When did you visit the Berlinale together with the “star” of many German movies, Dorothea Moritz?
That was 1968. I was a Rockefeller Fellow with a two-year grant to live and write in Paris. But the Student Revolution – first at Cannes, then at the Sorbonne – drove me out of the city. I met Dorothea that year at the Karlovy Vary film festival, held in June to accommodate Western journalists swarming all over Prague. Of course, Alexander Dubček and “Prague Spring” were the primary reasons, but “Czech New Wave” was just as interesting – Jn Kadr and Elmar Klos’s The Shop on Main Street and Jiř Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains were recent Oscar winners. Dorothea and I spent a lot of time together at the festival’s Forum Roundtable discussions. It was an exciting time. So we agreed to meet again a week later at the Berlinale. We saw Jean-Marie Straub’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968) and Werner Herzog’s Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968). I remember saying to Dorothea that Lotte Eisner was right. Anyway, to make a long story short, Dorothea an
