| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Harry Kreisler Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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I liked people, and as I was growing up I found myself becoming skillful at dealing with different environments. Obviously I was becoming more educated than my parents had been. I learned to relate to different worlds and so on. For some reason, politics interested me because it also was about presentation, perceptions, and images. I guess when you're growing up without a father, one unconsciously becomes very aware that something is different in your family. We're talking [about] the fifties, that was a very different time than now. And so, I think you work a little harder at presenting yourself, so those [differences] are not issues.
Have you ever felt that the search for a father has influenced your life?
Oh, gee! Yes, well, I would think so. I think so, but not in a classical Freudian sense. In the sense that a father is a source of stories, basically. There is a lot in the relationship between any child and a parent, and there is a different bonding between a parent with a child of the same sex. But in such relations, stories are told about how to do things. The parent's life is an example of possibilities, which is not to say that you follow what your parent does. I sometimes think (if we're going to be honest here; why not?) that in the conversations I have here in my series, one of the things that propels me is a fascination with peoples' lives -- the choices they made, where they went to school, questions that I never could get answered [from my father].
Of course, you're a father yourself now.
Right.
You want to tell us something about that?
Yes. Being a father and having had a father but not knowing your father is an interesting challenge. You work harder, but there are a lot of things that you don't know. I think that you probably find that you want to think more about what you're doing to get it right.
You think you invent fatherhood more? You actively invent fatherhood?
I think you think about it more, you think about the responsibility. I also think that you get from it a real sense of hope. I always saw myself as between father and son, so there is a continuity that's very important. Interestingly enough, when I went back to Vienna and I was given some pictures of my father, [I saw] a remarkable resemblance physically between my son and my father. I was told that my father had certain characteristics that my son has. All three of us pace; we can't sit still, as I am doing now. So the answer, to sum up your question, is that you're missing some things, you invent things because you have to figure them out on your own. But in the end, you do come back to a kind of continuity.
I tend to suspect that whether you have a living father or the father that passes away as yours did, that you're still like the son, that you're still the child, and it's very problematic. The only way to resolve it tends to be to become a parent. That you move over to the other side, and it's actually perhaps a balancing or a resolving of the dilemma of hanging out there as a child, and wanting or still trying to prove to your father in some same way.
I think that there is truth in that. Actually, since you make movies and think about movies, a popular movie --
I probably won't know about it.
OK, there is a movie called Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner about a man who imagines the return of his father so that he can play that one last game of ball which he missed.
I already hate it ...
I see!
... just hearing it. It's just a fairy tale. But I do believe that movies should be about the impossible, that life is limited [but] movies are not. As long as you know that you're dreaming.
So you're still involved in political science?
Right, I came to Berkeley in graduate school but I got very disenchanted with the field of political science, which is not so much politics, the study of politics or political life, but the science of politics. I got very frustrated with that, and was doing a dissertation that I was unhappy with, never finished it, but wound up getting a position here at the Institute of International Studies which became an environment where I could realize a lot of the creativity that related to people, politics, political life, and so on.
How long were you here before the interviews began?
I came here in graduate school in '69 and started working for the institute in about '74, and then got the idea of doing the interviews, the Conversations with History, in the early eighties. The way it came about was the following: somebody from this office which is taping this interview, the Office of Media Services, called me and said they'd like to tape a lecture that [the Institute of International Studies] was presenting. Part of my job was to supervise a lot of the public events where world dignitaries and others came to the institute and gave a public talk, and in the conversation, we agreed that when you tape a lecture it's not very interesting. So they said, "Why don't you bring them over to the studio?" I said, "What would we do there?" And I got the idea to actually do the interview. We started doing this in 1982 and I've done 170 of them [as of 1999]. My interview with you is probably about 175.
Wow. But what is this about hearing them speak is not interesting? You want to watch their mouths move? You want lip sync?
No ... It's not hearing the lecture. That could be interesting. I didn't think it would be interesting to videotape a lecture, because a lecture is formal and so you're shooting somebody who's not really themselves, whereas the interview opens the possibility of doing what you espouse, that is, trying to get at their spontaneity.
I see. I [heard] what you said about taping the interview and I just automatically thought of audiotape.
Right
That somebody has created the structure of words, and you're going to preserve the structure of words. The interest in observing the person or getting into the person ... that didn't occur to me.
Right.
So what you really wanted to do is to "inter-view" the person --
Right.
-- and you wanted to see the person.
That's right, I wanted to see them, but also, if somebody comes and gives an academic paper, it's only a part of their life. It's what they do research on. I was fascinated by [the question of] what is their whole story. One thing that interests me is, how do people make choices about what they study? How did you make the choices to be interested in film? We talked a little bit about that.
Yeah, but I consider my self-presentation as a much lesser thing than the work I present. I would imagine that most of the people you interviewed thought that the talks they gave was their work, that was the fruition of their labors, this was the best of them.
Right. Well, I think that's true, but it doesn't tell me the roots of them, basically. I think that as this series has evolved -- of course, I'm not trying to impute an intention at the beginning, because I didn't have this intention -- but as I've done so many of them, and we're using the web to reach out, I think that what people find most interesting about a person may not be their life's work. It should be, but by talking about their past, making them into human beings, that's a platform from which you direct the audience to their life's work. Because in the end we do talk about what it is the person does; the only difference is when they talk about that, I try to get them to articulate it in a simpler way than they would do in a normal academic presentation.
Going back to my background, because my mother's native language was not English, I became a translator of sorts, an explainer between the world of English, which she ultimately spoke, and the Polish that she had been raised in, and the Yiddish. I never learned Polish. By translator I mean, taking the English, and simplifying it. So I think I do that in this [medium]. Most people, [whether they're] the president of the Council on Foreign Relations or a world famous photographer or a cinema artist, are so into what they're doing that they don't help in the transition to getting people up to speed, so that [people] can appreciate what they've done. I'm not saying what I do is a substitute for the body of their work.
I got you. I was very impressed in you doing the interview with me, the research you did, that you came around to see the work I presented, that you read up on me. It's unusual.
The process has evolved.
A lot of this early work was done at the time of the nuclear weapons buildup in Europe, and at that point I was focusing on news and current events. But as I've evolved into this, what I have developed is an intuition about people, and a respect, in the same way that you respect film and not worship it, a respect for what people have done.
There is an entry point where I see that I have responsibility to prepare. The preparation may be overnight or it may be a week. But that responsibility means if you're a filmmaker, I watch your movies, or as much of them as I can see. If I am invited to a dinner for you, as I was in your case, I go and I listen to how the person responds, what they have to say. If you have books or whatever, I read them, actually.
The constraint of time -- I never had a budget for this; and we had an hour uninterrupted, we didn't have money to edit -- so it just became a conversation. What I'm discovering is that what was originally an obstacle became an advantage. To truly do you justice, we could talk for five hours to ten hours; but I've only got an hour, so when I interview you, we create something different. My responsibility of representing you, of capturing you -- a better word: of capturing you -- in an hour's time impels the conversation forward. So that's what's at work.
Also, you're in real time. It's the one hour, and it stays an hour. Is that correct?
Right, that's correct.
That means that people rubbing their noses, everything there is caught, you actually have the mannerisms, and the character, and things that begin to indicate the real person and not their persona.
Right, that's right. I wouldn't say that's true of the whole interview, but what you're doing is exploring in real time and finding moments when people reveal themselves and what they're all about. Sometimes it doesn't happen; sometimes they're too guarded.
One moment that I can think of off hand, I once interviewed Robert McNamera and we were talking about his education here at Berkeley and why he went into public service as opposed to staying in the University, and he said to me, "Well, my wife and I both got polio." That was the most revealing moment of his humanity because in most of what he was talking about, he has a public presentation which is very defensive and so on.
So in sum, this process that I've created is a way to tap a vital component of what a person does, and that something is being captured which is not captured in the formal work.
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