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.