Locarno film festival digs up postwar German classics
Jochen Kürten / dbAugust 1, 2016
In 1962, young West German filmmakers rang in a new era for movie-making in the country. German post-war cinema, they said, is dead. The Locarno film festival tries its hand at a reinterpretation.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
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Locarno film festival digs up postwar German classics
Despite their bad reputation Germany's early postwar films offered diverse stories and suspenseful narratives. The Festival del Film Locarno has teamed up with the German Film Institute to present a retrospective.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
Avoiding war at all costs
Germans initially chose denial as a way to cope with the horrors of war, which was also reflected in its cinema. However, there were exceptions to that rule: "Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?" by Frank Wisbar (1959) tried to piece together the Battle of Stalingrad. Wisbar's film was intended to show the pointlessness and brutality of war.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
A man's world
The role of women remained unchanged after the war: Germany's budding democracy was built on patriarchy in the 1950s. "The Confession of Ina Kahr" in 1954 picks up on themes of submission of women in marriage and domestic abuse. The movie by G.W. Pabst examines events in protagonist Ina Kahr's life, using flashbacks as she faces trial for the murder of her husband.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
Overcoming adversity
Other movies from that era also picked up on the theme of women's rights. "The Glass Tower" from 1957 depicts the suffering of a woman under her domineering husband.The stereotype of the controlling male was not just fiction in those days. Director Harald Braun's movie, however, is also a nail-biting thriller with a happy ending.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
War crimes
A number of long-forgotten masterpieces of postwar cinema will be revived at the film Festival in Locarno. Not many movies dared to explore touchy subjects like the Nazi regime at the time, but there were exceptions like "The Devil Strikes at Night" by Robert Siodmak. The movie features German actor Mario Adorf and received rave reviews despite the political climate.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
Rising stars
Mario Adorf was also the main actor in the 1959 drama "Am Tag, als der Regen kam" (The day the rain came), as he started to cement his career in film. The movie took a critical look at gang violence among youths in West Berlin. The film's soundtrack meanwhile featured a song with the same title, It was made famous by French chanteuse Dalida, and was one of her first major hits.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
A critical look at the West
As the rules of engagement for the Cold War started to become clear, not everyone found Western values to be infallible. The 1961 movie "Black Gravel" by acclaimed director Helmut Käutner deals with corruption and prostitution at a U.S. army base in West Germany. The Locarno film festival will also be presenting this worthwhile title.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
A city in rubbles
Some movies of the time are interesting because they show what life was like in Germany after many cities and towns had been reduced to ruins during the war. "Adventure in Berlin" from 1952 was filmed at many of Berlin's iconic sights such as the Brandenburg Gate or the Berlin Radio Tower.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
Masterpieces and hidden gems
The Festival del Film Locarno will highlight nearly 80 postwar movies from Germany. Running from August 3-13, it hopes to spark new interest in the often overlooked era of German filmmaking. Some of the movies presented are legendary treasures, such as the 1951 Peter Lorre movie ""The Lost One," while other films presented at the festival may be more obscure.
Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
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"Papas Kino ist tot" (Dad's movies are dead) was a popular outcry in the 1960s. German postwar was on its way out. While in France, directors including Francoise Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were starting the Nouvelle Vague movement, a group of young German film enthusiasts was carrying German postwar cinema to its grave.
In 1962, 26 filmmakers signedthe so called Oberhausen Manifesto, which listed what the young men didn't like about the older generation's films. After all the corny "Heimatfilme" (simple, sentimental films in rural settings) and uptight war dramas, after silly entertainment and harmless crime thrillers, they were ready for a new beginning.
Enter New German Cinema, which brought German filmmaking a great deal of international recognition.
Directors Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz won international awards; soon Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Volker Schlöndorff joined the list of renowned directors. New German Cinema was a development that enriched both the German and the international film scenes.
On the set of 'Black Gravel' (1960/61)Image: Deutsches Filminstitut
But as is the case with revolutions - France's Nouvelle Vague ran into the same problems - people overlooked the fact that not everything filmed before 1962/63 was bad.
To rehabilitate that particular era of German film, the Festival del Film Locarno (August 3-13) and the German Film Institute have compiled an extensive retrospective on German postwar film.
Popular film genres in particular were "sorely ignored" in the 60s, the organizers say. Perhaps that was a way of showing contempt for popular culture, says Claudia Dillmann of the Frankfurt Film Institute, adding that in any case, it's the reason why even today commercial and art films are fruther apart than ever.
Unjustifiably neglected
"We're highlighting an era in West German filmmaking that we feel has been unjustifiably neglected," says Locarno film festival artistic director Carlo Chatrian. "Not everything our fathers and grandfathers did was meaningless." It's time, Chatrian addds, to salvage buried cinematic treasures and make them available to the younger generation."
Locarno's Piazza Grande is ready for the festivalImage: Imago
The assumption that the New German Cinema was in any way special is in fact a "huge misunderstanding," says Olaf Möller, who helped curated the retrospective in the Swiss city of Locarno.
Some of the New German Cinema directors only had the chance to try their hand at something new because the much-maligned producers of the commercial films helped them, Möller argues.
Off to the U.S.
About 80 films are on the program at the Locarno retrospective "Beloved and Rejected: Cinema in the young Federal Republic of Germany" - documentaries, feature films, animated films by well-known and lesser known filmmakers of the era. It's certainly worth taking a look at films produced in the young West German, even if some of the curators' arguments come across as slightly exaggerated.
After the Locarno Film Festival, the retrospective travels on to several German and Swiss cities, and it's also booked in Italy and the U.S., where West Germany's "beloved and rejected" films will be shown in Washington and New York.
