Show [fill in the blank] the money!

The German Film Awards were handed out on Friday and there were no surprises. Good bye, Lenin!, a film for which the term "bittersweet" seems to have been coined in the first place, swept up seven Lolas (yes, they bear probably the most resonant name in German film history). Reuters's coverage is amusing and undoubtedly confusing to those who don't know how the German film industry is structured. On the one hand, the GFAs are described as "the world's most lucrative film competition" with a total of $3.4 million given to the winners, but on the other hand, they're "Germany's equivalent of the Oscars."

But of course, besides a mighty box office boost an Oscar can bring, the Academy does not award checks along with its gold-plated statues. So what is that $3.4 million all about then? As it happens, that's currently the subject of a lively debate that seems to be pitting Germany's federal minister of culture, Christina Weiss, against just about everybody in the German film industry. The Deutscher Filmpreis is, first and foremost, a form of government subsidy for the arts. Not the only one, but for film, the major one. It's only relatively recently that the awards ceremony has evolved into a red carpet affair. But the awards themselves, that is, the cash, are meant to subsidize future projects.

So, for example, the 500,000 euros for Best Film that went to Stefan Arndt and X-Filme for producing Good bye, Lenin! are supposed to be applied to the next project; same with the considerably more modest financial reward, 10,000 euros for Best Direction, that went to Wolfgang Becker. You can easily imagine the question cineastes and artistes have been raising for years: Doesn't this system reward those who are already successful and pass over those who really need the help?

It's a question that will only be asked with greater intensity as new rules for qualifying for subsidies have been drawn up by Weiss and her ministry. It'll be tougher. A film will have to score points by being invited to film festivals (and not just any festivals, but A-level festivals, Cannes, Berlin, Venice), and what's more, those points will only count if the film has sold 50,000 tickets. It gets much more complicated and terribly German, but I'll spare you. The gist is, as Katja Nicodemus points out in Die Zeit, two of the films up for awards this year, Züli Aladag's Elefantenherz and Eoin Moore's Pigs will fly, wouldn't qualify under the new system, despite the fact that they've both been critically lauded and have both found substantial audiences relative to their low, low budgets.

Daniel Brühl in Good bye, Lenin! He won best actor for this performance and for Elefantenherz as well.

To be fair to Weiss, though, she does have her reasons. The current system is partly a result of the government's having thrown money for years, particularly in the 80s, at auteur-riffic films no one ever saw or wanted to see. But the main line of reasoning has to do with the extreme crisis the German economy as a whole is currently floundering in and the enormous debts the government is facing. In short, Weiss has been assigned the task of coming up with a system that pays for itself. Not directly, of course. But her plans to shift funding away from production and more towards marketing denote the outline of the overall scheme: Make German films more popular around the world, creating a demand which will then lead to more production, more jobs and so on.

In other words: Don't dangle art out there and expect the world to bite. Instead, create an economically viable environment in which to cultivate art. It's that old dilemma about art and money all over again: Which is the cart and which is the horse?



Posted by dwhudson at June 8, 2003 7:49 AM