Directory of World Cinema: Germany

Michelle Langford

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841504650
• eBook ISBN: 9781841505824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From bleak expressionist works to the edgy political works of the New German Cinema to the feel-good Heimat films of the postwar era, Directory of World Cinema: Germany aims to offer a wider film and cultural context for the films that have emerged from Germany—including some of the East German films recently made available to Western audiences for the first time. With contributions by leading academics and emerging scholars in the field, this volume explores the key directors, themes, and periods in German film history, and demonstrates how genres have been adapted over time to fit historical circumstances. Rounding out this addition to the Directory of World Cinema series are fifty full-color stills, numerous reviews and recommendations, and a comprehensive filmography.

Left: Lola and Billy the Kid, Boje Buck Produktion/ Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)/Zero Film GmbH.

Queer cinema was born in Germany in 1919 with the production of Different from the Others (dir. Richard Oswald), a politico-educational film appealing to both homosexuals and a society that rejected them. While other nations consider their early examples of cinema focusing upon unambiguously queer characters to have begun in the 1970s and 1980s, early German examples of queer-oriented texts – such as Different, Michael (Dreyer 1924), Gesetze der Liebe (Hirschfeld and Oswald 1927), Sex in Chains (Dieterle, 1928) and Girls in Uniform (Sagan and Froelich, 1931) – emerged much earlier. As B. Ruby Rich attests, Girls in Uniform is the film ‘most central to establishing a history of lesbian cinema’ (1981: 44–50), and similar statements can certainly be made for the other films named here.

As the years progressed, and excepting the years of the Third Reich, Germany continued to lead the world in the production of films featuring queer characters and relationships. As the 1970s dawned, queer auteurs such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Rosa von Praunheim broke new ground. Each of these directors were unapologetic in their engagement with queer characters and politics, as can clearly be seen in the provocative title of von Praunheim’s It is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives (1971), a film advocating visibility politics. Several of Fassbinder’s films, such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and Querelle (1982), feature complicated and dark queer relationships, and can perhaps be seen as the precursor to the new queer cinema movement that emerged in the United States in the 1990s.

Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1978) also gained significant critical attention, likewise thematizing power relations within the context of a queer, postmodern pirate film. Another important queer German film from the 1970s is The Consequence (Petersen, 1977). This work depicted the dire consequences of homophobia, adapted from an autobiographical novel by schoolteacher Alexander Ziegler.

The 1980s saw expansion upon such representations, with films such as Taxi zum Klo (Ripploh, 1981) providing an examination of the queer life of the period. Berlin Blues (1983) saw von Praunheim continue his innovations with an avant-garde queer musical. Also directed by von Praunheim, A Virus Has No Morals (1986) engaged with the pressing issue of HIV/AIDS. Avoiding the melodrama of later films engaging with the subject, von Praunheim’s work is experimental, political and strangely prophetic.

Celebrated German film-maker Werner Schroeter’s film The Rose King (1986), like the work of Schroeter’s compatriots, depicts a queer love riddled with sadism and symbolism. During the same period the work of auteur Monika Treut first came to public attention with Seduction: the Cruel Woman (with Elfi Mikesch, 1985), Virgin Machine (1988) and My Father is Coming (1991). In these films Treut explores the terrain of sexual/gendered fluidity and sadomasochism, encouraged no doubt by the contemporaneous sex wars, and ‘variously discover[s] new ways of expressing how multi-centred realities can be,’ challenging ‘static views of identity alignment’ (Kuzniar 2000: 159). Treut’s transnational settings and address assisted in bringing diverse international audiences to her work, highlighting the popularity of co-production and diverse settings that increased in later work by German film-makers focusing on queer issues.

A key theme emerging in queer German cinema has been that of re-envisioning the past lives of Germany’s homosexuals. Films such as November Moon (von Grote, 1985) and Aimee & Jaguar (Färberböck, 1999) are both set during the tumultuous period of the Second World War. Farberbock’s interpretation of Lily Wurst’s autobiographical story is framed as an aesthetically beautiful romance despite its negative outcome, and the film gained significant international popularity. Both Aimee and November Moon feature Jewish lesbian characters, acknowledging the fear and suffering of multiple German minority communities during this period, and recognizing the differential positions of lesbians and gay men during Nazi rule.

Colonel Redl (Szabó, 1985), a German/Hungarian/Austrian co-production, also took up such themes, with its narrative based on the true story of a homosexual officer blackmailed on the basis of his sexuality. Legend of Rita (Schlöndorff, 2000) engages in representing lesbian relationships, likewise within a particular historical context – in this case featuring a character from within the Movement 2 June, a terrorist movement of the 1970s allied with the Red Army Faction. Other films, such as Gallant Girls (Teufel, 2002), depict a past of feminist communes and the situational feminist lesbianism that arose in such environments; while von Praunheim’s The Einstein of Sex (1999) re-envisioned the life of Magnus Hirschfeld and his associates, bringing to the screen a slice of queer history frequently overlooked.

A dark world for queer characters is depicted in such films as Coming Out (Carow, 1989), made in the former East Germany, which explores a gay schoolteacher’s journey toward self-identification; while the period film Love in Thoughts (von Borries, 2004) also featured an angst fuelled narrative based on real-life murders. Oi! Warning (Ben Reding and Dominik Reding 1999), in contrast, was set in contemporary times, depicting a world of skinheads, punks, and violence.

As of the late 1990s various examples of queer German cinema began to emerge, with a sophisticated understanding of queer identity as intersectional with issues of race and nationality. The work of Angelina Maccarone, whose film career began with the made-for-television Kommt Mausi Raus?! (with Scherer, 1995), featured such characterisations in her later works Everything Will Be Fine (1998) and Unveiled (2005). The latter’s engagement with the difficulties faced by an immigrant living illegally in Germany is likewise explored in Kleine Frieheit (Yavuz, 2003).

Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) brought into focus representations of Turkish-German queer identities, an engagement continued in Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007). The sexual and racial identities of the protagonist of Return to Go (Sanoussi-Bliss, 2000) are further complicated by his HIV-positive status. The characters in these films engage not only with a world hostile to their queer identities, but one in which the characters’ very status as Germans is rejected by racist elements of a predominantly white society.

In Ghosted (2009), Treut takes queer border crossing to a new level in her film set in both Taipei and Hamburg, with a tale that unhinges the boundaries between life and death. Each of these films represent a new age of queer cinema, where sexuality is not the primary ‘issue’ of the film, and border crossing is further developed as a theme. This is the case too with such films as 4 Minutes (2006), where sexuality takes a secondary role to incarceration, both literal and metaphoric, and performance is used as a motif of queerness, as is argued here by Mueller.

Along with such independent work, and in keeping with contemporary movements in queer-focused cinema from around the world, German film also moved towards genre film in such films as Rolf Silber’s Regular Guys (1996), which engaged with the discovery of attraction and romance from within a hybridized form of the crime genre. Killer Condom (Walz, 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: German Cinema and the Vicissitudes of History
• Film Pioneers
• Festival Focus
• Scoring Cinema
• Fantastic Film
• Adventure Film
• Der Heimatfilm
• Comedy
• Foreigners and Guest-workers
• Queer German Cinema
• Vergangenheitsbewältigung
• Rubble Film
• War Film
• Historical Drama
• Political Drama
• The Berlin Wall
• Recommended Reading
• Online Resources
• Test Your Knowledge
• Notes on Contributors
• Filmography