_{O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times by Pim Zwier}

Max Schönwetter, the subject of Pim Zwier’s new documentary (premiering in IDFA’s Envision Competition), was born in 1874 and died in 1961. The German oologist therefore lived through periods of huge social and political upheaval - world wars, great depressions, the rise and fall of the Nazis etc. However, his focus remained firmly on what mattered most to him, namely eggs. He studied and collected them obsessively. When it came to the esoteric science of oology, he ruled the roost.

During his time as an artist in residence in Halle (Saale) in 2011, director Zwier first visited the Natural Sciences Collections of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Dr Frank Steinheimer, the head of the Collections, gave him a short guided tour and then let him roam the collection on his own for the rest of the day. This led him first to hatch the video-installation Breathless, and eventually to develop the new project O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times. The documentary screening at IDFA is one part of it. A photo book will soon follow.

Zwier remember vividly just what it was like to encounter Schönwetter’s work. “After opening the first drawer of eggs I was intrigued. The (bio)diversity of shapes, colours, textures, and sizes was beyond expectation. My curiosity was awakened, and subsequently the desire to open the second drawer, the third, the fourth..., and eventually all one hundred and thirty-eight of them,” the filmmaker recalls. “Something similar happened when I opened the first folder of Schönwetter’s correspondence. It was surprising to discover how the exchange of knowledge of eggs was seamlessly combined with the exchange of news of world events during the 20th century.”

What do you say about a man whose life work was measuring, weighing and studying 50,000 eggs? That is a difficult question to crack. The director broods on it. He can understand Schönwetter’s fascination with the eggs but certainly does not share his desire to hoard them. “I do believe it is good that taking eggs from nature is nowadays forbidden,” he states.

Zwier knew instinctively that he wanted to make a documentary about Schönwetter. “For the last fifteen years I primarily considered myself to be a filmmaker. Subsequently most new projects almost automatically become documentaries. Schönwetter’s egg-collection was no exception, especially as the collection in itself is a combination of correspondence (textual ingredient for a film) and eggs (the visual ingredient). And I do believe it works well as a documentary.”

However, the filmmaker has also become more and more preoccupied with photography as an independent medium.

One challenge he set himself was finding out if there was “a secret” to photographing eggs. His conclusion is that you need to spend plenty of time working out how to set the lights and how to position the eggs themselves. It was very painstaking work.

“Last year when the production of ‘O’ came to a stand still due to the pandemic, there was time to start working on the photos of eggs that I had taken during the research. The result was promising and the prints I had made confirmed that the photos also work independently.”

In his work, Zwier is strongly influenced by cultural philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. He describes his visit to a 1991 Benjamin exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin as a near epiphany and calls Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Concept of History’ “an essential text” for his own work.

“It provides me with the opportunity to link the abstraction of historical events to personal stories or memories. According to Benjamin, “the past exists as something that can be reconstructed, not as it really was, but how it is remembered. And this memory changes and enriches the past.”

Zwier’s fascination is not with great battles of the past or seismic political events, but with what he calls “small history.” In trying to get to the bottom of somebody’s personality, he likes to draw on their diaries, autobiographies and letters… and, in the case of Schönwetter, on those thousands of eggs as well.

O, Collecting Eggs Despite The Times is produced by Moondocs and is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.