Germans. Films. Awards.

The German Film Awards were given out last night, but before I sort through the names and numbers, let me push along the slow but sure leaking of what, up to right about now, has been one of the better-kept secrets in cinema: the Germans are making some of the best films around these days. German cinema is now healthier and livelier than it has been since the advent of the so-called "New German Cinema" of the late 70s and early 80s. True, if you held the Cannes competition lineup as the ultimate guide to the best and brightest in international film, you'd have no idea. But Cannes is (in)famous for snubbing the Germans every year as it has snubbed - with the exception of a single film, Lou Ye's Summer Palace - all of Asia this year.

Besides the films themselves, what's most remarkable about the current state of German cinema is that the German press is celebrating it. Remarkable, because German critics have usually been exceedingly hard on German films, almost as a matter of course. If Robert Hughes's debatable tag "culture of complaint" could be applied anywhere, I'd pin it on German film criticism of the past decade or so up to just these past few months. It wasn't just the films, either. The whole system of financing them, the tastes of a lazy public, the hegemony of Hollywood, the theaters, the schools, it was all terribly, miserably wrong.

But what a turnaround. In the run-up to last night's ceremony, the papers began running glowing assessments of the current state of German film, all but tumbling over themselves for the most laudatory proclamations. The winner, of course, was the one who went too far, Hanns-Georg Rodek, who wrote in Die Welt this week, "2006 is to German cinema what 1939 was for world cinema." This naturally led to a few snappy rejoinders (a "Holla!" from Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example). Sure, it's an absurd claim to make in May for any year, but there's something to his overall argument: Not only are the Germans producing the sort of films that win prizes at festivals and raves from critics, but they're also making silly comedies that lure butts to seats, retelling fairy tales, in both animated and live action versions, that the kids are actually going for and, in the occasional Bernd Eichinger production (Downfall fairly recently, and just around the corner, Tom Tykwer's Perfume) or X-Filme comedy (Good Bye, Lenin!, Go for Zucker!), breaking out into the international market.

Focusing on just that first category, though, the festival and critical favorites, the films that actually do something fresh and substantive for the art, what's doubly remarkable is that, at least in a few nooks and crannies, the rest of the world is beginning to take notice. Die Zeit did a very smart thing this week, almost as an assurance to feuilleton readers that German critics aren't getting carried away in some frenetic feedback loop. The weekly paper asked four critics from four countries for their own assessments. In general, all agree that these are halcyon days.

More specifically, Libération film editor Gérard Lefort praises German filmmakers for tackling the dark sides of "the past of a nation that experienced the two worst forms of totalitarianism in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism," when, "with few exceptions," French filmmakers have proven "unable" to even approach the Vichy regime and the Algerian war. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw worries, though, that the very idea of a German film set in the Nazi era is the sort of "selling point" Germany doesn't need in Britain, especially when films like Oskar Roehler's Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go) or the last three films by his personal favorite, Christian Petzold, go unseen on the Isles. Like Lefort, El País film critic Mirito Torreiro admires the ways Germans deal with the past without falling into the "same old clichés and moral judgments" Spanish filmmakers do when treating the Civil War, but at the same time, suggests that the current generation has yet to produce a Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmbrain and I were talking about this point just the other day; I don't think the current crop needs identification figures like RWF, Herzog or Wenders just so they might be pegged as some sort of movement. Whatever factors are contributing to this sudden and unexpected flourishing - and they would be interesting to forage out - a school (not even a "Berlin School") or a manifesto are not among them, and that's probably all for the better.

Variety's Eddie Cockrell wins points with me for mentioning another chapter of Germany's recent past that's been dealt with onscreen recently, the Red Army Faction years, and, after naming a few highlights, writes, "It's simply a disgrace American audiences are kept ignorant of all this variety. They know of a few 'big' titles: Run Lola Run, Rosenstrasse, Downfall, Sophie Scholl, and that's it. But that's only the tip of the iceberg."

If there's a Gladwellian tipping point at work in this slowly dawning realization, it's surely this year's Berlinale, for which festival director Dieter Kosslick programmed four German films in the Competition - in other words, about one out of six films in the running for the Gold and Silver Bears were German. What's more, three out of four of those films were awfully damn good (The Free Will, Requiem and Sehnsucht), while even the fourth, the disappointment (Elementary Particles), was more or less acceptable as an event, if not as a film, what with its star-strewn cast and all (Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu and Martina Gedeck, for starters).

The good news is that the film that pretty much swept the German Film Awards last night appeared after the Berlinale. In other words, things are still on the up and up. Das Leben der Anderen (The Life of Others) won Best Film (Gold), Best Screenplay and Best Direction (Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck, and this is his debut feature, mind you), Best Leading Male Performance (Ulrich Mühe, and it is one of the most unique performances I've ever seen), Best Supporting Male Performance (Ulrich Tukur), Best Cinematography (Hagen Bogdanski) and Best Set Design (Silke Buhr.

What makes The Lives of Others an extraordinarily effective thriller, albeit a thriller of intense and terrifying silence, is that, at its core, the story is actually quite simple, while at the same time, there are countless small surprises along the way from A to B to C. I don't want to give too much away because the screenplay is rock solid and I hope readers in the States will get a chance at some point to experience its full effect, but briefly: mid-80s East Germany. Mühe plays Gerd Wiesler, a stone-cold Terminator of a Stasi interrogator who's lured by his superior's dangling of the carrot of advancement in the Party to spy on a playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his lover, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), the lead actress in his new play. But Wiesler's faith in socialism is no match for Dreyman's naive idealism and, as the inexorable machinations of State grind away, the battle lines are redrawn and redrawn again and again. As I've mentioned here before, the film is a stunning reality check to the wave of Ostalgie that hit German screens in the late 90s, but it's also a sober warning to any nation's people whose government is beginning to show even minor totalitarian tendencies such as, oh, I dunno, collecting records of millions of its citizens' phone calls.

A little linkage before moving on, all in English: Damien McGuinness talks with Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck for Spiegel Online and, once again, former dissident Wolf Biermann on the film's astonishing authenticity.

The two Best Film (Silver) awards, the runners-up, went to Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem and Detlev Buck's Knallhart (Tough Enough), both of which will see their North American premieres at the Seattle International Film Festival in a few weeks. Requiem also picked up Best Leading Female Performance (Sandra Hüller, who won a Silver Bear for this one at the Berlinale), Best Supporting Female Performance (Imogen Kogge), Best Costumes (Bettina Marx) and Best Sound (Lars Ginzel, Dirk Jacob, Marc Parisotto [hey, I know that guy] and Martin Steyer). Tough Enough won Best Editing (Dirk Grau) and Best Film Music Bert Wrede).

I wrote about Requiem here, so I'll simply add that I'm glad to see it forging on. I remember meeting Hans-Christian Schmid briefly at the premiere of his 23 when I wrote a bit about it for Wired News, and in retrospect, I realize that the best of what he learned about honing a narrative plus the stylistic freedom he discovered with Lichter (Distant Lights) have both gone into Requiem. If this trajectory continues, his next film may be too good to bear.

As for Tough Enough, I'm anxious to see how it plays outside Germany. To an extent, it's a universal story of teenage violence. But it's also very specifically rooted not just in Berlin but in one district in particular, Neukölln, the very neighborhood, in fact, that I lived in with my family for several years up until a little over a year ago. We thoroughly enjoyed the liveliness of it all, but if you see the film, you'll realize why we were also glad to get out. Just a few weeks ago, for the first time in Germany, a principle at a high school in Neukölln had to make a 911-sort of call to the police, asking them to come in and take over; they'd lost control of the building entirely. Linkage: Daniela Sannwald interviews Detlev Buck.

Other notable winners: Lost Children, Best Documentary, and Die Höhle des gelben Hundes, a gorgeous, nonchalantly informative but ultimately lightweight work, Best Children's Film.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2006 4:23 PM