers viewers a variety of images to combine and through which they can reconstruct their own version of events, their own truth. So the film is docudrama, film-collage and narration; but it simultaneously reveals an approach to the investigation of history, a way of gathering and reconstructing memories and past events using history as a material that can be recombined to produce a new narrative body—a form.

In the early '90s after his studies in Glasgow, Campbell founded Radiotuesday together with some other artists; it was an amateur radio program in which music and compilations often intertwined with audio fragments assembled off air, silences and experimentations in sound and editing. In fact, the editing work in Radiotuesday seems somehow to be the starting point for the young Irish artist's subsequent practice in film investigation, exploration and collage.

Like Campbell's two previous documentaries, Bernadette (2008)—the story of the youngest woman in Britain's Parliament and passionate spokesman for the protest in Northern Ireland—and Make it New John (2009), in Arbeit, viewers are invited to follow the story's flow and forget the plot at the same time, diverting their thoughts by looking at photographs of Deutsche Bank interiors, kitchens at post-war German universities, Frankfurt streets and market squares, or shop windows before reunification.

"Money, Hans, is more than part of the economic system; it is a reflection of a nation's desires and sufferings," the narrator states while close-ups of German banknotes—with the historical figures printed on them, their decoration, watermarks and different geometries—appear on the screen; the details of all the banknotes in the world that we may have seen a thousand times in our hands. The change in scale of the image charges the object with a disturbing aura-like quality—the bill, a piece of paper that is as everyday as it is dense with history and meaning—and simultaneously distances viewers from the narrative context, projecting them into an abstract and suspended dimension. The film closes with a camera slowly zooming in on a graph depicting some recent financial performance that is shown pixel by pixel, point by point on a bright screen.

Everything that was—every episode of History—has brought us thus far. Campbell's story about Tietmeyer is the story about a landscape of things, people and facts from our economic history in which we can get lost, think about, observe and reconstruct our own version of events. "Your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it".
Francesco Garutti