German cinema: a historical overview of origins to the present day.

German cinema: a historical overview of origins to the present day

1- PRESENTATION

Before the First World War, Germany had a significant film industry, with its researchers (Oskar Messter), his personalities often come from the theater (Max Reinhardt, Paul Wegener), his technicians and stars borrowed from Denmark, as the actress Asta Nielsen.

2- THE TIME OF THE MUTE

During the mute period, Paul Wegener produced feature films whose themes were drawn from nineteenth-century German fantasy literature: the Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag, 1913) and the Golem (Der Golem, 1914), after the novel by Gustav Meyrink, whose director signed a new version in 1920, in collaboration with Carl Boese. The fundamental theme of the film, transposition of an ancient Jewish legend, is the revolt of the creature against the demiurge. At the end of the First World War, Ernst Lubitsch became one of the leading German filmmakers with his comedies and historical dramas. Immediately after the war, some films were largely influenced by the expressionism of painting and theater: the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene (1919). These films remained without any real posterity, the main filmmakers, such as FW Murnau, Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1926), and EA Dupont, Lupu-Pick, GW Pabst, developed their own style. The prestige of German cinema in the 1920s was so great that Hollywood took away several stars (Pola Negri, Emil Jannings) and directors (Lubitsch, Buchowetzki, Dupont, Murnau). Parallel to production of diversified and conquering fiction films, documentary filmmakers laid the foundations of a realistic cinema that produced, in 1930, the Men on Sunday, and several "proletarian" films engaged while experimenters were working on the editing cinema (Walter Ruttmann) and an animated cinema poured into abstraction.

3 -THE GERMAN PARLING CINEMA

With the advent of the Talks whose first success was Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel, 1930), we witnessed the emergence of daring realizations, taking advantage of the use of sound, especially with Fritz Lang (M the Cursed, 1931), GW Pabst (the Tragedy of the mine, Kameradschaft, 1931), Ludwig Berger (Me the day, you the night, Ich Bei Tag und of the Nacht, 1932) and Max Ophüls (Liebelei, 1932). Good musicals were also performed at the confluence of the Viennese operetta (Congress fun, Der Kongress tanzt, by Erik Cherell, 1931) and the song of varieties (The Way of Paradise, Die Drei von Tankstelle, Wilhelm Thiele, 1930), filmed in several languages ​​with actress Lilian Harvey.

In the thirties, we continued to produce about 130 films a year. With the rise of National Socialism, Jews were excluded from the economy, and of course from the cinema. Many emigrated as well as many filmmakers and actors opposed to Nazism: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Max Ophüls, Erich Pommer, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Körtner, Peter Lorre, GW Pabst, William Wilhelm Thiele, Wilhelm Dieterle, Curt Bernhardt, Friedrich Holländer, Eugen Schüftan, Otto Preminger and many others, who found themselves in Hollywood, where they had various fortunes. The film industry came under the direct control of the Minister of Information and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who was interested both in the artistic aspect of cinema and its potential for propaganda. The control of the content of a film was practiced before the realization. Mobilized by the project of building a powerful Traumfabrik (dream factory) in Germany, Nazi policy limited direct propaganda in feature-length fiction and reserved it for news and documentaries, including Leni Riefenstahl's film on the Nazi Congress. of Nuremberg (the Triumph of Will, Triumph of the Willens, 1935) and the famous anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude, 1940). The new leaders commissioned explicitly Nazi fiction films, such as SA Mann Brand (1933) and Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), favored "patriotic" war films and nationalist, sometimes anti-British films (films about Jeanne d ' Arc or the South African Boers) or anti-French (films about the Napoleonic era and the glory of Prussia) and of course anti-Semitic films (the Rothschilds, 1940, or the Jew Süss, 1940), anti-Communist ( Wiesse Sklave, 1936) and anti-Soviet (Guépéou, 1942). In 1941, Ich klage an ("J'accuse") justified euthanasia when decisions were made to eliminate "degenerates" and "associates".

It was the era of formal academicism reinforced by a totalitarian power. Those who tried to circumvent the guidelines, like Reinhold Schünzel (though Jewish, he was protected by the success of his comedies), were forced to start, as well as Detlef Sierck (the future Douglas Sirk), who had distinguished himself in the novelist La Habanera (1938), and Franck Wisbar, author of a good film in 1936 (Fährmann Maria). Some important post-war filmmakers began under the Nazi regime: Helmut Kaütner, Wolfgang Staudte, and Harald Braun.

After the war, Germany was divided into two sectors of military occupation, which became two separate states until 1990. The film industry then had many new small companies formed in West Germany, and a single corporation DEFA, the heiress of most of the Berlin installations of the former UFA (Babelsberg studios), in East Germany, under the communist government. It was in the Soviet occupation zone that film production resumed, especially with The Assassins Are Among Us, by Wolfgang Staudte (1946). In the West, producer Erich Pommer returned to Germany without much success, like Peter Lorre, who only directed one film, Der Verlorene (1951). In the East, a cinema under close political control showed strong technical and professional qualities: films by Wolfgang Staudte (moved to the West in 1955, where he continued to practice a very critical realism), Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Franck Beyer. But censorship, which banned a dozen films in a new tone in 1965-1966, prevented this production from being renovated before the last years of the system.

In the West a very commercial production, with conventional war films (many of which were committed to clearing the German army of Nazi crimes) and reactionary rural romances ("Heimatfilme"), conferred a mediocre international reputation on German cinema, which however, it exported many actors (Curd Jürgens, Hildegard Kneff, Lilli Palmer, Romy Schneider, Nadja Tiller, Hardy Kruger, Klaus Kinski, etc.). The crisis was right at the beginning of the sixties of this traditional production to which hardly escaped that the films of Staudte, Kaütner, Franck Wisbar, Bernhard Wicki.

It was then that young filmmakers who produced only short films and documentaries obtained reforms aimed at renewing the framework of a dying creation and production, in particular, the "Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film" ( Young German Cinema Committee), created in 1965. The films Anita G (Abschied von Gestern, 1966), Alexander Kluge, Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen, 1967) by Werner Herzog, the Disorders of the student Törless ( Der Junge Törless, 1966) by Volker Schlöndorff, Unreconciled (Nicht Versöhnt, 1965), by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The style of these films, relatively influenced by the films of the French New Wave, was appreciated in many countries and allowed many other filmmakers to be recognized in turn: Edgar Reitz, Peter Fleischmann, HW Geissendörfer.

The years 1968-1984 were a very fruitful period for quality German cinema. This is the great era of auteur cinema, where Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Werner Schroeter, Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Theodor Kotulla, Herbert Achternbusch, and many others were revealed: a set of very diverse personalities who have given great cultural prestige to their country and whose greatest commercial successes are in 1978-1982 with the Tambour, Schlöndorff, several films of Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog, and the Boat, Wolfgang Petersen, whose more classic qualities favored the career in the United States (unlike Wenders who failed with Hammett, but succeeds independently with Paris, Texas).

The German reunification allowed former GDR filmmakers to shoot previously banned subjects, but this new blood only very temporarily awakened an auteur cinema which, in the West, sought, and still desperately seeks new life. Despite the young filmmakers who manage to make an often interesting first film, Germany's own production structures and their endemic weakness in a national market crushed by American cinema only succeed in obtaining commercial results with comedies that are not very exportable. : films by Doris Dörrie, Sönke Wortman and Helmut Dietl, while expatriate filmmakers in the United States only work in conventional production.