From masterpieces of silent cinema to the post-war Golden
Age and the New Cinema of the 1970s, German cinema has been one of the most
innovative and vibrant in the world.
The first picture-houses to appear in Germany were little
more than converted shops with a sheet hung on one wall, but at the turn of the
20th Century the first custom designed cinemas were being built throughout the
country, mostly showing imported British and French films. The first German
film to be reviewed by the press, and taken seriously as a piece of art, was
Max Mack’s 1913 melodrama The Other One, based on a well known play. The
establishment of the first industrial-scale German film studio UFA gave a base
for emerging film talent including Ernst Lubisch, who made his technically
dazzling Madame Dubarry for the studio in 1918. UFA’s roster of directors also
included a young Alfred Hitchcock, who learned his craft while making The
Blackguard in Berlin in 1924.
After the First World War, German cinema began to produce
its own films, as the more liberal culture of the Weimar republic triggered an
explosion of output across all the arts. Filmmakers responded to the new
freedoms by incorporating the techniques of expressionist art and avant-garde
theatre to produce macabre stories of madness and dread at the beginnings of
what would be known as the horror film. With its skeletal make-up, tattered
costumes and visually distorted black and white sets, Robert Wiene’s 1920 The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari was at the vanguard of what became known as German
Expressionism and is regarded as a landmark in international cinema. Two years
later, F.W. Murnau made an unauthorised adaptation of Irish writer Bram
Stoker’s Dracula entitled Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror with Max Schrek as
the rat-like vampire Count Orlock, capturing some of the most frightening, and
enduring, images of cinematic horror ever filmed. The film was almost lost when
Stoker’s widow Florence sued the production company for copyright infringement
and, as part of the settlement, requested that every print of the film be
destroyed. One copy, shipped to the United States, survived the judgement and
was duplicated over the years. Two decades later, the ominous shadows and stark
storylines of Expressionism would be a major influence on the emerging film
noir genre in Hollywood.
Almost a century later, it’s difficult to appreciate the
influence Wiene and Murnau had on world cinema. Wiene went on to make an adaptation
of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment entitled Roskolnikowin 1923 that was the
first genuine German blockbuster. Murnau delivered a series of authentic silent
masterpieces, starting with 1924s The Last Laugh (the first film shot from the
point of view of the protagonist) and his last German-made film Faust (1926),
adapted from Goethe’s play about a man who makes a deal with the devil. Later
that year, Murnau emigrated to the United States where he joined Fox studios
and, in 1928, made Sunrise, regularly cited by film scholars as one of the
greatest films ever made. Sunrise was not a success at the box office but
shared the Academy Award for Best Film with William A. Wellman’s WWI action
movie Wings at the first Academy Awards presentation in 1929.
At the same time as Murnau was making his name in Hollywood
(it was a short career, he died in a car crash 1931) Fritz Lang was putting
together the most ambitious, most expensive and most influential silent film of
all time in Germany. Cited as the first science-fiction film, and heavily
influenced by the new Communist thinking of Marx and Engels, Metropolis tells
the story of a futuristic city, divided between workers and managers, where a
scientist attempts to create a robot that will maintain the city. Savagely cut
by censors and distributors from its original 210 minute running time, an
almost complete version of the still-astonishing film was discovered in a
Buenos Aires archive in 2008. Lang followed the success of Metropolis with his
extraordinary M, starring Peter Lorre as a serial killer preying on children in
an unnamed German city.
At the beginning of the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s,
an entire generation of German filmmakers fled the country for Hollywood,
including Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. Before they too
left, never to return, director Josef von Sternberg cast Marlene Dietrich in
her first starring role, and first talking movie, The Blue Angel, which played
to captivated audiences around the world. Dietrich would go on to become one of
Hollywood’s brightest stars. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the last
remaining talent left the country, including Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Curtiz and
Douglas Sirk. All would become world-famous filmmakers in Hollywood. The only
filmmaker to remain in Germany, former actress Leni Riefenstahl, would become
infamous for her Nazi-approved documentariesTriumph of the Will and Olympia,
which venerated the imperial iconography of the Third Reich while attempting to
make gods of its leaders. After the war, the shattered film industry was almost
entirely shut down, with the newly-divided Germany struggling to form any kind
of artistic expression. One of the few international successes was former actor
Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 anti-war film The Bridge, which was nominated for Best
Foreign Language Film at the 1960 Academy Awards.
The fervent political and social atmosphere of the 1960s and
1970s in West Germany was reflected in an outpouring of radical cinema that
emerged in what would become known as the New Cinema. Influenced by the French
New Wave and working with low-budgets, found locations and innovative
technicians, the New Cinema saw the emergence of a generation of exciting
filmmakers including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wender and
Volker Schlondorff, among others. Working under the banner “Old Film Is Dead”,
these filmmakers set about rebuilding and revitalising German cinema, One of
the first films to make an international impact was Herzog’s extraordinary 1972
South American saga Aguirre, Wrath of God which had Klaus Kinski play a
half-mad conquistador sailing down the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Herzog
went on to make more than fifty films, documentaries and television dramas and
is one of world cinema’s most acclaimed and respected directors.
In 1974 Fassbinder released his gut-wrenching drama Fear
Eats the Soul, which told the story of a love that blossoms between a young
Moroccan emigrant and a middle-aged German housewife. Fassbinder shot the film
in 15 days on a minimal budget as an exercise in making a film with materials
on hand but the film was acclaimed as a masterpiece and won both the FIPRESCI
and Ecumenical Jury prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. The controversial
Fassbinder was nothing if not productive and continued to release film after
film throughout the 70s and 80s (sometimes as many as three in a year), with
his masterpiece being arguably 1979's The Marriage of Maria Braun, which
suggest the moral decadence of the era had its roots in the collapse of German
society after WWII. Fassbinder died in 1982, at the age of 37. Also in 1979,
Schlondorff was to win the Palme d'Or for his adaptation of Gunther Grass's
novel The Tin Drum, which was distributed internationally to commercial and
critical acclaim.
In 1974, Wenders released Alice in the Cities, the first in
his road-movie trilogy which also include 1975s The Wrong Move and 1976s Kings
of the Road. His 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novel The
American Friend, starring Dennis Hopper, would bring him to international
attention, followed by a series of acclaimed films including 1984s Paris Texas,
1987s Wings of Desire and 1999s documentary The Buena Vista Social Club.
Following the critical and commercial success of his extraordinarily tense WWII
U-Boat epic Das Boot in 1981, Wolfgang Petersen followed in the footsteps of
the German émigré directors of sixty years before and decamped to Hollywood,
where he would enjoy success with a long series of action films including 1993s
In the Line of Fireand 2000s The Perfect Storm. Petersen was joined by Roland
Emmerich, whose 1990 student filmMoon 44 brought him to the attention of
Hollywood producers who enlisted the young director to make a series of
commercial science-fiction blockbusters including 1994s Stargate, 1996s
Independence Day and 2004s The Day After Tomorrow.
The collapse of communism and the end of the cold war
reunited Germany and brought about a long period of rethinking the German
national cinema. One of the first films to address the new, reunified Germany
was, oddly, a comedy. Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye Lenin! tells the
story of a young man pretending that East Germany still exists in order to
placate his ill, elderly mother. The following year, Oliver Hirschbiegel directed
Downfall, a lacerating account of Hitler’s final days in his bunker in Berlin
featuring an extraordinary performance by Bruno Ganz as the defeated dictator.
In 2006 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made his debut writing and directing
The Lives of Others, an excoriating story of how the communist East German
state attempt to destroy the lives of a radical playwright and his actress
wife. Von Donnersmarck won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in
2006, among a host of international gongs. The country’s troubled past also
cast a dark shadow across Austrian director Michael Haneke’s superb Palme d’Or
winning The White Ribbon, which studied the roots of Nazism in a parable about
a group of children in a small German village before WWI.
Source: volta.ie
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