A Portrait of a Man Who Has Remained True to Punk  Love in Slow Motion: Peter Sempel

Since filmmaker and photographer Peter Sempel passed away on March 20th 2026, a few days before his 72nd birthday, the Hamburg art scene has grown noticeably quieter. One of its most headstrong and unique figures is now gone—a man whose true identity was never entirely clear: music filmmaker, experimental director, or fan?

With Sempel’s passing, a very distinct way of seeing has vanished: a camera that never documents from a distance, but is always right in the thick of it—shivering, cheering, dancing, even stumbling along—and yet never loses its footing.

Sempel, born in Hamburg in 1954, grew up as a child in the Australian outback without running water or a radio, and returned by ship at the age of twelve; throughout his life, he filmed outsiders and those who crossed boundaries—because he himself had always remained one. “Protest against the normal world,” he once called it. His punk wasn’t a stylistic accessory, but an existential stance.
Sempel’s first short films were made in 1981, at that strange moment when punk in Germany was already starting to feel a bit tired and worn out—yet still managed to rise up one last time, as if to prove it wasn’t ready to be killed off just yet. Short films like Save the Children / Kriegsjugend, Fressen, Klarheit über alles (featuring Die Toten Hosen), or Wozu sind die Männer da? are raw, feverish films in which bands like DAF, Birthday Party, Crass, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Abwärts do not pose as stars, but appear as living, sometimes unruly material. These are not polished portraits, not staged productions, nor even documentaries, but rather psychograms in extreme slow motion, with cross-fades and wild associations.

Sempel loved punk with the same devotion as he loved opera. To him, they were two sides of the same coin: both were about excess, both demanded radical devotion, and both were a furious or yearning assault on the boring mainstream. Beethoven clashes with the UK Subs, Mozart with the Poison Girls, Schubert with the Neubauten. The soundtrack alone was a manifesto against any form of neat separation between high culture and subculture.
Sempel never sought the grand, linear narrative. He collected, collaged, associated, superimposed images and sounds: for him, the truth lay in the superimposition. His films are like the punk scene itself: raw, chaotic, contradictory, sometimes unbearably close, sometimes almost tender. In Dandy (1988), he has Blixa Bargeld waiting at a bus stop while Nick Cave and Nina Hagen engage in absurd, nonsensical dialogue. Campino appears, along with Lene Lovich and Dieter Meier from Yello—everything flows into one another without it ever becoming clear why. Sempel never wanted to explain; rather, he wanted to discover something for himself and let others feel it too. For him, the camera was like an extension of his nervous system, an empathetic instrument that captures energy before it turns into a pose. In an interview with the German daily newspaper taz on his 70th birthday, he said laconically: “A lot of people think I’m chasing after famous people. But no, it’s just always turned out that way.”

That wasn’t false modesty. Sempel was genuinely interested in people—in their neuroses, their powerlessness, their anger, their hidden beauty. That’s why so many of them became his friends and have remained so to this day.

And that is why Peter Sempel’s films still feel so fresh and effortless today—because they preserve the raw, unpolished energy these people had when they were not yet icons, but young, angry, desperate, or euphoric figures in a world that felt too confining to them.

For Peter Sempel, punk was never just music, fashion, or a phase. It was a fundamental stance: refusing to conform, refusing to be exploited, and refusing to use the camera as an instrument of power or distance, but rather as a means of tenderness, solidarity, and complicity.

His short films from the early 1980s are therefore more than mere historical documents of a bygone subculture. They are attempts to counter acceleration with something radical: deceleration, repetition, superimposition, the persistent lingering on detail. Love in slow motion, one might say. A form of radical slowness amidst the noise and the hustle and bustle. Peter Sempel remained true to punk without turning it into a museum piece or reducing it to a pleasing retro aesthetic. He lived his punk to the very end, every day and every night—in the Hamburg club just as much as on his homemade postcards, lavishly decorated with tender details and lovingly inscribed, which he sent all over the world; in endless late-night conversations with him as well as in his films, which no one could ever really market and which, for that very reason, will always retain their incalculable value.

In one of them, you hear Nick Cave say: “I’m just visiting this planet.” Peter Sempel was just visiting, too. As a farewell, he left us some of the most beautiful images of this strange planet.

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