Joseph Garncarz, Annemone Ligensa, eds. The Cinema of Germany. 24 Frames Series. London: Wallflower Press, 2012. xii + 264 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-905674-90-9; $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-905674-91-6.
Reviewed by Larson Powell (University of Missouri-Kansas City)
Published on H-German (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
From National Art to National Entertainment: Rewriting German Film History
Wallflower's 24 Frames series has viewed film history in deliberately iconoclastic fashion. The volume on Scandinavian cinema, for instance, discusses no films of Ingmar Bergman other than his 1951 commercials for Bris soap. This is even more outrageous than the infamous judgment in the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma that Party Girl (1995) was Nicholas Ray's best film. The Cinema of Germany offers nothing so shocking, but it does propose an unusual model of film history. There are no entries for Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Wim Wenders; New German Cinema (NGC) is represented by one Werner Herzog film and the omnibus Deutschland im Herbst (1978), yet five chapters are devoted to the commercial "cinema of consensus" that followed it, taking up fully one-fifth of the book.[1] Auteurs are not important here. This expresses more than merely a wish to be different: the implication is that commercially successful film merits more attention than an art cinema that was never popular at home. The "renewed vigor" of German cinema evoked by the book's jacket is thus one of economics more than artistic ambition or political document. Joseph Garncarz's introduction makes this position explicit, by setting forth a model of German cinematic history that is shaped neither by political history—as a more or less realistic "reflection" of German society—nor by the aesthetics of modernism, that is, as "the seventh art" as so many influential film theorists saw it. Neither Thomas Elsaesser's Fassbinder's Germany (1996) nor Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolph Arnheim are thus relevant here. Nor, for that matter, is the dialogue and competition with Hollywood so often seen as a crucial component of German film, which the book rejects, following Garncarz's lead.
With this basis on the criterion of popular success, Garncarz's introduction argues for three phases in German film history. During the first, between 1910 and 1963, "the overwhelming majority of successful films were German productions" (p. 2). The second phase, from 1964 to 1979, is called "the European phase" due to the popularity of "films from neighboring West European countries" (p. 2). From 1980 onward, the dominance of U.S. film coexisted with a younger generation of German filmmakers making popular German films. Garncarz's model is not applied with absolute rigor, for the book includes Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946), one of the "less popular Trümmerfilme." Similarly, Der geteilte Himmel (1964) is included, but not Auf der Sonnenseite (1962), the first star vehicle for Manfred Krug.
To make his argument for a nationally specific model of German film history, Garncarz must distinguish between form and content: mainstream German film "was structurally very similar to Hollywood, but with nationally specific content and style." German genre films' success "was due to their cultural specificity," a quality Garncarz defines sociologically by shared "values" (p. 3). Thus the beginning of a new phase in German history in the 1960s is linked to a shift from the older value of duty to that of self-realization; in this way, an element of historical reflection does indeed re-enter Garncarz's model. In fact, one could argue that this book's perspective is itself very much determined by present market-driven conditions for German filmmaking: its strengths lie in those periods of film history when profit was similarly important, but less in those, such as the heyday of NGC, when political or artistic considerations were paramount. The future of German film remains open: as the end of the introduction notes, the industry is in the process of being restructured. Producers, such as Bernd Aichinger, have become more important than directors, and state funding has shifted its criteria from artistic merit to market success; yet German films still rely on subsidies and are rarely successful abroad.
The freshest and most interesting aspects of the book are those dealing with questions of financing, production, and reception—as in the discussion of the American funding for Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), or the links to television in the production of Das Boot (1981). On more ambitiously interpretative matters, it is studiously abstemious, avoiding any whiff of old "Grand Theory," or even of any political or aesthetic value judgments, in accordance with its overall positivist bent. This abstention is not carried through with absolute rigor, though: the discussion of Grün ist die Heide (1972) touches on Sigmund Freud several times, and Tom Gunning's chapter on Metropolis (1927) refers to his familiar Benjaminian idea of Fritz Lang's film as allegorical. In some cases, substantial interpretative traditions are merely brushed aside without being engaged in depth, as with the association of fascism with nature imagery in the films of Arnold Fanck. Similarly, political criticisms of Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) and Der weisse Traum (1943) are simply dismissed. At one point, it is stated: "Due to the fact that The White Dream could be remade in 1963 without major changes, there is every reason to regard the film as primarily well-made entertainment" (p. 106). Yet one could draw absolutely opposite conclusions from this remake, namely, that Konrad Adenauer's Germany was not particularly troubled by continuities with its fascist past. (This is the conclusion drawn by Rentschler at the end of his Ministry of Illusion, not cited in the bibliography.)
Some chapters are stronger than others. That on Alexander Kluge's Abschied von gestern (1966) is occasionally tendentious in its rewriting of history against the Oberhauseners. Against the calls that "Papas Kino ist tot," Thomas Ballhausen asserts that "at the beginning of the 1960s, the German film industry was still very successful, despite the fact that older cinemagoers were increasingly turning to television" (p. 160). What does "successful" mean? "Successful" in whose terms? On the next page, after noting Kluge's "aesthetics of 'fragmented sensuousness,'" the author adds: "However, in contrast to the avant-garde of high culture, Kluge also valued and used non-canonical sources and everyday material" (p. 161). "The avant-garde of high culture" is an oxymoron, given the avant-garde's opposition to bourgeois "high culture," and the avant-garde had always "valued and used non-canonical sources and everyday material." Some chapters, such as that on Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973) (which never mentions the furious critiques of the film by West German feminists), spend too much space on lengthy plot summaries. The chapter on Lola rennt (1998) never acknowledges that the film's plot was borrowed from Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance (1987)—surely an important historical aspect of the film. Among the better contributions are Seán Allan's piece on Good Bye Lenin! (2003), which nicely situates the film between more auteurist farewells to the GDR such as Letztes aus der DaDaEr (1990) and purely commercial ones like Go Trabi Go (1991), and notes the role of film in defining "public debate on post-unification Germany" (p. 228). Similarly, the concluding chapter on Das Wunder von Bern (2003) highlights the film's globalized aspects, in particular its debt to British working-class comedies of the 1990s. It is surprising, given the amount of current discussion of the so-called Berlin school, that none of its films were included, but one presumes box-office popularity may have motivated this decision. In most cases, when a film is included for reasons of commercial "success," the book honestly takes note of critical and scholarly pans, although without endorsing them. (The chapter on Die Drei von der Tankstelle however makes rather exaggerated claims for the film, incongruously deeming it "avant-garde" and noting its "unprecedented self-irony" [pp. 71, 72], although Ernst Lubitsch, Lang, and others had been ironists of cinema long before this.)
The Cinema of Germany participates in a larger tendency toward reevaluating popular cinema, to which the British Film Institute's The German Cinema Book (2008) and Sabine Hake's Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (2001) already contributed. Editor Garncarz is known for his scrupulous philological rigor in historical investigation (exemplified in his 2010 book Masslose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland, 1896-1914). Coeditor Annemone Ligensa has also done work on early cinema and media history. Wallflower's rigid series format of twenty-four brief ten-page chapters means that individual contributions must summarize rather than present new findings; one presumes that the volume is designed for use as a textbook, although its idiosyncratic choice of films—as noted, no entries for Lubitsch or Fassbinder—would require it to be supplemented if used for teaching. The largest question left unanswered by the book is this: if one strips German film of its socially interpretative function (the subject of Kracauer's, Anton Kaes's, and Elsaesser's works), and also refuses to view it as art (as Lotte Eisner did), choosing to see it solely as commercial, then why should it be interesting to non-Germans? The implicit answer would have to lie in an empirical sociology of entertainment. For with few exceptions (such as Lola rennt, which was still a flop in France), many box-office hits in Germany have had less recognition abroad. The paradoxical effect of this book is thus a restoration of a national cinema model, although one no longer based on politics or aesthetics, but rather on domestic economic markets.
Note
[1]. Eric Rentschler, "From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus," in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (New York: Routledge 2000), 260-277.
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Citation:
Larson Powell. Review of Garncarz, Joseph; Ligensa, Annemone, eds., The Cinema of Germany.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39837
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