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A young German actor walks into a New York talent agency looking for work. “The Germans aren’t mean any more, in terms of film,” the agent tells him. “You’ll have to play a Russian, an Arab, or maybe an Indian.” Fortunately for this actor, he simply has to play himself in Andres Veiel’s “Die Spielwütigen” (Addicted to Acting). Filmed over seven years, this semi-documentary follows four students as they work their way through the elite Ernst Busch School of acting. We see them competing with other applicants, clashing with professors, freaking out backstage, and ultimately trying to land jobs. None of them goes to Hollywood, and that might not be such a bad thing, for German cinema currently has a great deal to offer.
German films were on full display at the 54th Annual Berlin International Film Festival—
a.k.a. the Berlinale. Of the 400 films presented, more than 60 were from Germany. Compared to last year’s festival, which featured the important “Good Bye, Lenin!” (dir. Wolfgang Becker) and a host of other strong productions, the German films in this year’s festival were somewhat less impressive. But they were also more decorated. “Die Spielwütigen” won the Audience Award, and Fatih Akin’s “Gegen die Wand” (Head On) won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize. It was the first German movie to do so in almost 20 years
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The Berlinale provides an international platform for young German actors and filmmakers. It also offers at least a partial view of what’s happening in German cinema now, a panorama of the current trends and topics.
One of these topics is the culture of surveillance. Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion’s “Pour l’Amour du Peuple” (I Love You All) is a fiction film based on found footage—surveillance films from the archives of the former East German Ministry of State Security, or Stasi. Marcus Mittelmeier’s directorial debut, “Muxmäuschenstill” (an untranslatable title that means something like “Mux, Quiet as a Mouse”) takes the logic of surveillance to the extreme. It criticizes rampant social corruption while participating in the German penchant for self-policing. The main character, Mux (Jan Henrik Stahlberg) is a die-hard idealist, versed in literature and philosophy, who demands that other people take full responsibility for their actions, and sets out to make sure that they do. Imagine Charles Bronson in Berlin, running down punks of all kinds, from jaywalkers to murderers, with a gun in one hand and a copy of Goethe’s “Italian Journey” in the other. His flabby side-kick, Gerd (Fritz Roth) eats piece after piece of cheesecake while documenting every crime and punishment with a digital camcorder—as Mux himself breaks the law in the act of policing others. Here is a vigilante film for philosophy students, shot in the style of “COPS.”
Some of the films presented this year dealt with the Holocaust and the Nazi past, to be sure. Only recently has it become possible to focus on the “good German” (think of “Schindler’s List”) and to imagine that figure as a victim, not a perpetrator. “The Germans aren’t mean any more,” to put it crudely, not even in films about Holocaust. Margarethe von Trotta’s “Rosenstrasse” offers a case in point, and a troubling one at that. The script is so poor, the iconography so hackneyed, the melodrama so overheated, that the movie almost invites laughter at crucial points—none of them comical. A costume film set in 1943 Berlin, “Rosenstrasse” recounts the tragic story of Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann) and dozens of other “Aryan” women who remained true to their imprisoned Jewish husbands, waiting outside the jail at all hours of the night, calling out loud for their release. These images of the German past are framed and linked to the American present by the story of Hannah (Maria Schrader), who travels to Berlin from New York in order to learn about her mother’s past. She searches obsessively, almost at the expense of her own marriage.
Indeed, for better or worse, only the Americans seem more obsessed with the Holocaust and its legacy. That, too, was evident at this year’s Berlinale, in Volker Koepp’s “Dieses Jahr in Czernowitz” (This Year in Czernowitz), a documentary about Jews who fled Bukowina during the war and sought exile in various countries. Koepp returns with some of the emigrants and their children to Czernowitz for the very first time. Among them is Harvey Keitel, who inadvertently undermines the very sense of authenticity that a film about memory and the Holocaust would seem to require. Upon arriving in his mother’s city of origin, Keitel dramatically bends and touches the ground, playing for the camera, while commenting to his guide: “I’ve never been here before, and I miss it already.” Such touristic nonsense is juxtaposed to images of the Romanian writer Norman Manea, whose sober reflections on exile and the crisis of language provide the film’s most compelling moments.
Other films this year explore more familiar and seemingly innocuous themes. The most popular German film of 2003, Sönke Wortmann’s “Das Wunder von Bern” (The Miracle of Bern) revisits the German national soccer team’s dramatic victory at the 1954 World Cup. The game is seen through the eyes of a young boy, whose father has just returned after 12 years in a Soviet POW camp. The boy’s passion for soccer “miraculously” rehabilitates the father and integrates him back into the family. Since the Nazi period, the soccer stadium has been perhaps the only place where mass audiences of Germans could openly display their national pride. For a new generation of audiences, “Das Wunder von Bern” would seem to make that possible in the cinema now as well.
On the other end of the spectrum, Hans Steinbichler’s “Hierankl” subtly comments on films that only perpetuate myths about family, nation, and masculinity. Set in the Bavarian hinterland, it offers a fascinating reflection on the German genre of the “Heimatfilm.” In the 1950s, these popular films imagined an idyllic world of family, love, and folklore, where traditional values prevail and time stands still. “Hierankl” basically takes that genre to its logical conclusion, exposing the half-hidden fantasies of incest and acts of betrayal on which it was based.
Love and death remain the stock and trade of popular German cinema. This is perhaps best illustrated by Achim von Borries’s “Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken” (Love in Thoughts), starring Daniel Brühl and August Diehl. Though based on historical material—the tragic events surrounding a sensational murder trial in 1920s Berlin, not unlike Fritz Lang’s “M”—Boerries’s film, with its sepia-toned sunsets and candle-lit interiors, is less about history than it is about “the moment,” that fleeting experience of pure joy that comes with first love, and the desire to suspend it indefinitely. To that end—you guessed it—two students form a “suicide club.” The first rule of this club is, kill any lover who has ever betrayed you; the second rule of this club is, kill yourself at the very pinnacle of happiness. Needless to say, this film offers anything but a happy end.
Nicolai Rohde’s “Zwischen Nacht und Tag” (Between Night and Day) also revolves around suicide—in this case, the moment in which a young woman leaps in front of an oncoming subway train, and its traumatic effect upon the driver. Haunted by the memory of this experience, the driver descends into a twilight world of his own, where the dead seem to walk among the living. Rohde creates a stylized, almost abstract image of the city as labyrinth, where underground tunnels and dark passages seem to channel the train driver’s unconscious fears and desires.
“You know, you can put an end to your life without committing suicide,” a psychologist says to Cahit (Birol Ünel), a down-and-out Turkish immigrant who drove smack into a building without even touching the brakes. “Gegen die Wand” (Head-On) is the prize-winning film by Fatih Akin. Half of it takes place in Hamburg, the other half in Istanbul. To escape from her traditional Muslim household, Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) first attempts to commit suicide, and then—by slashing her wrists again—coerces Cahit to marry her, but only for show. A bottle collector and self-described bum, Cahit begins to fall in love with Sibel, as she continues to see other men. The story eventually leads each of them back to Turkey, where it seems that the two might finally have a chance together. With its excessive treatment of sex and violence, its unswerving critique of Turkish as well as German society, and its problematic depiction of women in particular, “Gegen die Wand” is sure to start any number of debates among critics and audiences. And that makes it all the more interesting to watch—especially if the film comes to Seattle. At a press conference in Berlin, a local journalist actually asked the director, “When are you going to make a film about a real German subject?” That’s precisely what Akin did in this film, head-on.
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