German Cinema since 2000 – PGR workshop & training event

30 November 2009, University of Leeds

Chris Homewood (c.j.homewood@leeds.ac.uk)

TRAVEL

- For those flying into Leeds Bradford Airport:

BUS
Metroconnect 757 provides a direct bus service to/from Leeds, serving Leeds bus and train stations, Kirkstall, Horsforth, Rawdon, Pool and Otley. 
Click here for a timetable

TAXI

Arrow Private Hire taxis are available at LBIA by pre-booking at the office located in the International Arrivals area, or online by clicking arrowprivatehire.co.uk

Arrow Private Hire: +44 (0) 113 258 5888

The on-site booking office at the airport is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

- For those arriving by train

There is a reliable taxi rank immediately outside of the main entrance of the station. The hotel will be able to book you a taxi for your return to the station.

NB: Leeds station now operates a barrier system, so you will need your tickets to get off and then back on to the platform

Accommodation

If you need to stay overnight we recommend the Hotel Ibis Leeds. The website for the hotel (including an area map) is: http://www.ibishotel.com/gb/hotel-3652-ibis-leeds-centre/index.shtml

Workshop venue for 30 November

The workshop will be held at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lhri/), 29-31 Clarendon Place on the main University campus: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/campus_map/

Tea/coffee and lunch will be provided. The room we are using also has a small kitchen attached.

Workshop Programme

10:30 – 11:25: TEA & COFFEE

11:30:

Andrew Wormald

'Constructing Consensus: teamWorx's TV Event Movies Dresden (2006) and Nicht alle waren Mörder (2006)

12:00:

Helen Wright

The Berlin School and the Film Festival Aesthetic

12:30: Elena Caoduro

Revolution Begins in the Wardrobe: Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex as Vintage Film

13:00 -14:30: LUNCH

14:30:

Klemens Czyzydlo

Transnational Autorenkino - Tom Tykwer's Heaven (2002)

15:00:

Brian Hanrahan

Violently Satirical: The Films of Jan Henrik Stahlberg and Marcus Mittermeier as Political Cinema

15:30 – 16:30:

Dr Stephanie Dennison & Dr Chris Homewood

HOW TO GET PUBLISHED

Abstracts

Andrew Wormald

Constructing Consensus: teamWorx’s TV Event Movies Dresden (2006) and Nicht alle waren Mörder (2006)

Since the production company teamWorx was founded in 1998, it has become one of the most important in contemporary Germany, responsible for a wave of so-called ‘TV Event Movies’ focused mostly on historical themes, from National Socialism to the GDR past. As such, their productions are, thematically, a world away from the romantic comedies criticised by Rentschler in his seminal article on the ‘cinema of consensus’. However, teamWorx unashamedly chase as large an audience as possible and are not afraid to use conventions of populist cinema in doing so. In this paper I shall investigate, using two TV Event Movies on the subject of the Nazi past, Dresden and Nicht alle waren Mörder, to what extent teamWorx’s films conform to Rentschler’s cinema of consensus.

In some respects teamWorx’s films appear typical of the cinema of consensus described by Rentschler. The company wants to “engross and accommodate” and is not shy of chasing audiences, using high-profile advertising campaigns to create a hype around their TV Event Movies, defined as “Programme, über die Deutschland mehrere Tage spricht.” Similarly, teamWorx certainly “believe in Spielberg”, using Spielberg’s production company DreamWorks as a model and undisputedly look to Hollywood for inspiration. The two films I have chosen as typical of the teamWorx canon both unabashedly use numerous conventions of Hollywood genres, in terms of their style, appearance and narrative structures.

Rentschler’s criticism of the cinema of consensus for ‘skirting large topics’, however, cannot readily be applied to teamWorx’s historical features. The company is well-known for portraying and attempting to ‘come to terms’ with difficult pasts in its productions, priding themselves on their ability to communicate historical reality and promote understanding of the past. Both Dresden and Nicht alle waren Mörder can be seen to be influenced by the current debate on the representation of German victimhood, for example. teamWorx are making waves outside of Germany, something which the ‘cinema of consensus’ never achieved and, contrary to that cinema’s ‘lack of national voice’, teamWorx are proud their productions transmit an image of Germany which is comfortable with its past.

It will be necessary here to re-evaluate the concept of consensus and, in the context of teamWorx’s films, reveal it as an artificial construct. On the one hand it may appear that teamWorx are using mass entertainment features, shared with the cinema of consensus, to illuminate German histories and bring these large topics to as wide an audience as possible, forging a synthesis between art and ratings, between populist cinema and Vergangenheitsbewältigung. On the other hand, however, it can be argued that teamWorx treats complex histories as a source of raw material for its melodramatic, conventional narratives; exploiting the Nazi past, not out of any desire to come to terms with this past, but merely to gain a bigger audience. Finally it must be questioned whether this dichotomy can ever truly be resolved and, in the context of film production in contemporary Germany, whether a film can ever completely avoid elements of the cinema of consensus.

Helen Wright

The Berlin School and the Film Festival Aesthetic

This paper will consider the transnational aesthetic of the Berlin School films produced since 2000. It will be posited that the films under discussion epitomise the film festival style which is common to productions competing and exhibiting on the world’s festival circuit. This style is defined by psychologically-driven characters, long takes, wide framings, sparse dialogue, and a contemplative atmosphere combined with inconclusive narratives. Cinephiliac referencing of big name European directors of the 20^th century are also a common feature.

It will be argued that the presence of such an aesthetic precludes a description of the films as specifically German. In line with Thomas Elsaesser’s (2005) “impersoNation” labelling of more popular European cinemas, the content of the Berlin School films, which is sometimes considered representative of German society or culture, provides merely a national sheen useful for generating interest at film festivals. Discourses surrounding the latter largely group films according to their nationality whereby provision of a window onto another culture is required for auteur status to be inferred on individual directors (Nichols, 1994). The auteur classification is therefore necessarily accompanied by a national one, as represented, for example, by the nouvelle vague Allemande tag applied to the Berlin School films by French critics.

The resulting conservatism of style and content challenges the claim that these productions constitute a German counter-cinema, as asserted by Abel (2008) amongst others. Whilst not hugely successful financially, the films rely on recognition, alongside the possibility of international sales, at film festivals to justify both their continued funding and their designation as an artistic aggregation. The commercialisation of the major festivals, which have become primarily market places and events designed to attract tourists as opposed to the nationalistic, politicised institutions of the past (see Lloyd, 2008 and Iordanova and Rhyne, 2009), has accompanied reduced formal experimentation and a loss of films as social critique. The Berlin School films embody one example of this.

Through textual analysis of a selection of films, I will define and identify the film festival style and show how cultural and social elements in the films are muted as a consequence of the transnational element. National specificity, where it is in evidence, will be considered as a form of branding rather than anything essentially or constructively ‘German’. Films to be examined include, for example, Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (2003), in which a Hansel and Gretel motif designates Germanic origin, and Die innere Sicherheit (Petzold, 2000), whose heroine attends a screening of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), creating a forced reference to an event associated with German history.

It will thus be argued that a transnational aesthetic is dominant in the Berlin School productions. This development coincides with a neutering of social critique on the part of Germany’s foremost art house filmmakers. These films are consequently found lacking as an answer to Rentschler’s Cinema of Consensus and are locatable as an alternative but unoriginal aesthetic for cinephiliacs and festival goers rather than a counter-cultural movement.

Elena Caoduro

Revolution begins in the wardrobe. Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex as vintage film

With the friendly-user formula of action movies, the vast profusion of well-known actors and its iconic mise-en-scène, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel, 2008) presents as a middlebrow biopic that seeks to please the popular tastes rather than educate and instil some deep questions in the audience.

Uli Edel’s film about the tragically famous guerrilla group Red Army Faction, RAF, seems to adhere to the canon of “Cinema of Consensus”[1] (Rentschler, 2000), which referred to the post-wall first decade of German Cinema. Compared to the other films about terrorism and political violence by filmmakers of the New German Cinema, among others Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, Margarethe von Trotta, 1981) and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The lost honour of Katharina Blum, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975) - the case study taken under consideration opts for less politically committed forms, which could satisfy a variegated and young audience instead of investigating with a more critical touch the decade that put Germany on the brink of a social meltdown.

Although particular attention is paid to crude violence and the atrocities perpetrated by this group of terrorists, since the beginning of the film the audience is prone to align with the protagonists, seen as victims of an unjust regime, beaten by policemen and with limited civil rights. At the end, however, it emerges a contrasting image of brutal criminals but at the same time, stylish youth icons.

If history reproduces first as tragedy, and then as fashion, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex shows the RAF terrorists as pop icons, generational myths, whose identities are defined not only on political ideas, language but also costumes. On the one hand, the adoption of a glamorous style shifts the attention from political inquiry to mere entertainment; on the other hand, it is also symptomatic of a revival culture based on videoclips and prosthetic memories of television images and advertisement.

The proposed paper aims to investigate the relationship between costumes, identity and memory in Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex drawing on studies of fashion, popular culture and society such as those by Susan Sontag, Stella Bruzzi, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Vintage differentiates from other fashion related notions, like kitsch, camp, trash and it indicates the recuperation of old styles, which are considered beautiful because they appear at the right time. Vintage is therefore à la page. The concept is useful here to comprehend the success of this myth-centric version of history close to fashion style. Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex reflects the emotional power of memory united with the pervasive nature of media and it results in a distorted perception of the past driven by mediated memories.

Klemens Czyzydlo

Transnational Autorenkino: Tom Tykwer’ Heaven (2002)

Tykwer’s first film made outside Germany, Heaven (2002) is a particularly revealing example of what could be described as ‘transnational Autorenkino’: a tendency among German directors to make movies in multinational co-productions and in foreign languages, yet, in various ways continuing and developing the tradition of German Autorenfilm, be it on the level of themes and motifs, or aesthetics and style. In the case of Heaven (2002), both aspects in focus – transnationalism and Autor – are particularly strongly pronounced, thus making the film representative of the phenomenon under discussion.

Combining the names of Tom Tykwer and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski who authored the script, like few other films made recently, Heaven is practically built around the concept of auteurism. When analyzing numerous reviews of the film, one is struck by the impression that Cate Blanchett might not have been the actual star of the movie, rather, Kieslowski and Tykwer were. The film was produced by Harvey Weinstein, the chief of Miramax, who earlier successfully introduced Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colours Trilogy’ (Blue, White and Red, 1993-1994) in the US, and was widely credited with securing Kieslowski’s Academy Award nomination for Red (1994). From the outset, Heaven was planned as an auteurist production joining the names of Kieslowski and Tykwer, the latter at the peak of his popularity in the US and worldwide after the 1999 success of Lola rennt (1998) at the Sundance Film Festival, and widely recognized as a German Autorenfilmer of the post-unification generation. The intention to capitalize on the popularity of Kieslowski and Tykwer would confirm Timothy Corrigan’s thesis of the recent ‘commerce of auteurism’ and the use of the auteur concept as a means of marketing (Corrigan 2003).

The strongly pronounced transnational dimension of the film attracted a lot of media attention too. In an article published by the Variety magazine in 2000, the project was described as an ultimate international co-production. Written by the Polish director Kieslowski and his collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Heaven stars an Australian Cate Blanchett and an Italian-American Giovanni Ribisi in the main roles, as well as Italian actors in secondary roles. Shot on location in Italy by a predominantly German crew led by Tykwer, the film has English and Italian dialogues.

My paper starts with a brief description of the production circumstances of Heaven, followed by an analysis of the film’s engagement with the Autorenfilm tradition in a transnational context. In Heaven, Tykwer develops his aesthetic approach which blends romantic fantasies and postmodern distance, here with a clear dominance of the former. As such, Tykwer’s film can be seen as continuing the romantic, ‘sensibilist’ tradition of Autorenkino, associated mainly with Herzog, Wenders, Achternbusch and Schroeter (see Elsaesser 1989). In my paper I examine the film’s visual style and its celebration of nature landscapes, with compositions and motifs strongly influenced by German romantic painting. Moreover, I argue that Heaven, while seeking to create a ‘transnational appeal’ (Haase 2007) represents a ‘recognisably German tradition (…) of Romantic anti-capitalism’ (Elsaesser 1989), portraying capitalism as a destructive force and juxtaposing it with a romantic vision of nature. Finally, Tykwer’s film revives an important motif of the New German Cinema Autorenfilm, that of (urban) terrorism. I compare Heaven with Deutschland im Herbst (1978), showing how Tykwer portrays terrorism as an abstract, moral problem, avoiding to place it in a specific historical and political context.

Brían Hanrahan

Violently Satirical: The Films of Jan Henrik Stahlberg and Marcus Mittermeier as Political Cinema

My paper examines the bleak, violently satirical comedies of Jan Henrik Stahlberg and Marcus Mittermeier,[2] investigating their critique of and broader relationship to contemporary political, media and visual culture. In Muxmäuschenstill (2004), Bye Bye Berlusconi (2006) and Short Cut to Hollywood (2009), Stahlberg and Mittermeier engage with this culture, not only through narrative thematization, but also via the astute promotional strategies surrounding their films, which have manipulated television, press and Internet in increasingly elaborate hoaxes and modes of guerrilla marketing. The films are not easily placed within emerging categories of “post-2000” German cinema. Located on the border between popular and art cinema, they differ from the recent wave of “historical films” in their emphatically concern with the present. They do not share, however, the Berlin School’s aesthetic ambitions, nor its fetishization of the cinematic image as a manifestation of the specific and the local.

While Stahlberg’s and Mittermeier’s work has garnered some attention and acclaim – in particular Muxmäuschenstill, winner of the 2004 Max-Ophüls Prize, their films deserve more critical scrutiny than they have hitherto received. I argue that these films are exemplary works of contemporary political cinema, not only in their conscious thematic concerns but in the way they are pervaded with uncertainty and unresolved tension. I argue that the films exhibit a fundamental ambivalence: towards the media culture they both satirize and manipulate, towards contemporary political phenomena, and ultimately towards their own project. Arguably stemming from a critique removed from any outlet or agency, this ambivalence lends the films their characteristic affect of unresolved and narcissistic rage. Hovering between fascination and repugnance towards the phenomena they satirize, it is no coincidence that their central characters (played by Stahlberg) often die in cathartic moments of self-destructive violence. (Short Cut to Hollywood features the hero’s auto-dismemberment, performed to secure reality-television time and thus affirm his own existence.)

More generally, I make the case that the films’ acutely polemical take on the immediate present make them a good starting point from which to address broader questions of contemporary German and European cinema and politics: the relation of cinema to the proliferating media and visual culture which surrounds and arguably overwhelms it, the nature of political cinema within that changing landscape, as well as, more narrowly, the relation of the film-text to its paratextual and performative penumbra of publicity stunts, marketing materials and supplementary images.

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[1] Rentschler, Eric. 2000. “From new German cinema to the post-wall cinema of consensus”. In Cinema and Nation, eds Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 260-277. London and New York: Routledge.

[2] For brevity, I here refer to these films as the work of both. In fact, each has a slightly different configuration of collaboration: Stahlberg wrote and starred in Muxmäuschenstill, with Mittermeier directing; Stahlberg wrote, directed and acted in Bye Bye Berlusconi; Short Cut to Hollywood was written by both, directed by Mittermeier and features both as actors.