Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (28) West German Cinema Part Four - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

Edgar Reitz

Edgar Reitz and Alexander Kluge were among the 26 signatories to the Oberhausen manifesto in 1962. Reitz was a leading figure in the Young German Cinema decades before the enormous success in Germany of his “highly ambivalent reworking of the heimat genre” (Kaes) ; the 16 hour television mini-series Heimat (1984) was filmed in the district in which Reitz grew up.

Reitz had been passionately committed as a filmmaker to developing new forms beginning with what are regarded as two of “Young Germany’s best experimental films.” Kluge called him “the most consistent German filmmaker […] the one who deals, in the most relentless fashion with the ambiguity of human consciousness […] a superb craftsman, open to experiment” (1981 interview quoted in 0Phillips ed. 247).

Reitz completed 5 features and more than 20 experimental shorts and documentaries and participated in several collaborations, 1958-78. Unlike Kluge, an intrinsically political person who came to film through legal studies and philosophical investigations, Reitz began by simply wanting to make films. “My idea of how to become a filmmaker,” he has said, “is to spend five or six years doing every possible job connected with films” (ibid).

Following the creation of state funding opportunities in setting up the new film school at Ulm in 1965, Kluge and Reitz took on teaching the theory and practice of filmmaking until the founding of the Munich and Berlin academies several years later. Practical training at Ulm was discontinued with the school thereafter devoted solely to research and theory. Reitz served as cameraman on Kluge's first feature Yesterday Girl. He was also mentor at Ulm to Ula Stöckl whose films, beginning with Neuenleben hat die Katze/ The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968), were precursors to the New German women’s cinema’s, ‘Frauenfilm’, of the mid seventies.

Reitz’s commitment to auteur filmmaking was shared with Kluge. On the basis of what Reitz called the “real experiences of the author” he struggled to reconcile his own identity with Young German Cinema’s self-understanding in his first feature. Mahlzeiten/Mealtimes (1966) is the story of a marriage, a “fairly realistic love story” that challenged genre stereotypes with elements of ambiguity injected by abrupt changes and reversals, especially with the ending. Retitled more provocatively Lust for Love for international release, it won the award at the Venice Film Festival for best first feature but was pulled from release at home by the distributors in an on-going dispute between the industry and the new filmmakers over the issue of manipulation of subsidised distribution (ibid 235).

Mealtimes

Reitz’s second feature Cardillac (1969) is an adaptation of a novella ‘Das Fraulein von Scuderi’ by E.T.A. Hoffman. Cardillac is a goldsmith who, unable to give up his creations, resorts to robbery and even murder to recover them. He suicides in a home-made electric chair. The film reconstructs his life while shifting to his daughter who, dominated by her authoritarian father, becomes a cold, unresponsive young woman. Alongside fictitious characters real people appear in the transposition of feudal patronage to contemporary West German show business and of a literary work from the Romantic period into a context that allows contemporary references. All, as Elssaeser points out, “almost an anthology of motifs clustering around New German Cinema’s fictionalised self-understanding” (87) Cardillac never made it into cinema release: “critics found the story too academic and the style too arty.”

Reitz's hometown in the remote Hunsrück region west of the Rhine is the locale for Die Reise nach Wien / The Trip to Vienna (1973). Co-scripted by Kluge, based on an actual story of Reitz’s mother, focussed on the everyday lives in the Spring of 1943 of two young wives whose husbands are serving in the army. Lonely and frustrated, the discovery of a cache of money allows them to realise their dream of a trip to Vienna only to lose it all to a racketeer. Returning home, Illusions lost, one of them is arrested by the Nazi authorities for failing to report the slaughter of a pig but they manage to implicate the official on a rape charge. Found guilty, he is sent to the Russian front where he is killed. “Made for a wide audience[…] in evoking the connection between private life and the National Socialist system […] the film does not make any value judgements (Phillips ed. 258).

The Trip to Vienna

In 1974 Reitz again collaborated with Kluge, sharing the director and screenplay credits this time on In Gefar und größter Not bringtder Mittelweg den Tod/ translated as In Danger and Deep Distress the Middle Way Spells Certain Death, the title taken from the writings of Friedrich von Longau, a German mystic of the Reformation, another period of great upheaval (ibid 259). Fact and fable are combined in a collage of events in Frankfurt-on-Main during a ten-day period in February 1974. The film is modelled on the 'Wechenschau' (weekly newsreel) a cinematic form that has been written about by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger as “Fragmented World : Anatomy of Wechenshau” whose central theme remains destruction (Phillips ed. 259). Kluge and Reitz further deconstruct the already fragmented footage by leaving out the conventional newsreel attempts to make sense of what is on the screen, letting the images speak for themselves without unifying commentary whereby the world becomes chaos. Two fictional characters, variants on Kluge’s Anita G and Roswitha, while never interacting provide a connecting element, Inge who “sleeps around” and steals from her lovers whenever possible and Rita, an East German spy harassed by her superiors. Fictional and real-life events are radically interwoven to form the nightmarish collage : the annual Mardi-Gras celebrations, police action, a political convention, a conference of junior executives, a beauty contest, and a meeting of astrophysicists. The film culminates in police action against squatters protesting the destruction of long occupied apartment blocks to make way for redevelopment adopting a realist mode as defined by Kluge - see 6 (26) Two Types of Realism .

The Middle Way attracted some criticism for not making an overt political statement; viewers are meant to draw their own conclusions from a series of ironic visual aphorisms, radical critiques of mass culture that poses questions, not solutions. “If the 'plot' seems consistent with Kluge's work, the images are clearly the result of Reitz's early experimental efforts. We see a world moving very fast but going nowhere. The image of the destruction of perfectly useful buildings in the name of “renewal” becomes “a metaphor for post industrial society and its obsession with mindless growth, hurtling through chaos to what may well be total annihilation” ( Lutze 260)

Reitz's fourth solo feature, Stunde Null/ Zero Hour (1977) is partly autobiographical, centred on a group of people in a small town near Leipzig in the immediate postwar period. The occupying American forces are preparing to move out to make way for the Russians. The troops in both invading armies are not at all accomodating of the locals. Described as “powerful, warm and moving,” Zero Hour, then considered by many to be Reitz's best film, received a national award. Reitz has said that some of those portrayed in the film, including members of his own family, “were capable of being part of the Third Reich […] It remains a mystery how Hitler's Germany could have come about […] I have learned to live with this ambivalent feeling that is typical of my generation in Germany.” Zero Hour was a prelude to the enormously successful Heimat (1984) which, by 1980, was already a work in progress. Reitz, like Kluge, Fassbinder, Syberberg and Sanders-Brahm, sought “to provide in their films a historical memory that runs counter to Hollywood’s notions of German history - even at the risk of appearing, or indeed becoming, revisionist” (Kaes ‘Hitler to Heimat’ 197).

Reitz in his first two features, was intent on fulfilling promises made in the Oberhausen Manifesto : dealing with present day realities while challenging audiences to accept new forms and conventions in telling a realistic love story in Mealtimes; the “modernising of the literary adaptation through “a constant gruelling dialogue with his film team on the theme of social responsibility of the artist to society” in Cadillac (critic Kirsten Witte quoted Phillips ed. 257). As previously noted, both films failed to find find a cinema release, setting Reitz on the path to Heimat inTrip to Vienna and Zero Hour.

Volker Schlondorff

After completing his secondary and tertiary (economics and political science) education in Paris, while also attending the Cinematheque regularly, Volker Schlöndorff spent a year at the film institute IDHEC before making a short film and then working as an assistant director to Louis Malle, Alain Resnais and Jean-Pierre Melville. Although he was not one of the Oberhausen Manifesto signatories he readily joined the Young German filmmakers when he returned to Germany in the mid-sixties after a decade in Paris. The first works of many of them aroused hopes that they were seldom able to fulfil having to struggle with the difficult conditions in the context of a failing national industry.

As Anton Kaes acknowledges, the films of Kluge and Schlöndorff are radically different from each other in the formal treatment of their subject matter, in essence alluding to causes and consequences of National Socialism (Nowell-Smith ed.616). Kluge's experimentalism is in sharp contrast to Schlöndorff's professional craftsmanship, the latter's tendency toward convention obscuring the extent of his commitment to rigour and craft. What placed him as the outsider in the New German Cinema was his unashamed populism: “I believe that it's only a popular medium as the nickelodeon that the cinema can really be justified.” ( Sandford 37). The greatest vindication of this popularizing approach was perhaps the success of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) “which not only managed to present sensitive major political issues to a wide audience, but actually was the first real international commercial success of the whole New German Cinema” (ibid).

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

A film like Katharina Blum made in realist style can readily attract an audience and “may ask the right questions but in a manner not sufficiently geared to provoke a spectatorial reply.” Corrigan asks the final question “whether this kind of aesthetic moves an audience to merely accept history as a reality or to engage with it as an horizon that can and should be changed?” (72).

Corrigan further notes that Schlondorff from early in his career began to define his aesthetic around the notions of reception and distribution as “one of the pioneers of ‘commercial' developments in the New German Cinema’s distribution. By favouring the appeal of adaptations of literary classics Schlondorff took on the risk of the film being often negatively compared by critics, as a priority, with the original novel rather than approaching the film on its own terms. He has spoken of how for him literature “is a source of information […] above all, information regarding the question : What is German? What is actually German identity?” (quoted by Christian-Albrecht Gollub, Phillips ed. 278).

Another evaluation is that Schlondorff has been as a director without a style. Rather than a criticism, this could be taken as a measure of his adaptability. He has spoken of lack of stylistic mannerism in his films – an absence of experiment in narrative in what he has termed a “film-theoretical concept” adhered to in order to connect with a wide audience which is rejected by him as “a type of moralistic imperative.” This absence of a theoretical concept of cinema eschewed finding filmic equivalents for literary tropes in favour of the more conventionally direct synthesis of performance, visual and sound atmospherics, and linearity.

Margarethe von Trotta

This ‘no film-theoretical stance’ was shared by his then wife, collaborator and writer-director in her own right, Margarethe von Trotta, who resented labelling of any sort, making films with a wide audience in mind, she collaborated with Schlondorff on Katharina Blum and Coup de Grace (1976). Acknowledged as a leading force in the New German cinema, she directed her first solo feature, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, in 1978.

In The Young Törless (1966) darkly ironic intimations of things to come in the behaviour of adolescents from the Austrian upper classes, pre World War I in an Austro-Hungarian military boarding school, was adapted by Schlöndorff from a novel by Robert Musil in a co-production with Louis Malle credited as artistic adviser – he apparently recommended the novel to Schlöndorff. While the dark irony is not overstated, the chilling anticipation of violent obsession and passive weakness secreted in a culture stifled by authoritarian regimes and attitudes, is clear enough. Corrigan draws a telling comparison with Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Lindsay Anderson's If ... (1968), films with similar boarding school settings. “But unlike these two films there is no rebellion against the institution but instead a frighteningly stoic withdrawal” (review in Criterion online).

The Young Törless

A loose companion to The Young Törless is a rebuttal of the premises of popular provincialism in the German heimat film genre, The Sudden Fortune of the Good People of Kombach (1970), conceived as a television production but also intended for theatrical release, co-scripted by Schlöndorff and von Trotta based on actual events that took place in 1821. A desperate small band of Hessian peasants hold up a tax-wagon only to find that their sudden wealth proves more lethal than the impending threat of starvation as they find their action bringing the full weight of the ruling class upon themselves. The film chronicles the situation rather than focusing on individual characters.

The ability to combine entertainment and political commitment on contemporary issues, as the American cinema from time to time demonstrates, was in short supply in German cinema which very seldom reacted so topically to current developments as in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) which Schlöndorff and von Trotta co-scripted and co-directed. In December 1971 the West German yellow press “reported” a bank robbery by the terrorist Baader-Meinhoff gang, and when novelist Heinrich Boll took exception to the slanted and sensationalist accounts he was promptly labelled a sympathiser and intellectual accomplice of the group and his house was subject to police search. This resulted in a novel in which Boll describes four days in the life of a young woman victimised by unfair tabloid practices. Boll sent the galley proofs to Schlöndorff and von Trotta.( Phillips ed. 282).

The Second Awakening of Christa Klages

According to von Trotta she directed the actors while Schlöndorff looked after the technical aspects. Whereas Boll narrated the story - subtitled “How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead.” - in 58 sections filled with flashbacks and commentary, the film presents a straightforward chronological sequence of events. The camera acts as a passive recording device to narrate, not to explain. Many critics preferred Boll's mosaic structure but audiences were in no doubt: Katharina Blum was the most successful German film of the mid-70s, both at home and internationally.

The producer of The Young Torless Franz Seitz acquired the rights for Gunter Grass’s provocative novel The Tin Drum (1959), wrote an initial script, and invited Schlondorff as director to work on the further adaptation co-written with Grass and Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière. Starring an international cast it was a major success in 1979 both with West German audiences and internationally while, as Grass agreed, maintaining the spirit of the novel.

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke