From gutter to Goethe

Wally Hammond welcomes a new wave of films that together hint at something afoot in German cinema

Nov 23 2006

The inverse rule always applies when considering the health of a nation's cinema: the healthier the cinema, the more unhealthy the gutters that its makers explore. None of the best talents of the New German Cinema of the 1970s – Herzog, Straub, Wenders, Syberberg, Fassbinder – would have made polite guests at embassy parties. Rather, they relished embarrassing the burghers, by picking at the scabs of the national conscience, making brazenly explicit hitherto hidden sexual appetites, and inviting along not only the poor, perverse and disaffected, but also – shockingly – the immigrants, gastarbeiters and ill-dressed newcomers from across their borders to take places of honour at the table. Lively guests, and damn good moviemakers.

We know what happened. The invites dried up and German film lingered in the doldrums (allowing one critic to review the 1992 comedy 'Schtonk!' in one pithy line: ''Schtonk!' stinks.') But, according to reports, the awkward squad is now sneaking its way back into German cinema.

Take Sandra Hüller, the young star of Hans-Christian Schmid's very moving 'Requiem '. She won best actress at Berlin for her role as the 'devil-possessed' student in a film that examines as eloquently as Loach's 'Family Life' the relationship between 'normative' social repression and 'hysteria' in young women. Likewise, major new titles like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 'The Lives of Others', which deals with state surveillance of cultural output in '80s East Germany, and Valeska Grisebach's 'Longing', which anatomises the inadequacies of marriage for a provincial fireman, take their energy from their roots in discomforting realities.

Encouragingly, this audacity is characteristic of the 20 or so films in this week's German Film Festival at the Curzon Soho and Goethe Institute.The festival centrepiece is Christian Wagner's 'Warchild', which, like Swiss director Andrea Staka's impressive debut 'Das Fräulein', deals with the repercussions of the Bosnian conflict. In a film of keen social observation, Labina Mitevska gives a movingly controlled performance as the tenacious Sarajevan mother in search of the child she lost in the war ten years before.

'Hounded', a portrait of a transgressive relationship between a handsome 16-year-old offender and his 50-year-old probation officer, is even more stark. In common with others in the fest, Angelina Maccarone's black-and-white feature adopts a challenging non-judgmental attitude to her characters; there are few pieties in the representation of Maren Kroymann's progressively 'seduced' Hamburg professional, nor does Maccarone strive to make her protagonist particularly sympathetic or justified.

'Hounded' makes an interesting contrast to 'Berlin: Schönhauser Corner' (one of the six films showing in the 'Rebels with a Cause: The Critical Cinema of East Germany' strand that continues after the festival at the Goethe Institute, until Friday December 1). This interestingly dated 'teen cult' film from 1957, with its James Dean quotes and fine location work, shows how a determined director could inject challengingly perceptive insights and sympathetic portrayals at odds with the upbeat 'social-realist' diktats of the former East Germany's state-run DEFA studios.

Fifty years on, 'Schönhauser Corner's' scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase provides the screenplay for 'Summer in Berlin'. The festival bills the ever-reliable director Andreas Dresen's movie as a warm, romantic comedy, but this lighter-veined and lively look at the supportive relationship of two hard-pressed unattached women sharing the same Berlin suburban apartment block deals with its share of problems – loneliness, jealousy and alcoholism not the least among them.

Some of Dresen's idiosyncratic humour can be found in Michael Hofmann's opener, 'Eden', an odd but well-meaning 'foody' movie with oddball chef Josef Ostendorf's culinary creations proving an aphrodisiacal proposition to the married mother of a young daughter with Down's Syndrome.

The most startling film, however, is Matthias Glasner's award-winning 'The Free Will', which takes us on a journey with the monstrous figure of Theo (Jürgen Vogel), a dangerous misogynist and jailed rapist, who may or may not find redemption in his relationship with abused Nettie (Sabine Timoteo). It's a tough, finely acted film, but I must admit, I found another monster, Josef Bierbichler's angst-ridden, raging bear in Hans Steinbichler's finely directed 'Winterreise' far more entertaining. Padding his room in the early hours shouting rock lyrics, or sitting in the moonlit mountains listening to Schubert, Bierbichler – as a man battling despair as his business goes bust and his wife blind – gives the performance of the festival.

The German Film Festival runs November 23- 26.

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