“Leibniz would say that all images lie”: Edgar Reitz on Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting at Berlin Film Festival 2025

As a participant of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, director Edgar Reitz is one of the founding fathers of auteur cinema in Germany and one of the country’s most prolific filmmakers. His Heimat trilogy alone consists of over 30 features. Just last year, Reitz was awarded the honorary Berlinale Camera for his lifetime achievement. This year, he returns to the festival with his newest work: Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting, a philosophical chamber play about the German polymath’s difficulty being portrayed.

We spoke to the exceptional filmmaker about his interest in Leibniz as a subject matter, his penchant for philosophy and the importance of lighting in a film about painting.

How important do you consider the subject of philosophy today?

Academic philosophy might not be as crucial anymore, but philosophy today means developing and asking new questions. Maybe it’s more about taking this thinking outside of academia and putting it into practice, into politics, into human life. Maybe we shouldn’t even call it philosophy, but the process of thought. As humans, we are beings who are all able to think beyond the situation we happen to be in. We do that every day. When preparing coffee, we imagine it being ready, drinking it, serving it, or that sort of thing. So, imagination helps us see the consequences of the action we are performing. The perception of our freedom to do what we want to do, or not to do it, has to do with that, because we can imagine alternatives to our reality, at all times and in every practical context. That is the basis for modern philosophy. I personally am not a philosopher, but these fundamental questions are pivotal for making films. I can’t make a film without asking myself, what if I don’t do it, and imagining the alternatives.

What makes Leibniz stand out for you? Why did you dedicate your film to him?

When we talk about Leibniz, we always talk about his universality. In English, one would use the term polymath. But that would not be what we would imagine nowadays; when we hear this word, it means something different today. Today, no clever person can know everything. That was just about possible in Baroque times, but not anymore. But that’s actually not decisive for me regarding Leibniz. For me, the decisive point is that he realised that in nature, everything is connected to everything. So you can’t touch something without touching everything. There’s no separation in creation, he says. On the other hand, nothing is identical. In a world where everything is connected, everything is unique, nothing exists twice, not even a drop of water, much less any human being. Every human being only exists just once, is unmistakable, unrepeatable. Nevertheless, every person is connected with all other people and with nature. And if you hurt one person, you hurt everyone. If you give a gift to somebody, you give it to all. And freedom for one person is freedom for all.

This is a simple and very beautiful thought, but difficult to conceive concretely. But in the film, we chose a portrait as an example and, of course, within the process of creating a portrait, the question to the unmistakable is inherent. This court painter, in the first part, who comes in with a ready-made painting where the hair and the cloak have already been painted and only the face is missing. The individuality is already torn. Leibniz tells him, “perhaps if you add my nose it may be my nose, but that’s not my cloak, and that’s not my hair, so it’s not me.” And that opens up the whole question of whether it’s even possible for me to be in the picture, because I can’t exist twice. Where lies the truth in this painting? Does this painting really say something about me?

Now, I’ve studied Leibniz, and Leibniz would say that all images lie. All sorts of different factors play a role here, but it does not apply to art. Because in art, the truth of an image lies somewhere else, and artwork is created outside of reality. With this new creation, there is a truth that can be measured by all these other factors. So now the issue revolves around likeness, around similarity between a picture and reality. There has to have been a touch, between the artist and the subject.

When I am talking to you, we are two completely different people, individuals, but on the other hand, we are also taking part in each other. When you ask yourself, “Where do you end? Where do I begin?,” there is an area in the middle. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to understand each other, wouldn’t even be here together. Depicting these transitions, that’s the task of art, that is Leibniz’s philosophy.

You mentioned the scene with the court painter, why was Lars Eidinger the best actor for this part?

I needed somebody brilliant for this introductory sequence, because the main film, of course, is about Leibniz and the painter from the Netherlands, that was always in my mind. But I needed somebody to overcome the first questions, so to speak. And so I invented this court painter. It’s not a historical person; he’s fiction, for which there were no models, no prototypes. I needed someone to see the comical side of the whole situation, because you have this painter looking at his model and say things like, “think of nothing!” It’s funny. To be able to do that, you really need a great artist, and that was Lars Eidinger.

Would you fare better as a model for a portrait than Leibniz does in your film?

I’ve been going through this all day here with the photographers, and I can only say I suffer. Because I don’t understand the background: I don’t know who pays for them. I don’t know who prints this photograph. I don’t know who’s interested in it, afterwards. I don’t know where this person learned to use his camera. I have the feeling this is not really artistic work, because he doesn’t even engage with me. If he did, maybe he’d produce a completely different photograph. In general, I believe that filmmakers usually don’t like being in front of a camera, because we know what it’s like on that side.

Lighting is an important subject for the painters in your film, but it feels like you also set yourself a particular challenge lighting the film in order to reflect this?

Lighting was crucial; yes, we studied the paintings of those times. Caravaggio was a wonderful Italian painter, and he invented a new method whereby he painted by having a black grounding on his canvas, and then painting the light on top. So he was not drawing contours or lines like all the others, but light, and in a similar way, Rembrandt – they basically invited the lighting for films, the way light hits objects. If you stand in a museum, in front of a Caravaggio, it looks like a film still. Caravaggio’s paintings could easily be stills from some elaborate US American film.

We didn’t want to pass up this opportunity for our film, so we created our atelier in the studio to the exact working conditions of a painter’s studio at the time.

You look at the individual pictures of Caravaggio, there were no spotlights, he used to have only candles or sometimes an oil lamp, but these are faint. The keylight was always natural light coming in through the windows, and these were placed very high up, with flaps to steer from below, so that you could change the lighting. And that’s what we recreated. Our cameraman, like Caravaggio, was using the outside light coming into the studio through the window, and then the painter in the film used mirrors to redirect the light towards the object. So, basically, what we did in the 21^st century was use the techniques of painters from the 17^th century. And it was a great pleasure!

Selina Sondermann

Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting does not have a release date yet.

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