Hauff the subject of a New German Cinema season
Hauff the subject of a New German Cinema season
By Jane Freebury
JAKARTA (JP): German director Reinhard Hauff is the subject of
a season of New German Cinema next week at Erasmus Huis. The
program of eight films screening from Monday to Saturday, with a
wind-up discussion, has been put together by the Goethe
Institute.
A filmmaker since the mid-1960s, Reinhard Hauff is currently
head of the Academy of Film and Television in Berlin. Hauff is
not as well known internationally as his contemporaries -- Volker
Schlondorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta,
Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders -- but he has the
same inclinations, the same roots.
Watching his films or just glancing at some of the titles you
have an immediate sense of where he is coming from. His most
popular film Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head), and his most
controversial one Stammheim - Baader-Mainhof vor Gericht
(Stammheim - The Baader-Meinhof Trial) belong among the
blistering best of New German Cinema along with Schlondorff and
von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Kluge's
collaborative Germany in August, Sanders-Brahm's Germany Pale
Mother and the extraordinary films of Fassbinder and Wenders.
Emerging young directors of this new wave made films about the
Fatherland that were most definitely not celebratory heimatfilm,
films popular in 1950s and 1960s that gave audiences reassuring
images of a pristine, harmonious and changeless homeland. Images
of glowing landscapes with happy inhabitants contradicted a
Germany that was in fact becoming rapidly industrialized and
repression of dissent was commonplace. Reinhard Hauff and his
colleagues turned away from romanticism to inspect what had been
swept under the carpet.
Serious intentions like these can make for movies that are
boring and didactic, but Hauff has a knack for making fluent
narrative cinema out of the issue film. Films chosen for this
retrospective look at some heavy issues: the prison system (The
Brutalization of Franz Blum); the penal and judicial systems in
extreme circumstances (Stammheim - Baader-Meinhof vor Gericht);
police activities (Messer im Kopf); and the split German national
identity Der Mann auf der Mauer (The Man on the Wall).
Hauff even follows his countrymen overseas. Themes of
compliance and individual responsibility surface again in his
1989 film Blauaugig (Blue-Eyed), a psycho-political thriller set
among German immigrants settled in Argentina who turn a blind eye
to the system there while they got on with the good life. This is
the most recent film in the retrospective, and screens last.
Screening first is Mathias Kneissl (1971), Hauff's first
cinema feature. With its family portrait to camera, ellipses in
the plotline, and cursory naturalism, it betrays anti-illusionist
signs of counter cinema of the time it was made. But this is
unusual as the body of Hauff's work uses traditional tactics of
mainstream cinema with its central hero, sequential story
development and invisible filmmaking techniques
The tale of a late nineteenth-century Bavarian poacher who
became a folk hero (Germany's answer to Robin Hood), it
represents harsh landscapes and harsh attitudes. Kneissl is the
son of a carpenter who embraced misfortune when he married an
Italian wife and produced a rowdy, ragged family that the local
peasantry referred to as "those Italians". They are
systematically picked off one by one, until only Mathias is left
impoverished and unemployable. Mathias, in a dark hat and coat,
has to trudge the leafless, wintry landscape in search of food --
a long from the home of heimatfilm.
Hauff's controversial Stammheim -- winner of the Golden Bear
at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986 -- leaves a strong
impression. Based on actual transcripts of the 1975 to 1977
Baader-Meinhof terrorist trials, this is vivid courtroom drama of
the most dynamic kind, with vehement exchanges between the young
defendants, their defense, the prosecution and judiciary, that
illustrate the deep divisions within German society at that time.
The trial took years and ended after events that left each of
defendants dead, and saw a hijacking at Mogadishu -- it shook
German society to its foundations. Viewing Stammheim is an
intense experience, but it is impressive in its intelligence and
skill. An insight into extraordinary recent events and a class-
act in filmmaking, beautifully constructed with fine editing and
fluid camera work and overwhelming performances from the cast.
But tough, very tough. No beer and skittles here.
Messer im Knopf draws on the same historical moment. It is
about a biogeneticist called Hoffman, played by the always
engaging Bruno Ganz, who seems to symbolize a society on the
edge.
"An American in my situation would shoot out the window," he
says as the film begins. He is a man who could be a terrorist or
who might have terrorist affiliations. Who could tell either way
for sure during those unsettled times? Present at a
rehabilitation center for young offenders, though possibly as an
outsider, he receives a police bullet in the head during a
disturbance. The injury is such that he must start all over again
-- he has to learn to walk and talk, he has to learn to eat with
a spoon. Later he has to come to terms with his status of no
consequence, of being passed over (the police are not interested
in him any more) and of the people in his life having moved on.
Revenge is a possibility.
Der Hauptdarsteller (Main Actor), was made in 1977, and takes
up the dilemma actually experienced by the filmmaker during the
making of Paule Paulander two years earlier. A fifteen-year-old
country boy, the main actor of Paule, wants to leave behind the
deprived circumstances of his family and follow the director to
the city. When he champions poor agricultural communities does
the film director become a social worker too? This is about as
reflexive as Hauff gets -- finishing off what was begun but not
concluded in the film Paule Paulander.
Linie 1 (Line 1) hits a lighter note. It is a filmed musical,
originally conceived as a small stage play for Berlin Grips-
Theater. At the Zoo Garden subway station in Berlin, a girl from
the provinces has arrived, an Alice in the Wonderland among the
rogues' gallery of types that inhabit or pass through the city's
underground. It is filmed in a studio -- which is unusual for
Hauff -- but it is concerned mainly with social outsiders --
which is not usual for him. For Reinhard Hauff the best way to
evaluate a society's successes, or its failures and
contradictions, is through the relationship it has with its
minorities, the way it treats its "misfits". The underground
subway is obviously the place to be.