Gerd Pohlmann

Gerd Pohlmann arrived in New Zealand at a time when many battles were being fought, and many more were brewing. It was the year of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, which over 20 African countries boycotted after the All Blacks toured South Africa; a time when Māoritanga was under threat; Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s campaign against the trade union movement was underway. Yet Aotearoa was also a place that Pohlmann found "politically inspirational" thanks to the anti-nuclear movement, the environmentalist Values Party, and "the anti-apartheid stand of so many good Kiwis". 

Pohlmann's name can be found on many of the great documentaries from this period: Patu!, The Bridge, Bastion Point: Day 507, and Kinleith ‘80.  But he is quick to argue that it's the films that matter — not the individual people involved. "I'm merely someone who arrived here during this significant point in history. I wanted to document it, but not just to document it as a historian, but from the point-of-view of the attacked . . . of those that had a cause."

Pohlmann himself grew up during a period of great protest. The primary conflict in Germany was between generations, as those born after World War II questioned the older generation who continued to govern, wary of their potential complicity or collaboration with the Nazis. His early childhood was spent in Schwalefeld, "a little village of 250 people". Later he studied theology in Munich, and briefly considered becoming a pastor. "I was already too much of an agnostic,” he explains. "You’ve got to be actually able to believe, to muster belief." 

Nonetheless, he wanted to do something social or political. "Film school was one of the obvious choices". Pohlmann was influenced by "the role that film played in the creation of the Soviet Union" through filmmakers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov. After all, it was Lenin who stated that "of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema". With this intention in mind, Pohlmann applied for the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin, "a very political film school" that only accepted 18 students a year.

Yet he was not alone, applying alongside friend Chris Strewe, the son of a German refugee, who'd been raised in New Zealand. "A really cool sort of character," Pohlmann recalls. "He'd been a seafarer — he was the first man that I met with an earring..” Strewe had worked with Cinema Action, a London film collective whose aim was to analyse and encourage the struggles of unions and political groups. Both won a place in the Berlin film school, and Strewe decided that his thesis film would be about the Māori people. He invited Pohlmann to fly with him to Auckland, promising him that "the guys in New Zealand are into motorbikes and surfing" too. 

With Strewe only having Māori friends in the far north, he and Pohlmann approached the first pair of Māori men they saw at the Hotel Kiwi pub in Auckland. After explaining they wanted "to make a film about you guys", the group "drank till ten — that’s when the pubs closed" — and continued at one of their places. The two men turned out to be Selwyn Muru, acclaimed painter and sculptor, and Eddie Twist, who worked for the Race Relations Conciliator. When the four next convened, Muru and Twist brought along other Māori people who wanted to meet them; some, including Merata Mita, were part of the activist group Ngā Tamatoa. 

With this, Strewe’s thesis film was underway; it ultimately became Waitangi: The Story of a Treaty and its Inheritors (1977). “We actually filmed the occupation of Bastion Point . .  . when the construction ban was imposed by the Auckland Trades Council and the meeting house there was being built." Merata Mita acted as a collaborator for the film, and during the production, Gerd Pohlmann fell in love with her. "She was a Māori princess, of course I did," he laughs. "It was one of the greatest summers of my life."

Soon they were married. “Just out of love, not any other nonsense.” Pohlmann went back to Germany for three months, helping Strewe edit Waitangi before flying to Aotearoa. An agreement was made in Berlin that allowed him to continue his studies as an exchange student of the Australian Film and Television School in Sydney, where he later completed his 1979 thesis film on Kiwi trade union history, The Hammer and the Anvil.

Upon Pohlmann’s return, he discovered that the Bastion Point occupation was ongoing and spent lots of time up there to show his support. "That’s why we were accepted on Bastion Point — because we were basically part of the occupation.” Together with filmmaker Leon Narbey and Merata Mita —  the three of them credited in alphabetical order— Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980) came to be.

The day the police arrived to begin mass arrests, Narbey only had three rolls of film, meaning that he and Pohlmann (recording sound) had to be extremely selective to ensure they didn’t waste film or miss significant moments. Bastion Point incorporates still photography and offcuts from news broadcasters. Pohlmann feels proud at having captured "a watershed moment in New Zealand history", and that the film won top prize at Oberhausen, a key festival in Germany. He recalls it as "a lovely collaboration between Māori and Pākehā".

This collective approach would continue throughout Pohlmann’s career, with him taking on varying production roles; his title as director or producer would often be shared instead of separated. "Everything we made was by us," he says, "even directing is collaborative." Because their films were made independently on low budgets, they rarely had money to pay for full crews, and took on many of the required roles themselves.

This method of filmmaking led to Gerd Pohlmann being approached by Rod Prosser, of Wellington-based collective Vanguard Films. "They were the only political filmmaking group in New Zealand doing the same stuff that Cinema Action were doing in London." Recognising their shared beliefs and approaches, Pohlmann and Vanguard began working together, and continue to this day. Kinleith ’80 was the first film from this burgeoning partnership; made with Prosser and Russell Campbell, it covered the 12-week Kinleith Pulp and Paper Mill strike, which Pohlmann considers "the greatest workers victory in New Zealand history".

A much more muted victory was captured with The Bridge (1982), recording the Māngere Bridge dispute, still "the longest in New Zealand’s industrial history". In need of money, Pohlmann offered to make short instructional films for trade unions, intending to make "a little film" about the Māngere Bridge labourers, to "show how a trade union struggle is conducted". As the strike stretched beyond two years, it became a larger and more complex undertaking. Pohlmann credits editor Annie Collins as the person who ultimately "found the story", culminating in a documentary that remains relevant and devastating.

During the creation of these shorter films, Pohlmann and Mita were developing Patu! (1983), a feature-length documentary covering the 1981 Springbok tour. It was to have a Māori perspective, with Mita credited as the director. Filming began long before the arrival of the Springboks, but during the tour itself, they recorded or organised footage of protests across the country. The production required many collaborators — above all Vanguard Films, who estimate they provided roughly a third of the footage. “It’s just brilliant to have all these sorts of people helping for a day or two, filming a bit here and there. But someone has to hold it together."

In the aftermath, Pohlmann had the footage processed secretly, or sent offshore, as the police were still searching for material in order to identify and prosecute protestors. While Mita and Annie Collins were working on the edit, Pohlmann went overseas to raise money for the film's completion. Months later, when he watched Patu! at a private screening in Amsterdam, he was "very surprised" to see he had no producing credit, and that Vanguard's Rod Prosser was not listed as co-producer. Pohlmann argues that "there'd be no Patu! without Vanguard— they'd originally set out to do their own tour film." Following a long process of negotiating distribution deals for Patu!, he and Mita separated after seven years together.

In her book Filming the Colonial Past, Annabel Cooper argues that Patu!, Bastion Point: Day 507 and The Bridge all chart bigger trends, including "the emergent visibility and increasing authority of Māori through political protest movements." They also chronicle alliances between Māori and Pākehā, and "the ways that difficult historical events pit people against each other, disrupt loyalties and confront certainties".

At the end of 1982, Pohlmann left New Zealand and returned to Germany, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Berlin he helped a friend set up the Society for a Nuclear Free Future, and launched a distribution company, Gaia Films, under its umbrella, which screened environmental and indigenous films on German cinema and television screens.

For German TV he made documentaries in Australia, and portraits of Kiwi writers Katherine Mansfield and Keri Hulme. The discovery of a simply-marked gravestone in an Auckland cemetery kickstarted a film on Karl Wolfskehl, a German-Jewish refugee exiled to Aotearoa during the rise of Nazism. In 1994, Pohlmann returned to Aotearoa, and has since lived between both countries. "Somehow I find them complementary." 

Gerd Pohlmann still speaks with a sense of satisfaction about the films he made with Merata Mita, during that time of many battles.“I’m a romantic, that’s what I am. One day I’ll publish our love letters,” he laughs. In 2012, Patu! was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register, exhuming the unresolved dispute surrounding the credits of the film — namely Pohlmann's view that he be listed as producer, and Vanguard’s contributions be acknowledged.

"Someone in the collaborative universe is always the driving force," he argues. "I drove these films. I would have made Bastion Point without Merata. I would have made Patu! without her, although I'm glad that it was her that made it. But that’s meaningless. Because there wasn’t a without. You know what I’m saying? We were together."

Profile written by Danny Bultitude; published on 2 June 2024

Sources include 
Gerd Pohlmann
Annabel Cooper, Filming the Colonial Past - The New Zealand Wars on Screen (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018)
Alice Fraser & Kieron Webb, 'Cinema Action', BFI Screen Online, Accessed 16 May 2024
Mark Derby, 'Strikes and labour disputes - The decline of the arbitration system', Te Ara website. Accessed 2 June 2024
Kinonedelja No. 4 (1925)
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision catalogue. Accessed 2 June 2024