Jaga
The film sounds interesting with the human sensitive aspects with it. Generally, our cinema is boring and from this experience, usually look at the foreign productions as better. As also, the entry fee has become increasingly more expensive.
I must keep this film in mind for the future
Charles
Dear Charles,
I have to disagree with you, because I find German cinema exellent and one of the best
European movie countries together with France, Spain, Italy, England, Czech republic,
Hungary and Russia. I do not know that much about Polish cinema and so can not judge about that (exept Kieslowski and Polanski, who are exellent movie directors too).
To be frank I find Germany on standing on top in world cinema:
The history and present of German cinema
In the beginning of the century the Germans were cinema pioneers, and before the first world war Italian and Danish movies were popular in Germany and therby influenced German cinema. The public's desire to see more films with particular actors led to the development in Germany, as elsewhere, of the phenomenon of the film star; the actress
Henny Porten was one of the earliest German stars. Public desire to see popular film stories being continued encouraged the production of film serials, especially in the genre of mystery films, which is where the director
Fritz Lang began his illustrious career.
In 1917 a process of concentration and partial nationalisation of the German film industry began with the founding of Universum Film AG (Ufa), which was partly a reaction to the very effective use that the Allied Powers had found for the new medium for the purpose of propaganda. Under the aegis of the military, so-called Vaterland films were produced, which equalled the Allies' films in the matter of propaganda and disparagement of the enemy. Audiences however did not care to swallow the patriotic medicine without the accompanying sugar of the light-entertainment films which, consequently, Ufa also promoted. It was in this way that the German film industry became the largest in Europe.
1918-1933 - Film in the Weimar RepublicWith the rise of German Expressionism, there was also a desire to move forward and embrace the future that swept most of Europe at the time. Expressionist movies relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than stark realism to tell their stories.
In the same time there were the Dadaist experiments and the Surealist influence of the
French movement of Surealism (Max Ernst, André Breton and Manray). Bauhaus pioneers like László Moholy-Nagy changed photography, design and architecture as much as they had their indirect influence on cinema and society. The film usually credited with sparking the popularity of expressionism is Robert Wiene's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) (1920). It painted a picture on the cinema screen with wild, non-realistic sets built with exaggerated geometry, images painted on the floors and walls to represent objects (and often light and shadow), and a story involving the dark hallucinations of an insane man. Other notable works of Expressionism are Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's
Nosferatu (1922), and Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's
The Golem: How He Came Into the World (
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam) (1920). The Expressionist movement died down during the mid-1920s, but it continued to influence world cinema for years after, its influence being particular noticeable on horror films and
film noir in America, and the works of European directors as diverse as
Jean Cocteau and
Ingmar Bergman.
In addition to
Ufa, there were some 230 film companies in business in Berlin alone in 1920. The production of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1927), was the most famous German film of the Weimar era, and the announcement of Modern time! Animators and directors of experimental film such as Lotte Reiniger, Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttmann were also very active in Germany in the 1920s. Ruttman's experimental documentary
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) epitomises the energy of 1920s Berlin. The arrival of sound at the very end of the 1920s produced a final artistic flourish of German film before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Sound production and distribution were quickly taken up by the German film industry and by 1932 Germany had 3,800 cinemas equipped to play sound films. Der blaue Engel (1930) by the Austrian director Josef von Sternberg was Germany's first talkie (shot simultaneously in German and English) and made an international star of Marlene Dietrich. Other early sound films of note include
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Pabst's version of
Bertolt Brecht's
The Threepenny Opera and Lang's M (all 1931).
Brecht was also one of the creators of the explicitly communist film Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was banned soon after its release.
1933-1945 - Film in Nazi GermanyDespite the emigration of many talented film-makers and the political restrictions, the period was not without technical and aesthetic innovations, the introduction of
Agfacolor film production being a notable example.
Technical and
aesthetic achievement could also be turned to the specific ends of the Nazi state, most spectacularly in the work of
Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's
Triumph des Willens (
Triumph of the Will) (1935), documenting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and
Olympia (1938), documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, pioneered techniques of camera movement and editing that have influenced many later films, but both films, particularly
Triumph des Willens, remain highly controversial as their aesthetic merit is inseparable from their propagandising of Nazi ideals.
Post-war reconstructionAmidst the devastation of the Stunde Null year of 1945 cinema attendance was unsurprisingly down to a fraction of its wartime heights, but already by the end of the decade it had reached levels that exceeded the pre-war period.
Many of the German films of the immediate post-war period can be characterised as belonging to the genre of the Trümmerfilm (literally "rubble film"). These films show strong affinities with the work of Italian neorealists, not least Roberto Rossellini's neorealist trilogy which included Germany Year Zero (1948), and are concerned primarily with day-to-day life in the devastated Germany and an initial reaction to the events of the Nazi period (the full horror of which was first experienced by many in documentary footage from liberated concentration camps). Such films include Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are among us) (1946), the first film made in post-war Germany, and Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Liebe 47 (Love 47) (1949), an adaptation of Wolfgang Borchert's play
Draußen vor der Tür.
The fifteesThe German
Wirtschaftswunder made adaptations of operettas, hospital melo-dramas, comedies and musicals possible. Many films were remakes of earlier
Ufa productions shorn of the nationalistic
Blut und Boden traits of those Nazi-period films. Rearmament and the founding of the Bundeswehr in 1955 brought with it a wave of war films which tended to depict the ordinary German soldiers of World War II as brave and apolitical. This period also saw a number of films that depicted the military resistance to Hitler. Few German films and film-makers did achieve international recognition at this time, among them Bernhard Wicki's Oscar-nominated
Die Brücke (
The Bridge) (1959), and the actresses
Hildegard Knef and
Romy Schneider.
The 1960s: Cinema in crisisIn the late 1950s, the growth in cinema attendance of the preceding decade first stagnated and then went into freefall throughout the 1960s. By 1969 West German cinema attendance at 172.2 million visits per year was less than a quarter of its 1956 post-war peak. As a consequence of this, numerous German production and distribution companies went out of business in the 1950s and 1960s and cinemas across the Federal Republic closed their doors; the number of screens in West Germany almost halved between the beginning and the end of the decade.
Initially, the crisis was perceived as a problem of overproduction. Consequently, the German film industry cut back on production. 123 German movies were produced in 1955, only 65 in 1965. However, the roots of the problem lay deeper in changing economic and social circumstances. Average incomes in the Federal Republic rose sharply and this opened up alternative leisure activities to compete with cinema-going. At this time too, television was developing into a mass medium that could compete with the cinema.The majority of films produced in the Federal Republic in the 1960s were genre works: westerns, especially the series of movies adapted from Karl May's popular genre novels which starred Pierre Brice as the Apache Winnetou and Lex Barker as his white blood brother Old Shatterhand; thrillers and crime films, notably a series of Edgar Wallace movies in which
Klaus Kinski, Heinz Drache, Wolfgang Völz, and Joachim Fuchsberger were among the regular players.
New German CinemaAs a reaction to the artistic and economic stagnation of German cinema, a group of young film-makers issued the
Oberhausen Manifesto on 28 February 1962. This call to arms, which included Alexander Kluge,
Edgar Reitz, Peter Schamoni and Franz Josef Spieker among its signatories, provocatively declared "
Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen" ("
The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema"). Other up-and-coming film-makers allied themselves to this Oberhausen group, among them Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Jean-Marie Straub,
Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder in their rejection of the existing German film industry and their determination to build a new industry founded on artistic excellence rather than commercial dictates.
Despite the foundation of the
Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (
Young German Film Committee) in 1965, set up under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of the Interior to support new German films financially, the directors of this
New German Cinema (
Der Neue Deutsche Film oder
Junger Deutscher Film“, abgekürzt: „
JDF“), who rejected co-operation with the existing film industry, were consequently often dependent on money from television. Young film-makers had the opportunity to test their mettle in such porgrammes as the stand-alone drama and documentary series Das kleine Fernsehspiel (The Little TV Play) or the television films of the crime series
Tatort. The artistically ambitious and socially critical films of the
New German Cinema (
Der Neue Deutsche Film) strove to delineate themselves from what had gone before and the works of auteur film-makers such as Kluge and
Fassbinder are examples of this, although Fassbinder in his use of stars from German cinema history also sought a reconciliation between the new cinema and the old. In addition, a distinction is sometimes drawn between the avantgarde
Young German Cinema of the 1960s and the more accessible "
New German Cinema" (
Der Neue Deutsche Film) of the 1970s. For their influences the new generation of film-makers looked to
Italian Neorealism, the French
Nouvelle Vague and the British
New Wave but combined this eclectically with references to the well-established genres of
Hollywood cinema.
The new movement saw German cinema return to international critical significance for the first time since the end of the Weimar Republic. Films such as Kluge's
Abschied von Gestern (1966), Herzog's
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) (1972), Fassbinder's
Fear Eats the Soul (
Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) and
The Marriage of Maria Braun (
Die Ehe der Maria Braun) (1979), and Wenders'
Paris, Texas (1984) found international acclaim and critical approval. Often the work of these auteurs was first recognised abroad rather than in Germany itself. The work of post-war Germany's leading novelists
Heinrich Böll and
Günter Grass provided source material for the adaptations The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) (by Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta) and
The Tin Drum (
Die Blechtrommel)(1979) (by Schlöndorff alone) respectively, the latter becoming the first German film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The New German Cinema also allowed for female directors to come to the fore and for the development of a feminist cinema which encompassed the works of directors such as Von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms and Helke Sander.
The 1980sHaving achieved some of its goals, among them the establishment of state funding for the film industry and renewed international recognition for German films, the New German Cinema had begun to show signs of fatigue by the 1980s, even though many of its proponents continued to enjoy individual success. In addition, the "aesthetic left" nature of New German Cinema (in the words of the critic Enno Patalas no longer coincided with the spirit of the times.
Among the commercial successes for German films of the 1980s were the Otto film series beginning in 1985 starring comedian Otto Waalkes, Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of The NeverEnding Story (1984), and the internationally successful
Das Boot (1981), which still holds the record for most Academy Award nominations for a German film (six). Other notable film-makers who came to prominence in the 1980s include producer
Bernd Eichinger and directors
Doris Dörrie,
Uli Edel, and
Loriot. Away from the mainstream, the splatter film director
Jörg Buttgereit, the experimental film director
Werner Nekes and the provocative
Christoph Schlingensief all came to prominence in the 1980s. The development of arthouse cinemas (Programmkinos) from the 1970s onwards provided a venue for the works of less mainstream film-makers.
From the mid-1980s the spread of videocassette recorders and the arrival of private TV channels such as RTL Television provided new competition for theatrical film distribution.
German cinema todayToday's biggest producers include
Constantin Film,
Bavaria,
Studio Hamburg, and
UFA. Recent film releases such as
Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer,
Good Bye Lenin! by Wolfgang Becker,
Head-On by Fatih Akin, Downfall by Oliver Hirschbiegel, and Academy Award winner
The Lives of Others (
Das leben der Anderen) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck have arguably managed to recapture the provocative and innovative nature of 1970s New German cinema. A number of modern German films try to examine the German history of the 20th century in totalitarian systems in movies like
Der Untergang,
Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, The Lives of Others and The Counterfeiters.
Apart from the international releases, a number of intimate German films have enjoyed critical success in France, where the term
Nouvelle Vague Allemande as been applied to smaller productions mostly coming out of Berlin. A circle of directors of penetrating, realistic studies of relationships and characters informally constitute the
Berlin School of filmmaking. Among those directors are
Christian Petzold,
Thomas Arslan,
Valeska Grisebach,
Christoph Hochhäusler,
Benjamin Heisenberg,
Henner Winckler and
Angela Schanelec.
Other notable directors working in German currently include
Sönke Wortmann,
Caroline Link (winner of an Academy Award),
Romuald Karmakar,
Harun Farocki,
Hans-Christian Schmid,
Andreas Dresen,
Ulrich Köhler,
Ulrich Seidl, and
Sebastian Schipper, as well as comedy directors
Michael Herbig and
Sven Unterwaldt.
Germany has recently experienced an influx of independent and underground films (mostly pertaining to the horror genre). Directors in this popular circle include
Andreas Schnaas,
Olaf Ittenbach,
Jorg Buttgereit, and
Timo Rose.
The new decade has also seen a resurgence of the German film industry, with bigger-budget films and good returns at the German box office.
Other good films I saw in the last two decades were
Das Experiment,
Gegen die Wand and
Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) (2004), "
Christiane F, Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (We children from Bahnhof Zoo) and
Viejud Levi and
Beruf Neonazi.
The trilogy
Heimat of episodic films by
Edgar Reitz which views life in Germany between 1919 and 2000 through the eyes of a family from the
Hunsrück area of the
Rhineland. Personal and domestic life is set against glimpses of wider social and political events. These three series of films are one of the most beautiful and historical evident and important works ever made. It is a great piece of art in which cinema (black & white and color), literature, poetry, classical music, history, political history of the the German federal republic, sociology, Romantic views, Realism, Abstraction, Art, Culture, understanding of the German society and Germans and the importance of time and memory are melted in one Multi-demensional paralel society.
Links:
www.german-cinema.de/www.daslebenderanderen.nl/www.diefaelscher.at/www.dasexperiment.de/intro/de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimée_und_Jaguar /
german.imdb.com/title/tt0130444/postersmovies.nytimes.com/movie/292155/Rosenstrasse/overviewmovies.nytimes.com/movie/292155/Rosenstrasse/trailerswww.djfl.de/entertainment/djfl/1105/110511.htmlHeimat trilogy:
www.erfilm.de/h1/frame.htmlwww.erfilm.de/h2/frame.htmlwww.heimat3.de/www.heimat123.net/www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/heimat.shtml
