Der Brokatweber von Krefeld | Der Letzte seines Standes

The Brocade Weaver was produced in 1997 for the series "The Last of His Kind" in collaboration with Bayerischer Rundfunk. Paul Amend is the last person still working occasionally at the Gotzes-Maus vestment weaving mill in Krefeld. Seven looms from the last century stand there, as if they had only been briefly abandoned by their masters. Magnificent gold brocade, Art Nouveau braids, and velvet wait on the warp beams for someone to pick up the shuttles again. But the weavers have all died. And there are no new recruits. The work requires inexhaustible patience and a sense of forgetting time. A 200-year-old mechanism, the world's first machine to operate like a computer on the yes-no principle, assists the weaver. In the past, as the film also shows, all the threads had to be pulled by hand. We see in every single step how the master ties a complete warp beam from thousands of threads and then an ancient pattern is brought back to life before our eyes: a precious altar cloth made of red silk and Japanese gold.