Cargo. And film criticism in Germany.

Before I tell you anything else about Cargo, here's an online viewing tip: Lav Diaz. Because the interview's in English, and of course, because Diaz is a lively and intriguing talker.

Now, admittedly, just about everything else at this important new site is in German, but you may well be interested in knowing a bit about it even if you can't read it. For one thing, Cargo will appear as a magazine: 96 text-heavy pages on thick paper. The first issue will be available on the Berlinale's opening day, February 5. And there's a blog, of course.

Each week, films opening in Germany are rated by half a dozen of the country's most respected critics; the overview of the year so far is a bit thin at the moment, but that's because the site launched just a few days ago - pretty much in conjunction, as it happens, with a one-day conference, "In the Net of Possibilities: Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet," held by the Union of German Film Critics.

As the first to speak, Ekkehard Knörer - a frequent contributor to the indispensable Perlentaucher and to German papers such as die taz as well as one of the four editors behind Cargo (and at the moment, its busiest blogger, too) - pretty much laid out the parameters of the discussions that would follow. He began by recalling a debate that flared up, both online and off, about three months ago in Germany that'll ring familiar bells to Daily readers in the States. In short, Josef Schnelle, a critic and once head of the Union himself, had just slammed blogs and bloggers in a piece for the Berliner Zeitung. You know the drill: They're not to be taken seriously in the first place, and worse, they're putting professional critics who do know what they're doing out of work. While Schnelle steered clear of a German translation of "snake-hipped word-slingers," he did turn to another American critic for back-up, quoting liberally from Richard Schickel's 2007 anti-blog op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.

Any acrimonious residue of the debate that ensued seems to have dried up and blown away well before the conference on Thursday. If those who spoke or participated on panels - critics who write primarily for print (Gerhard Midding, Berliner Zeitung and epd film; and Hanns-Georg Rodek, Die Welt), the online critics (Frédéric Jaeger and Sascha Keilholz, critic.de; Michael Baute, new filmkritik; and Ines Walk, moviepilot and Film Zeit) and those who work in both old and new media (Volker Pantenburg, new filmkritik, Jungle World, kolik.film; and Thomas Groh, filmtagebuch and Splatting Image) - are representative of current film criticism in Germany as a whole, and I believe they are, then the Germans have already raced through all the arguments on both sides and laid down their weapons.

At the risk of oversimplification, I'd say that the general mood on Thursday was not unlike the one that prevailed at the Film Criticism in Crisis? panel held in New York in September; it's a "good news, bad news" situation. The bad news is obvious. As ad revenue evaporates, newspapers and magazines are cutting staff or shutting down altogether. I have a note here quoting someone on one of Thursday's panels as saying that there are now, in all of Germany, only about two dozen writers employed as full-time film critics left. (I may well be wrong about this; if someone reading this - Ekkehard? Thomas? - needs to correct me, please do.) At any rate, all of us on both sides of the Atlantic are still wracking our brains to come up with an economic model that'll keep film criticism an open option as a viable occupation.

By now, the good news is just as obvious. New technologies have made it possible not only for countless fresh and passionate new voices to be heard (and yes, of course there's also a lot of crap out there, but Sturgeon's Law applies everywhere) and for these voices to find each other, commune, exchange insights and so forth, but also for experimentation with new forms of criticism (such as Kevin Lee's video essays, RougeRouge and so on). The difference between the German and American scenes is that, unfortunately, in Germany, there's a little less of the good news going on.

It's not that anyone's calling for more blogs, necessarily; but Ekkehard points out a need for German counterparts to the communities that gather at, say, Dave Kehr's or Girish's places or at the House Next Door. None of us know why this might be, but, a few days before the conference, I did suggest to Ekkehard that this has long been the case, back on through the days when, in the run-up to the dotcom boom of the late 90s, venture capitalists and observers of "cyberculture" alike were wondering which of the "three C's" would eventually prevail: content, commerce or community. Stepping back even further, I recalled watching Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days; in the US, he gets on a train and the camera pokes around inside a dining car, moving from face to face - all of them talking. Palin watches a bit and then says something to the effect of: "America is a nation of performers." Yes, eight years of Bush's foreign policy aside, we are, by nature, a talkative bunch, eager to make friends. We also have to keep in mind that online communities thrived in the States long before there was such a thing as a World Wide Web. By the time the Internet really caught on in Germany, most Germans first saw it in the form that most resembles the old top-down, one-way media.

The conversation in Berlin differed from the one in New York in one further small but notable aspect. None of us have any silver bullet solutions for the "bad news" side of things at the moment, but Thierry Chervel, speaking not so much as a film critic but as founding editor of Perlentaucher, and filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler (Milchwald) both floated variations on the notion of some sort of governmental support. That'll strike many as a typically European fix, but governments here have traditionally played a larger role in the media and arts than in the US. After all, there were no privately owned television broadcasters in Germany until the early 80s; perhaps more interestingly, German filmmakers have often looked enviously at France's system of subsidizing its film industry with a tax on movie tickets. But as the lines blur between professional, freelance, amateur and just-for-the-fun-of-it film critics, funneling financial support to an increasingly indefinable cluster would seem, to me at least, to present a bureaucratic nightmare.

What's more, whatever solutions are eventually found probably won't last. As Hanns-Georg Rodek observed on Thursday, the ground's not going to stop shifting anytime soon. We're in the middle of a transformational phase that'll carry on for not just years, but likely for generations.

Meantime, if you do read German and you're interested in learning more about what went down on Thursday in Berlin, Thomas Groh has the most complete roundup I've seen yet.

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2008 11:34 AM