German Joys

Seriously, Duck Fubbing

Last weekend, I watched "In Bruges," a movie about two English hit-men sent on an obscure mission to that charming Belgian city.  It was sort of an English Tarantino knockoff, with oh-so-quirky, studiedly non-PC characters (including a racist midget), banal conversations, and gratuitous high-velocity splattering of blood and brain-matter.  Nevertheless, the movie had some intriguing twists, gorgeous shots of Bruges, and a fun performance by Colin Farrell.

But...

...it was dubbed into German.  And, as usual, dubbing crippled large chunks of the movie.  Accents played a crucial role in the plot: we were meant to chuckle at one character's broken English, but we didn't know it was broken.  We might have realized that one character was a Canadian because of his accent (a minor plot point), but we didn't, because he, along with everyone else in the move, spoke uniform Hochdeutsch.  I though one character was English until she explained -- in dubbed-into-Hochdeutsch dialogue -- that she was Belgian.

Once again, I was reminded of what a national cultural disgrace German film dubbing is.  Let us review the reasons why:

1. Even in the best dubbing -- and trust me, not every film gets that -- it's painfully clear that the voice-overs were done in a room somewhere, by someone reading a script into a microphone.  Of course, much movie dialogue is also dubbed-in later by the actors.  But unlike the original actors, the German dubbers never actually filmed the scene, or immersed themselves in the emotional landscape of the movie, or personally met any of the people on-screen, or had any conversations with the director.
2. Dubbing kills jokes or plot points that depend on regional accents, timing, or inflection. Of course, some of these won't come through in subtitles either, but dubbing eliminates almost all of them.  Even in a language you don't speak, you can often tell just by sound if someone's drunk, or just in from the country, or trying to tell a joke.
3. Translating everything into Hochdeutsch means Germans don't learn how to understand accents. I once traveled throughout the United States with Germans and other Europeans. Although most of the Europeans had problems understanding Southern American and black accents, the Germans had even more problems. They were expecting a black guy in a store in Mobile, Alabama to speak HochEnglish, just as he speaks Hochdeutsch in the movies. For a country that prides itself on its own diversity of accents and dialects (you can hear all of 'em at the House of German History in Bonn), the wholesale annihilation of Welsh, Scottish, Indian, and southern American accents (to name only English accents) should provoke outrage.
4. In dubbed movies, you can't enjoy the sound of other languages. How many people have decided to learn a foreign language because they heard it in a film, and fell in love?
5. Dubbing always distorts what the characters say. Always. I have seen many films and TV shows in German (such as the Simpsons) that I knew before in the USA, and the changes are often startling. The changes are driven by the need to find German phrases that will match the characters' lip movements.  This can be hard, because saying something in German takes about 20-30% longer, on average, than saying it in English.  Therefore, the dialogue either gets amputated or rushed.

Caveats: Nobody minds when ordinary Hollywood fare or TV specials are dubbed.  Die Hard IV's not going to lose too much in translation, and its core audience probably doesn't want to be bothered by subtitles.  The problem in Germany is that everything gets dubbed -- even independent movies destined to be seen by people who can handle subtitles, and in which accents and dialogue are basic parts of what makes the movie work.  That's the real disgrace.

I'm feeling the urge to put on an armband.  Anyone want to join this crusade?

Sunday Video Blogging: 'The Heart of the World'

Six action-packed minutes from Canadian director Guy Maddin:

Apparently, it's one of John Ashbery's favorite videos.

Jules Dassin dies in Athens

...at 96.  After leaving the U.S. in the early 1950s, he moved to Europe (eventually settling in Athens), where he directed one of my favorite movies, Rififi.  If you haven't seen it yet, now's a fine time to do so.

Le Cochon Danseur

The Dancing Pig, a French silent film from 1907 (f).  Music by Eric le Guen.

[h/t Bouphonia]

Buruma on Fassbinder

Ian Buruma assesses Fassbinder's eccentric-but-convincing film of Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz:

When Fassbinder made his fifteen-hour-long film of Berlin Alexanderplatz for television in 1980, Döblin's city was mostly gone, destroyed by Allied bombs, Soviet artillery, and East German wrecking balls. And what little was left, in the east, was hidden behind the Berlin Wall, and thus out of bounds for Fassbinder and his crew. A documentary approach was clearly impossible. And even if it had been possible to reconstruct the Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt that you could tell how it really would look out on the streets better from the kinds of refuges people created for themselves, what kinds of bars they went to, how they lived in their apartments, and so on. So he recreated the city as a kind of theater set, confined to a few interiors--Biberkopf's room, his local bar, Reinhold's apartment, an underground railway station, and a few streets -- built in a Munich movie studio.

A Plug for the Filmgalerie

Well, having just insulted Mönchengladbach, I should try to repair the damage by mentioning something good -- very good -- that has come out of that city.  I'm talking about the Filmgalerie Videothek.  For anyone who's ever gone into a mainstream German chain-store video rental place and been disappointed by the crappy selection, the Filmgalerie (G) is for you.  They started in Mönchengladbach, and now have an outlet in Duesseldorf. 

What makes the Filmgalerie so special?  The fact that it's run by and friendly film buffs with eclectic taste.  There are sections for every major director, from Almodovar to Peckinpah to Pasolini to Fassbinder to Renoir to Malle to Scorsese to John Waters.  If that's too hoity-toity for you, there are also extensive collections of splatter, horror, 'Kult' (John Watersy stuff from Germany and Europe), a generous selection of the weird and wonderful movies coming out of South Korea and Hong Kong these days, and miscellaneous 'erotic thrillers' (but no outright porn).  For the expats among you, there are films in English that were never released in Germany, and special sections with movies from Iran, China, India, Iceland, Mexico, and other exotic lands.  For more mainstream fans there's also plenty of comedies and drama. It's all laid out logically, if a bit idiosyncratically, and you can search the whole collection at their website.

Much of this stuff is impossible to come by, especially in mainstream German video stores. In fact, I still haven't even found an rent-by-mail service in Germany that matches the Film Galerie's selection (although last time I looked was 2006). The Film Galerie is a tad more expensive than conventional video stores (but not if you get a 10-film card, which costs 26 euro), but if there is anything more worth subsidizing than a great neighborhood video store, I don't know what is. 

Movie-loving friends of mine in other, supposedly cosmopolitan, German cities, complain that they don't have a single decent video store.  That's why I keep encouraging the Film Galerie crew to expand...

The Lynchian Tower of French Invincibility

Nicolas Sarkozy and David Lynch, shortly after Lynch was made (G) an Officer of the French Legion of Honor. David Lynch is venerated across Europe, and this is one cultural preference that I endorse without reserve.

I'm thrilled to know that this honor went to the man who directed 'Eraserhead,' the most unsettling film ever made.  To paraphrase Tom Jones, if the miasmic swamp-eroticism of 'Eraserhead' doesn't turn you on, you ain't got no buttons. If it doesn't horrify you, you're probably a psychopath. A film that has changed thousands of lives (including my own) and probably ended some, as well.

After the ceremony, Lynch quite sensibly "suggested to the French president to build 'an invincible tower in Paris' to make the country and its president 'unconquerable.'"

In heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things, and I've got mine.

A German Looks at Democracy in Boise, Idaho

Via signandsight, an English translation of Ekkehard Knörer's review of Frederick Wiseman's new documentary "State Legislature" -- an almost four-hour long film about the inner workings of the Idaho State Legislature.  Knörer notes with interest that most Idaho politicians are genuine citizen-legislators (fairly common in the Western U.S.), and the close attention they pay to constituent complaints.  He wraps up his review thus:

"State Legislature" documents both the idea and the praxis of politics in America, showing how even – or precisely – at the semi-professional state level, the two are inseparably linked. The politicians we watch are shown as embodiments of the indissoluble interweaving of praxis and idea. The omnipresent reference to the founding fathers of the constitution, the ever-present antagonism - even in conservative Idaho - between the principles of freedom and control, all of this determines the most nitty-gritty debates and decision-making. Even if you don't share many or even most of the often reactionary positions and attitudes expressed, "State Legislature" shows what holds not only this state, but the whole of the United States together: the idea that procedures must exist that give people a hearing in matters that concern them. The grandeur of this idea shines through the nuts and bolts of political workings, and Europeans can only look on in astonishment.

German Joys Review: Vier Minuten

First a prelude. This review contains spoilers. Also, this review is going to criticize an Autorenkino film. Autorenkino ("author-cinema") is the word for movies made by independent (often young) directors, working from their own script and ideas, subsidized by Germany's bewilderingly complex network of overlapping film foundations. Germans media types are proud of their film subsidy scheme, which really does create breathing space for offbeat projects with an individual stamp.

Sometimes, the result's quite interesting. Often it's average, and sometimes it's self-indulgent: a movie that make a bunch of sophomore narrative and technical mistakes; or that feature navel-gazing explorations of the emotional lives of uninteresting people; or that cries out for an aggressive editor and a script doctor. You wouldn't know this, though, because in the German media, Autorenkino movies (also ones from other countries) are treated with kid-gloves. Reviewers will overlook ludicrous implausibilities, longueurs, and stilted dialogue, and instead praise a film's "sensitive exploration" of a "delicate topic." (an example of this very muted criticism of the flim under review is here (G))

Well, you won't get any of that here.  I won't get my subsidies cut if I rub somebody the wrong way, so I will tell you exactly what I think about this movie. So here goes.

Vier Minuten ("Four Minutes") features lesbians and Nazis, and it's set in a women's prison. A certain kind of film fan is now thinking: so far so good! But wait, there's so much more. It also has two hangings, an attempted suicide, intentional self-mutilation, a threatened extrajudicial execution, and incest. Hmm, you may be thinking now, that seems a bit much. This isn't one of those German movies in which people scream at each other, throw things around, and engage in self-destructive behavior to show how deep their tortured souls are, is it?

I'm afraid it is. And not a particularly coherent one at that. The plot, briefly: Traude Krueger (Monica Bleibtreu) is an elderly spinster who teaches piano in a women's prison. Her star pupil is Jenny (Hannah Herzsprung, whose last name means "Heartleap"). Hannah is a skulking, antisocial twentysomething serving a long sentence for a brutal murder. And, like so many murderers, Jenny is also a piano prodigy capable of sight-reading music and tossing off a flawless Beethoven sonata, even after years out of practice and hand injuries. The wizened old piano teacher, who insists on ladylike discipline from her charges, immediately offends the chain-smoking, unwashed young brat, causing a bloody row.

But wouldn't ya know it, eventually they come to respect each other and share their deepest secrets. It will also come as no surprise that Jenny is not really guilty of murder, but took the fall for her worthless boyfriend. Or that the old spinster decides that music can heal the damaged soul hidden under the spiky facade of self-mutilating rebellion. That's 3 psychodrama cliches. There may be a movie that's recovered from going 3 for 3 here, but if there is, I have yet to see it.

And Vier Minuten is not that movie. It moves from contrived conceit (outside: beefy prison guard; inside: sensitive opera lover!) to contrived conceit (Jenny's day-trip to a piano competition falls victim to petty bureaucratic infighting!) with the sure-footedness of a wood-nymph stepping from stone to stone across a mountain stream. The contrived situations are only aggravated by contrived shots -- over-cute pans and quirky angles that repeatedly call attention to themselves in the wrong way. The whole thing is overheated and overstuffed. It has several passages of what I can only call, to use a German word, Gefuehlskitsch (literally, 'emotional kitsch'). Somebody needed to tell the director, Chris Kraus: "You've got an interesting idea here, but your movie can contain either Nazis or incest or repressed homosexual desire or self-mutilation. Not all four."

To be fair, the film isn't a complete wash. Herzsprung and Bleibtreu do rather ham it up, but in a watchable way that invests the characters with some real depth. Herzsprung is especially soulful; I look forward to seeing her paired with a more plausible script. The final scene, set in a competition for young musicians, is brought off with panache. But the whole thing is just too artificial, too art-house, too self-indulgently Autorenkino and at least 20 minutes too long.

Arno Widmann Denounces Trash

My enthusiasm for Antonioni exists, but has clear and well-defined borders. The reason? I've actually met people here in Europe very much like the people who populate his early films -- self-involved aristocrats and bohemians with no visible means of support.

The mere fact that they're the sort of people who populated Antonioni's universe doesn't meant they're worthy of being filmed. As the Pet Shop Boys once put it, "We were never feeling bored / 'Cause we were never being boring." The inert half-humans in Antonioni's European films look so gorgeously, langorously bored because they are boring. And it's pretty hard to make an interesting film about boring people, although Antonioni came as close as anyone. When he left Europe, though, he was capable of making some truly stunning films ("Red Desert"; "The Passenger.")

But now to German Arno Widmann. Widmann read the New York Times' massive obituary of the Italian director, and had a few thoughts on ennui-laced Europeans and chirpy, superficial Americans. The piece ends, as so many things you read in European newspapers do, with a denunciation of pop culture:

The New York Times entitled its obituary of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni - whose literary works are unfortunately little-known - with the words: "A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New World." The title underscores the hopelessness of Old Europe's position. Even before the article began, it made clear how small and thoroughly passé the Old Europe - and one of its most astute representatives - look in the new world of the present.

***

But when nothing is questioned any more, when only laughter counts, when people over 60 watch film-versions of Rosamunde Pilcher romances and anyone younger watches comedy, the time has come to seek once more the earnestness we're making fun of. When everything had to be tone-in-tone, when a tight-fitting suit and teased hair were the ne plus ultra of the feminine aesthetic, it was good to throw a little dirt on the cream-coloured costumes. But nowadays when trash rules, we feel a longing for the clear, full-screen beauty of the young Monica Vitti.

Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg? Why the Hell Not?

It seems we are, indeed, going to be treated to a movie called "Valkyrie", in which Tom Cruise will play Claus Schenk, Graf vom Stauffenberg, the conservative German military officer who organized the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

The project has already made lots of amusing waves in Germany, mostly because Tom Cruise is a member of the Church of Scientology. This odd synthetic can-do American Value-Pak half-religion half-business combo is a focus of almost-pathological obsession in Germany. The government -- and I'm not kidding here -- actually spends millions tracking the organization and writing hand-wringing reports about its "unconstitutional" world-view.

Stauffenberg's son said Cruise should "keep his hands off" my father, and that the film will "surely be crap." Various German officials, always keen to protect their subjects from the insidious danger of Scientology, fell all over themselves to announce that they had denied Cruise's film team permission to film in various government-owned buildings -- sometimes even before a request had even been made.

Now director Florian Graf von Donnersmarck (scion of a wealthy and well-connected German family with ties to the von Stauffenbergs) steps up to the mike to break a few lances (as the German saying goes) in favor of the project. Excerpts, in my translation:

[In a brochure recommended by a German politician to warn citizens about Scientology] much is made of the fact that L. Ron Hubbard began his career "writing Westerns, horror stories, and science fiction." Then he wrote a history of the world which smacks of science fiction, and which is taught to his disciples as the truth, in return for lots of money. But isn't it glorious that we live in a world in which a half-successful science fiction writer can earn hundreds of millions by explaining to his disciples that, 75 million years ago, an evil ruler named Xenu deposited billions of his subjects into volcanos and blew them up with hydrogen bombs?  And that the resteless souls of these murdered people are now the source of all our suffering on earth? The horribly boring pressure to conform that thrives everywhere in Germany these days will not tolerate this. It demands complete correctness in all aspects of life.

But perhaps, in this context, one should take a closer look at Stauffenberg. As youngsters, my brother and I discovered a letter from Stauffenberg in a book, in which he wrote his wife that the population of Poland were "rabble," composed of "many Jews and many half-breeds," "a people that enjoys rule under the jackboot." ... But do we therefore deny Stauffenberg his glorious heroism, his strength of conscience and his exemplary character? Of course not. But his superhuman perfection? That, yes.

...

Perhaps we should simply recognize that none of us is a god -- neither Stauffenberg nor Tom Cruise nor L. Ron Hubbard nor the rest of us. Germany offers no patent recipe for the world, and neither does the United States. In truth, everyone must find his own way in the world, and life remains a search for inner truth. Stauffenberg represents exacly this search. All I wish for from the state is that it should provide me a secure framework in which I can carry out this search. But in the Tom Cruise/Stauffenberg affair, the German state again pretended it had all the answers already.

Tom Cruise as a Multiple-Amputee Nazi

The category is links I will never follow:

Entertainment: Tom Cruise Pushes Ahead With Nazi Movie, Hires Prosthetics Expert

Alright, I did follow the link. The movie's called Valkyrie, and Tom will play a "Nazi general under Hitler's command [who has] already lost an eye and a couple of limbs." OK as far as it goes, but wouldn't it spice things up a little if he were a Nazi general under Churchill's command? Dare we hope that Tom Cruise will chop off a couple body parts for the sake of authenticity?

Snark aside, let me say this loud and proud: I cannot wait for this movie. In part because it's my first-ever job as a script consultant.  Can spot my handiwork in this sneak peek at the thrilling climax?

Scene: Fuhrer Hauptquartier

General von Kreuz: [Played by Tom Cruise.  He is agitated, pacing nervously, his prosthetic left leg making a loud clumping noise] "But Mein beloved Fuhrer, I haff said again und again, zee situation is hopeless!  Hopeless!"  [His glass eye pops out of its socket and falls to the floor. Von Kreuz attempts to pick it up with his black-leather-clad prosthetic right hand, to no avail] "Ach, this is alvays happening ven I am aufgeregt!"

Hitler: [Can we get Dennis Hopper? Jeff Bridges? Safety choice: Steve Buscemi. Whoever he is, he is screaming] "You are a coward und a traitor! A deesgrace to zhe Fazerland!  Lieutenants, take heem avay...to Niederschleimhausen."

Von Kreuz: "Nein!  Nicht Niederschleimhausen! [Eye pops out again, but von Kreuz is too terrified to notice]  I cannot be laboring vith zhe common criminals! At least you must be letting me to kill zhe self in act of self-murder, to be preserving zhe honor of a soldier!"*

If you want to know what happens to our gruff-but-lovable multiple amputee Nazi hero, you'll just have to see the movie. Let's just say that the ending is suprisingly heart-warming and family-friendly. Unlike the ending to World War II.

* Note: in order to avoid confusing American moviegoers, the characters are speaking with a "Nazi-German" accent which, as Max Goldt has pointed out, has nothing to do with actual German accents.

German Joys Mini-Review: Schnitzelparadies

I saw Schnitzelparadies ('Schnitzel Paradise', in case you hadn't guessed), last Friday. It was Holland's biggest box-office hit in 2005. Nordip (Mounir Valentyn), a young guy from a Moroccan family, is our hero. He lives in a drab Dutch town with his wastrel brother and devout Muslim paterfamilias, who runs a small grocery.

Nordip got fine grades and could go to medical school, which would please his father no end. However, he needs to find himself, and decides he can do this only by taking a job in the kitchen of the local restaurant/hotel, "The Blue Vulture." Its mainstay is Schnitzel, the fast food of Northern Europe. There he falls in with a motley crew of sweating, profanity spewing service-industry stereotypes: the portly stoner boss, two fellow immigrants who speak a heavily-accented Dutch hipster slang (liberal use of proper English words such as "fucking" "cool" and "shit"), a half-mad, mohawked Serbian butcher, and the refulgently gorgeous Agnes (Bracha van Doesburgh), the hotel owner's daughter.

German Joys Mini-Review: Princesas

"Princesas" (G) is the new movie by Fernando León de Aranoa, a Spanish director who last gave us Mondays in the Sun, a rather charming movie about unemployment. Princesas is about prostitutes: the Spaniard Caye (Candela Peña, smoldering) and the Dominican Zulema (Micaela Nevárez, winsome). The Spanish hookers distrust the foreign competition, which undercuts their prices. However, Caye develops an initially wary, increasingly warm friendship with her rival, after she learns that Zulema is in a desperate spot -- dependent on a sadistic official who keeps promising her working papers in return for rough sex.

I found Princesas to be a frustrating movie, because it's about half moments of genius and half stumbles.

Genius: the performances of the two main characters, which won them both Goyas. Also the subplot of Caye's relationship with a computer programmer. She meets him under ambiguous circumstances that don't reveal her profession, and she then struggles to keep it secret from him as she falls for him. There are also pungently individualizing details, and lots of warmth and playfulness. The film indeed exudes Malegria, the sort of melancholy cheerfulness that is de Aranoa's specialty.

The Lives of Others Praised Again

Anthony Lane, the New Yorker's film critic, was just as impressed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's towering Das Leben der Anderen as I was. Lane: "If there is any justice, this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language film will go to 'The Lives of Others,' a movie about a world in which there is no justice." [h/t Ed Philp]

German Joys Mini-Review: Le Cercle Rouge DVD (British Film Institute)

God bless the British Film Institute. Not only have they released Le Cercle Rouge, director Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 Paris crime thriller, they've filled it out with fine extras.

A weird Buddha quotation (invented by Melville) about men meeting mysteriously within a red circle  gets Le Cercle Rouge off to a properly existential start. It's a typical Melville gangster drama: aloof, suspicious, highly intelligent criminals drift around the underworld milieu of Marseilles and Paris like loose atoms, occasionally coming together for a heist or two, after which they return to their wary, solitary existences. The colors are subdued, and the dialogue is mostly shop talk between and among bad guys and cops. There are no heroes; in fact, the superintendent of police is quoted several times affirming that "all men" are guilty.

The centerpiece of the movie (which John Woo frequently cite as one of his chief inspirations, and which he would like to remake) is one of the most intriguing heist scenes since Jules Dassin's Rififi. Virtually in real-time, and without dialogue, we watch an elite cadre of jewel thieves (Corey, played by Alain Delon, is the organizer) stage an elegant assault on a heavily-guarded jewelry showroom on the Place Vendôme. All set to a suave, unobtrusive jazz score.

Delon is his fox-like, taciturn self, even though his mustache looks somehow unconvincing, and his hair looks dyed. Bourvil -- a French music-hall star with an absurdly broken nose -- is cast against type as a detective. Yves Montand plays a corrupt, alcoholic cop who lives in a rundown house with hideous aqua-and-sea-green wallpaper. There's a hallucination scene in which Montand, foaming at the mouth after another night hitting the bottle, watches helplessly as (real) snakes and (marionette) spiders ("the inhabitants of the cupboard", he calls them) crawl out of a closet to attack him.

Yes, really -- Yves Montand, foaming at the mouth, being attacked by marionette spiders, all set to late 1960's psychedelic freak-out music. I had to back up and watch it twice before I believed my eyes.

German Joys Review: Camera Buff

Polish director Krzyzstof Kieslowksi (known internationally mainly for the Trois Couleurs (G) trilogy he directed in the 1990s) made Camera Buff in 1979, long before his reputation had crossed the Polish border in a serious way.

We meet Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr), an unassuming thirty-year-old who works as a purchasing manager for a factory in Wielice, a nothing town whose residents live in gray, pre-fabricated rent-barracks. As the movie begins, Irka (Malgorzata Zabkowska) gives birth to their first child, a daughter. At the time, Polish men were kept away from their wives during childbirth, and instead downed congratulatory vodka with friends. After sleeping off his hangover, Jerzy buys a Russian 8mm camera to record his new daughter’s first steps and words.

Cameras were rare in Poland then – Filip’s cost 2 months of his salary. When the factory director learns Philip has a camera, he orders him to film the company’s 25th anniversary celebration (speeches, visits by dignitaries, a cheesy band). This assignment sparks a fascination with moviemaking; Filip begins to imagine his daily environment filmed, and begins to frame shots with his hands. He forms a film club with the factory’s "cultural" subsidy. He's the director, and his wiry young friend Witek and a "crew" of other enthusiasts helps him. He submits the resulting movies to the local amateur film federation, headed by the sultry Anna (Ewa Pokas).

After getting some advice from some of the of bald, turtleneck-clad auteurs in the Film Federation, Filip begins coming up with his own ideas for short documentary films, among them a feature about a midget who works in the factory. A brief, hesitant flirtation sparks between Filip and Anna, and shortly after, the midget documentary is shown on Polish television. Filip attends a lecture by an established Polish feature-film director, Krzyzstof Zanussi, and persuades Zanussi to visit drab old Wielice to screen his new movie Camouflage and answer questions afterward. (Zanussi, a contemporary and friend of Kieslowski, plays himself in the film).

"The Perfume": A Review

I saw the movie The Perfume: The Story of a Murderer last night, an international production which will be released in the UK and the US in December. The movie's based on the much-translated 1985 novel by German writer Patrick Süskind (G), another notorious recluse who rejects prizes (here, literary ones). One of the most expensive European movies ever made, The Perfume stars Dustin Hoffman and a host of lesser-known (and less excitable) actors, including the extraordinary Ben Whishaw.

Whishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille ("frog" in French), who squirts out from between the legs of a filthy fishmonger in the "foulest-smelling place in Paris" in the early 18th century. Grenouille's mother abandons him and is hanged for doing so, and the lad is sent to an orphanage. Early on during the brutal struggle that is life in a Paris orphanage, Grenouille discovers that his sense of smell is extraordinary, he can distinguish thousands of different scents and can even smell his way "through" objects to their interiors. Eventually sold to a tannery, Grenouille sees the golden, shimmering windows of perfume shop during a delivery run, and becomes obsessed with the idea of capturing scents forever.

German Joys Review: Forklift Driver Klaus

It's time for a subject that doesn't get enough attention on German Joys: industrial safety.

Yesterday I watched Staplerfahrer Klaus: Der Erste Arbeitstag ('Forklift Driver Klaus - The First Day on the Job'), a 10-minute long industrial-safety film directed by Jörg Wagner and Stefan Prehn. Forklift Driver Klaus opens in an office of a warehouse complex in some industrial suburb of a German city. All the forklift driver trainees are assembled; they've all passed their test, and all receive a badge signifying that yes, they too may join "the 37,000 specially-trained people in Germany who can rightly call themselves forklift drivers."

The camera focusses on Klaus, a cheerful, innocent-looking blond-haired young man, beaming with pride as the firm's president pins his forklift-driver badge onto the lapel of his blue work overalls. Accompanied by peppy, burbling industrial-training-film music, Klaus walks confidently to his designated forklift and puts it through an initial safety inspection. Everything works. Klaus is about to start his new career as a forklift driver!

A near-accident at the warehouse entrance isn't Klaus' fault, it's the fault of the foolish pedestrian who ignored the sign clearly marking separate paths for motorized and pedestrian traffic. Unfortunately, Klaus cannot so easily be absolved of blame for the series of "cruel but informative accidents" (to quote the film's English-language website) that happen next.

To Germany's Taste-Makers: Idiocracy!

Like most countries, Germany has an inferiority complex towards the crass, bumbling, super-rich hyperpower America. Take, for example the 1997 book Der Kleine Bruder. Deutschland und das Modell USA ('The Little Brother: Germany and the Model of America'), in which two young journalists warn Germans that, when it comes to prevailing in global competition, America has "already done its homework" and Germany lags far behind, so that Germany will usually be "sitting in the classroom, not teaching at the podium." But I think you got all that from the front cover photo already, no?

To compensate for this nagging feeling of inferiority, Germans travel through the U.S. obsessively documenting the "dark side" of American culture, read books by obscure left-wing authors predicting America's imminent collapse, and consume American pop culture products that portray Americans as obese, gun-toting, TV-obsessed morons ('Bowling for Columbine' and Michael Moore's entire written output, 'The Simpsons,' 'Beavis and Butt-head', etc.).

German taste brokers, working in large entertainment conglomerates, scan American culture for movies or books that make Americans look like idiots. For these people, I have one word of advice: Idiocracy. It's the new movie by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and the ingenious film satire 'Office Space' (which inexplicably has not yet been released in Germany). The plot of Idiocracy is pretty simple:

[S]oldier Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) wakes up 500 years in the future, the result of a botched hibernation experiment, [and] finds the country hopelessly dense and incapable of solving the most basic problems. Buildings are teetering and collapsing. Garbage towers high in the streets. Farm fields are barren because a sponsor pumps salty energy drink into every place water used to be -- including the irrigation systems.

Most everyone in 2505 is a mouth-breathing lout, barely capable of forming a sentence. They've elected as president the guy who seems cool to them, a loudmouthed porn-star wrestler.... They pass their days consuming, defecating, fornicating and gawking at anything that goes boom. Then consuming some more. And because they don't know any better, they've let themselves be co-opted by corporate marketers, taking brands ("Frito") for names and wearing disposable clothes covered with ads.

They say the movie is funny, but its American distributor, 20th-Century Fox, thought it would bomb, and hasn't given it a broad release in the U.S. You know, O taste broker, that this movie is just right for the German market. All I ask, O taste-maker, is a small cut of the profits, or perhaps a job as "cultural consultant" during the creation of the dubbed German version...

German Joys Review: Das Leben der Anderen

The former East Germany, a relatively small country of 16 million people, was controlled by the most sophisticated, cunning, and thorough secret police the world has ever seen, the East German Ministerium für Staatsicherheit, or "Stasi." The Stasi had about 90,000 employees -- a staggering number for such a small population -- but even more importantly, recruited a network of hundreds of thousands of "unofficial employees," who submitted secret reports on their co-workers, bosses, friends, neighbors, and even family members. Some did so voluntarily, but many were bribed or blackmailed into collaboration.

In a totalitarian country plagued by shortages, the State lavished funds and training on Stasi agents. They did sometimes resort to physical violence and torture, especially in the basement of the infamous Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin. However, such drastic measures were rarely necessary -- the Stasi could usually get the information it obsessively sought from a meek and terrorized population by doling out (or withholding) State favors: university slots for parents of teenage children, painkillers for closet addicts, or perhaps a visa to visit relatives in the West.

Das Leben der Anderen, ("The Life of Others") German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut, builds this painful legacy into a fascinating, moving film. In its moral seriousness, artistic refinement, and depth, Das Leben der Anderen simply towers over other recent German movies, and urgently deserves a wide international release. The fulcrum of  the movie (but probably not its most important character) is Georg Dreyman, an up-and-coming East German playwright in his late 30s. Played by the square-jawed Sebastian Koch, Dreyman is an (apparently) convinced socialist who's made his peace with the regime. His plays are either ideologically neutral or acceptable, and he's even received State honors.

Although he is a collaborator, he is also a Mensch. He uses his ideological "cleanliness" to intervene on behalf of dissidents such as his journalist friend Paul Hauser (Hans-Uwe Bauer). These unfortunates must contend with every humiliation a totalitarian state can invent: their apartments are bugged, friends and family are recuited to inform on them, and chances to publish or perform can be extinguished by one stray comment from a Central Committee member. The most recalcitrant can be kicked out of the country and stripped of their citizenship, like the singer songwriter Wolf Biermann.

A German Orchestra in the Middle Kingdom

On Friday, I saw the premiere of a documentary about a German orchestra's tour of China and Japan.  The orchestra in question is the Heinrich-Heine-University Orchestra, a semi-professional ensemble made up of current and former students of the University, under the leadership of University Music Director Silke Loehr.  (Disclosure: I know several members of the orchestra).  After months of intense preparation, the Orchestra finally set out, in fall of 2005, to play six concerts in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Beijing.

Ordinarily, you would hire professional tour managers to move 74 people and $60,000 worth of musical instruments around big foreign countries.  The HHU Orchestra, though, doesn't have fancy managers.  The orchestra members all have day jobs, and took time away from those jobs to organize the tour themselves.  They booked the hotels, planned the itinerary, and managed the customs and visa regulations themselves.  Nobody paid them a cent; and many used up most or all of their vacation days to make the trip.

Fortunately for us, the orchestra was accompanied by a team of young filmmakers from Duesseldorf's Robert Schumann Conservatory (G).  The conservatory students are studying sound and image technology, and the resulting film is their doctoral dissertation.  And boy, does it look professional -- the director, Aleksander Bach, seamlessly mixes interviews, jump-cut videos of pulsing, neon-drenched metropolises, cinéma vérité treks through the backstreets of Beijing, dramatic confrontations with defective hotel doors and defective Chinese customs officials (who unexpectedly demanded a huge security deposit to let the orchestra's instruments through customs), and -- of course -- generous excerpts of the orchestra playing Wagner, Schumann, Bizet, and Beethoven.

Lars von Trier Saws Off the Hand that Feeds Him. Again. To no effect.

You're Danish director Lars von Trier.  You've made a couple of interesting films during your life.  The rest are pretentious, incoherent disasters, in which you reach deeper and deeper into your bag of non-politically-correct tricks in order to shock the European movie-viewing audience.  This is hard to do, since they have already seen a lot of shocking movies, many filmed by directors with more talent than you. 

Although the film subsidies keep flowing, the viewers seem to getting a little bit bored, especially by the time you release 1998's The Idiots, a Disneyesque feature about a commune whose members go out into restaurants and stores and pretend to be mentally retarded or insane by day.  They drool and scream and knock things over, attracting quite a bit of attention.  Then they return to their comfortable villa at night for orgies.  The audience isn't very impressed.

It's time to win them back, which you do by launching a filmic jihad against the United States of America.  You direct a series of movies which are little more than self-righteous, bitterly critical tirades against that nation.  The fact that you have never visited this nation and do not speak its language is no hindrance, of course.  Things are going well!  The new movies are called "thoughtful" and "provocative."  You're getting back your audience using the controversial bad-boy technique of openly pandering to their prejudices.  (Good thing you just happened to pick the USA and not, say, South Africa as your target)

Then disaster strikes.  A right-wing Danish politician is concerned about Denmark's immigrants, who don't seem to be fitting in very well.  He warns Danes that they must fight a "long and bitter Kulturkampf", which raises an eyebrow or two.  At first this seems to have nothing to do with you.  Bu then the politician assigns a group of culture bureaucrats draws up a list of 108 glorious Danish masterpieces in 7 different categories.  (One of the chosen works is the Danish version of Donald Duck).  And what do these bourgeois prigs do do?  They pick one of your films!  And not just any one of your films, they pick The Idiots (German)!

Gaack!  What's a bad-boy to do?  Soon little Ahmed will be watching good-looking young bourgeois Danes drooling and penetrating each other on a grainy videotape in his school classroom. And told to venerate it as a masterpiece!  Immediate action is required.  You go on Danish T.V., and, well, we'll let the newspaper article take it from there:

The Danish director Lars von Trier, whose film "The Idiots" was also named in the cultural canon, protested against the entire plan as a "nationalization of culture," during a television appearance in which he cut apart the red-and-white Danish national flag, the "Danebrog", sewed it back together as a completely-red flag, and hoisted it again.  All the while he played "The Internationale" in the background.

Communism?  Is that the best you can do, Lars, baby? 

Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man"

Warning to German readers: I'm about to review Grizzly Man, a 2005 documentary by the grand old man of German cinema, Werner Herzog.  There are no plans to release this extraordinary movie in Germany.  I don't know why this is so, and I hope whoever controls this decision changes their mind.

Now to the review.  Herzog's name conjures unshaven, sweaty half-madmen hacking through a trackless forest, cursing God.  And Grizzly Man is no disappoinment, although the Herzogian protagonist here -- a wildlife activist named Timothy Treadwell who lived among wild grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness -- is real. 

Treadwell believed that man can live peacefully with bears, and brought along videotape -- which he shot himself, often alone -- to show how it's done.  He shoots himself  singing and talking to the bears (to whom he gives names like "Mr. Chocolate"), droning "I love you" over and over in a high-pitched voice to keep them calm, and even approaching and petting them.  Treadwell filmed thousands of hours of footage of the bears and of himself before his luck ran out in 2003, when he and a female companion named Anne Huguenard were killed and eaten by an old, emaciated brown bear who was unfamiliar to them. 

The Great Depression

A friend just told me about a new German documentary called The Great Depression.  Here's the first paragraph of a short review from the local film newspaper:

Garden gnomes, cuckoo-clocks, currywurst, mustaches -- all things people like to associate with Germans.  But are we Germans also permanently pessimistic, depressive and constantly whining?  Young director Konstantin Faigle is convinced of it, and in his new documentary "The Great Depression" launches a thorough investigation. 

I'm not so sure about the garden gnomes -- England, the home of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, has a strong claim here --  but I must agree about the general whininess of the public discourse here.  Why, just this morning, I was listening to Tagesgespraech on the wonderful local public radio station, while I waited for a workman to come by and fix my telephone.

The Discreet Charm of European Movies

First, thanks so much for responses to the anonymous burial question.  I find them anthropologically fascinating.  As Clifford Geertz once said, "Society's forms are culture's substance."

And now, Culture Week continues at German Joys! We move from the sad subject of dead pets to the engaging question of What Makes a Good European Movie.

If you spend a little time browsing through the Feuilleton (Arts & Culture) pages of German newspapers you’ll soon encounter the insult Hollywoodmäßig (Hollywoodesque). A movie is Hollywoodesque when it displays some or all of the following characteristics:

• The characters are slim and attractive, and brandish perfect, even rows of mercilessly white teeth;
• Important plot moments are underlined with pounding or swelling music;
• Characters always have a perfect wisecrack at the ready;
• The male/female pair who distrust each other at first trade increasingly affectionate barbs, and end up in love (see Rule #98 of 100 Rules for Evil Masterminds);
• The end must be, in the clumsy German formulation “Happy End.” As in: “Ein Film mit Happy-End!”

Profound Ruminations from Lars von Trier

I've had it in for Lars von Trier since watching his grotesquely pretentious and sentimental Dancer in the Dark.  He was supposed to design the current Bayreuther Festspiel, but has recently pulled out, because...well, I'll let him explain it himself, from a recent piece in Sign and Sight:

The Tagespiegel has published Lars von Trier's defence of his decision to pull out of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth next year: his plan not to let anybody see anything of his "Ring" cycle would have been too complicated to stage. "The essence of illusion is that it does not exist; or more correctly, it only exists in the mind of the spectator. How do we put it there? Simply by implication. By showing things that cause the spectator to deduce and 'see' the illusion that is precisely not shown. It is simple dramaturgy: if A via B leads to C, we show A and C, and let the spectator deal with B! It's the simple recipe for conjuring tricks. ... It doesn’t take much brainpower to deduce from this that all that is really interesting about the Ring cannot be seen! Like conjuring tricks, the visual mythology is a definite B! So I concluded without hesitation that the ultimate production would have to take place in total darkness! ... But to a director, in addition to being consistent, total darkness is also rather meager and unsatisfactory. And anyway, Wagner's words also include a small but very important and far-reaching number of stage directions. And to make this long story a bit shorter, permit me to take this chance to present my scenic conclusion! A conclusion partly in line with 'theatre noire' but which I would rather call direction using 'enriched darkness'." (You find the whole text in English here)

Yes!  Go read the whole text, and then compare it to, this site.  Whom would you rather drink a beer with?