Back to a German Presence at the Berlinale
Pick up at the Berlinale a copy of a green-covered »German Films« booklet, a publication initiated by Dieter Kosslick in conjunction with the Export-Union des Deutschen Films (German Film Export Union) and the Filmförderungsanstalt (German Federal Film Board), and the first thing that catches your eye is the preface titled »Back to the Presence« with its emphasis on unification at the 2002 Berlinale. All the German entries in all the Berlinale sections Competition, Panorama, International Forum of Young Cinema, Children’s Film Festival, German Cinema Perspective, and German Cinema Series are listed and documented in this 128-page edition. Thus the Berlinale visitor was presented with »ample evidence of the diversity of genres, the wealth of ideas, and the professionalism of German cinema.« Nowhere were these hopes more realized than in the section Perspektive Deutsches Kino, described by programmer Alfred Holighaus as »a voyage of discovery into the various genres of the cinema: experimental, documentary, fiction films of any length.«
Perspektive Deutsches Kino
Kicking off the eleven films programmed in this section was a popular teaser: 99euro-films, produced by the Oldenburg Film Festival (an annual avant garde new-media event) under the artistic supervision of actor-director RP Kahl. Billed as a compendium of »shorties« shot with a mini-DV camera, 12 German filmmakers followed a simple production rule: their projects were to cost just 99 euros (less than $100) each and run at approximately five minutes. More a media spoof than a film series, 99euro films accomplished its purpose in grand style by drawing a sellout crowd of festival merrymakers, mostly friends of the filmmakers and performers. Only Michael Klier’s Ein Mann boxt sich durch (The Boxer on Alexanderplatz) reworked a familiar scene from film history: like Zampano, the street-performer in Fellini’s La Strada, an ageing strong-man challenges onlookers in the crowd to try and knock him down with a boxing glove.
Three German Cinema Perspective entries had already been critical hits at other festivals: Thomas Imbach’s Happiness Is a Warm Gun at Locarno, Stanislaw Mucha’s Absolut Warhola at Leipzig, and Almut Getto’s Fickende Fische (Do Fish Do It?) at Saarbrücken see festival reports in KINO 76. Three other entries, all debut films, were genuine Perspective discoveries: Antje Kruska and Judith Keil’s Der Glanz von Berlin (Queens of Dust), Katalin Gödrös’s Mutanten (Mutants), and Eike Besuden and Pago Balke’s Verrückt nach Paris (Crazy for Paris). Further, since Queens of Dust and Mutants were produced by Egoli Tossell Film in Berlin, the pair of Jens Meurer and Judy Tossell are now recognized in the press and media as one of Germany’s leading producers the more so since their latest feature coproduction, Alexander Sokurov’s The Russian Ark, has been invited to compete at the Cannes film festival. (See interview with Meurer and Tossell in KINO 76.)
Antje Kruska and Judith Keil’s Queens of Dust, a collective portrait of three Berlin cleaning women, was directed by two filmmakers who had never attended a film school perhaps one of the reasons why it comes across as a documentary freed of pretense or moralizing. Its emphasis is less on the menial tasks these working women perform as on the »glance« in their personal lives: Argentinean born Delia Pereira-López has never abandoned her artistic dreams, Ingeborg Martinsson fills her day with job-seeking and hopes of finding a suitable partner, and Gisela Weiss returns home every day to the routine of a family life bolstered by 35 years of marriage. The ease with which the directors allow the trio to express themselves, their intuitive sense to grasp details, and the warmth extended to their subjects these, together with other refined elements of filmmaking, guaranteed a distribution release for Der Glanz von Berlin immediately following the festival.
On the surface, Katalin Gödrös’s Mutants appears to be little more than a psychogram about a 13-year-old girl’s weird fantasies namely: mutants, extra terrestrials, serial-killers, and horror movies. But when Paula (Karoline Teska) meets the slightly older Jens (Jacob Matschenz), who can’t come to terms with society after losing his parents in a car accident, she decides on the spur of the moment to accompany him in a stolen van on a roadtrip to France to the place where the accident had occurred. Once on the road, cameraman Sebastian Edschmid is given free rein to enhance the psychological edge of the story with striking images, particularly when Jens rams another stolen car into a summer cornfield to resolve his frustrations and end the odyssey.
France is also the destination of a trio of disabled individuals in Eike Besuden and Pago Balke’s Verrückt nach Paris (Crazy for Paris). A fiction-documentary, it features some remarkable performances by these funny, likeable runaways, each with a tick but all filled with a joie de vivre that allows them to win friends and stay one step ahead of a pursuing supervisor (Dominique Horwitz) despite expected setbacks along the way. As for how the codirectors hit upon the idea for Crazy for Paris, then managed to get the backing of the Geisberg Studios in Bremen, that too is a rather bizarre story. Eike Besuden, a TV documentary filmmaker at Radio Bremen, has made scores of human-interest documentaries. Pago Balke, a cabaret performer and actor at a Bremer theater, had founded a school for students with learning difficulties. Thus their wacky Crazy for Paris is a slice-of-life document that effectively upstages all those misguided, do-goody, make-believe, bleeding-heart fiction films on the disabled.
Panorama
For the film historian attending the Berlinale, André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer’s documentary Im toten Winkel: Hitlers Sekretärin (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary) (Austria) was the most important if not the best German film on view at the festival. In this spellbinding, 90-minute portrait of 82-year old Traudl Junge seated calmly before a bookcase in her apartment and occasionally smoking a cigarette we listen to her story of what she saw and experienced as Adolf Hitler’s private secretary a half-century ago as though these events had happened only yesterday. Traudl Junge talks about her first meeting with Hitler in the autumn of 1942. »Der Führer seemed like a kindly, elderly gentleman,« she says, noting his charisma with the staff at the same time. She talks about private and political events as his private secretary, about mutual experiences and working days at Obersalzberg and the Wolfsschanze, their trips on a special train through the night to Berlin and then through the dark streets to avoid having to see the city in ruins.
Shortly after the Berlinale opened and just before Hitler’s Secretary premiered in the Panorama, Traudl Junge died in München of cancer. Thus, just as Hitler had once dictated to her his last testament in the bunker during the fall of Berlin, so too she had found a way to clear her conscience before her own death. She makes full use of a video recording to »confess« making sure she has not missed anything important by requesting from the filmmakers the opportunity to see and hear her testimony again in playback, then adding on another salient fact or two to complete the overall picture. She also accuses herself back in 1942 of being »too young, too naive, too unpolitical in her thinking, too filled with ardor and enthusiasm for the Führer.«
Heller and Schmiederer recorded ten hours of nonstop testimony, from which 90 minutes were edited into a seamless conversation with one’s own self. Hitler’s Secretary is pure talking-head documentary a portrait without any superfluous photos, extra inserted archival footage, and other distracting documents related to time and place. Traudl Junge tells her story slowly, with pauses, giving herself time to reflect and pinpoint the heart of the matter as best she can, without artifice or exaggeration.
Has she told everything? Did she purposely leave anything out? Did perhaps Heller und Schmiederer forget any important, provocative, enlightening passages that might fill in a few more historical gaps? Indeed, you want to listen to her story for hours on end. You want to hear the entire interview. Why, for example, does she cite in passing a »black hole« in her memory during the last hours in Hitler’s bunker? »Sophie Scholl was born in the same year as I was,« says Traudl Junge at the end of the interview. »When I think about that, it shames me,« she adds, as though she now can rest in peace after her recorded confession. She is especially bitter when she repeats Hitler’s last words spoken to her in the bunker: »The German people didn't deserve me.« Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, a moving, piercing historical document, was awarded the Panorama Audience Prize.
International Forum of Young Cinema
Cinéastes who religiously flock to entries programmed by Christoph Terhechte and his team at the Forum know that the question-and-answer period following a screening is the icing on the cake. This is particularly true of the German films on the program, always listed at the front of the Forum catalogue. Further, the program notes invariably include a lengthy interview with the director, as though the question-and-answer session has already begun.
Erika Richter’s interview with Barbara and Winfried Junge on the making of Jochen ein Golzower aus Philadelphia (Jochen a Golzower from Philadelphia), the 17th documentary in the long-term, continuous, 41-year chronicle on a single thematic project in cinema history, is particularly revealing. As previously noted in KINO 76, our Berlinale issue, the »Philadelphia« in the title refers to a village in Brandenburg where Hans-Joachim (Jochen) Teich was born. But why was Jochen originally picked from the crowd to be the »star« of the first Golzow film back in 1961? According to Winfried Junge: »We had wanted this pudgy little rascal to play the main role, but our cameraman thought he had a polar-bear expression. Had we stayed with Jochen, however, we eventually would have had to decide whether our long-term study should focus on him or on Golzow, because Jochen only attended school there for a year.« As the interview unfolds, we learn that Jochen Teich was the son of an agricultural official who helped introduce socialist principles in the early days of communist East Germany first in Philadelphia near Storkow, then in Golzow, and finally in Bernau just outside Berlin. This fact alone makes Jochen A Golzower from Philadelphia a sociopolitical document as well as a human-interest one.
Over the years, despite an interruption that lasted the better part of a decade, the Junges kept track of Jochen as he bounced from school to school, trained as a milker, was a border guard, married Manuela at a ripe young age, became the father of two sons and a daughter, and now lives in a summer house near Bernau, which the appropriated owner wants back. Always frank and outspoken, he speaks his mind on the demise of the GDR and the disappointments he personally experienced as a youth raised by his parents along socialist principles. When, in 1998, the Junges offered Jochen and Manuela the opportunity to review their lives on video, Jochen acknowledged he’s hardly any more satisfied with his life today than before. Also: »I’ve had enough of this film,« he says at the end. »You can come whenever you like, but not with your camera. You’ve filmed enough.« And then as an afterthought: »Nothing changes in our life anyway.«
Similarly, in Ansgar Vogt’s interview with Volker Koepp on the making of Uckermark, we note in his response that the documentary is as much about the landscape as it is about the inhabitants of Uckermark, a district larger than Land Saarland but scarcely populated although a short 60 kilometres northeast of Berlin. And we sense in cameraman Thomas Plenert’s images that it won’t be long before this idyllic paradise is »settled« by retired diplomats, eager investors, and savvy real estate agents. For the Uckermark is a land of sparkling lakes, rolling hills, broad horizons, peaceful meadows, waving clover fields, quiet marshes, medieval churches, ruined castles, forgotten manor houses - a hallowed vessel of ancient »Junkerland« culture.
Regularly, during his trips to the area over the four seasons of the year, Koepp encounters Fritz Marquardt, the prominent GDR stage director, who first came to the Uckermark in the fifties and is now settled here in semi-retirement. No better spokesman could be found to chronicle the political events of the past. His other interview partner is the 84 year-old Adolf Heinrich von Armin, who has returned to his family estate after a long sojourn in the Federal Republic of Germany. Of course, the Baron hopes to bring the know-how of the West to rejuvenate rural life in the East.
Queried by Ansgar Vogt as to his definition of »rural life«, Volker Koepp responded with words that throw light on German unification. »There are different approaches. Fritz Marquardt effectively refers to Heiner Müller’s Die Umsiedlerin (Resettled), which he once directed at the Volksbühne in East Berlin. At one point I considered giving Uckermark the subtitle >Life in the Countryside<, but then I decided against it. It would have been a quote from Mrs. von Arnim. She frequently spoke about rural life, which made me realize that the lives of the individuals in my film are very closely interwoven, something that I hadn’t realized to the same extent before.«
German Cinema
Festival directors scout this section for entries to fit their festival mandate and audience taste. And often they find a film that’s suitable for distribution and exhibition at art houses abroad. Last autumn, when Roland Suso Richter’s Der Tunnel was an audience hit at the Montreal World Film Festival, it was immediately picked up by a distributor for Canadian release and continued to draw for six months running in Montreal. This year’s slate in the German Cinema section was particularly laudable if for no other reason than that it was spearheaded by Michael »Bully« Herbig’s Der Schuh des Manitu (Manitu’s Shoe), whose box office gross (11 million audience) was greater than all other German productions put together. Another that commanded attention was Andres Veiel’s extraordinary documentary Black Box BRD, chosen by KINO editors as »German Film of the Year 2001« (see KINO 76 for citation).
But there are others to be noted as well. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s action thriller Das Experiment drew well at the home box office, as did Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa), a Jewish refugee drama shot in Kenya. Thilo Rothkirch’s warming animation feature Der kleine Eisbär, another box office hit, is about to be released in English-speaking territories as The Little Polar Bear. Christian Petzold’s psycho-thriller Toter Mann (Something to Remind Me), a telefeature invited to several festivals, is about to have its cinema release. Sandra Nettelbeck’s social comedy Mostly Martha, starring the popular Martina Gedeck, received a Lola Nomination, as did young acting discovery Daniel Brühl for his performance in Benjamin Quabeck’s Nichts bereuen (No Regrets), a debut feature about a youth’s coming-of-age. Carlo Rola’s Sass (The Sass Brothers) featured Ben Becker and Jürgen Vogel in an historical bank robbers tale set in the 1920s. And Marc Rothemund’s Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt (Final Hope) takes a strong position on the mobbing of a police woman on and off duty that leads to tragic consequences.
On 14 June 2002, German Cultural Minister Julian Nida-Rümelin will hand out the Lola Awards at a gala ceremony in Berlin at Hotel Adlon.
Ron and Dorothea Holloway