Professor David Peimer
Post-War Renaissance in German Film: Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders
Professor David Peimer - Post-War Renaissance in German Film: Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders
- And so today we’re going to dive into the last section on Germany, which is looking before going onto England next week. And we’re going to look today at four of the really, I think, most significant and interesting post-war German filmmakers. And for me, I’m just going to give a few reasons why I think they really stand out, and what they’re trying to grapple with in a post-war Germany being of that generation. Fassbinder for me, among the most interesting of them all. Born in 1945 and then an early death from an overdose. He was 37 years old, then Werner Herzog, 1942, still living in California. Wim Wenders born in ‘45 and Schlondorff born in 1939. So I’m going to look at brief clips of one or two films from each of these, just to try and get a sense of what were these filmmakers trying to explore, trying to understand through the medium of film after the nightmare of the war, and how were they trying to deal with that, and yet, obviously living in a completely different generation. But their parents or grandparents at least, obviously having been involved in some way in the horrors of the war. So this is really looking at a more contemporary sense of Germany today through the artistic lens of these filmmakers. And I think a couple of key points in essence, before diving into the first one, I’m going to look at Fassbinder, which is these are a group of young people struggling with their parents’ war generation, whether they had been more active or more passive during the war. And usually parents, obviously not grandparents, although some of them were, but there were nevertheless participants in the war in some way. And they grow up and in the sixties they become young people who observe that many of former Nazis are still in prominent positions in government, in culture, in business, in the sciences, the arts, et cetera.
So the whole idea of the de-Nazification, is to put it mildly, tinged with a scepticism, tinged with a darkening of the shadow nevertheless, that hangs over them, their parents’ generation, and their children, and so on generations. So what was this new cinema going to be about? What kind of techniques were they going to adopt in film? And for them, I think what pulls them all together is a sometimes savage, but subtle or tender or strong ongoing criticism of the own society, of the West German society emerging out of the grotesqueness of the war. The prejudices, the politics, the culture of West Germany at the time, this memory, the ever-present past, the history that they were living. And James Joyce’s great phrase from his novel, Ulysses, history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake. What is this? How are they trying to deal with it? And still living in the present living, you know, for 20 years, becoming young people 20 years after the war, a certain ignorance, unaware of the denials going on. How far de-Nazification really succeeded in a cultural or psychological context. Prejudice, what was the role of hate and lies? Was this democracy, wasn’t it? Would it last? Wasn’t it fragile? The dangers of how quickly democracy can be changed or overthrown. And also a searching, a searching for a meaning, a searching for an identity post the war and aloneness if you like, in a way. I think all these human themes clothed in the culture and the politics of West Germany of the times. And they started a group where they called themselves these four and others, the New German Cinema.
It’s 40, 50 years ago, but I think we can see parallels today of that fragility of memory, fragility of the past and the present, the fragility of what something that was or may still come again, that ever darkening shadow. And in these ways, what lies in peril that can rear its ugly head again or not, or at least living in that terrible tension between the two. And I think there are parallels in that way. So despite the claims of de-Nazification, despite the claims that Nazism was “over”, they knew it wasn’t. They sensed it, they lived it, in the home, in the family growing up, in their grandparents’, parents, friends, et cetera. I hesitate to use the word trauma ‘cause I don’t think it is a trauma. It’s just living with an understanding of where they were positioned in this moment in history and trying to deal with it artistically. So the first one I’m going to look at, sorry no, move onto the next slide please. So these are a picture of the four that I’ve chosen to look at today who are really, for me, the main examples of the New German Cinema. It was influenced by the new French wave cinema of the fifties, Gondar and many others as well. Low budget films, not trying to be realistic, but trying to show a kind of what we might call a bit of magic realism or hyper-realism today. On the left is Schlondorff, and then next to him is Werner Herzog, the young one there in black and white is Fassbinder, and then on the far right is Wim Wenders. Completely different visions and different aesthetics that they were using artistically. And I want to delve into some of these today. Okay, so the first one we’re going to look at is Volker Schlondorff and his remarkable film, the Tin Drum, made in 1979.
So this is quite a while after the war and as I’m sure many know, adaptation of Gunter Grass’ novel, the Tin Drum. And essentially about a young boy who is growing up in the final years of the wall and lives in contempt of the adults around him, witnesses firsthand, their cruelty via the rise of the Nazi party and of course the wall. And the little boy, Oscars, uses his drum, his little toy drum, tin drum, and he drums on it all the time, also often during the film and the novel as a protest against growing up. And he’s able to arrest his growing up and can stay young for a large part of the film and the novel. And he resisted, protested against growing up, because he doesn’t want to be part of this insane world of extreme authoritarianism, of extreme conformity of hate and lies and is literally, he doesn’t want to become part of what he sees as an insane adult world. And he has the ability to scream and break glass when he does so and or shatter glass and at the same time keeps drumming. And of course drives everybody nuts or the adults. But it’s a little boy’s way of protesting against this world that he’s been groomed to become an adult in. He’s literally and metaphorically drumming out the sight and sound of the world that he is a part of as a little boy. It’s his protection against what’s going on around him. The film won the 1980 Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film in 1979, the Cannes Award, the Palm De'Or together jointly with the other, well, Cappolo’s remarkable film, Apocalypse Now. Fascinating. Two wars, two films, the Apocalypse Now about the Vietnam War based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Gunther Grass’ and Schlondorff film based on Gunther Grass’ novel, The Tin Drum. Yeah, if we can just show this is from the trailer.
Oscar! Oscar, Oscar! Oscar!
So I think we see Schlondorff, you know, as I said, and obviously based on Gunter Grass’ novel, trying to come to terms and trying to find a way in to tell this story of such extreme momentous proportions and finding a little boy character doesn’t want to grow up, can stop his physical growth, plays the drum, and can raise his voice to a high pitch and shatter glass. But it starts with the adult voice inside the boy. Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn’t want to grow up. Once upon a time, a boy he didn’t want to be part of this adult world. Let’s look at how different Schlondorff and Gunter Grass are dealing with this history through this personal character than compared to someone like a movie like a Boy With A Stripe Pyjamas, which is one of my, one of the films I really ready do not like at all. Because not only is the Nazi made out to be the victim, the father and the boy are made out to the commandant of the camp and his little boy made out to be the victims. And somehow the little Jewish boy character is meant to be the saviour of the Nazi, you know. It’s a terrible thematic concept in The Boy With The Stripe Pyjamas. And to hear that it’s been taught so much and been used at so many schools is a bit scary for me, because of who is the victim? The victim is shown to be the Nazi. And, you know, and the Jewish character must give salvation. Here it’s very different. Schlondorff and Grass trying to find through the little boy with a adult voice as a narrator figure. That combination is brilliant to try and understand something of what has been going on.
Obviously a film made in 1979. Okay, the next one I’m going to go onto is Fassbinder, who is one of my favourite filmmakers as quite a few of these characters are. Fassbinder as we know died young, 37, 37 years old. I’m going to show just a couple, one or two clips from two of his films, which I think are by far his greatest, Fear Eats the Soul, and The Marriage of Maria Brown. I remember seeing those films so many decades ago and being stunned and watching so many of others of Fassbinder, you know, the bitter tears of Petro Fund, just many, many others. He made over 40 films and he died by the age of 37. In a 15, 16 year period, he made over 40 films. A driven workaholic, a driven part addict at least, shall we say, cocaine, alcohol, other things. But to make three or four films in West Germany at the time, sure he was able to get money and so on, but to write them, direct them, plus he wrote a lot of plays and TV series, et cetera. An obsessive brilliant mind, just constantly making. He was homosexual or bisexual at times as well. And I think there are a couple of keys that Fassbinder gives us in terms of the vision and the understanding of this New German Cinema. First of all, he endlessly accused the New Germany, the New West Germany, of never having really exorcised Nazism. He was a self-destructive Windikit. He’s literally saw history as a nightmare in the present. He saw a Germany literally driven completely mad. And this insanity idea feeds into quite a few of them over that 12 year period of the Nazis and obviously the war. And trying to be an individualist in this, which of course is impossible during the Nazi period, you know, as obviously so many other far more serious things are. But it’s impossible to be an individualist.
It’s impossible to have a voice. And he is determined to have a voice, partly because of his sexual gender mix, bisexual and homosexual, but more importantly, understanding it, being so frustrated and struggling and so angry at this past, and yet able to show it with a tenderness, with a certain beauty and with a tenderness with a camera, with a tenderness and understanding of colour and dramatic tension in film. And perhaps most importantly, the paradoxes and the complexities of human nature in the characters. I think what defines Fassbinder equally with these other filmmakers, but Fassbinder perhaps more than the others, is the position of the outsider. He is the outside stranger looking in on his own society, trying to analyse it, understand it, and make films from the outsider, the marginal perspective. As many great artists have done before, before the war, after the war, many, the ability to step outside and actually look with fairly cold eyes to understand what is really going on and to write about it from that perspective. His dominant theme was power, power at every level of society, between lovers, families, a country, a nation, the cities, the rural, power, almost almost in the veins of human nature and society, certainly his own society of West Germany at the time. What he called the daily fascism that he found in his society of West Germany. It’s Hannah Shugula, the great West German actress who acted in many of his films, she, in an interview, said that Fassbinder was against people being educated to do what they were told.
Yet again, a strong tendency in Germany to utter obedience. So this is the actress who worked with him so much, understanding anti-obedience, anti this authoritarian, anti being told what to do all the time, and of course the education. And looking at de-Nazification, was that going to work or wasn’t it? Because prejudice remained everywhere. And it’s in the daily fascism. That’s interesting for me that Fassbinder looks in the ordinary daily life of West Germans post the war. She herself had a strange, bizarre birth. She was born on Christmas day, 1943. She was delivered by a doctor who, and I’m quoting her, average translation from The German, was working part-time at Auschwitz. What exact work, we don’t know. But he is the doctor who delivers this little baby, Hannah, on Christmas day in 1943. She said later in an interview, it was like living with a secret crime or a corpse in the cellar, knowing that man who’d given me birth had held me in his hands. And ultimately about Fassbinder, that Fassbinder saw the world through the eyes of the outsider. You know, we so often talk about the artist and certainly the Jewish personality, the Jewish character, the Jewish individual being the outsider in so many ways, the double outsider, the outsider to society. Fassbinder, of course, and none of these are Jewish obviously, but the ability artistically to see the world of one’s own culture through the eyes of an outsider. And this is her phrase about him. So the first film I’m going to show the clip from is the 1974 movie of his, and it’s Fear Eats the Soul, which was inspired by Douglass’s Zirk’s film of 1955 called All That Heaven Allows. And in Zirk’s original film in the fifties, an upper class widow falls in love with a gardener who’s much younger, obviously of a much lower class, and it’s against the Faho family and community wishes. Fassbinder took the story from Zirk and from Douglas Zirk and set it in his own Munich and made it about a German widow who’s much older and falls in love with a much younger Moroccan Arab worker.
The actor happened to be Fassbinder’s lover at the time. And she, what’s interesting, and you’ll see the clip in the film, is that her own children claim she’s lost her sanity. Again, this endless theme of sanity, who’s insane, who isn’t insane, what is sanity? Her children claim she’s lost, the adult children, claim she’s lost her sanity. Her neighbours ostracise her. We’ll see that clip in the film. The local shopkeepers turn their noses up at her. He’s looking at the little world of the little community in Munich of these, let’s say ordinary characters. But he also shows that even the widow has hidden prejudice because she wants, once the Moroccan, her younger Moroccan lover, to better fit in, assimilate better in her society, fit in. She sees him ultimately as inferior. And it’s this ruthless honesty of Fassbinder’s to look within, not only at the society, but look within even somebody who’s able to fall in love with somebody of such a different religion and nationality and race. She wants to reassure the widow, Emmy, wants to reassure fellow Germans that she hasn’t quite lost their twisted sense of values. She wants her own redemption, how? Through being re-assimilated into her own society of her own “her own people”. And yet what Fassbinder manages so superbly is to show a sympathy for both, Emmy, the widow character, Ali, the Moroccan Arab waiter character. And you know, that even in this little love relationship in his very ordinary type of characters, we see inside the prejudices which are hidden, but the truth must come out. Not only prejudices on a mass social scale. It’s through the realism of these smaller, if you like, characters. In the end, the paradox is the contradictions in life, from the outsider perspective, Fassbinder can see it. And he ends up with quite a tender, beautiful film about the extreme horror of prejudice of race, colour, age. Fear Eats The Soul. The title is obvious. Okay, if we can show the clip, please.
♪ Everybody says ♪ ♪ To do each and every little thing ♪ ♪ But what does it bring ♪ ♪ If I ain’t got you ♪ ♪ Ain’t got baby ♪ ♪ You don’t know what it’s like ♪ ♪ Baby you don’t know what it’s like ♪
- So just in this little clip we see that the family, obviously the adult children, you know, in their response we see a little clip of the neighbours. He so beautifully, and I use that word thoughtfully, it is so beautifully and tenderly filmed most of it because the look in the actress playing Emmy, the older widow, you know, and Ali, the Moroccan waiter, the Moroccan Arab character. It is so gently, but never, it’s never shown with sentimentality. And that is, for me, the ultimate brilliance of Fassbinder. He’s able to see prejudices hidden, so-called small and big prejudice, everywhere, prejudice and power to how they go together in psychology, in society, but hidden and everywhere. And how comes in the privacy of the home or the close friends. The next one I’m going to show is from, what for me, is his other great film. And let’s remember he made over 40, The Marriage of Maria Brown, the 19, pardon me, the 1978 movie. And I’m going to just mention the story because I think it is a brilliant writer, well, the story of a film. Maria gets married at the beginning to the soldier at the end of the war, Herman, it’s unfulfilled, of course ‘cause of the war. And then, at the end of the war, she thinks he’s dead, but he’s not. But anyway, at the end of the war, she adapts to the realities of post-war West Germany. She becomes the mistress of a very wealthy industrialist while staying true to her love of Herman, the soldier that she married. She starts to work at the end of the war as a prostitute in a bar, which is frequented by American soldiers. She has a relationship with an African-American soldier. Fassbinder’s always playing with race and religion. But he plays it in a way which it retains the humanity without sentimentality. Then Herman returns home one day to discover that Maria and the African American soldier, Bill, are together in bed.
There’s a fight between Herman and Bill. Maria kills Bill the African American soldier by accident. She’s tried by American military tribunal and expresses her love for both, the soldier, the African American soldier, Bill, and her own German husband, Herman. Herman is so struck by her declaration of devotion and love that he stands up in the court and says, no, no, I take the blame, I really killed the American soldier. He is imprisoned. On the train home, Maria makes sure she catches the eye of an elderly wealthy German industrialist, probably ex-Nazi, Hintet. And he offers her position as his assistant. She becomes his mistress, of course. She visits Herman again in prison, tells him that, look, okay, I’m going to shack up with this this rich ex-Nazi, so we can have plenty of money. So when you come out of prison, we’ll be able to start a whole new life. He’s older, he’ll die, et cetera. Maria becomes wealthy, buys a house, et cetera. The industrialist visits Herman and offers him a deal that when he dies, he will make Herman and Maria very rich, leave all the money if, if the German soldier agrees to disappear, go to Canada, and not appear until he’s died, after the German soldier’s release. And this agreement is written into the will. So neither man tells Maria the truth of the deal they’ve made. On his release, Herman immigrates, goes to Canada, sends Maria a red rose every month as a kind of reminder, he still loves her. And then after the industrialist death, Herman reappears, comes back to West Germany and to Maria. But she discovers the truth when the will is read out about the deal they made. They argue, they fight, and about who has sacrificed their life more for the other. 'Cause they both argue they’re both sacrificed. Then she goes into the kitchen to light a cigarette from the gas stove flame. And of course the building blows up and both of them are killed. The New York Times placed the film on its Best 100 Movies Ever Made list.
It was a huge commercial success. In America, the film was the highest grossing German film ever made. And had it not come out the same year as Schlondorff’ Tin Drum, probably would’ve won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. So I mentioned this because the story in a bit of detail, because those complexities in the paradoxes for me in the post-war Germany are brilliant. He understands from within the psychology of how to get a sense of the picture of West Germany post-war. Okay, if we can show a clip, please.
[Maria] My man is dead.
Hermann?
[Soldier] I bet your pardon?
Hermann Braun.
So that gives us a sense of the, for me, what’s interesting is that Fassbinder like in Fear Eats The Soul and the other filmmakers of this era are not scared to use colour and dramatic moments suddenly thrown in, and a lingering shots of faces, looks, glances. So, you know, strong, if we look at film noir of Fritz Lang and others of Myrna, the doctor of cabinet of Dr. Kaari, et cetera of the twenties films made then, the genre of film noir, here I think they are taking it, but they’re not scared to use colour, to bring colour as a metaphor of life into this terrible nightmare that they’ve inherited in the fifties, sixties and seventies in West Germany. And that complexity of that plot is so brilliantly thought through because the paradoxes, the Fastian bargains. So remember Fast, the story of Gunther Fast, so deep inside German literature and psyche, you know. I’ll sell my soul to the devil, what price? She will sell her soul to become the wife of the wealthy industrious so she can make a lot of money, get rich, et cetera, with the fantasy that her and Herman will eventually end up together. But of course it doesn’t happen. He makes the Fastian bargain. He’ll say, look, I killed Bill, but he didn’t kill Bill, and go to prison, because I love her so much. The wealthy industrialist makes a Fastian bargain that I will make sure that Bill can never see my wife again even though they love each other. I’ll keep the girl until I die. Each one makes the Fastian bargain. And it’s that sense of Fast at the core of human nature, the Fastian bargain, and the core of human nature, and thus the core of human society. And that Fassbinder can see the interplay of power and love and wealth and history always involved the Fastian bargain of Fassbinder.
The other films that, which I’m not going to show, but for me it was one of the great films of the seventies, made in 1978, Germany, and Autumn. And the backdrop of this is the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, we’ll know about West Germany. In the autumn of 77, 1977, they kidnapped the German industrialist, Hunt Schela. His own anti-communist views and that he had been a member of the Nazi student movement. So the Baader-Meinhof Gang capture him, Schela’s later killed in prison. The four leaders of the Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof, either commit suicide or killed by the state. We’re not quite sure. But the film was made with… Each filmmaker did about 15, 20 minute extract. Fassbinder, Schlondorff, Heinrich Paul, and others had about 15, 20 minutes in this film overall. Germany and Autmann, it was meant as a seventies, 1970s reflection of the post-war German period and German identity. And for me, and I remember seeing it at a young age, the most powerful segment and it has remained, can’t find it on YouTube anywhere, which is, so I’m not going to show it, but it’s the film of Fassbinder where he plays himself as a young man in his thirties, hard drinking, hardworking, constantly working, filmmaker, snorting cocaine, having some other drugs, et cetera. But the scene has a real life debate. And this is only partly written, it’s a real Fassbinder with his real mother. And we hear the radio every now and then announcing what the Red Army Faction have been doing, Baader-Meinhof, this killing of the industrialists in the background. And Fassbinder and his own mother are engaged in a eight, nine minute debate in the film. And what is fascinating is that she has a… He pushes it out of her a sense of a strange nostalgia, maybe not so strange, a nostalgia for life under a dictatorship. She talks about, why?
Things were easier. Doesn’t use the word better in German, it’s more “the things were easier”, you know, to have a fascist, one leader, one Fuhrer, one leader, et cetera. Yes, there were problems with that, but things were easier for us, you know. So through the words of his own mother and himself trying to grapple with this, ‘cause it’s his own mother he’s grappling with, and the huge big picture of the past. It’s an extraordinary scene. And if, you know, if I can find it off offline somewhere, I will certainly look for it and get it. But one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen. It’s again Fassbinder working through psychology of character and individual to get to the bigger picture, not the other way around. And that’s why he can touch on the contradictions and paradoxes in all their lives. He, for me, and of course there’s interplay of, again, it’s power and love between a mother and her son, you know, in the West Germany of the seventies. And we’ve got the deeper backdrop of course, of the Munich Olympic massacres, you know, which is a bit deeper behind it in the whole film, Germany and Autumn. Again, it’s Germans of the time, this young generation trying to look at and struggling with all these contradictions that they’re living through and their history. The next one is going to come from Werner Herzog and his films are totally different. Werner Herzog is dealing with much larger than life characters, but again, it’s all through the character, and they engage in battles against nature, to see seemingly impossible dreams. What are the main ideas in the film?
Obsessions, power, praised madness that the power has gone so far. Their obvious metaphors for the Nazi period of Hitler and others. This mass insanity, again, being seen through the eyes of the outsider again, you know, but set in the 15 hundreds in South America in the Amazonian jungle. Aguirre, Wrath of God. And I’m going to show after that a bit from Fitz Carraldo. And the essence of the film is Aguirre’s determination to find the legendary City of Gold, El Dorado, in the Amazonian South American forests. And in the 15 hundreds and pushing the Spanish conquistadors, you know, pushing them beyond life or death to find El Dorado. And in Fitz Carraldo, the obsession of this German character to build an opera, an opera house in the middle of the jungle and push this boat up over this hill, semi-mountain. Herzog is focusing on renegades, on these individuals obsessed with the madness of power and the power of madness. People who live or hover on the outskirts of so-called respectable society. He understands that society sees them as romantic and tragic. There is that paradox. He’s looking, I think, at Nazism, from the inside for the Germans of millions and millions, the romantic and tragic paradox inside these characters. It’s an outsider perspective. So classic of Fassbinder, Schlondorff, of the New German filmmakers, of the New German Cinema filmmakers. So the first one, the clip is from Aguirre Wrath of God, which is of course a story of power and madness, where a complete self-destructive maniac drives himself and his men to push them into insanity and beyond death or to death in the 16th century looking for El Dorado. But it’s contrasted by the lush beauty and magnificence of Amazonian nature in the jungle, okay. And of course, there’s the hint underneath everything of the obvious theme of imperialism. Okay, if we can show the next clip, please.
- If we can hold it there, please. Thanks, Emily. So Aguirre Wrath of God. Obviously we see the Klaus Kinsky look if you like, as an actor. And what’s interesting is that he’s using, consciously, Klaus Kinsky’s look, which hints at a kind of sense of Germany of the crusaders, the Tutonic Knights, with their religious imperialism to conquer, go to Jerusalem, conquer and, you know, Christianize the world. A, if you like, the rebirth of the Nordic stereotype, absolutely. Towards the end of the film, there’s Aguirre’s deranged final speech, which has got phrases which link to German fascism and link to this mediaeval Tutonic Knight sense of German Nordic, you know, blonde hair, blue eyes, and et cetera. But he places it in without punching it in our face. Francis Ford Cappolo said that his own film of 1979, Apocalypse Now, could only have been made after Aquirre Wrath of God. Now influenced he was by the imagery and one could not ignore that stunning visual imagery. And in a way, what Cappolo does in Apocalypse Now, we have this stunning visual lush beauty of the nature and imagery and the horror of the story of Apocalypse Now of the Vietnam War. You know, there’s an echo between the two. The music is haunting, it’s ecclesiastical. We have the sense of a Catholic choir often an echoing in the background. It’s human, but it’s also of a non-human ecclesiastical world in a way. Time Magazine voted this film also one of the best hundred of all time of films, became a cult. It’s what’s interesting to me is how Herzog is obsessed with the idea of myth and myth making and how he understands history and myth, working together, obviously how the Nazis used it, but before that as well, how art and and society and humans need to make myth out of reality.
And he’s aware of how to create myth in order to comment on reality in myth in film, which goes way back to the ancient Greeks and Homer and the Odyssey. Fitz Carraldo, the next look I’m going to show is a 1982 film of Herzog, which is an epic adventure film if you like, almost, where the opera loving European character, Fitz Fitzgerald is his Irish name, Kinsky again acts it, lives in a small city in Peru and he’s called Fitz Carraldo at the time. And he’s obsessed with building an opera house in his town. And to make his dream a reality, he realise, of course he needs the money, and he’s going to have to make a huge amount of money in the rubber business stripping obviously tree bark for rubber purposes, et cetera. In order to become a successful rubber Barron, Fitz Carraldo hatches an elaborate plot that calls for bringing a massive boat over a mountain or semi mountain with the help of the locals. And in the film, Herzog went to film it there and had his crew attempt to manually haul a 320 tonne steamship over this big. Hue Hosana called Fitz Carraldo one of his greatest and favourite films and we obviously can see why. It’s a sense of myth, of monumentalism, of obsession, and ambition gone mad. Power crazed by a guy who loves opera, wanting to set an opera house in the Amazonian jungle and hold the steamboat over. Okay, if we can show the clip please.
What happened? We are drifting into the pond! Schlondorff!
So, I find it extraordinary. I mean, in one level it is partly an allegory, I think of the insanity yet again, that theme keeps reverberating. You know, what is insanity from the out… And the outsider perspective of this German character with a tutonic look, of the myth anyway, of the tutonic, coming in and wanting to have a opera house in the Amazonian jungle. And looking at how he manages through being a romantic and tragic character, you know, get galvanised so many others to work on it, to work so hard on this obsessive crazy idea. But how you can get people to do it in a way as well, that’s Carraldo and Aquirre Wrath of God. I think that what’s interesting here is that Herzog deals in these films much more with the role of the myth and the myth making in, you know, in history and in society as a necessary part of that terrible 12 year period of Nazism. And living in his own times, you know, also, what is imperialism? How do you, what is the attitude? You know, but that’s very much a sub minimal theme if you like, in the whole movie. And that music is so religious and it’s filled with the music almost of the Catholic mass and other kinds of religious, iconic music that gives another whole layer to the meaning of this act of this guy taking the steamboat up over the river, over the Amazon River. The last film maker I’m going to look at briefly is Wim Wenders. And I had wanted to show, if I could I’d show much more of his as well, 'cause I regard them all quite equally actually. And Wenders I think is subtly brilliant. In a way, what he does is he talks about it in an interview of making the fiction films with a documentary approach, and making documentaries with a fiction approach. Remember he made the Buena Vista Social Club, which is a fairy tale.
You know, these are guys who are cleaning shoes in Havana. They had nothing, so poor, but he found them through the musician, Ray Kuda, he found them and made the film. I’m sure we all remember Buena Vista Social Club. Wenders made it. And by the end they’re playing Carnegie Hall and they’re making money and they’re talked about on a level of the Beatles almost. So he wanted to write and direct that documentary as fiction, and he said, if I made it as a fiction, it would be the same film and vice versa. So it’s that fascinating understanding of how question we’ve looked at quite a few times. How do you represent history? Do we do it through pure documentary, pure fiction? Does that even exist or do we blur the boundaries endlessly between the two? The aesthetics of fiction, the aesthetics of documentary. There isn’t a simplistic polemic or binary opposition between the two. They’re always using techniques of each other in a way. And ultimately for me, Wim Wenders, his approach, the American friend, which is remarkable. And I’m going to show a clip from Alice In The Cities and I’m going to hold on Paris, Texas for the moment, but ultimately he’s interested in the individual odyssey going way back to Homer, The Iliad and the Odyssey of ancient Greek poetry. And the Odyssey is an individual, a man alone, isolated, wondering the cities, wondering the places of the world in search of something, a meaning, in search of a connection, a human connection and understanding, searching for something given the insane history they’ve all gone through. And all the characters are always outsiders. Again, same as with the others. I’m going to go straight onto showing the very last one, if we may in a moment, Emily, which is a clip from Alice In The Cities. And here this deals with loneliness in a beautiful, subtle way. It was Wim Wenders, one of his early films made in 1974. Paris, Texas is the great one. Remarkable.
Wins all the awards at Cannes and elsewhere made with Sam Shepherd, et cetera. But Alice In The Cities’ interesting, I’m sure many know Paris, Texas, but Alice In The Cities was an earlier film made in Germany. Well, it’s basically deals with… It’s a beautiful rambling, introspective film. Move slowly. What is home, what is family, using the genre of the road movie. And it’s based on a character who is a, Winter, who’s a writer journalist who sent to New York, finish an article, doesn’t. And he goes back to the airport to book his flight back to West Germany. He meets a young German mother and her little daughter, Alice. They book tickets for the next day for flights to Amsterdam. The next morning though, the mother’s gone. She’s left a note for him telling Winter that she’s gone to sort out a recently broken relationship and promises if he will look after Alice for the day and she will meet them at the airport later that day. Of course she doesn’t pitch up. She abandons her own daughter. And Winter now has this little girl and he decides, well, I can’t leave her, I’m going to take her to Amsterdam and then to West Germany with me. They go back and an odyssey of a road movie genre, an odyssey of Western Europe begins. Looking forward to the hope to deliver Alice to her grandmother. But Alice is too young, she can’t remember where the grandmother lives. She can’t remember the home, not even really the street or the school where they live or anything.
She’s battling, all she has a little picture of the grandmother’s house. The main character, Winter of course is furious, and they drive around looking, he gets cross and upset, but slowly they develop a bond, slowly they develop relationships between Winter and this little girl. And they discover that they’re both truly have nowhere else to go. Their lonely individuals. History has abandoned them. Not only has the mother abandoned the child, not only is he abandoned by the history of Germany, they only have each other. They’re vagabonds on the outskirts of society. And besides having very little in common, that’s enough to join them together in a surrogate father-daughter relationship, if you like. Again, it’s told without sentimentality and it’s very similar to the theme of the American Friend. And they finally come together in these little moments of friendship, humanity, semi sort of father daughter little relationship. These are a couple of clips. One brief clip from the film. Thanks, Emily. ♪ Under the barber clock ♪ ♪ Down by the sea ♪
[Reporter] 14 Minutes before 10 o'clock.
Shut up!
[Reporter] Sunny Florida, at from big city.
[Winters] New York City.
Would you please put… Would you please put… Would you please put her on the flight to Amsterdam tomorrow?
Piss off!
Leaving the note. Then they start their odyssey in Western Europe. Looking for the little girl’s grandmothers home.
She can’t recognise the grandmother’s house.
Thanks, Emily. So this last one of Wim Wenders, the road movie genre, but this slowly gentle coming together of these two total strangers. But again, the themes of abandonment, of loss, and a searching and finding little moments of emotional connection between the two of them as he did in the American French, Paris, Texas in another way and other forms of Wim Wenders as well. Just to give us a bit of a sense of, a couple of, a taste of how some of these filmmakers in the seventies and eighties post-Second World War trying to grapple with those ideas that I mentioned before. And again, I come back to Hannah Sugala’s, the Fassbinder actress. He was able to see the world through the eyes of an outsider. And for me, all of these fall making up New German Cinema of this period were able to see their own society without any sentimentality through the eyes of the outsider but using totally different techniques and cinematic devices with camera and lighting and colour. Okay, thank you very much. And we can take some questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Ed, parallels of contrast, do you think between the German and later Spanish intellectual artistic response arising in post-fascist societies. Absolutely, in a British expressed sexuality symbol. I agree. I mean, I think I see a similar thing between some of the German and later Spanish, especially post-Franco. I presume you alluding to post-Franco, not sure here.
Q: William, what was Lenny Reffenstein do post-war?
A: Well, as I mentioned in the talk about Reffenstein was that she could not get funding for any film afterwards. Some individuals try to, but either too much societal pressure or couldn’t get funding. So she spent her time in photography and she went to parts of Africa and filmed there some of the rituals and experiences, you know, living in quite rural areas in Africa and took photographs, but she couldn’t go back to making films.
David, although the guy who directed Eutsis, you know, one of the most evil films made, Heit Vital, he did go back. He was able to direct again.
Q: David, what was the name of Fassbinder’s first film?
A: That was Fear Eats The Soul by Fassbinder.
Rita, thanks. Very appreciate it.
Fear Eats the Soul. Again, an obvious metaphor for, you know, all these underneath prejudice lies fear, which is really what Fassbinder’s trying to say. And there’s a little speech in the beginning fairly early on in the film where the Moroccan Arab character actually talks about fear eats the soul, you know, as a fairly well known phrase. But underneath prejudice it’s fear, which of course eats the soul.
Q: Carol, thank you so much. I saw all these films that were so outstanding. Is the German film industry producing any newer?
A: Well, I haven’t seen that many lately in the last eight, 10 years. Certainly post-Covid or even pre-Covid, perhaps there are many that come to the same idea. I think these guys were so obsessed with struggling to understand from their outsider position, struggling to understand their own parents and grandparents generation of the war and history, all these big themes. I think they were obsessed in a way that they had to tell the stories. And I’m not sure if that same level of obsession exists today. Even looking at post East Germany and West Germany post the fall of communism.
Sheila, thank you. Rubbers made from the sap of trees. Thanks so much, Sheila. Appreciate.
Sam, thinking of Zoba’s Hill Line. Yeah, absolutely.
Q: Barbara, thank you. Have you read Modern Day novel, Bel Kenter?
A: No, I haven’t. But I have read quite a bit of Elfriede Jelinek who is a brilliant, she is a brilliant Austrian Jewish novelist who won the Nobel Prize. And she looks at the same themes in a ruthlessly vicious and sexual way through families in Austria post-war living a little bit later, the eight more, the eighties, nineties, compared to these guys. Monty’s documentary about the tumultuous relationship, yeah, between Herzog and Kinsky. He was absolutely volatile. His daughter, Natasha Kinsky, who’s the main actress, one of the main actresses in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas.
Yes. And Herzog kept trying to get Kinsky to not act outrageous and over gestural, to exaggerate it. He kept trying to get him to tone it down, tone it down, you know, the more subtle, the more the madness will come across. There was a bit conflict between the two.
Q: Romane, did they all explore the irony of power?
A: Yes. They all looked at power and authoritarianism in love relationships, in family, and then for Herzog in the big grandiose mythical stories of history.
Sandra Eitz, took a class in documentary making. Told that a documentary should have suspense and a domain like fiction. Absolutely. I mean, anybody who denies that documentary is made with the techniques, the film techniques of fiction is out of touch. The techniques of film make… In the essence, ultimately a storytelling. And storytelling is the essence of documentary and fiction and the techniques of storytelling are used in documentary, absolutely. And some of the techniques from documentary come into the storytelling and fiction. So storytelling and character is the overlap and how we see the two, you know, there are not and never can be or have been two kind of purest genres. You know, they constantly overlap each other and that’s what Herzog completely understood in the making of his films.
Sorry, Wim Wenders. Okay. It’s Rita. Natasha Kinsky is still very much alive. Yeah.
Q: Lorna, is something violent?
A: Yes. I mean the violence is all there and I mean, not only, I mean making films about human nature, but again, let’s give the context of post-war, a couple of decades after the war. And these individuals are born towards the end of the war, except Schlondorff is a bit earlier. So they can’t ignore that at all in their society.
Gita, I agree about Stripe Pyjamas. Well, instead of banishing it, I would like it to, if it could be discussed to show, you know, in analysing film or theatre or novels, who is the victim character? Who is the victim and who is the forgiver, the saviour, if you like, character. And it’s a problem for me of how we position the victim and the perpetrator. Who is the victim in a film. And that’s at the core of looking at something like Stripe Pyjamas, and an educational analysis of that would be crucial to contrast to show that and another film, perhaps.
Q: Jill, was he influenced by Douglass Zirk?
A: Yes, exactly.
In Fear Eats The Soul. And the use of colour, yes. And those shots always through frames. Fassbinder would often use frame, ‘cause he’s trying to show different levels of reality. So, you know, through which lens are we seeing it? Even those three neighbours up on the stairs, they’re like a frame. He’s framing all the time because he is looking at the image and the reality of who they really are.
Nina, Netflix is showing a satirical series documentary now, which includes a hilarious tale, oh, on Herzog directing Kinsky. Yeah, fantastic. That’s great. That’s great. Thank you. I mean, Kinsky on the one level, the tabloid response was that he’s nuts, but he’s not, you know. He’s just got a highly exaggerated, highly outgoing personality, and all he’d wanted to act over the top what we would call over the top, you know, but Herzog constantly bringing him down.
Q: Was a revelation of Grass’ Nazi past come after his Nobel Prize?
A: Yes, I think it did if I remember. I need to check that exactly. And you know, I think what all of these guys are saying, because they were born in the forties. They’re born in the forties, except Schlondorff in the thirties. But you know, none of them are, don’t even have a past like Gunter Grass. But their parents and their parents and their grandparents generation absolutely are. So that’s the difference. Looking at it from their lens. Jean, thank you.
The Austrian Jewish writer, her name was Elfriede Jelinek. J-E-L-I-N-E-K. And the great novel that she’s known for is called Lust, but she won the Nobel Prize for that and others.
Thanks, Daniella. I’ve been practically, all the films, so very, okay. Thank you. And I try to bring it exactly as you said, Daniella. into a contemporary look because I do think that we are obsessed now. And rightly so in our times with memory, history, the past, documentary, how to tell the stories of so many kinds, Holocaust and many other things, obviously coming out of the Germany focus we’ve been looking at the last three months through lockdown and that Trudy has been fantastically looking at, and William and others. As we come out of it, how do we, you know, grapple with it? Because when questions of identity are so in, you know, are literally like clashing in the night and day all the time. It’s a search for a way of how to tell the stories of our own times using memory, using the past, history.
Okay. Thank you so much. Thanks Emily again, and hope everybody has a great rest of the weekend.