German Joys

Jeffrey Herf on The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Jeffrey Herf praises the Vergangenheitsbewältigung of 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex':

[A]n honest reckoning with the past is exactly what the movie attempts. And, in providing a frank and unsentimental depiction of the brutal excesses associated with 1960s radicalism, it sets an example that Hollywood would do well to follow.

Director Uli Edel and writer Bernd Eichinger present the RAF as it was--a brutal, violent organization--while flatly and effectively contradicting some of the myths surrounding the group. They show the RAF shooting an unarmed office worker in a successful effort to free Baader from custody, placing bombs in police departments and at the Springer Press building, and exchanging fire with police after being offered the option of peacefully surrendering. They present the RAF seizure of the German Embassy in Stockholm and the murder of its military attache, Andreas von Mirbach. Scenes of the murder of German banker Jurgen Ponto in his home (though disputed in its details by his widow) and of the assassination of German Attorney General Siegfried Buback and his bodyguards with machine guns by two assassins on a motorcycle leave nothing to the imagination; they are barbaric.

...

Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex places on the big screen the truth about these self-inflicted deaths [of the RAF prisoners in Stammheim in 1977], which RAF supporters transformed into a politically useful story of martyrdom at the hands of the allegedly fascist state.

...I hope that American filmmakers take this movie as a long overdue invitation to revisit the uglier side of this country's experience with radicalism during the 1960s--and engage in some Vergangenheitsbewältigung of our own.

Perhaps. But the big difference is that the RAF is still very much present in the German consciousness. Thousands of gallons of ink are spilled about the group every year in Germany, and even young people know about them and have an opinion on them, one way or another. In the U.S., by contrast, 1970s terrorism has a much lower profile. The first thing newscasters had to do when introducing the subject of Bill Ayers, the "washed-up terrorist" who surfaced in the 2008 Presidential campaign, was to explain to viewers who the Weathermen were and what they did. Seventies terrorism is, as the kids say, 'ancient history.'

Here are my proposed explanations for the difference: (1) the RAF sells newspapers and magazines; (2) German news outlets are controlled by former hippies for whom the RAF was a critical experience of their youth; (3) Germans are hard-wired to mull over their past; (4) the RAF killed a lot more people, and was generally more sophisticated and ruthless than the Weather Underground; and (5) there are many public figures in Germany who are willing to defend the RAF or at least 'try to understand' the RAF, with varying degrees of coyness, thus keeping the debate alive.

In the U.S., by contrast, you won't find anyone who will still carry water for 1970s terrorist groups, except for a few left-wing university professors or ranting ex-hippies). The only reason Bill Ayers became "salonfaehig" was because he had never been convicted of a crime, and had spent decades building a career as a respected professor. American commentators defended Ayers-as-he-is-today, but never showed the slightest understanding for the Weather Underground's actions or motivations.

'Decomposition of the Soul' on DVD?

It's time for another bleg. I'm looking for a DVD of a 2003 documentary called "Decomposition of the Soul," about Stasi psychological terror tactics (Zersetzung). The documentary apparently had a theatrical release in the U.S. and U.K. in 2003, and has been broadcast on German stations. Here's a review by the New York Times' critic:  

A German and Belgian co-production, “The Decomposition of the Soul” ... offers no palliatives, though partly because it’s a bore.* It takes more than a worthy subject to make a good documentary, after all; it takes intelligent, specific, directed filmmaking. The German-born Ms. Toussaint and the Italian-born Mr. Iannetta have seized on a fine subject and, in Hartmut Richter and Sigrid Paul, former Stasi prisoners, found witnesses who put a face on a national calamity. Yet they have made a film as austere and barren as an old Stasi prison hallway.

The filmmakers basically employ one strategy: they shoot interviews with Mr. Richter and Ms. Paul inside the Stasi’s former prison (part of it now a museum) in the East Berlin district known as the Hohenschönhausen. These survivor-witnesses, who were arrested on different charges, alternately walk through the building’s desolate halls and rooms, movingly relate their stories on camera and stare silently into space, sometimes while their voice-overs continue. The filmmakers are big on silence, which perhaps they mean to seem poetic, but mostly feels like padding.

Ideally, I'd like to buy a version (1) on DVD; with (2) English subtitles. I wouldn't mind seeing this film myself, but a friend of mine who's very interested in the Stasi would also like to see it, and English subtitles would help him a lot.

I made a few perfunctory efforts to find this movie on DVD, but had no luck. Then, I thought "why not see if my good-looking, ultra-sophisticated readership can find this movie for me?" Go to it, you beautiful bastards!

The Lost 'Metropolis'

Bioscope, citing Die Zeit, reports that a version of Metropolis has been found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that includes scenes thought to be forever lost.

Georg Diez on Provincial German Books and Movies

Georg Diez (g), in an article called "Be Popular!" endorses a version of the doughnut-hole theory in the literature section of this week's Die Zeit.  It's not online, so you'll just have to trust my summary and translated excerpts.  Diez begins by noting that Clemens Meyer just won the German Book Prize at the Leipzig book fair. "German literature," Diez begins sarcastically, "how nice! How wonderful!" Everyone's praising each other after the book fair, but, Diez observes, nobody seems to have noticed "how small, how narrow, how provincial is the country that they're talking about -- and, unfortunately, often also the stories that are told here."

Nobody seems to want to film these boring German books. Things are different in the U.S.  Diez points to No Country for Old Men (based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy) and There Will Be Blood (Upton Sinclair) as examples. (I'd add to his list Into the Wild, Sean Penn's fine film of a 1996 book by Jon Krakauer).  On the surface, these movies might deal with life in the provinces or suburbs, but they also contain fierce and uncomfortable truths -- "the whole cosmos," in Diez's words. 

Why, he asks, "doesn't one find in German books this power, this reality, these depths, this consistency and toughness and truth, that could tempt filmmakers -- and, conversely, why don't German filmmakers search for these epic worlds[?]" He continues:

Something's missing, still today. Something that's only approximately described by the word 'reality.' On the one hand, there's the will toward popular success, to telling stories, to being understood; and on the other hand the energy that's released when differing realities collide with one another, twist each other, when injuries result, comfortable truths are torn apart, and the way down to the bottom of the abyss is laid bare, the bottom that, if you follow McCarthy, is dark and heavy -- the stuff of myths. There has to be an end to the constant 'small-small'* in our heads.

Instead of filming epic stories, Diez complains, Germans are "seriously discussing Clemens Meyer's new hairstyle."

I'm with Diez on this one.  You don't have to like all these movies, or admire everything about Hollywood (note that none of the movies Diez praises was a straight Hollywood production), to notice the difference in ambition Diez is talking about here.  I've seen plenty of recent German movies and reviewed quite a few in these pages.  Some of them were just plain dull, some of them were reasonably interesting, but none really stuck with me, except for The Lives of Others and On the Other Side.

I think there's something else at work here, besides the lack of exciting novels.  Note that the category Diez accuses Germany of underperforming in is movies that are both artsy and exciting.  Germany produces plenty of mass-market comedies and dramas for just plain folks.  The problem is that movies that are supposed to tackle 'ambitious' themes often turn out so dreary.

People in the German film industry tell me there's a norming process that controls access to German film subsidies.  Directors have to convince committees of tastemakers to fund their projects.  The filmmakers themselves, and the tastemakers, have strong preferences and prejudices.  They consider themselves proudly allergic to "Hollywood" -- which they associate with Ken and Barbie actors, canned happy endings, staged dramatic confrontations, stereotyped confrontations between good and evil, unnecessary explosions, action-movie cliches, etc.  They're looking for interpersonal drama, for social commentary, for moral ambiguity -- "anti-Hollywood" qualities.  In fact, I've personally seen film scripts that have come back to aspiring directors with passages marked "too Hollywood."

The problem, according to my sources, is that a lot of these tastemakers and directors eventually come to stamp the dreaded "Hollywood" label on any enhanced storytelling technique -- such as suspense, or a happy ending, or a voice-over.  Endings in which everything turns out basically OK will be choppped and replaced with ambiguous fade-outs.  Pleasant, likable characters who we're supposed to identify with will be criticized as too "one-sided" or "subjective."  Humor that's considered too broad (by stuffy Bildungsbuerger) will be squelched.  The end result of this process is films that end up bland and wishy-washy even when they're supposed to be provocative.

And which play in art-house theatres for 5 weeks, get polite and respectful reviews, and disappear forever.

* The original is "Es geht um ein Ende des ewigen Klein-Klein in den Koepfen."  I've translated it pretty much literally, but I get the idea I'm missing some allusion here.  Little help?

German Joys Review: On the Other Side

Auf der anderen Seite (literally translated, "On the Other Side"; English title "The Edge of Heaven") is the new movie by Fatih Akin, who made Head-On in 2004.  It's one minute longer, less confrontational, and more reflective than his earlier effort.

Akin's screenplay is a pretty routine variant of "seemingly unconnected strangers whose fates pass like ships in the night."  The debt owed to movies like Short Cuts and Amores Perros is in the five figures.  Here, the passing ships include Ayten Öztürk (Nurgül Yesilçay, pictured at left), a gun-wielding young member of a "resistance group" in Turkey.  We're never told the name of the group, and the word "Kurd" is never mentioned, but her group chants solidarity with Abdullah Öcalan during a demonstration in Istanbul.  Ayten is almost arrested during this demonstration and flees to Germany under a pseudonym.

There, she tries to locate her long-departed mother Yeter (Nursel Köse) who, unbeknownst to her, now works in Bremen's red-light district.  Yeter, for her part, meets Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a lonely old man seeking companionship and a bit more, and his son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a professor of German studies at a German university.  Ayten (remember her?), in turn, gets to know a young German student, Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who's also looking for companionship and a bit more.  After a dispute with her underground comrades in Germany, Ayten is left homeless and moves in with Patrycia and her mother Susanne (Hanna Schygulla).

Lots of complications ensue.  About half the movie takes place in Germany and half in Turkey, and much of the dialogue is in either Turkish or English.*  Characters move back and forth between the two countries both willingly and unwillingly (deportation), and the transitions are managed well.  As in Amores Perros, the different strands of the story don't take place simultaneously, a fact which is made clear to the viewer in nicely-done, understated scenes that show characters whom we've already seen die or be deported in one time-phase pass directly by their own loved ones without making eye contact in another.  The coincidences don't feel contrived, and the performances -- especially from the smolderingly rebellious Yeşilçay and the forlorn Koese, are quite good. 

Now to the weak points.  First, the structure is hardly original.  That doesn't concern me too much, though -- genre movies can innovate and entertain even without being particularly original, and this one does.  The bigger problem is that it's tough to give the characters enough depth in these jam-packed, plot-driven, asynchronous movies.  Akin comes close, but doesn't quite pull it off, especially as to the university professor Nejat and the German student Lotte.  They make some dramatic and seemingly bizarre decisions during this movie, but we don't know enough about their motives to understand these decisions.  When the characters do explain themselves (later), it sounds forced because it doesn't fit into a recognizable character structure.  Akin tells us, for example, that Lotte felt constricted by her routine middle-class existence and needed a dramatic (and practically suicidal) existential wager to feel alive again, rather than showing us this.

This flaw, though, is redeemed by so much else: original conceits and interesting characters, heartfelt moments, some genuine suspense, amusing and harrowing moments of cultural misunderstanding, and a pleasantly inconclusive ending.  Akin is prodigiously talented, and I look forward to his next feature film.**

* I note gratefully that the English and Turkish in this movie is subtitled in German, not dubbed.

** Which will be shot in New York and called "New York, I Love You".  New York, by the way, is located in the USA, a country which, in Akin's youthfully exuberant opinion, is run by fascists.  "He who f**ks nuns..."

[picture from Zelluloid.de]

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.

Funder on the Impossibility of Das Leben der Anderen

Anna Funder, author of the excellent Stasiland (which I reviewed here), writes in The Guardian that despite Das Leben der Anderen's appeal as a movie, the assumption it's based on -- that a Stasi spy might take pity on the subjects of his surveillance and shield them from persecution -- just could not have happened:

The ex-Stasi are vociferous in their claims of being "victims of democracy". But the truth is that, by and large, they are doing much better in the new Germany than the people they oppressed. They have the educations and solid work histories they denied their victims. Many of them were snapped up by security firms and private detective agencies eager for their considerable expertise, or they went into business, skilled as they are - to perhaps an unholy degree - in "managing" people. Surprisingly often, they sold property and insurance, occupations unknown in the Soviet bloc. (I think they had a head start here - after all, they were schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their better judgment.)

[Dr. Hubertus] Knabe [director of the Hohenschoenhausen memorial (G)] is no doubt correct about the internal surveillance of the Stasi making it physically impossible for a Stasi man to try to save people. But in my experience, the more frightening thing is that they didn't want to. The institutional coercion made these men into true believers; it shrank their consciences and heightened their tolerance for injustice and cruelty "for the cause".

Von Donnersmarck spent four years researching the film, and knows as well as anyone that there is no case of a Stasi man trying to save victims. He has said: "I didn't want to tell a true story as much as explore how someone might have behaved. The film is more of a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account of what actually happened." The terrible truth is that the Stasi provide no material for a "basic expression of belief in humanity". For expressions of conscience and courage, one would need to look to the resisters.

German Joys Mini-Review: Netto - Alles Wird Gut!

Anyone who spends more than a few days in Germany will meet an unemployed alcoholic. In Germany such people get meager state benefits which keep them afloat financially. This exposes them to an unexpectedly demoralizing fate: having much more time than they can ever use. They spend a lot of it hanging about in the dark recesses of pubs. They come alone, but soon gravitate to any table whose denizens don't project the metal-plated wariness of the city dweller. When our watery-eyed friend plants himself at the table, the rest of the company will be in for some long, perhaps not particularly intelligible discussions about life, work, broken marriages, troubled relationships, petty government bureaucrats, and maybe art. (A surprising number of the ones I've met take up painting, and even bring their canvases along).

Netto - Alles wird gut! (roughly: "In the End, Everything's Gonna be OK!") takes us into the life of Marcel Werner (Milan Peschel), a former East German who, like millions of his countrymen, never quite found a place in the unified Germany. Werner, who's been unemployed for years, conducts long, one-sided conversations with the chef in his local Vietnamese restaurant, mostly concerning personal protection and security, the field he has utterly formless plans for conquering. Before his ship comes in, though, he supplements his government benefits by the modern German equivalent of rag-picking: taking in broken old computers and VCRs (yes, VCRs) for a pittance, fixing them, and re-selling them for a slightly higher pittance.

Von Donnersmarck's Land

Congratulations for Florian von Donnersmarck for nabbing an Oscar for best foreign-language film for The Lives of Others, which I praised here. I'm not going to admit to taking the Oscars very seriously, or knowing anything about the other foreign-language contenders, but it's always good to see a fine movie get more attention.

Von Donnersmarck's English is good. Frighteningly perfect, in fact. I also found his praise of Arnold Schwarzenegger for teaching him to eliminate the words "I can't" from his vocabulary to be kind of cute. It's good to know Ah-nold is still helping give birth to film milestones.

"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.