Who Will Save German Cinema?

Weekly Review: The Berlinale has the German press giddy over homegrown films. Not Telepolis, though. Also: Heisenberg, Chicks on Speed, etc.

"It's as if German cinema were about to liberate itself at the Berlinale," wrote last week in anticipation of a Berlin Film Festival with four German films in competition and a new "Perspectives on German Cinema" series to boot. "The economic and logistical limitations, the work with small teams and compact cameras is setting free creative energies no one would have suspected were still to be found in the country." It's just this sort of "collective 'Woo-hoo!' from the filmland of poets and thinkers... this patriotism with which the papers have greeted Tom Tykwer's " that sets editor Michaela Simon's hair on end.

Michaela Simon's diatribe is ferociously funny and many of her points are spot on. Even so, there's space in a look back at the week so much of the German press spent wallowing in its own films to respectfully disagree with a few of her other points.

First, how collective is the current "Woo-hoo!"? Yes, two of Germany's most influential papers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung have praised the new film from the director of the last film from Germany, really, to break through internationally, Run Lola Run. But the taz and others were far less impressed while the US-based indieWIRE was -- despite pointing out what no other reviewer has yet dared utter: the problem with this problematic film lies first and foremost with the script, the last written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, and in collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who has evidently expressed interest in working with Tykwer on the rest of the trilogy, i.e., Hell and Purgatory.

Simon is quite right to state that the first five minutes of Heaven are among "the most elegant and exciting to be seen in a cinema these days." But also a little unfair. Because, in this viewer's eyes, Tykwer maintains this level of understated elegance and suspense up to, oh, about halfway through. Which is partially why reaction to the film has been not so collective as split right down the middle. To an extent, those that defend the film forgive its maker for the second half for the sake of the first, while those that condemn it are too put off by the second to even remember the first.

But enough here about Heaven. Onto the other half of Simon's well-delivered one-two punch, the pep rally currently going on in Germany over its own cinema. It has to be put into succinct context.

In over 100 years of film history, German cinema has made its mark exactly twice: during the Weimar era and during the late 70s and early 80s with a flare-up of creativity known as "New German Cinema." All in all, not an overwhelming track record. Since the death of the "NGC," i.e., since the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, German filmmakers have beaten their breasts and torn their hair over a laundry list of woes, but three of them aren't just whining and can be taken seriously.

One, Hollywood's hegemony. It's real and it's suffocating, a product of a series of lopsided trade "agreements" drawn up during the Cold War yet still guaranteeing that while Scream Umpteen will be shown in every German town and burb, if Fassbinder himself were alive today, his latest couldn't reach the fraction of the "arthouses" his movies were once shown in across the Atlantic because the few that remain there are showing pap like Chocolat.

Two, funding. The system in Germany is archaic and ineffective, and while Culture Minister Julian Nida-Rümelin looks to France for fresh ideas on rejuvenating it and, on the opening night of the Berlinale, Chancellor Schröder called on public and private television as well as theater owners to pour more money into it, more and more German filmmakers are opting out of it altogether and going it alone. Probably an encouraging sign, actually, but until an alternative system firms up, it's still tough going out there.

Three, the German press. It's notoriously hostile to homegrown product, driving the public away in droves (a complaint, interestingly enough, voiced frequently as well in that supposed cinematic nirvana, France). Part of it is force of habit, that feuilleton tone that can at times be delightfully bitchy, but at other times, just plain tired. The Berlinale is actually a prime example. German filmmakers have often complained that local papers harshly pan that rare film of theirs that actually makes it into the festival while the foreign press cuts them far more slack.

It's this third and last complaint that suddenly seems on the verge of change and no one has done more to spur that change than the new Berlinale director, Dieter Kosslick. On the one hand, because he can crack a joke and give good copy, the press eats him up. On the other, because he knows the troubles German filmmakers have seen -- his previous job was to allot grant money to them from the wealthy state of North Rhine Westphalia -- and because he's reversing the festival's policy of all but ignoring their work, he's making the other side of the divide a lot happier, too. Kosslick probably can't go on front-loading the Berlinale competition with German movies, but as a symbolic gesture in his first year, it's a pretty sharp move. And most reviewers realize they don't have to be as rah-rah as Der Spiegel to appreciate it.

It's also important to keep in mind that what the press and public will see in these four films -- the other three are Andreas Dresen's Grill Point, improvised from beginning to end, Dominik Graf's A Map of the Heart, shot on digital video, and Christopher Roth's Baader, a pop portrait of the RAF terrorist -- is precisely the sort of filmmaking and storytelling that would not and could not get done in Hollywood.

In Telepolis

September 1941. Copenhagen. The setting of the widely praised play of the same name by Michael Frayn which tells the story of a meeting between Danish physicist Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who was heading up Hitler's atomic bomb program. Tells, that is, Heisenberg's side of the story, which is that he did what he could to sabotage development of the bomb.

Not so, wrote Bohr in 1958, in a letter he never sent to Heisenberg. Or at least that seems to be what he's saying. On February 5, the letter and other documents were released online by the Niels Bohr Archive.

While papers around the world are covering this now, Goedert Palm, tipped off by a story in The Sunday Times, wrote about the new revelations back in mid-January, maintaining: "Just as it is impossible to exactly measure the impulse and location of a particle at the same time, it is just as difficult, despite the documents presented now, to determine how deeply Heisenberg was involved. But the relationship between science, guilt and responsibility is not only an unclear chapter of this scientific history, it also remains a diffuse problem of ethics itself, more threatening than ever."

In English

The presidency of the EU rotates every six months among its members and is currently in the hands of Spain, which is now encouraging the EU to classify "anti-globalization" (or, if you prefer, as I do, "global justice") demonstrators as terrorists. Jelle van Buuren reports.

John Horvath argues that it turns out we didn't need the Internet and other new technologies to plunge ourselves into a New Dark Age after all.

And I was impressed by the crowds that showed up for the opening of the transmediale.02 in Berlin. Update: They kept coming. While the venue was never quite as packed as it was that night, the panels, performances, media lounge and so on were hopping right up to the end.

Elsewhere

Some fun stuff this week, but first, the news. It's bad.

His news hook may be the leap in unemployment to over 10 percent, i.e., nearly 4.3 million, but Toby Helm pretty much sums up the entire situation in The Telegraph: "With Europe's biggest economy now on the edge of recession and the government facing a reprimand from Brussels over the state of its finances, the economic outlook could hardly be more wretched for [Chancellor] Schröder as he heads for a general election in September."

Turns out, too, that Berlin is in even worse financial shape that previously thought, but it is not alone among German cities. (The Financial Times, The Economist.)

As if all that weren't enough of a downer, Jörg Haider is working on a comeback. Steven Erlanger in The International Herald Tribune.

Ok, the fun stuff. Darius James interviews Berlin-based "subversive electro-pop band/artists/record label/'glamour girls'/feminist collective Chicks on Speed for The New York Press.

In The New Yorker, Jane Kramer provocatively argues that the Germans aren't very good at spying, fighting terrorism or crisis management in general, and it's frustrating the hell out of the Americans and other Europeans.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Gary Cohen tells the odd and at times amusing story of what happened in 1942 when Nazis landed on American shores to bring US industry to its knees.

"Your seminar at Berlin's Humboldt-Universität has quickly become a meeting point for intellectuals and artists. What are you focusing on at the moment?" Daniel Birnbaum interviews Sarat Maharaj for Artforum.

Speaking of intellectuals, in response to Richard Posner's ridiculous list of the 100 most important in the US, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung decided to have a bit of fun with Google. Herewith, the 100 most important intellectuals in Germany. Topping the list, of course, is Günter Grass, but oh, look, there's a Telepolis editor right up there at lucky 13.