SBS Film Focus: Germany

SBS TWO Film Focus: Germany
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To be a contemporary German filmmaker is to stand on the shoulders of giants. The history of the German cinema boasts several diverse eras that were crucial at home and highly influential internationally. During the silent era of the 1920s German Expressionism eclipsed what was happening amidst the orange groves of Los Angeles: Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis remain masterpieces; when a young Alfred Hitchcock was looking to broaden his knowledge, he worked in Berlin.

If that was a groundbreaking era, then the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s looked to wipe away artifice and cliché and start again. Young German directors, the children born in the years after the horrors of World War II, wanted to examine both the booming society that had risen from the ashes as well as the past. The likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Volker Schlondorff were inspired by radicalism and theatre, social realism and film noir.

While it isn’t unified by a single movement, the current German cinema is in good health, both in terms of market share and creative diversity. A forthcoming season of German movies on SBS provides an introduction to the successes of the last decade, spotlighting five features: Downfall (9.30pm, Tuesday 1 November), The Silence (9.30pm, Tuesday 8 November), Four Minutes (9.30pm, Tuesday 15 November), Faith (9.30pm, Tuesday 22 November) and Phantom Pain (9.30pm, Tuesday 29 November).

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2005 film Downfall (pictured right) remains the best known of these films. Like Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl: The Final Days and Schlondorff’s The Ninth Day, it examines the harshness of life under the totalitarian rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Coming to terms with the realities of those years has been a crucial task for German filmmakers, and in adapting several non-fiction books and memoirs screenwriter and producer Bernd Eichinger uses the regime’s final days, as Russian troops advance on Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in May 1945, to capture the delusional extremes of institutionalised monstrosity.

Even as it disintegrates the regime maintains a maniacal hold on those closest to it. A hunched, delusional Hitler (a memorable Bruno Ganz) rages at his military commanders as young boys try to stop Russian tanks, while Hitler’s companion Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler) demands her guests party with her as shells fall on the Fuhrerbunker and Joseph and Magda Goebbels (Corinna Harfouche and Ulrich Matthes), loyal to the end, murder their children so they don’t have to “live in a world without National Socialism”. Keenly observed by Hirschbiegel, Downfall has a cumulative power, putting a face to the regime even as it is destroyed.

Those same years linger in the background of Chris Kraus’ Four Minutes (below), the story of an elderly piano teacher in a women’s gaol (the grimly real, just decommissioned Luckau Prison) who must deal with the emotionally scarring memories of her youth in Nazi Germany as she struggles to harness the prodigious talent of a young, self-destructive inmate. The late Monica Bleibtreu (mother of Moritz) plays the uncompromising Traude Kruger, while there’s a career making performance of roiling anger from Hannah Herzsprung as her charge, Jenny von Loeben.

The 2006 drama is a film about discipline, whether it’s the discipline required to master the piano or the discipline to rise above past misfortune. The interplay between Bleibtreu and Herzsprung is a study in dynamics, and the movie doesn’t succumb to being merely an inspirational tale of redemption. “I think you’re despicable, you should know that,” Traude curtly tells Jenny, “but you have a gift.”

One of the crucial issues in present day Germany is the country’s increasingly multi-cultural mix in the face of traditionally conservative notions of identity. As far back as Fassbinder, with 1974’s Fear Eats the Soul, and through many of the recent works of Fatih Akin, filmmakers have explored the issue. In Afghan-German writer-director Burhan Qurbani’s 2010 feature Faith (left), three German-born Muslim Berliners struggle to reconcile their religion and their nationality.

Episodic in structure and set during a wintry Ramadan, the strands take in Maryam (Maryam Zaree), the daughter whose assumed freedoms conflict with her Turkish-born father, an imam at a mosque; married police officer Ismail (the intense Carlo Ljubek), who becomes obsessed with another woman; and Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), a fish market worker of African heritage who is fearful of his own sexuality. Qurbani’s debut tends to the melodramatic, but it has a lived in quality that certainly compensates.

If Faith is the classic independent feature, then Phantom Pain (right) is very much a star vehicle. Matthias Emcke’s movie is built around Til Schweiger, the leading male box-office draw in Germany. More familiar to English-speaking audiences for supporting roles in the likes of Inglourious Basterds and King Arthur, Schweiger (who often also directs and produces) mixes farcical romantic comedies and historic dramas for German audiences.

In Phantom Pain the actor plays Marc Somners, a charming loner who is an onlooker in the life of his wife, Nika (Jana Pallaske) and young daughter. When his great passion, cycling, leads to a serious accident and he loses a leg, the narcissist must decide whether to give in, as his own father previous did with alcohol, or rebuild his life. This is a reminder of Schweiger’s versatility, but as emotionally honest as he is, Emcke’s movie is a very cleanly laid out tale of tragedy and cathartic rebirth.

Finally, fittingly, there’s The Silence (left), a movie whose mastery of technique allows for the reinvention of a genre seemingly played out: the serial killer tale. Time feels like it is imperfect in Baran bo Odar’s 2010 movie. The disappearance of a young girl turns into a spiritual black hole that some of the protagonists have never escaped from, while a copycat event 23 years later repeats the pain and anguish already suffered once.

Illuminating the characters of this ensemble piece in seemingly offhand moments that favour stillness over suspense, the monstrous Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) is at ease in a way those unknowingly pursuing him, especially the erratic police detective, David (Sebastian Blomberg), can’t be. Peer shows us, as Hannah Arendt once famously wrote of the Nazi mindset that is repellently reproduced in Downfall, the “banality of evil”, and this compelling movie, which holds steady to the final studied shot, is a fitting companion piece to Fritz Lang’s M. From the end of a previous highpoint in German cinema, 1932, the original serial killer study is paired to the newcomer, an outcome that reminds you of film’s always powerful undercurrents.

SBS TWO Film Focus: Germany
Tuesdays throughout November

SCREENING SCHEDULE

Tuesday Nov 1, 9:30pm
Downfall (2004) 
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler
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Tuesday Nov 8, 9:30pm
The Silence (2010)
Director: Baran bo Odar
Starring: Ulrich Thomsen, Sebastian Blomberg, Wotan Wilke Möhring
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Tuesday Nov 15, 9:30pm
Four Minutes (2006)
Director: Chris Kraus
Starring: Monica Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Sven Pippig
Watch trailer
Read review

Tuesday Nov 22, 9:30pm
Faith (2010) 
Director: Burhan Qurbani
Starring: Carlo Ljubek, Jeremias Acheampong, Maryam Zaree

Tuesday Nov 29, 9:30pm
Phantom Pain (2009)
Director: Matthias Emcke
Starring: Til Schweiger, Stipe Erceg, Luna Schweiger