German film has brooded itself to death
This claim is at the beginning of this great essayistic documentary film by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert, which premiered at the Berlinale 2016. In conversations, reflections and many film excerpts, the question of why German film is doing so badly is examined. After all, there was a heyday of German film during the Weimar Republic (The Weimar Touch). And in Adenauerland (Federal Republic, 1949-1963) there was also a largely functioning film industry, with its own - typically German - genres such as melodrama, hit film, medical film and local film.
Then came bankruptcy, television gained the upper hand, and the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962 declared that Papa's cinema was dead. But with that, a lot was lost. Genre films were almost completely avoided by the makers of the New German Film, state money was vehemently demanded and also granted, and the interests of the audience were lost sight of. And so interest in German films declined. As a reminder: in 1956, over 800 million cinema tickets were sold in West Germany, half of them for German-language films! Those times were soon over.
The film lets filmmakers who have made German genre films have their say, and sheds light on the situation of those German actors who went to international cinema in Rome (Cinecitta, from 1958 to the 1980s the Italian film industry was the European film industry). . State film funding and the increasing integration with television ultimately dealt the German film industry a death blow and made the production of wild, dirty and therefore more relevant films much more difficult. A final turning point was the dispute at the beginning of the 1980s between the director Roland Klick and Bernd Eichinger, the producer of the Neue Constantin Film, over the filming of "We Children from Bahnhof Zoo", in which the producer prevailed with a kind of "compulsory control". What would have consequences right up to the present.
This documentary film is a tremendous success and can open your eyes to why German cinema so often seems to lag behind. The interviewees have their say: the actors Mario Adorf, Christiane Krüger, Gisela Hahn, Werner Enke, Peter Berling / the directors Klaus Lemke, Wolfgang Büld, Roland Klick, Roger Fritz / the producers: Artur Brauner, Dieter Geissler.
Of the film theorists, Olaf Möller is particularly noteworthy, as he co-curated the groundbreaking retrospective "Loved and Repressed: The Cinema of the Young Federal Republic of Germany" at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016.
