Magnus left the export business even before the editing of the short film was finished. It was too stressful for him because there was constantly more competition and the conditions were constantly becoming tougher. In the raw footage for Of Stains, Scrap and Tires, there's a scene where he sprays over his phone number at the entrance to the warehouse. I found this image very strong: a short, unsentimental gesture with which he closes this chapter in his life. For me, the beginning of a new film was already present in this. I mainly stayed in touch with Cliff, probably also out of a feeling of mutual respect. Cliff and I agreed very quickly that we wanted to make another film together. Since it then took a while to finance this project, our acquaintanceship could turn into friendship. I was impressed by how in spite of all adversity, Cliff continued on with the transcontinental used car business. There are very concrete efforts from the Austrian scrap metal lobby so that the metal which leaves Austria in the direction of Eastern Europe and the African continent in the form of used cars and spare parts remains in the country in order to supply their expensively purchased and not very active shredding facilities. Metal recycling is a big business.

But not only did the framework for Cliff's business model change, his immediate surrounding did too. When I visited him again one day in the warehouse, the paintball field had suddenly disappeared and part of the location's acoustic backdrop along with it. But the traces of the tires stacked on the field for many years were still there, photographic imprints created by the weather, framed by a bit of moss and grass that had grown around them. Impermanence is clearly one of the strongest themes that interested me with Movements of a Nearby Mountain; the different times and temporalities superimposed in this location. Photographic traces of Magnus' presence in this location also existed in the footage shot for the short film. Looking at it again, I noticed that there were moments with him again and again in which he strangely appears or disappears, like a phantom; a peculiarity that I've also often experienced in real encounters with him. Out of this eventually came the idea of giving Magnus an immaterial presence in the film, but with a casualness that also allows for a more material interpretation.

It was actually a lack of gear that led to the short film consisting exclusively of static shots. It was cold and we didn't have a heated eyecup for the camera, so that the viewfinder would fog up as soon as Klemens Hufnagl tried to shoot handheld. Therefore some of the footage was unusable, for example a scene with Ibolya and Gusti, the junk dealer couple from Hungary. But now they appear twice in Movements of a Nearby Mountain. At that time, we had also already shot with one of the two Bulgarian dealers, but the scene couldn't be used for the same reason. I found it interesting how the need for used goods being dealt with here is not only in Africa, but also just beyond the Austrian border in Hungary, in further parts of Eastern Europe. So there was also a chance in this location to describe relations in our world with a higher degree of complexity as had been possible in my previous short film.

In Movements of a Nearby Mountain, I also wanted to achieve a higher degree of cinematic complexity, using a more varied formal structure, with a procedural way of working rather than rigor as its most important principle; the "directorial claims", so to speak, were to be outbalanced by forms of possibilities. The latter should maybe even take preference over the former. I think the meandering quality - already present in the structure of the short film and something that I am in fact striving for finds a new quality in Movements of a Nearby Mountain, above all in terms of the camera, in relation of the moving to the static shots.

In fact, I also found that film was not the right choice for the short in filming this location. The texture of film stock always evokes a nostalgic desire for materiality and tactility and in this case both were already present in abundance: different concrete, wood, glass, and metal surfaces, wood shavings, rust, dust, scratches, dents, splashes of paint. The materiality of film stock actually worked against the materiality of the location. So this time we shot digitally in 4K (although with old Super 16mm Zeiss lenses), allowing Cliff's warehouse to be discovered in slightly surrealistic detail on the movie screen. It sometimes reminds me of those polished and unbelievably detail-rich oil paintings. I think the ghostliness, the immateriality of digital images gets at the material richness of the location very well; there is already a visual tension in the choice of the working tools alone.

For Klemens Hufnagl, who was behind the camera, and I, it was never a question of getting closer that way. At the end of each day of shooting, as we looked at the footage, it simply felt right. Movements of a Nearby Mountain is the fourth film we've made together, so we've developed an understanding and shorthand. Spectacle as a "harvesting" of the most spectacular images, sounds, or also situations has never interested me, rather the truth and poetry that are in the everyday and that are revealed in a particular way in cinema. Here it's first of all about looking closely and being patient, so two components that are diametrically opposed to spectacle.

At the same time, there is an insane amount to look at and listen to in this film. The pleasure of looking and sensuality definitely have much more meaning here than in my previous films. But of course the camera deals intensely with the overall relations that are revealed in Cliff's solitude in this massive warehouse. The size of the warehouse also contributes strongly to the feeling that Cliff is entirely alone here. That's also an example of the kind of "truth" cinema can reveal since in this case we are dealing with a kind of mythological framework in the everyday: the one person (man) in a foreign country who dismantles cars with his bare hands in a secluded warehouse in order to then continue on to another continent. I'm overemphasizing to articulate this more clearly. The film is also constantly offsetting this impression. But this in the film and it communicates with our cultural memory.

In the scene where Cliff and Magnus comment on the paintball game, the camera becomes independent for the first and only time in the film; there is no driving or movements of the characters to motivate the camera movement, at this moment it is autonomous, first panning around and finally turning a full 360°. This might be compared to using italics or quotation marks in a text. For me, this is the film's central scene, in which the past, present, and future appear at once, where the borders between reality and fiction as well as the relationship between time and space are lifted.

The tracking shots have another quality in regards to the camera as the scene I've just described because the car is moving and thus the camera along with it. I liked them in the short film already because it is an easy way to establish the off-screen space, which has always been an important component of my films. Besides, there's a close relationship between cinema and car rides - the view through the windshield, landscape films that one experiences while sitting. I like the interpretation of these as phantom rides, as you expressed it in your essay. If this feeling sets in, then I think that the most important elements I've worked and played with in this film, have come together. Not only have my ideas come together, but all of the people who have worked on the film too over long periods of time or at decisive moments. All of these decisions are ultimately the result of a dialogue, with my co-editor Dane Komljen and the artist Bárbara Palomino Ruiz, Johannes Schmelzer Ziringer, who was responsible for the sound through to the mix with Simon Apostolou, just to mention a few of the most important ones next to the more obvious roles of Klemens Hufnagl and Jenny Lou Ziegel behind the camera.

Yeah, although in the short film there are off-screen conversations in almost every car ride because at that time Cliff was not yet going around on his own. Now it is silent, Cliff only once hums and whistles a religious hymn about eternity: "Ebighi-ebi." The off-screen space is first and foremost visual and when Cliff gets out it becomes clear that this is a searching movement, a searching gaze. I've often accompanied Cliff on his drives, during which he has told me that this is the most stressful part of his work because he feels very exposed because of his skin color and reactions to it. The shield between Cliff and the world through which he looks out from inside his protected car conveys something of this feeling, describes a distance, and is perhaps also a kind of a protective membrane. It's a possibility to subtly describe Cliff's inner life without making him talk explicitly about it. The tracking shots therefore stand in stark contrast to Cliff's everyday life in the warehouse, since he feels extremely comfortable there. I can remember that with the short film, right at the beginning, some people got the sense that Cliff (and his colleagues) were criminals. If both of them had spoken German off-screen and not Igbo and if a white guy had gotten out to look at the car, another impression would likely have arisen. It is already hard enough with texts to control the meaning so that the "right" message comes across. With film, we often talk about visual vocabulary, but the interaction is obviously endlessly more complex. Consequently, my aspiration as a filmmaker is not to convey a certain message, but to make my films open and multifaceted, to complicate things, and to hone in on issues.

I'd have a hard time speaking for Cliff or about what the film means to him. I can only speculate about it. In any case, with Nollywood, Nigeria has a very big low-budget motion picture industry and there is probably also a culture of non-professional actors through it. Cliff and Magnus were ready, aside from the documentation, to take part in this "acting" and interestingly were never irritated when I started to talk about the waterman and different levels of time. I found that interesting and thought about it even more later. The concept of time as something linear and forward moving is a European concept that is reproduced in most films. But the medium of film is suited for using this concept more freely, or even to contradict it. There has also been meanwhile a very strict division of the profane everyday and the world of myths that enlightened adults sneer at. At the same time, the need for myths is obviously huge since they even return falsely objectified in the form of conspiracy theories. Cinema can be a free space where, in spite of its connection to a material universe, everything that is not visible at first glance — the "bigger picture," so to speak - plays a roll.

Cliff leads an existence on the edge of the capitalist system and global trade, where the contradictions and limits of these become blatant, but where the tremendous attraction exerted by their center is nevertheless still the constant, dominating force. A contradictory play between centrifugal and attractive forces: on the one hand, the centrifugal forces of capitalism push a not inconsequential part of the population to the edge of society, on the other hand, there is the attractive force of its center in the form of the prospect of an economic and social ascent. I can imagine that the tension you're talking about results from this; on the one hand the urge to make money because economic survival depends on it, but on the other hand a certain form of calm because materially speaking there is not (yet) too much to lose. This is constantly shifting, also depending on if it has been a good or a bad day, a good or a bad week. In your essay on the film, you also mention the "poetics of negotiation" For me, there is a related tension in the negotiation scenes as well that come out of the dialectic between necessity and play.

In relation to the film's structure, there is a kind of goal with the business trip to Nigeria. At one point during the editing, I also considered placing this block more centrally in the film. But my co-editor Dane Komljen and I felt that this would throw the relationship between film's material and immaterial dimensions off balance. Though I could certainly have taken the abstraction of conventional conceptions of time even further. In any case, in Cliff's workshop, there is an almost tangible quality to time because he pursues all of his activities at the same, even tempo. This has sometimes given me the feeling as if the movements of his body were bumping into a slight resistance, as if there were a very subtle slippage in the space-time continuum. His solitude and the vastness of the warehouse obviously contribute a lot to this. Besides, the entire place is pervaded by a foreboding impermanence, by traces and memories, while at the same time not much vanishes, but people do return from memory, things are supplied with a new or an additional use... In Notes on Kafka, Adorno writes: "The resurrection of the dead would have to take place in the auto graveyards." Godard and Fassbinder read this too. That's why the showdowns in Sympathy for the Devil: One Plus One (1968) and The Niklashausen Journey (1970) take place in auto scrapyards.