The best of post-WWII German cinema
Aug 02 '05 (Updated Nov 09 '09)
The Bottom Line Although there is a list (two, actually), this is more about auteurs than about specific movies
Between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the accession to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, German cinema was, together with Soviet, the most innovative in the world, providing ideas to the Hollywood dream machine (especially to Douglas Fairbanks Sr.). (For silent comedies, Hollywood reigned alone. Moreover, D. W. Griffith had some ideas of his own and made some movies that deserved their international attention and enduring fame.)
The masterpieces of interwar German cinema were mostly made by four men: F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch was the first to go to Hollywood and stayed there. Pabst made one movie in Hollywood and returned to Germany. Murnau made one of the last great American silent movies (Sunrise, which brought the first-ever best actress Academy Award to Janet Gaynor) and kept going (to Polynesia, where he made "Tabu") and then died in an automobile accident. Lang fled in 1933, made a series of noirs and other American movies into the mid-1950s, then went to India and filmed some movies in German, and revisited Germany to make his underrated final film, "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" (and then memorably played a director in Godard's "Le Mépris" (Contempt)).
(Joseph von Sternberg was American-born and, after directing the big (in several senses) German star Emil Janning to the first-ever Oscar for best actor collaborated with Marlene Dietrich in Germany in making "The Blue Angel" and then returned to the US with his new star and directed her in an amazing series of movies that had declining box office success. Max Ophuls was Austrian and made his masterpieces in Hollywood and Paris. Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar Ulmer, all of whom got their starts in film production in Germany before World War II made a number of memorable films in Hollywood. Doulgas Sirk (né Hans Detlef Sierck) was, along with Leni Riefenstahl, the only director to make interesting movies in Nazi Germany, with Zora Leander as his muse before he emigrated in 1937.)
As I discussed at some length in my review of the first postwar German film production The Murderers Are Among Us, there was some continuity of (expressionist) look and personnel, and a few possibly interesting projects of Robert Siodmak who returned from exile and Peter Lorre, who directed and starred in "Der Verlorene" in 1951 and, afters its commercial failure, returned to Hollywood.
Two of Germany's wartime allies, Italy and Japan, were the source of many great movies in the decade after the end of the war with the names Rosselini, Visconti, De Sica, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu becoming world famous among cinema-lovers of the late-1940s and 1950s, all of whom began film-making during or before (in Ozu's case, long before) the war. Japan was at least as heavily bombed as Germany and had had a fascist regime longer (for that matter, Mussolini attained power before Hitler), so the delay in the re-emergence of German film is a subject that would merit investigation and analysis—all the more so in that the epic theater of Bertholt Brecht was known and much discussed (Brecht himself had fled to Hollywood via Denmark and went to East Germany after testifying before the US House Un-American Actitivies Committee.)
Brecht had considerable influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), who not only began as a theater director, but continued to alternate directing on stage and on screen. I date the start of the "New German cinema" to Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation of Robert Musil's pre-WWI masterpiece Der Junge Törless (The Young Törless) in 1966. Schlöndorff had attended a French Jesuit boarding school (where he had shared a desk with fellow future director Bernard Tavenier) and had been an assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais, so that the "New German cinema" has direct links to the French "New Wave," as well as the more diffuse influence in the focus on lower-class characters and criminals in the films of Fassbinder, Percy Adlon, Wim Wenders and others.
The New German Cinema peaked both in output and international attention during the late-1970s and early 1980s. Rather than reeling off a top-ten list, I want to comment on what happened to the leaders of the "movement" (unlike the French New Waves, the auteurs of the New German Cinema did not know each other before they stared making movies and did not have the kind of program of cinema aesthetics that Godard, Truffaut, et al. had developed in Cahiers de Cinema).
As is already evident in his first film, "Der Junge Törless," (The Young Törless from Robert Musil's novel), Volker Schlöndorff (born 1939) aspired to adapt prestigious literary works. He went on to adapt Günter Grass's The Tin Drum Marguerite Yourcenar's Coup de Grâce, Marcel Proust's Swann in Love" (part of Swann's Way), Michel Tournier's The Ogre, Heinrich Bôll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and Nicholas Born's Circle of Deceit (set in Beirut). Schlöndorff is completely fluent in English and has directed an adaptation of the Swiss master Max Frisch's novel Homo Faber (as "The Voyager" with Sam Shepard), Arthur Miller's canonical play "Death of a Salesman" (with Dustin Hoffman) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (with a script by Harold Pinter, starring Natasha Richardson) in English. The only one of his movies not based on a novel that I have seen, "Die Stille nach dem Schuß" The Legends of Rita, 2000) is interesting but, like "The Tin Drum" is politically very ambiguous. I have not seen Schlöndorff'ss 2004 movie "The Ninth Day" (based on the diary of Jean Bernard) and am unenthralled by "The Tin Drum" (which I watched again last month) and by his adaptation of Swann's Way (except for Alain Delon's Baron Charlus). Unable to decide which is better, I'll pick two Schlöndorff films for my list: "The Young Törless" and "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" (and urge anyone who watched the DVD to watch the DVD extras with Schlöndorff).
The second master of the New German cinema to emerge was Werner Herzog (born 1942), who says he is a "Bavarian film-maker," though his movie about traditional rural Bavaria, Heart of Glass, is one of my least favorite of his movies. Herzog remade Murnau's vampire classic "Nousferatu" in color and with sound and adapted Georg Büchner's famous play "Woyzeck" during the late 1970s (both starring Klaus Kinski), and got around to making a movie about some anomalous Jewish characters during the Third Reich in the very underrated Invincible (2001). Herzog has also made some striking not always narrative nonfiction films including "Lessons of Darkness," "Grizzly Man," and "Little Dieter Neeeds to Fly." The story of the German-born flyer shot down and breaking out of a Vietcong POW camp became the basis for the gripping "Rescue Dawn." The most indelible impress (so far?), however, is from movies in which Klaus Kinski went to inhospitable tropical locales to act out: Aguirre-Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, and in the documentaries Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" and Herzog's retrospective "My Best Friend, Klaus Kinski." I'm tempted to put the last of these on my list, but will go with the consensus choice: "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."
I have to deal with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (born 1945), who for many is the New German Cinema. Before overdosing in 1982, Fassbinder was phenomenally prolific, and there are many of his movies (including the 15 1/2-hour "Berlin Alexanderplatz," the critically acclaimed "World on a Wire" or his first seven) that I have not seen. There are many others that I dislike. That two of them are the last two that he made ("Querelle" and "Veronika Voss") further dampen my enthusiasm. Among those I find interesting are his one film in English (an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Despair starring Dirk Bogarde), "The Marriage of Maria Braun," "Fox and His Friends," Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven. Fassbinder's veneration for the melodramas Douglas Sirk directed for Universal Studios is well known (and the saturated colors in Sirk's soap opera are a hallmark of the New German Cinema generally), so it is fitting that my choice of a Fassbinder film for the list is an homage to "All That Heaven Allows," with the romance of a widow that is unacceptable to her children crossing ethnic rather than class lines, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. (I've recently demurred from the many who regard the suicidally depressed In the Year of 13 Moons to be Fassbinder's masterpiece. It is from his middle period, the one I find least problematic. From his third and final period, I rather like Lola, which for Fassbinder is upbeat. And I thought that The Merchant of Four Seasons and "Fox and His Friends" from his earlier period are pretty good (but "Beware a Holy Wh•ore" was even more mind-numbing than "Querelle," "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," and "Chinese Roulette"
The other two best-known directors of the New German Cinema have made a number of movies in English. The English-language movies made my Wim Wenders (born 1945) are mostly duds, the exception being "Paris, Texas" (from a screenplay by Sam Shepard). (Wender's popular documentary "The Buena Vista Social Club," partly in Spanish, partly in English, is an international production.) I loathe the much-loved Wings of Desire (I even prefer the Hollywood remake, "City of Angels) and the much-despised "Hammett," like much in Wenders' version of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, The American Friend, and have fond (if vague) memories of "Kings of the Road" and "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" (a great title, that of Peter Handke's novel). My Wenders pick is "Paris, Texas," which despite being shot in America with an American cast and derived from a major American playwright's work has much of the wistful atmosphere of Wenders's German movies. Sam Shepherd also starred in the underappreciated 2005 Wenders film, "Don't Come Knocking."
Wolfgang Petersen (born 1941) has really "gone Hollywood," helmsing the bloated vehicle for Brad Pitt, "Troy," plus "The Perfect Storm," and the forthcoming remake of "The Poseidon Adventure." Long ago, I was impressed by "Die Konsequenz" (which I saw at a screening Petersen introduced). I am strongly tempted to choose "In the Line of Fire" for my Petersen entry, but will go with his much-heralded WWII submarie movie "Das Boot," which is already on my list of of best WWII combatant films.
Percy Adlon, a decade older than Fassbinder and Wenders (born 1935) has not made very many movies. The first one, Céleste, I thought "Salmonberries" with k.d. lang was quite interesting though I think I'm in a small minority on that. I like his three movies with Marianne Sägebrecht: Zuckerbaby" (Sugarbaby), Bagdad Cafe, "Rosalie Goes Shopping," the latter two importing her to America. Zuckerbaby is quintessentially (garish and unerlit) New German cinema, but I really have to choose "Bagdad Cafe" as Adlon's best.
Having seen none of his movies, I have to pass over Werner Schroeder (born 1945) in silence. "Malina" (with Isabelle Huppert enacting split personality) is his most highly regarded work to date. Alas, it is not available on DVD (or even VHS). (Schroeder was the foil of Fassbinder in Fassbinder's "Beware of a Holy Wh*re.")
Doris Dörrie was born in 1955 and belongs to a later generation than those who restored Germany to the map of world cinema starting in the mid-1960s, However, I found her 1985 movie "Männer" (Men) quite wonderfully funny and poignant (and I was charmed by her at the screening two decades ago). I haven't seen her more acclaimed 1994 film "Keiner liebt mich" (Nobody Loves Me) and 1998 "¿Bin ich schön?" (Am I Beautiful?),neither of which is available on DVD here, but enjoyed her 2000 film about two German men in a Zen monastery in Japan "Enlightenment Guaranteed." I also watched "Männer" again and found it still quite funny, probably holding up better than what I thought was my favorite German comedy: "Taxi zum Klo" [Taxi to the Tearoom: starring, written and directed by Frank Ripploh, 1981], which I have not seen since its original release.)
"Lola rennt" (Run, Lola, Run!, 1998), was the break-out international sensation directed by Tom Tykwer (born 1965), whose "Der Krieger und die Kaiserin" (The Princess and the Warrior, 2001), I also like (and which also starred Franka Potente). Although the set-up for Winterschläfer (Winter Sleepers, 1997) takes too long, there's much to admire in it, too. I'd like to see "True" (2004 with Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon) and "Die Tödliche Maria"(1993); "International" (2009) has not gotten good reviews. I loathed "Perfume" (shot in English) though it certainly looked amazing. Tykwer is fluent in English and has provided very interesting DVD commentary tracks, including for his extraordinary English-language debut, the 2002 Heaven (about a third of which is in Italian, BTW) with Cate Blanchett.
Although the preoccupations with chance and Fate in "Heaven" and "Winter Sleepers" (and "Lola") are those of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzystof Piezowicz, the compositions in "Heaven"are Tykwer's (and the four films of his I've seen also show enchantment with gorgeous helicopter shots and the continued fascination with supersaturated colors of earlier New German Cinema). I think that "Heaven" is close to being a great film (much closer in my opinion than most of the segments of "The Decalogue" and far superior to "The Double Life of Veronique"). Also, besides writing the scripts for his movies other than "Heaven," Tykwer composed most of the music for all of them.
I enjoyed the charming romantic comedy/road movie Im Juli (In July, 2000) with Moritz Bleibtreu and Christiane Paul, made by Fatih Akin (born in 1973) in Hamburg of Turkish parents. His "Gegen die Wand" (Head-On, 2004) won many European film awards, I was disappointed by it. It also moves from Hamburg to Istanbul, but getting there is none of the fun. Alas, it is a Turkish-German "Barfly." It left me unimpressed.
I enoyed the 2007 German farce version (with only one son) of "Death of a Salesman," Fashion Victims (Reine Geschmacksache, 2007), in which everyone is wiser by the end entertaining. I'd like to see writer-director Ingo Rasper's earlier (2001) comedy about smugglers "Dufte" and look forward to more deft comedies from him. (Raspe was born in Saxony in 1974)
I should also mention Caroline Link (born 1964), whose 2001 movie "Nirgendwo in Afrika" (Nowhere in Africa) was the second German movie to win an Academy Award for best foreign-language film—not that it was the best film not in English of the year, though it is a good one, and fairly typically of the New German Cinema's masterpieces was shot outside of Germany. OK, Alex, I'll also mention the controversial 2004 Hitler domestic melodrama "Der Untergang" (Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (born in 1957), who earlier directed Moritz Belibtreu in The Experiment (2001) based on the Stanford/Zimbardo prison simulation, and, while I'm at it, Pabst's (1955) "Last Ten Days of Adolf Hitler," and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's (born 1935) 1978 "Our Hitler" the German version of which ran 442 minutes (longer than "Parsifal," shorter than Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" or the whole Ring of the Nibelung).
(In that he was not born in Germany, has made no movies in Germany or in German, I have no classed Barbet Schroeder as a German film director, though his father was German. He was born in Teheran, worked on movies by Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, and has made movies in French, English, and Spanish (with some native New Guinea languages thrown in), including "The Valley Obscured by Cloud," "Reversal of Fortune" and "Our Lady of the Assassins."
I enjoyed "Goodbye, Lenin" (directed by Wolfgang Becker, 2003) as a portrait of filial devotion and of the difficulty of adjusting to change, though I found it bordering on nostalgia (even if surrealist nostalgia) for totalitarian rule. I'd like to see his 1997 movie cowritten with Tom Tykwer and starring Christiane Paul, "Das Leben ist eine Baustelle." I also found Lola and Billy the Kid (directed by E. Kutlug Ataman, 1999) an interesting portrait of intolerance for sexual diversity among Turkish Berliners. Neither it nor "Sommersturm" (Summer Storm, 2004, directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner) were handled with total assurance, though both had strong performances.
I thought the performances were great in "Das Leben der Anderen" (The Lives of Others, 2006), written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnsersmarck, especially the leading role played by the late Ulrich Mühehttp, though I have serious questions about the first movie about the Stasi (the East German secret police) showing a compassionate martyr. "Der Tunnel" (directed by Roland Suso Richter, 2001) is a gripping portrayal of divided Berlin.
I'd like to see "Soul Kitchen" (2009, directed by Fatih Akin, with Moritz Belibtreu), "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" (directed by Thomas Jahn, 1997), "Pappa ante Portas" (written and directed by Vicco von Bülow, 1991), "Gregors größte Erfindung (directed by Johannes Kiefer, 2001), Halbe Miete (directed by Marc Ottiker, 2002), and many more, but have not had a chance to. I would also like to see the adaptation of Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kröger" (1964) and "Das Mädchen Rosemarie" (1958), both directed by Rolf Thiele (born in Budweis 1918, died1994) from before the New German Cinema emerged.
Having organized my discussion by director (and more or less in the order in which they attained international notice), instead of ranking the movies, I'll conclude by ranking the directors by the number of films they have directed that I consider masterpieces. (With the proviso, that there more films by each of them that I haven't seen than the number that I have seen.)
Herzog
Schlöndorff
Petersen
Tykwer
Fassbinder
Adlon
Wenders
I'd be hard-pressed to say whether Fassbinder, Wenders, or Herzog has also made the worst movies. Each has made some bewilderingly bad movies. (If Schlöndorff has, I haven't seen it/them.)
And for a top-ten for the cosmopolitan directors of the new German cinema of the last four decades (half the links are to reviews by other epinionators):
(1) The Young Törless (Schlöndorff)
(2) The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Schlöndorff)
(3) Run, Lola, Run! (Tykwer)
(4) Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Herzog)
(5) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
(6) Bagdad Cafe (Adlon)
(7) Paris, Texas (Wenders)
(8) Fitzcarraldo (Herzog)
(9) Heaven (Tykwer)
(10) Das Boot (or "In the Line of Fire") (Petersen )
That I make a list of the best postwar German movies was suggested to me by Metalluk. The challenge led me to view, re-view, and review a lot of German movies in July (following upon a Herzog mini-retrospective last summer).
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