Summary

Franz Wilzek, a retired film editor living in the Abendruh Sanatorium, is abruptly collected by a chauffeur and driven to a television studio. In the smoke-filled car he struggles to remember why he has been summoned, then realizes he is headed to Heinz Conrads’s popular program, “What’s New on Sunday?” In the studio Wilzek sits beneath the lights, watches the smiling host perform warmth for the cameras, and tries to answer questions about his long career.

Conrads quickly steers the conversation toward Wilzek’s most famous collaborator, the director G. W. Pabst. Wilzek describes Pabst’s insistence on precision and his belief that editing creates meaning through motion, since one movement must lead into the next without breaking the viewer’s illusion. The host’s cheer begins to feel coercive as he presses for anecdotes that match the program’s upbeat...