German Joys

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.

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.

Snail-Friendly Formerly Socialist Indian Chiefs

First there was Karl May, the odd 19th-century German novelist who brought 'the Western' to Germany. Even though he'd never been to the United States, May's amazingly vivid descriptions of the rugged landscape of the West, and the ruggeder men who tamed it, were popular with German children. All Germans, and I mean all, can recite volumes about the loyal Indian scout "Winnetou", and the various palefaces who explored the West with him, including "Old Surehand" and "Old Shatterhand." The books remain in print to this day. In fact, Karl May has sold more books than any other German-language author.

Then there were American Westerns. Then came West German Westerns, which were successful. Then came Westerns...from the East! East Germany, that is. East Germany's historical role was the Potemkin country, the dolled-up store-display Communist dictatorship that showed the rest of the world that anything the West could do, the Soviet bloc could do just as well. (At least one Soviet-bloc country that is, which was relatively highly-developed and helped by massive infusions of Soviet economic aid). There were East German car brands, medical congresses, detective shows, management consultants, and even dance crazes (the Lipsi: "a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing").

So there had to be socialist Westerns, and there were. In these Westerns, the Indians were wise, peaceable beings who didn't even have a word for "property," and the cowboys, except for a few noble exceptions, were sadistic liars or unwitting tools of the capitalist robber barons. The Indian chief was usually played by the muscular Gojko Mitic (l), the son of a Serbian peasant family who became a (socialist) world-wide star in such movies as Chingachgook the Great Snake and The Son of the Great Bear.* Although Mitic could speak fluent German, his dialogue was always dubbed, in order "not to discriminate against the Indians." (G).

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.

Wolf Biermann on The West on the East

Wolf Biermann, songwriter and dissident in the former Communist regime in East Germany, doesn't think too highly of left-leaning West Germans who pretend not to know how they would have reacted had they lived in the East: 

There are increasing numbers of West people in Germany who dilettantishly play the role of the noble procrastinator. In an argument about the involvement of East people in the crimes of the GDR regime they prefer to opt for the worldly-wise option of holding their tongues. This sort of eloquent silence always sets a twisted Hamlet soliloquy ringing in my ears: "...To be or not to be. ... No...to get involved or better not ... that is the question. Whether t'is nobler in the mind to keep stubbornly quiet about the Stasi troubles of the Ossis, or to dive headlong into a sea of slanging matches.... No! I'm a Wessi. Who has never had to suffer that sort of repression and who has never lived under the weight of a dictatorship. So I won't take an inflated moral stand, I prefer to confess modestly to being one of the little people, with fears and weaknesses. Whether I would have been courageous in the GDR or cowardly, whether I would have gone along with everything or at least cautiously refused, or whether I might even have dared oppose the regime – I cannot say. And this is why I'd rather not judge these things, not to mention judging the people who – who knows – only swam with the tide, or in good faith that they were doing the right thing collaborated with the secret police or simply in ignorance or fear, and with great sadness in their hearts, inflicted misery on others. I'll keep out of all this. I thank providence that I was never forced to denounce, inform on or torture anybody, and I'm very thankful that I never had to find out. Luckily it's all over, its all in the past."

A "bogus declaration of bankruptcy," Biermann calls such thinking.  [Translation courtesy of Sign and Sight, original version here.] 

This is Biermann's introduction to a review of a film called "The Life of Others."  The film, which deals with Stasi spying in East Germany, was directed by by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who not only grew up in West Germany but also bears a title of nobility. 

Biermann, who was stripped of his East German citizenship in 1976, is pleasantly surprised; Von Donnersmarck has created an "unbelievably realistic genre study." 

I will be sure to see the movie and post any comments soon.  First, though, must get rid of a nagging Parisian cold...

German Joys Review: Die Blaue Grenze

I saw a new German film, Die Blaue Grenze ("The Blue Border," but I think the English title will be "Quiet Love") last night, and was impressed.   

The film takes place near Flensburg, a smallish city in the extreme north of Germany, near the Danish border.  Momme Bief (Antoine Monot, Jr.) returns from an afternoon of aimless hunting near his home village of Owschlag to find his father collapsed dead in the kitchen.  Momme travels to Flensburg to notify his grandfather, who he finds camped out in his garden allotment, having fled his city apartment because it still "stinks" of the death of his wife.  After his grandfather falls asleep in his chair, Momme wanders around the allotment grounds, eventually finding his way to a very odd party during which he makes the acquaintance of the lovely Danish girl Lene (Beate Bille), who lives just north of the border taking care of her grandmother.  After being arrested for breaking into a nearby garden shed for some hanky-panky, they make the acquaintance of Inspector Poulsen (Dominique Horwitz).  Everything is cleared up without charges being filed, but fair Lene has to return herself and her melting blue eyes to Denmark, leaving the chubby, puppy-dog-like Momme behind in Germany to pine after her.

How Germany Subsidizes Hollywood

Fascinating. Germany sets up a complex tax-incentive scheme to help subsidize German films. According to this Slate article, lawyers in Hollywood and Germany figure out how to structure a complex sale-leaseback transaction to turn it into a tax-shelter:

Unlike subsidies in other European countries, Germany didn't require that films be shot locally, use German actors, or employ German crews.  The tax-code only required that the film be owned by a German company that theoretically could share in its earnings. No problem for Hollywood lawyers. They arranged the deal on paper so the studio nominally sold the movie's copyright to a German corporate shell, which would then lease back the copyright to the studio with an option to repurchase it after the tax shelter had reaped its rewards.

More movies with talking bears, please

Some benighted few think of the German soul as suited only to the efficient production of exquisite consumer products. What rot!  Case in point: Die Reise ins Glück (The Journey to Happiness), a cavalcade of nonsense I recently saw in my local art-house.

The plot of this self-styled fairy tale is, if you exclude "the grim oracle of the snowman," not terribly complicated.