biographycinema

Germany

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The origins of cinema: 1895-1918

Rediscovered by the great retrospective Prima di Caligari, presented in the 11th edition of the "Giornate del cinema muto" in Pordenone (1990), the original German film production appears today of considerable interest. In traditional treatments, however, there was a tendency to start the golden age of German cinema only in the first post-war period, and to deal with the initial period only to trace, in a problematic continuity, the signs of the great season of Expressionism: those aspects related to the fantastic, the morbid, the terror, the nightmare, the double that still characterize the second part of the Ten years.

A month before the Lumière brothers, on 1st November 1895 at the Wintergarten in Berlin, the lesser known brothers Emil and Max Skladanowsky projected the first moving images in public, thanks to their still technically imperfect bioscope, establishing a record that in of exasperated nationalisms he was all too exalted; the program of nine films started with a wild Italienischer Bauerntanz.

During the first diffusion of the cinematographic phenomenon, G. witnessed above all the development of solid manufacturing and engineering bases aimed at appropriating technological innovations and transforming them into industrial growth, and therefore at the flourishing of optical and photographic companies. A strong technical progress was accompanied, however, by a rather scarce production and until about 1910 - as far as it is judged by the little survivor at the time - German cinema remained a poor appendix of the fairs or of the variety, with short rough films and without qualities', interesting more than anything else from the depth psychology aspect: in exhibiting the fear of matriarchy, military strength (and a continuous presence of the Kaiser), these seem to reflect that mixture of authoritarianism and insecurity typical of Wilhelminian age. In a market dominated by France with Pathé Frères and Gaumont, and above all by Denmark with Nordisk Film Kompagni, this primeval phase was therefore characterized by anonymous products that focused above all on current affairs, musical comedies, circus numbers, fashion and erotic scenes Among the leading pioneering figures, we must first mention that of Oskar Messter, active across the board in the various branches of the newborn cinema, as inventor of the Maltese cross, director, producer and distributor: in addition to having created since 1903 ante-litteram videoclips, the Ton-Bilder (or Biophon), short videos synchronized (as far as possible) with musical pieces played by a gramophone, would also have been among the inventors of the newsreel (the Messter-Woche,

In a more strictly technical context, we must instead remember the experiments of Guido Seeber: a great innovator especially as regards shooting, lighting and set-up and special effects (but also director of short animated films), he was in charge, among other things , of the construction of the first cinematographic theaters in Babelsberg in 1911 and became the first German cameraman of international fame.

Nel 1907 si verificò un mutamento strutturale nell'economia cinematografica: l'introduzione del Monopolfilm, vale a dire un contratto per concedere l'esclusiva di un film a un esercente di una determinata zona, una ristrutturazione che ebbe tra le sue conseguenze il consolidamento industriale, il processo di razionalizzazione della distribuzione, ma anche l'allungamento della durata del film, l'estensione del racconto con la conseguente nascita di generi e stili precisi. Di pari passo avveniva, come nel resto dell'Europa, la trasformazione dell'ambiente fisico del cinema: dalla rappresentazione ambulante delle fiere si passava a delle strutture fisse. I malfamati ex negozi del periodo del libero mercato lasciavano il posto a teatri eleganti, pensati per rassicurare un pubblico borghese: nacque il Kinopalast, capace di ospitare anche mille spettatori. Lo spettacolo, inizialmente composto di una decina di spezzoni diversi, alternati a numeri di varietà, si trasformava gradualmente in un'unica pellicola, lunga circa 45 minuti, e caratterizzata da una maggiore attenzione alla storia, anche per cercare di superare le obiezioni moralistiche del movimento dei Kinoreformer sui pericoli del nuovo medium e garantirne la rispettabilità, senza tuttavia perdere la sua presa sul pubblico. Sulla scia di questo processo di moralizzazione, legato anche a una crisi del settore tra il 1907 e il 1911, nacque di lì a poco l'Autorenfilm, dove il termine 'autore', diversamente da oggi, si riferiva non tanto al regista quanto allo sceneggiatore, in genere un letterato (nel 1914 Kurt Pinthus pubblicò il suo celebre Kinobuch con 15 soggetti cinematografici scritti da alcuni fra i più significativi esponenti dell'avanguardia letteraria tedesca). Si trattava di un prodotto dunque che coniugava le più ardite e spettacolari innovazioni tecniche a un plot avvincente ma ricco di riferimenti letterari. I primi esempi di tale genere, il sorprendente Zweimal gelebt (1912) o il celebre Der Andere (1913), entrambi per la regia di Max Mack, segnarono un primo punto fermo nell'affermazione del linguaggio filmico in G. mentre di lì a poco un genio teatrale come Max Reinhardt, la personalità che influenzò più profondamente il cinema tedesco dell'epoca, sperimentava il nuovo medium, realizzando in Italia due film tra il serio e il faceto, tra pantomima e fantasy, Die Insel der Seligen (1913) e Eine venetianische Nacht (1914).Contemporaneamente iniziava ad affermarsi il fenomeno del divismo, rappresentato per es. dalla danese Asta Nielsen, strappata alla Nordisk da Paul Davidson, il principale produttore ed esercente degli anni Dieci. Spesso diretta dal marito Urban Gad, la Nielsen, fin da Afgrunden (1910, L'abisso) e poi in film come Der fremde Vogel (1911), Engelein (1914), Vordertreppe und Hintertreppe (1915), fu la prima attrice a creare uno stile di recitazione naturale che si differenziava notevolmente da quello istrionico-teatrale allora in voga, nonché a dare vita a un nuovo modello erotico femminile. Il suo contraltare era Henny Porten, di fattezze decisamente più teutoniche, la blonde Blinde, così definita in virtù del suo primo grande successo Das Liebesglück der Blinden (1911, produzione Messter) che, giovanissima, a partire dal 1906 aveva cominciato la sua carriera comparendo nei Ton-Bilder del padre Franz e che contendeva alla 'divina' danese la palma della migliore attrice.Il più noto esponente dell'Autorenfilm fu l'attore (e regista) Paul Wegener, che si può considerare un pioniere del cinema fantastico nonché uno dei primi teorici della specificità del mezzo: nei film da lui interpretati, Der Student von Prag (1913) di Stellan Rye e Der Golem (1915) di Henrik Galeen, il secondo dei quali lo vide partecipare anche alla sceneggiatura, si coniugano effetti speciali alla Méliès con storie che presentano aspetti letterari tipici della cultura tedesca ma non rinunciano agli elementi più amati dal grande pubblico, come appunto la fantascienza e l'orrore, aspetti che sarebbero stati ripresi e approfonditi dal cinema del periodo della Repubblica di Weimar (v. oltre). Lo stesso Wegener pochi anni dopo realizzò con Carl Boese a remake of Der Golem entitled Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920; Golem - How it came into the world).

Upon entering the war, the German film industry thrived; the embargo on foreign films led to a significant increase in national production which saw the rise of some great personalities. Together with the proliferation of production houses, often managed by the most successful directors, Richard Oswald , Joe May, Franz Hofer, Joseph Delmont and the young Ernst Lubitsch , still known above all as an actor, established themselves.

As for the economic structure, there was the gradual phenomenon of the absorption of many small production houses, but a real turning point occurred in December 1917, when the UFA (Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft) was born, the largest European art workshop and for a long time the only true competitor of the Hollywood majors, who would dominate the market until the end of the Second World War. Its main feature was that it was born not so much to face capitalist competition as had happened in other countries, but rather as an economic-military operation wanted 'from above'. UFA was created by the merger of DLG (Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft), founded in 1916 by the chairman of Krupp's board of directors, Alfred Hugenberg, and BUFA (Bild- und Film -Amt) wanted by General Ludendorff, in 1917: on both sides the need for a large German film production was seen above all as a tool for both civil and military propaganda, indeed Ludendorff considered it a decisive weapon in view of a happy war outcome. Thanks to the Ministry of War, the Treasury and especially the Deutsche Bank, despite the period of serious crisis, companies such as Nordisk and those of Messter and Davidson were acquired, which were hired as technical and artistic advisors. In total countertendency with respect to the military defeat and the end of the empire, the UFA began its victorious path at the end of the First World War, inseparable from the history of German cinema. It was in fact also thanks to it that G. became the protagonist of an imposing change, such as to make it absolutely original in the panorama of European cinema, where it would remain for a long time

La nascita dell'UFA e la sconfitta militare segnarono una profonda cesura nel cinema degli anni Dieci, che comunque non può essere ridotto a semplice preparazione dell'epoca d'oro weimariana. Se la serie di Homunculus (1916), per la regia di Otto Rippert, appare un compendio del satanismo neoromantico del periodo, anticipando molti temi successivamente trattati dall'Espressionismo, nello stesso tempo vi era anche chi si prendeva gioco del tutto, buttando il demonismo in parodia come Edmund Edel in Doktor Satansohn (1916), film interpretato da uno scatenato e digrignante E. Lubitsch. E il grande regista berlinese, pur nell'ambito di trame 'popolari' e di una grassa comicità proletaria, diede già prova della propria classe, per es. in Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) o in Meyer aus Berlin (1919), dove apparve anche come protagonista. Lo stesso discorso può estendersi a due registi in seguito riscoperti: F. Hofer, decadente e fine regista di interieurs borghesi e di storie familiari (ma anche di un Sensationsfilm di alta qualità spettacolare come Die schwarze Kugel o Die geheimnisvollen Schwestern, 1913), oppure J. Delmont, in prevalenza autore, invece, di polizieschi all'americana. Senza poi dimenticare, solo per citare pochi titoli, film come Die Landstrasse (1913) di Paul von Woringen, dove la caccia a un assassino si trasforma in un'indagine fenomenologica su atmosfere e personaggi rurali; oppure la Lulu (1917) di Alexander von Antaffly, che non sfigura a paragone con la più tarda versione di Georg Wilhelm Pabst; o infine Die Teufelskirche (1919) di Hans Mierendorff, con cui, in un intreccio di sensualità, religione, sogno e delirio collettivo si raggiunge la piena maturità stilistica. Già negli anni della guerra la G. esprimeva un cinema di notevole livello.

The classical era

The silent period (1919-1929) . Political events profoundly influenced the development of German cinema. The first, fragile non-monarchical experiment on German soil, the Weimar Republic, born from the uprising of the sailors and the workers 'and soldiers' Councils, can be considered a unique case: the few years that elapsed between the two empires, the Wilhelminian Reich and the Nazi one, although marred by destructive political battles between the right and the left and by profound economic crises (or perhaps precisely for these reasons), constituted a moment of absolute creativity, in all sectors and especially in the cinematographic one, dominated, at the the day after the end of the conflict, with an extraordinary expressionist experience (see expressionism) that from painting and narrative also influenced the seventh art.In the cinematographic field the term Expressionismus was often used as a sort of formal label to group a series of films with common stylistic characteristics - strictly speaking it would therefore be more correct to speak of 'expressionist-oriented' films. Its revolutionary character lay not so much in the dramaturgical or content aspect but rather in the visual one: in fact, the concept of anguish understood as existential failure dominated thematically, only apparently similar to the concept of romantic horror (possibly the romantic influences of Expressionism , more than in Goethe, they can be found in Schiller's inclination to cruelty),

True expressionist innovation can be found above all in the relationship with the profilmic, which was transformed from analogical to dialectical: the objective and naturalistic seeing was replaced by the inner vision, or by a subjective representation in which ideas (or more often nightmares) became images and they moved further and further away from verbal language. The theatrical staging, the anti-naturalistic acting, the graphics and above all the scenography dominated, which for the first time assumed an autonomous role as if it were a character ("Le décor c'est acteur", he would have observed several years after André Bazin). The film that symbolized this trend was Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920; Dr. Calligari, also known as Doctor Caligari's Cabinet): thanks to the participation of eminent artists of the Der Sturm group, to the scenographies, painted as if they were scenes, to the script by Carl Mayer , to the interpretation of Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt , to the talent of the same director, the film is a perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, so that part of the critics has put forward the hypothesis that it is the only true purely expressionist work.

The extraordinary success of the film, at home, throughout Europe and in the United States, also due to an effective UFA advertising campaign, led to a widespread diffusion of these elements in German cinematography, so much so that there was talk of a real and precisely 'caligarismo', understood as a fashion made of imitations not always successful, but which also had the merit of continuing a theoretical debate on cinema, in the wake of the 'expressionist trend', understood above all in its deeper and innovative meaning of recreation subjective of reality, some directors affirmed themselves, who were already active during the war period, who elaborated this new Zeitgeist in an original way with a moderate audience success, proving that the phenomenon was not only cultural but also partially commercial.It was the case of the scenographer and directorPaul Leni to whom precious impulses are owed in the pictorial elaboration of the image, by Lupu Pick , the initiator with C. Mayer of the Kammerspielfilm , Karl Grune or Wiene himself. At the same time we witnessed the affirmation of those who were, alongside Lubitsch, the two major authors of the time, namely Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau : these are complex artistic personalities, in which the expressionist drive is elaborated in a completely autonomous way and original, within a cinematographic path already begun in the war years.

The Viennese Lang, first set designer and later screenwriter for J. May, then director in a long partnership with his wife, writer and set designer Thea von Harbou, appears strongly influenced by his studies of painting and architecture: from the earliest works - e.g. the spy serial Die Spinnen (The spiders), in two parts (Der goldene See, 1919, and Das Brillantenschiff, 1920) - the strong interest in the stylistic element combined with the rhythmic-narrative element dropped in genre cinema was manifested. It was however only with his larger works, such as the national saga Die Nibelungen (1924; The song of the Nibelungs) in two parts (Siegfried, Kriemhilds Rache) and above all the science fiction Metropolis (1927), that his conception of space he joined a spectacular architectural monumentality, which is counterbalanced by the plastic element of the mass.Actor who came out, like many others, from the inexhaustible forge of M. Reinhardt, FW Murnau established himself in 1922 with Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens, a film in which the exploration of the theme of horror refuses deformation as a scenographic element to enter a hallucinated reality similar to a nightmare, which is above all the vision of man and of his anxieties in an inhuman world. A theme that would have been taken up by the Kammerspiel Der letzte Mann (1924; The last laugh), interpreted byEmil Jannings is considered by many to be his masterpiece, a social drama about the existence of the individual, with romantically polemical implications against the nascent capitalist society and characterized by an extraordinary and dynamic use of Karl Freund 's entfesselte Kamera , a performance that would have been repeated in a another famous example of omnivorous mobility of the camera, Varieté (1925) by Ewald André Dupont .

Expressionism was only a trend of German cinema, certainly the most famous, but mostly the production, which was taking on dizzying rhythms also due to inflation (510 films in 1920; still 242 in 1927), was dominated by genre films, entertainment. In the wake of the (temporary) abolition of the censorship immediately after the fall of the empire and a certain lack of interest of the social democratic government for the control of the film industry (in 1921 the government gave up its participation in the UFA group, leaving all power to Deutsche Bank), the so-called Aufklärungsfilme were born who attempted adventurous excursions in the world, until then forbidden, of prostitution, syphilis, single mothers, homosexuality, alcoholism, drugs etc. In fact, as early as 1917 Es werde Licht had started to come out! by R. Oswald on the serious dangers of syphilis (and under the aegis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten) which, given its success, had three sequels, opening the door to gender. In the phenomenon, which curiously anticipates the Helga series as well as the soft-porn of the sixties, libertarian anxieties are mixed together (e.g. the right to homosexuality claimed by Anders als die Andern, 1919, by R. Oswald, with Conrad Veidt), true or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. Oswald on the serious dangers of syphilis (and under the aegis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten) which, given its success, had three sequels, opening the door to gender. In the phenomenon, which curiously anticipates the Helga series as well as the soft-porn of the sixties, libertarian anxieties are mixed together (e.g. the right to homosexuality claimed by Anders als die Andern, 1919, by R. Oswald, with Conrad Veidt), true or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. Oswald on the serious dangers of syphilis (and under the aegis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten) which, given its success, had three sequels, opening the door to gender. In the phenomenon, which curiously anticipates the Helga series as well as the soft-porn of the sixties, libertarian anxieties are mixed together (e.g. the right to homosexuality claimed by Anders als die Andern, 1919, by R. Oswald, with Conrad Veidt), true or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. opening the door to gender. In the phenomenon, which curiously anticipates the Helga series as well as the soft-porn of the sixties, libertarian anxieties are mixed together (e.g. the right to homosexuality claimed by Anders als die Andern, 1919, by R. Oswald, with Conrad Veidt), true or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. opening the door to gender. In the phenomenon, which curiously anticipates the Helga series as well as the soft-porn of the sixties, libertarian anxieties are mixed together (e.g. the right to homosexuality claimed by Anders als die Andern, 1919, by R. Oswald, with Conrad Veidt), true or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. real or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920. real or presumed didactic-medical aspects and above all greed and mercantile speculations. The wave of the Aufklärungsfilme, however, was soon exhausted, when censorship by the National Assembly was reintroduced in May 1920.

Among the most popular genres of the time are the Serienfilme, episodic detective films in the wake of the French Fantômas and Les vampires, already in vogue before the war, which repeat the pattern of the episodic feuilletons, as well as exotic productions, with which were fulfilled by now lost dreams of colonial expansionism and fantasies of distant lands, or historical dramas inspired by Italian blockbusters such as Cabiria (1914). Undisputed master was E. Lubitsch who, after the war, before his transfer to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, experimented with the potential of genre cinema and specialized in Kostümfilme, where he developed his famous touch, exhibiting a new spectacular scenography thanks to the staging and the wise use of the masses, the result of theatrical influence of the master M. Reinhardt or Ernst Toller. On the same level, director J. May moved, who had the merit not only of exploring the feuilleton in all its potential but also of keeping in his production house, personalities such as F. Lang and P. Leni. With his most successful works, like Die Herrin der Welt (1919; The Lady of the World) in eight parts, the historian Veritas vincit (1919), the adventurous Das indische Grabmal (1921; The Indian sepulcher) written by Lang, or the mélo Tragödie der Liebe (1923), May reinterpreted pre-existing film models with originality and great stylistic and scenographic accuracy, confirming himself above all as a great craftsman. A further contribution to the innovative reformulation of genres is due to Ludwig Berger,

After the street riots and putschs attempted by the extreme wings of the Weimarian political alignment (from the 1919 Spartacist revolt to Hitler's Munich Putsch in 1923), a crucial year, which marked an important turning point in the history of the Republic, was 1924, in which the so-called Stabilisierungszeit started: the mark became a stable currency thanks to the monetary reform of November 1923 and the intervention of the American Dawes plan. Through foreign lending, industrial development was powerfully increased and there was a dizzying phenomenon of modernization that did not fail to have consequences also in the cinema, where the most reckless and experimental phase of the Inflationary ended. With the ghosts of the war gone, the sentiment of the reconstruction and revival of G. as an international power prevailed: entertainment became a social purpose, a way to maximize work in mass society. The big city, in this case Berlin, represented the scenario of an ambiguous and contradictory reality that on the one hand saw with horror the hypothesis of the slave man of the machine-moloch and of alienating work (as in Metropolis by F. Lang), and on the other it rose to symbol of the Roaring Twenties, of unbridled fun. In the hearts of many German voters, however, there was always a general dissatisfaction with the political situation that would soon lead to the success of the National Socialist Party. it represented the scenario of an ambiguous and contradictory reality that on the one hand saw with horror the hypothesis of the slave man of the machine-moloch and of alienating work (as in Metropolis by F. Lang), and on the other it rose as a symbol of the Roarings Twenties, unbridled fun. In the hearts of many German voters, however, there was always a general dissatisfaction with the political situation that would soon lead to the success of the National Socialist Party. it represented the scenario of an ambiguous and contradictory reality that on the one hand saw with horror the hypothesis of the slave man of the machine-moloch and of alienating work (as in Metropolis by F. Lang), and on the other it rose as a symbol of the Roarings Twenties, unbridled fun. In the hearts of many German voters, however, there was always a general dissatisfaction with the political situation that would soon lead to the success of the National Socialist Party.

In this modernist climate the second half of the 1920s was essentially dominated by the current of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity (and by the birth of the 'proletarian cinema' related to it in some way: see Neue Sachlichkeit ) which had the merit of deepening, in the name of a social commitment (even if sometimes presumed), the economic and cultural transformations of the Stabilisierungszeit. Abandoned the nightmares and exasperated tones of Expressionism, the New Objectivity showed the painful side of existence, but without political attacks, rather in the name of disillusionment and resignation, raising the drama of the individual to a more universal human condition, in a generalized 'leftist melancholy' attitude,Walter Benjamin . The main representative (but also the least typical) of this trend was GW Pabst who went far beyond the apathetic resignation to combine social themes with a remarkable cinematographic experimentation, acquiring an unmistakable style that would quickly lead him to be one of the most admired (and overrated) directors of the time. The atmosphere of the Neue Sachlichkeit was not unrelated to the search for avant-garde cinema which took its first steps starting from the early 1920s with the experiments of the absoluter film by Viking Eggeling , László Moholy-Nagy , Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmannespecially with his famous feature film Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927).

At the same time, the Unterhaltungsproduktion continued, an entertainment production that exhibited a new, almost (all) German trend, that of the Bergfilme, melodramas or comedies set in the mountains, in which Arnold Fanck's directing work and the interpretations of Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenkerboth destined to become successful directors under the Nazi regime. Der Berg des Schicksals (1924), Der heilige Berg (1926; The mountain of love) and above all Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929; The tragedy of Pizzo Palù) co-directed by GW Pabst, propose without great variations an intertwining between the romance and the adventurous but contain extraordinary naturalistic images (absolute novelty for a cinema in which almost everything was shot in the studio and which had a marked tendency for the setting in interiors), inserted in a wider reflection on man and the nature.

A nod then to the documentary, which in G. mainly took the form of the Kulturfilm, a name that tended to 'ennoble it' and which was introduced at the end of the Great War, when its importance for scientific purposes was recognized in the cinema. Pioneers of this didactic-scientific documentary were Ulrich KT Schulz and Hans Cürlis with whose help, among other things, Lotte Reinigerhe began his silhouette animated cinema, culminating in the feature film Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (1926; Achmed, the fantastic prince). After the success of Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925; Strength and beauty) by Wilhelm Prager and Nicholas Kaufmann, with his 'daring' nude scenes, the UFA specialized in Kulturfilme which "thanks to scientific precision and excellent photography […] became a German specialty in great demand on the international market "(S. Kracauer, trad. it. 2001, p. 197). However, except in very rare cases, the genre suffered from an excessive specialization of the topics dealt with, the other side of the medal of that "incredible indifference to human problems" stigmatized by Kracauer. Only in the early sixties did German documentary filmmaking,

Already in bad economic waters - a situation that the treaty with the Americans of Paramount and Metro Goldwyn Mayer (the Parufamet-Vertrag, of December 1925) failed to heal - the UFA fired its most ingenious producer, Erich Pommerguilty of Metropolis' economic disaster. Increasingly indebted, in March 1927 it was acquired by the ultra-conservative industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, who saved the production house from bankruptcy but also made a decisive change at an organizational level: the rise of the figure of the production manager, with the task of calculating in exactly the costs while minimizing the risks, took away the power of the director, who until then had had considerable control of his work. To pay for it was for example. F. Lang, who after Frau im Mond (1929; A woman in the Moon) would have passed, until his forced emigration in 1933, to 'independent' production.

From sound to Hitler: 1929-1933.- After the great battle for sound licenses which, with the Paris Conference of June 1930, had ensured a leading role on the world market through the Tobis-Klangfilm consortium, it was going to happen in a few years the historic passage. The epochal restructuring, which had seen the Germans among the pioneers of the optical sound with the Tri-Ergon system (the first public attempt dates back to 1922), was both productive and aesthetic: if the hypothesis of creating works that were at the same survived commercial and prestige time, however, the idea of ​​cinema as an elitist art definitively set (the production costs having become too high and the film tending even more to level itself industrially). Genre films then proliferated, including the musical or rather the Tonfilm-Operette, which, thanks to the advent of sound, represented the great novelty of the period. After Hanns Schwarz's first Melodie des Herzens (1929), the first film produced by UFA all talked about, the genre took shape, which instead of linking up with the modern musical, turned rather towards the Viennese operetta: a title for everyone, Der Kongress tanzt (1931; Congress has fun) by Eric Charell. Wilhelm Thiele's Liebeswalzer (1930; Waltz of love) appeared for the first time the most famous couple of Tonfilm-Operette, Lilian Harvey and instead of linking up with the modern musical, he turned rather towards the Viennese operetta: a title for everyone, Eric Charell's Der Kongress tanzt (1931; Congress has fun). Wilhelm Thiele's Liebeswalzer (1930; Waltz of love) appeared for the first time the most famous couple of Tonfilm-Operette, Lilian Harvey and instead of linking up with the modern musical, he turned rather towards the Viennese operetta: a title for everyone, Eric Charell's Der Kongress tanzt (1931; Congress has fun). Wilhelm Thiele's Liebeswalzer (1930; Waltz of love) appeared for the first time the most famous couple of Tonfilm-Operette, Lilian Harvey andWilly Fritsch , while with Die drei von der Tankstelle (1930; The little mermaid of the highway), always directed by Thiele, went into parody, in a process of modernization of the genre: the scenario no longer includes fairytale realms, buildings and uniforms but the daily reality, including, as will be seen in other cases, the serious economic crisis and unemployment due to the world recession of 1929.

Another discovery of the sound was the patriotic film, of which Die letzte Kompagnie (1930; The Last Company), a film by Curtis Bernhardt of Prussian setting, Der Rebell (1932), by Bernhardt and L. Trenker on the Tyrolean independence struggle against Napoleon, or Gustav Ucicky's underwater drama Morgenrot (1933; Hell of the Seas) : still far from being pure propaganda films for rearmament, they send ambivalent messages, as the war comes seen as an indisputable destiny while nationalist sentiment coexists with melancholy tones and a veiled death drive.

UFA, however, thanks also to the return of E. Pommer from a profitable exile in the United States, was not confined to the commercial security of formulas already tested: one of the examples of his political elasticity was in fact Der blaue Engel (The blue angel ) by Josef von Sternberg , the greatest hit of 1930, boldly based on the novel of a leftist writer like H. Mann, who launched the then almost unknown Marlene Dietrich into the sky of the star system .

The more nonconformist but at the same time more interesting and original production survived with the support of independent film companies such as the bourgeois-inspired Black-Film , the communist Prometheus or other Munich companies. Within these niches a nouvelle vague of young artists was emerging, whose first extraordinary example was Menschen am Sonntag (1930), directed by Robert Siodmak , the result of the collective Filmstudio 1929, which included a group of unknown debutants who later established themselves in Hollywood, including Billy Wilder , Fred Zinnemann and Edgar G. Ulmer. Siodmak later confirmed his great talent and ability to use sound in an original way with Abschied (1930) or Voruntersuchung (1931; Preliminary investigation). In the meantime, the young Max Ophuls , who before his great success Liebelei (1933; Mad lovers), a film permeated by a magical atmosphere of Schnitzlerian lightness, with Die verkaufte Braut (1932; The bride sold) had renewed with great originality the Tonfilm-Operette formula.

In terms of strong political attention, both in form and content, the works of Piel Jutzi or Carl Junghans were placed (see Neue Sachlichkeit) that deal with issues related to the injustices of capitalist society such as unemployment, suicide, prostitution. And in a last great artistic explosion, there were some masterpieces of the great directors of the time: this is the case of Lang, who with M (1931) and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933) develops a path where the ideological aspect is stronger, even if it is excessive to trace signs or premonitions of the horror of later historical events. Pabst also studied more specifically social issues, with Westfront 1918, Vier von der Infanterie (1930; Westfront) or Kameradschaft (1931; The tragedy of the mine), which, however, earned him the accusation of too generalized humanitarianism by the most politicized critics. . The delightful Emil und die Detektive (1931; The terrible army, written by B.Leontine Sagan Mädchen in Uniform, (1931; Girls in uniform, supervised by Carl Froelich ) were the last great examples of a free and creative German cinema.

The National Socialist period: 1933-1945

Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Wilhelm Thiele, Ludwig Berger, Paul Czinner, Ewald André Dupont, Joe May, Douglas Sirk (registi); Elisabeth Bergner, Brigitte Helm, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Asta Nielsen, Conrad Veidt, Fritz Kortner, Curt Bois (attori); Karl Freund, Eugen Schüfftan, Rudolph Maté, Franz Planner (direttori della fotografia); Erich Pommer (produttore); Werner Richard Heymann, Frederick Hollander, Bronislav Kaper, Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Max Steiner (musicisti). Sono questi i principali nomi dei circa 1532 Filmemigranten obbligati a lasciare nel corso degli anni Trenta la G. (o l'Austria) per motivi politici e/o razziali; con questa emigrazione il cinema tedesco venne privato delle sue migliori forze creative. Con la presa del potere nel gennaio del 1933, si assistette, infatti, a un rapido processo di conquista di tutti i settori dello Stato da parte del regime nazista. Tra questi il primo fu il cinema, destinato a svolgere un ruolo nevralgico: già nel Mein Kampf, il Führer ne aveva sottolineato l'insostituibile funzione educativa del popolo, ma ciò si rivelò fondamentale soprattutto per la seconda fase della politica nazionalsocialista, quella della cosiddetta Gleichschaltung, ovvero il processo di livellamento delle istituzioni della G. allo spirito e ai fini del nazismo. Con la creazione del Ministero per la cultura e la propaganda, sotto la direzione di Joseph Goebbels, si assistette (oltre all'esodo volontario dal Paese) all'epurazione dell'ambiente cinematografico, quindi alla fondazione di una Reichsfilmkammer, corporazione pubblico-giuridica, l'iscrizione alla quale garantiva la possibilità di esercitare la professione in ambito culturale e quindi richiedeva l'implicita adesione all'ideologia nazionalsocialista. Fu esercitata una fortissima e capillare azione di censura, soprattutto a livello preventivo, e accanto a questa venne introdotta la Prädikatisierung, sorta di classificazione statuale che premiava, anche mediante agevolazioni fiscali, le opere il cui contenuto fosse più esplicitamente legato ai dettami ufficiali del regime. Anche la funzione di una libera critica cinematografica venne accantonata a favore dell'idea del semplice "racconto del fenomeno artistico" o della "critica costruttiva" (cioè addomesticata).

Sull'utilizzo del cinema come strumento di propaganda esistono contemporanee dichiarazioni di Hitler e di Goebbels piuttosto contraddittorie: mentre il dittatore affermava la necessità di separare i concetti di arte e politica nel film, il ministro si schierava (come Luigi Freddi nell'Italia fascista) a favore di un'idea di propaganda che operasse in maniera impercettibile, penetrando nella vita quotidiana. Prevalse quest'ultima tesi, tanto che le opere in cui contenuto, trama e personaggi erano contrassegnati come nazionalsocialisti, contavano una percentuale davvero esigua (meno del 15% sui 1110 film prodotti durante il 'dodicennio nero').

In general, the idea of ​​art in the Third Reich remained tied to a naturalism between the stylized and the illustrative, which expresses a consolidated or better simplified reality (the Führer loved to repeat: "Germans means being clear"), where the presence of the state is inherent in social and cultural relationships. In the cinematographic field this trend was manifested through the Tendenzfilm, that is the application, in the most popular and tested genre films, of an extreme simplification of the narrative fabric. It is the so-called Schwarzweissdramaturgie, an exasperated Manichaeism which pits the German hero, military or civilian, against the enemy of the people, with the inevitable victory of the former over the latter. Characters are common individuals, absolutely stereotyped in their roles and devoid of any psychological deepening, whose adventures end with the inevitable happy end, which can also contemplate the death of the protagonist, provided that doctrinaire values ​​triumph. The background of these events is often an idyllic, rural and community G., a sort of golden age that removes the first thirty years of the 20th century. and its 'modernist' degenerations, to return to the glories of the Wilhelminian era. The first cinematographic experience of the newborn regime was a trilogy of films dedicated to the SA (Sturmabteilungen, the paramilitary organization of the National Socialist party, whose members would have been almost of the all exterminated in the Night of long knives, in June 1934) and represented almost the only attempt at direct propaganda, from which Goebbels himself quickly distanced himself, also due to the commercial failure that followed. It is Hitlerjunge Quex - Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend directed by Hans Steinhoff, SA-Mann Brandt by Franz Seitz and Hans Westmar by Franz Wenzler, all of 1933. Despite the common theme of exaltation of martyrdom in the name of party ideals and the schematic Manichaeism, the first film of the trilogy stands out if only for its stylistic quality, as Steinhoff still appears to owe 'proletarian cinema', starting from the figure ofHeinrich Georgein the part of the Communist father. The present National Socialist disappeared, but only in appearance, from the Spielfilm; instead, in the Wochenschau, the newsreel, also subject to careful manipulative attention, or in the form of a documentary, the apex of which is constituted by Triumph des Willens (1935; The triumph of the will) by L. Riefenstahl on the Nuremberg congress of 1934. Behind the documentary aspect the Riefenstahl managed to catch the most genuine spirit in the spectacular mass movements and in the grandiose choreography of Albert Speer National Socialist and at the same time to elaborate on a higher level the liturgy of the Nazi gathering and the feeling of participation of the spectator. The director's works (including Olympia, 1938, on the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936), however, represent an exception, due to his talent and his ability to find new cinematographic solutions: the rest of the documentary production, such as Feldzug in Polen (1940; Advances to the East) by Fritz Hippler , did not pass the simple film for propaganda purposes.After the disappointing 'political' experiment of the trilogy on the SA, the cinema of the Third Reich returned on already tested roads, a guarantee of sure commercial success. This did not prevent him, however, especially at the beginning, from maintaining a good quality standard, although deprived as he was of his best forces, who had fled abroad. This is demonstrated by the irreverent comedies of Reinhold Schünzel (who emigrated in 1937), such as Viktor und Viktoria (1933; Vittorio and Vittoria, hence the modern remake of Blake Edwards Victor / Victoria, 1982) or Amphitryon - Aus den Wolken kommt das Glück (1935; Anfitrione), still rich in Weimarian spirit, or the fascinating melodramas of D. Sirk (also emigrated in 1937 ), or even the sparse episodes in the cinema of 'Mefisto' Gustaf Gründgens, author of fine literary adaptations (Der Schritt vom Wege, 1939, The novel of a woman, from Effie Briest by Th. Fontane) or of light comedies (Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs, 1934, remake of Murnau's film; Capriolen, 1937). Between Austria and Germany the former 'proletarian' director Werner Hochbaum tried to escape, sometimes successfully (Vorstadtvarieté, 1935; Die ewige Maske, 1935, The eternal mask etc.), to the leaden Nazi control, until in 1939 was excluded from the Reichfilmkammer. But apart from these 'authorial' exceptions, we mostly saw the development of genre films, especially historical ones, or literary transcriptions. The former, who had the advantage of legitimizing the Nazi war effort, preferred the Prussian cycle and the figure of Frederick the Great, understood as Hitler's ideal forerunner (Der alte und der junge König, 1935, I due re, directed by H Steinhoff or Fridericus, 1936, by Johannes Mayer), and fully responded to the regime's naturalistic dictates for their nineteenth-century academism, as well as the biographies of the great men of the past: Bismarck (1940; Bismarck, the iron chancellor) by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. , Friedrich Schiller - Triumph eines Genies (1940; The masnadieri) by Herbert Maisch or the much more successful Paracelsus (1943) by GW Pabst, who had unexpectedly returned to G. after spending years of exile in France. At the same time, war films were developing which tended to glorify the exploits of German soldiers during the Great War, whose heroism was opposed to the degenerate image of the Weimar Republic: such a specialist was confirmed as the mediocre Karl Ritter (e.g., in Pour le Mérite, 1938), which together with Steinhoff and especially aVeit Harlan , can be considered among the most representative filmmakers of the time, both for his technical talent and for his strong bond with the regime.

While Steinhoff seems at ease especially with historical-literary costume production, V. Harlan, with his fascinating family melodramas, represents the finest interpreter of the artistic dictates of the Blut und Boden culture. Films such as Der Herrscher (1937; Ingratitude), Das unsterbliche Herz (1939; The accused of Nuremberg), Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939; Towards love), Die goldene Stadt (1942; The Golden City), Immensee (1943; The lost love), Opfergang (1944; The prisoner of fate), often played by the Swedish actress (and Harlan's wife) Kristina Söderbaum, chase, in a synthesis (almost) perfect but undermined by an underground death drive , the utopia of conciliation, where, at inside the historical contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation dear to the conservative culture of the beginning of the century, man manages to recover his mythical relationship with nature. On the same line, but within the Bergfilm, you can place the best works of the South Tyrolean director L. Trenker, always in the balance between G. of Goebbels and Mussolini's Italy: former collaborator of A. Fanck, of whom he brings ahead of the great technical and spectacular lesson, with Der verlorene Sohn (1934; The prodigal son) and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1936) stigmatized corruption and decay of capitalist civilization, indicating nature (and in particular its mountains of origin) as a place of recovery of the roots and values ​​of tradition. man manages to recover his mythical relationship with nature. On the same line, but within the Bergfilm, you can place the best works of the South Tyrolean director L. Trenker, always in the balance between G. of Goebbels and Mussolini's Italy: former collaborator of A. Fanck, of whom he brings ahead of the great technical and spectacular lesson, with Der verlorene Sohn (1934; The prodigal son) and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1936) stigmatized corruption and decay of capitalist civilization, indicating nature (and in particular its mountains of origin) as a place of recovery of the roots and values ​​of tradition. man manages to recover his mythical relationship with nature. On the same line, but within the Bergfilm, you can place the best works of the South Tyrolean director L. Trenker, always in the balance between G. of Goebbels and Mussolini's Italy: former collaborator of A. Fanck, of whom he brings ahead of the great technical and spectacular lesson, with Der verlorene Sohn (1934; The prodigal son) and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1936) stigmatized corruption and decay of capitalist civilization, indicating nature (and in particular its mountains of origin) as a place of recovery of the roots and values ​​of tradition.

La maggior parte dei film prodotti nei dodici anni di regime risulta però di più difficile classificazione, legata com'è alla Unterhaltungsproduktion, un settore soggetto ancora a molti interrogativi da parte della critica e influenzato dai modelli di Hollywood, che il ministro Goebbels considerava il suo massimo ideale. Qui l'intento politico non è facilmente rintracciabile, se non a livello occulto o nei mezzi, piuttosto che nel contesto o nei fini ("Anche mantenere il nostro popolo di buon umore può essere decisivo per le sorti della guerra", avrebbe affermato Goebbels nel 1942). Del resto, molti dei registi rimasti a lavorare in G. dopo il 1933 hanno spesso usato come giustificazione il fatto di aver collaborato a film 'innocui'. Si tratta comunque di prodotti che avevano un vasto impatto sulla vita quotidiana e che, grazie al fenomeno del divismo (con nuove star come, per es., Zarah Leander, Kristina Söderbaum, Brigitte Horney o come Willy Birgel, Hans Albers, Mathias Wieman ecc.) sviluppavano un grande potenziale mitico. Va registrata, tuttavia, in questo panorama, l'eccezione rappresentata da Helmut Käutner che, senza assumere il carattere di aperta protesta, realizzò, in una guerriglia estetica contro il regime, Romanze in Moll (1943; La collana di perle), Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 (1944) o Unter den Brücken (1946, ma girato nell'estate del 1944), dove, calandosi nel quotidiano con uno stile intimista, disegna, con estrema accuratezza formale, straordinari ritratti di personaggi antieroici.

Allo scoppio della guerra nel 1939 si assistette a un'accelerazione delle tendenze già evidenziate, mentre la produzione, ridimensionatasi a 50-70 film e ormai quasi completamente accentrata nell'UFA, seguiva l'imperativo categorico di diffondere l'ottimismo e il divertimento come ben sarebbe riuscita a fare, in Agfacolor e in occasione del venticinquesimo anniversario della Major tedesca, con Münchhausen (1943; Il barone di Münchhausen) di Josef von Baky, interpretato da Hans Albers e scritto sotto pseudonimo dallo scrittore dissidente E. Kästner. Si moltiplicavano comunque i film d'argomento bellico con lo scopo di infiammare l'animo della popolazione, talvolta espressamente pensati per il pubblico femminile che rappresentava la maggioranza degli spettatori, come nel caso dei mélo Wunschkonzert (1940; Concerto a richiesta) di Eduard von Borsody o Die grosse Liebe (1942; Un grande amore) di Rolf Hansen, con la diva del Reich Zarah Leander. Accanto a questi prodotti prosperava il genere dei cosiddetti Anti-filme, che non erano esclusivo appannaggio della sola G. ma che in questo caso portavano un preciso e gerarchico messaggio razzista contro i suoi nemici: se infatti i film antibritannici o antifrancesi erano legati sostanzialmente a fattori politici, i film antisovietici (a partire dall'invasione dell'Urss nel giugno del 1941) comportavano un misto di avversione ideologica e razziale. Ma l'avversario infimo e ritenuto tuttavia il più pericoloso era comunque il giudaismo, rappresentato alla stregua di una peste che si diffonde in maniera subdola per il mondo, contro il quale il regime si scaglia con film, tutti del 1940, come Die Rothschilds, Aktien auf Waterloo (I Rothschild) di Erich Waschneck, il perfido Jud Süss (Süss l'ebreo) di V. Harlan, per non parlare dello pseudo-documentario di F. Hippler Der ewige Jude, la più infame opera antisemita della storia del cinema.

The delusion of omnipotence of Nazism ended with an emblematic film, Harberg's Kolberg (1945), which exalts the resistance of a Pomeranian town against the Napoleonic armies. The last, megalomaniac regime colossal saw a stellar cast and thousands of extras made up of soldiers specially recalled from the front. The 'first' was held on January 30, 1945 in La Rochelle, surrounded by the Allies, where a copy was parachuted. But the twilight of the (false) gods was upon us. On the day of the capitulation, May 7, 1945, he saw the G. in pieces: 40% of the houses were destroyed or damaged, the industrial capacity even more than halved compared to the levels of 1936, the whole territory of the 'millennial Reich' and Berlin were occupied by allied troops and divided into four 'areas of influence'

The 'zero hour': 1945-1949

Although characterized by growing political tensions that culminated in the birth of two opposing republics, the period 1945-1949 must be considered in a uniform way because there are no real differences between the films produced in the four occupation zones, and because a certain circulation continued to exist of works and directors between East and West. In particular, in the Sowjetische Besazungszone (SBZ) already on November 17, 1945, a 'cinematographic active' was called, in which forty experts took part, including the directors Kurt Maetzig, Peter Pewas and Wolfgang Staudte, with the task of restarting the cinematographic activity. In the SBZ where about 80% of the film studios and major development and printing plants remained,DEFA), in the form of a Soviet-owned joint stock company. Having inherited most of the UFA installations in Babelsberg, DEFA became for a time the largest German film company also because until the fateful 1949 it followed a 'liberal' and market policy, also offering work to numerous non-resident directors in the SBZ.Vice more difficult was the recovery in the three western areas where infrastructure was almost lacking, except in Hamburg and Munich. Unlike in the East, where a central production system was perpetuated in structural continuity with the Nazi one, in the West the principle of productive fragmentation and competition was introduced. This system, with a plurality of small firms poor in capital, would have led, instead, an almost automatic dictatorship of the market and an invasive dependence on distributions. In a situation characterized by an exercise destroyed by the war and by a complete invasion of foreign products, in 1946 the first two works of the new G were born: Die Mörder sind unter uns (The murderers are among us) by W. Staudte and Sag᾽ die Wahrheit by Helmut Weiss. While the latter is an insignificant comedy, Staudte's film is instead worthy of the greatest interest since it constitutes both from the content point of view (the shock and the drama of a return to a spooky Berlin), and from a stylistic point of view (the wise use of strongly contrasted lighting and live environments), the model of the short season of Trümmerfilme. Compared to this promising start, on the other hand, crowned by a notable public success (six million spectators), the subsequent development only partially maintained the 'realistic' renewal request. In addition to Staudte's work, DEFA was characterized by some of the best productions of the time: from Ehe im Schatten (1947) by K. Maetzig to Affaire Blum (1948) by Erich Engel, from Strassenbekanntschaft (1948) by P Pewas a Rotation (1949), also by Staudte. Also in western areas, in the same wavelength, In jenen Tagen (1947) by H. Käutner, Film ohne Titel (1948) by Rudolf Jugert, Berliner Ballade (1948; Berlin ballad) by Robert A. Stemmle or Morituri were made (1948) by Eugen York. In general, the Trümmerfilme focus on private cases and have the figures of 'little men' at the center, guilty of having passively observed the unfolding of events; often the narrative perspective is 'objectified', as for example. in the case of the car that spans ten years of tragic German history and seven masters, in the film In jenen Tagen, while the 'voice-off' that comments on events is frequently used. But it should also be added that, more often than not, the setting between the rubble of war seems to be pure decoration, the work of skilled scenographers. Stylistically, numerous Trümmerfilme refer to what we call the 'expressionist' tradition for convenience: strong contrasts of light and shadow, tendency towards symbolization, reproposing of a suffering but undifferentiated humanity. Or it is given, as for example. in Berliner Ballade or in Der Apfel ist ab (1948) by Käutner, a markedly cabaret form to express ironic-satirical moods, a device that was subsequently widely used. W. Liebeneiner in Liebe 47 (1949, freely adapted from the strong neo-expressionist drama of W. Borchert Draussen vor der Tür, 1946) finally makes use of 'surrealist' sequences, but bends the desperate protest of the play to the conciliatory morality of the happy end.

If the Trümmerfilm constituted the prevalent genre of the two-year period 1946-1948 (among the forty films made, only five are works of entertainment), it suffered from the comparison with Italian Neorealism, to which it wanted to be related in the desire for moral redemption and in research. of new stylistic ways (but if ever there is a perfect Trümmerfilm, it was made by Roberto Rossellini with the splendid Germany zero year, 1948, an Italian-German-French co-production). It was therefore a period characterized by a chaotic mix of old and new, not without interest. With the subsequent split of G., however, this pale beginning of renewal and the German cinematography was dragged into a fatal gap: "while the propaganda monotony was spreading in the east,

Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD)

The cinema of a long post-war period: 1949-1962. - It is almost surprising to see how quickly, starting from the monetary reform of 1948, the economic miracle took place, the destroyed cities were rebuilt and the eight million refugees from the eastern territories were integrated. But just as quickly the BRD cinema would have erased what little new expressed in the Trümmerfilm, whose problems emigrate, watered down, in the genre of the Problemfilm, often resorting to cabaret, the only form devoted to criticism or experimentation. An example for all: Rolf Thiele's Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1958; The Rosemarie Girl), an effective but reticent X-ray of the crime of the call girl Rosemarie Nitribitt, one of the greatest political scandals of the BRD. We are in the 'sad' years of the Adenauer era, aRainer Werner Fassbinderhe would have photographed with great effectiveness twenty years later. In the context of the economic boom, production, which stopped at 59 titles in 1949, would have doubled in a short time, reaching the record number of 128 films in 1955, and then slowly dropped to 94 units at the end of the decade. Although they were years of abundance for the German industry, whose market share would never drop below 47%, production still suffered from segmentation, despite the reprivatizations of the UFA plants that remained in western G., the Cassette hits and supporting government interventions. It was therefore a profound insecurity that pushed her, not only from an ideological point of view, to marry a conservative attitude, to rely on 'safe' products and ultracollaudati (hence the iron codification in popular genres and the continuous use of remakes of past hits). In addition, it was a 'too neat' cinema, made, almost without generational change, by the filmmakers of the 1930s, many of whom compromised with the Nazi regime. The result was the tired codification, in contents and forms, of a film of at least twenty years old. It preferred popular genres such as melodramas, doctors' films, war films, comedies, and above all the Heimatfilme, the most typical and provincial phenomenon of the time, which varied infinitely strapaesane stories of family agnitions, poachers or shepherdesses, set in alpine or rural areas. too orderly ', made, almost without generational change, by the filmmakers of the 1930s, many of whom compromised with the Nazi regime. The result was the tired codification, in contents and forms, of a film of at least twenty years old. It preferred popular genres such as melodramas, doctors' films, war films, comedies, and above all the Heimatfilme, the most typical and provincial phenomenon of the time, which varied infinitely strapaesane stories of family agnitions, poachers or shepherdesses, set in alpine or rural areas. too orderly ', made, almost without generational change, by the filmmakers of the 1930s, many of whom compromised with the Nazi regime. The result was the tired codification, in contents and forms, of a film of at least twenty years old. It preferred popular genres such as melodramas, doctors' films, war films, comedies, and above all the Heimatfilme, the most typical and provincial phenomenon of the time, which varied infinitely strapaesane stories of family agnitions, poachers or shepherdesses, set in alpine or rural areas. years. It preferred popular genres such as melodramas, doctors' films, war films, comedies, and above all the Heimatfilme, the most typical and provincial phenomenon of the time, which varied infinitely strapaesane stories of family agnitions, poachers or shepherdesses, set in alpine or rural areas. years. It preferred popular genres such as melodramas, doctors' films, war films, comedies, and above all the Heimatfilme, the most typical and provincial phenomenon of the time, which varied infinitely strapaesane stories of family agnitions, poachers or shepherdesses, set in alpine or rural areas.

Adenauer era also stand out in the individual careers of the most representative directors of the time: H. Käutner, W. Staudte and Kurt Hoffmann. The undoubted talent of the former developed in the post-war period in a multifaceted but discontinuous career, towards an abstract and somewhat affected humanitarianism, particularly evident when the director confronts political issues. In Staudte, after a series of remarkable works created in the GDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), the passage in the West did not help in 1956. Forced to struggle between commercial needs and civil commitment, the 'director of the two Germanies', once again taking up the theme of the opportunism of his fellow countrymen, would still have managed to make two noteworthy films: Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (1959) and Kirmes (1960; story of a deserter). K. Hoffmann, however, starting from the film Fanfaren der Liebe (1951, then remade by B. Wilder in 1959 in the immortal Some like it hot), went on to refine a comedy characterized by musical elements and critical ideas, in works such as Ich denke oft an Piroschka (1955) which launched the actress Lilo Pulver (together in ten films), Das Wirtshaus im Spessart (1958) and the comedy satire of the economic miracle Wir Wunderkinder (1958; Finally dawn). finally, part of it is the return from emigration of a number of important actors and directors already active in German cinema before Hitler's advent. The most beautiful and violent showdown with the widespread sense of unease of those who returned to their homeland after the 'black twelfth' realized it, taking up the expressionistic forms, the actor Peter Lorre with his only proof behind the camera, Der Verlorene (1951), an effective parable of a psychopathic assassin whom he interpreted, who will eventually find the strength to do justice. Among the works created after his return, R. Siodmak was proud only of Die Ratten (1955; I mice, from the drama of G. Hauptmann) and Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957; Secret Order of the III Reich), perhaps the stronger than the Problemfilms of the time, a political background yellow, where you can enjoy the magical touch of the master of noir again. F. Lang, on the other hand, shot three interesting but little appreciated genre films for Arthur Brauner's CCC-Film with which he returned to the sources of his cinema: the diptych formed by Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1959; La tigre di Eschnapur) and by Das indische Grabmal (1959; The Indian sepulcher, remake of the work by J. May, which he wrote in 1921 together with Thea von Harbou) and the third part of the saga of Doctor Mabuse, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960; The diabolical Doctor Mabuse), prophetic and ciphered swan song addressed to the looming of the television era. But apart from these cases, or that of the last Pabst or M. Ophuls of the splendid Lola Montès (1955, made in co-production with France), little is remembered of the other numerous directors who returned from emigration.

One of the major faults of commercial cinema of the Adenuaer era was that of not having produced a generational change within it. The few exceptions confirm the rule. From 1959 it is a war film characterized by a dry pathos in the staging, Die Brücke (The bridge) by Bernhard Wicki , which would have helped to revive internationally the poor prestige of the BRD, and at home that of a young and independent cinema. Together with him, only one other debutant, Georg Tressler, would have managed to establish himself, with the first work Die Halbstarken (1956; Black sheep), starring a Horst Buchholzvery young. Perhaps Tressler's or others' later career would have been different and would have offered more convincing results if BRD cinema had not embarked on a slow but suicidal 'self-sinking' policy. The vigorous shoulder of a new generation of outsiders would therefore have been healthy, while emigration on television was the most honorable solution for those who had trained in the bosom of the old industry: so for Tressler since 1962 or for Staudte and Käutner since 1970.

The rise and fall of auteur cinema: 1962-1989. - At the beginning of the sixties, the signs of a profound crisis in the film industry multiplied in the BRD due to the effect of television competition and at the same time the gradual disaffection of the public with fashion genres. This was accompanied by an increasingly pronounced decline in the average quality of commercial cinema that sought new strands to be exploited: the 'krauti-western' - a short cycle of films based on the volumes of the 'German Salgari', K. May, who was direct antecedent of the far more significant 'spaghetti-western' - and then yellow. However, despite some successful tapes, the economic meltdown was upon us and by the mid-sixties the German film industry would have gone into a coma if to lengthen its agony had not intervened the birth of soft-porn, on the one hand, due to the expansion of the frontiers of morality, and on the other the framework law of 1967, which returned to reward cassette films. Thus, the production, which dropped to the record negative figure of 56 films in 1965, quickly went back up to 110 units in 1969, of which the exact half was now made up of 'sexy films', first 'disguised' as semi-documentaries of type sex education Helga (1967) by Erich F. Bender, to move soon to more and more explicit products.

Preceded a month by the UFA's bankruptcy, which the newcomers welcomed as if it were the divine sign of the closure of an era, the Oberhausen Manifesto of February 1962 marked the official date of birth of the Junger Deutscher Filmthat after a whole series of short films would have blossomed in the period 1965-1967. However, the young cinema would have found itself somewhat unprepared to face the radicalism of the 1968 movement, which accompanied the formation of militant cinema collectives and the birth of feminist-feminist cinema, a phenomenon that in BRD would have taken on dimensions considerable. Antesignano was Neun Leben hat die Katze (1968) by novice Ula Stöckl from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, while shortly before another woman, May Spils, had shot a fun generational comedy, Zur Sache, Schätzchen (1968), d ' Munich environment and slang, which seems to anticipate Doris Dörrie's subsequent existential comedies. The student revolt, in addition to finding itself as an 'aura' of the times in numerous productions, had serious repercussions in the world of entertainment: the Oberhausen Festival risked jumping in 1968 after the successful provocation of the experimental director Hellmuth Costart that to protest against the newly launched law-framework on cinema, in the short film Besonders wertvoll , gives a penis the quality classification with which state economic contributions were requested; theFestival di Berlino1970 stopped following the withdrawal of the Americans from the competition, in protest against the film directed by Michael Verhoeven OK, highly critical of the war in Vietnam. But beyond these facts, 1968 marked a decisive break in the Junger Deutscher Film, leading to an overall rethinking which experienced - in its need to anchor itself to the public - one of the few genre operations in its history. The idea of ​​the so-called critical Heimatfilm started from that of Brechtian 'refunctionalization' of the main genre of the Adenauer era, to overturn its contents and ideologies, using the same provincial-peasant setting. The operation was part of the work of some Bavarian popular playwrights, M. Sperr, FX Kroetz or the same theatrical author Fassbinder, who, in turn, resumed the social-critical tradition of the Twenties of the Volksteather by M. Fleisser or Ö. von Horvath. Among the best results of this subgenre, we could remember the famous (but also a bit overrated) Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern (1969; Hunting scenes in Lower Bavaria, by M. Sperr) by Peter Fleischmann, or Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) byVolker Schlöndorff , in addition to the Fassbinderians Katzelmacher (1969, from his play of the same name) and Wildwechsel (1972; Wild game, unfaithful adaptation by FX Kroetz). Niklaus Schilling too, but from a sympathetic point of view, would have addressed the atmosphere of the Heimatfilm in his beautiful debut work Nachtschatten (1972).

Un caso tutto a sé di Heimatkünstler è, invece, il pittore, scrittore e poeta dialettale Herbert Achternbusch, un autore di difficile comprensione linguistica al di fuori dalla G. meridionale. Emulo del grande comico monacense Karl Valentin, Achternbusch si muove in una narrazione fiabesca, surreale e clownesca, tra un grand-guignol di paradossi e il Moritat religioso; dall'angolo privilegiato della provincia e con radicalità anarchica, lancia una serie di provocazioni nei confronti dei suoi conterranei: humour nero, paradossi, giochi di parole contraddistinguono un opus pamphlettistico di cui è attore, produttore e regista. La sua opera cinematografica, quasi naif e amatoriale, è andata migliorando formalmente nel corso degli anni (ma anche perdendo di incisività): dal ruvido esordio di Das Andechser Gefühl (1975), passando per Bierkampf (1977), un film 'all'impronta' dove sotto le mentite spoglie di un poliziotto ubriaco provoca i frequentatori dell'Oktoberfest, e arrivando a Das letzte Loch (1981), un amarissimo apologo sullo sterminio degli ebrei, o a Blaue Blumen (1985; Fiori azzurri), poetico studio sui volti dei bambini cinesi, una delle rarissime escursioni di Achternbusch fuori dei temi e dei confini della Baviera.

At the end of the 1960s, Das andere Kino also matured, a term with which BRD defined itself as 'independent', underground cinema, which arose from the second half of the 1960s in almost all of Europe under the influence of New American Cinema. Already at the Knokke Experimental Film Festival (Belgium), between the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, the main representatives of this trend were active: Werner Nekes, Lutz Mommartz, Hellmuth Costard, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, while from the same humus, in addition to Wim Wenders , came Werner Schroeterand Rosa von Praunheim, whose subsequent careers, while not forgetting the original avant-garde matrix, would soon have taken other paths, one in the direction of the opera melody, the other of a militant gay cinema, sometimes declined in the direction of a At the turn of the decade, the Junger Deutscher Film, also due to the emergence of new talents, became the Neuer Deutscher Film, inaugurating an extraordinary season of international success. From this moment until the middle of the following decade, German cinema would therefore have lived a double existence, which is characterized, in negative, by an accentuated decline of the industrial fabric, accelerated with the progressive extinction of the soft-porn wave and the consequent halving of the production base (112 films in 1971, only 68 in 1989) and the box office. The stagnation of trade was contrasted by the authorial exploit of Neuer Deutscher Film, made possible thanks to an increasingly complex and complex system of state subsidies, but penalized by a massive 'Americanization' of the year. This found a very partial and limited correction in the rise of an alternative circuit (municipal cinemas, arthouse halls, film clubs etc.) and in the activity of the Americanization of the year. This found a very partial and limited correction in the rise of an alternative circuit (municipal cinemas, arthouse halls, film clubs etc.) and in the activity of the Americanization of the year. This found a very partial and limited correction in the rise of an alternative circuit (municipal cinemas, arthouse halls, film clubs etc.) and in the activity of theFilmverlag der Autoren or similar small companies specializing in German quality products. Talking about the golden age of the seventies necessarily means following the poetics of directors such as RW Fassbinder, Werner Herzog , Alexander Kluge , Edgar Reitz , W. Schroeter, V Schlöndorff, Hans Jürgen Syberberg , Margarethe von Trotta, W. Wenders etc., each different and far from the other, given that any other type of analysis - by genres or themes - does not adapt to capturing the jagged galaxy of the Neuer Deutscher Film, where few common characters can be found: a constant social or anthropological interest often connected to the analysis of German identity, the widespread use of the low budget self-production formula (especially in the early 1970s). Still, if 'realistic' styles and content prevail, nevertheless the melodrama has been frequented with some continuity by the Autorenfilm: in addition to the names of Fassbinder or Schroeter, great innovators of the genre, among those who have practiced it, it will be necessary to mention Robert van Ackeren and N. Schilling. Finally, it will be appropriate to remember theHelma Sanders-Brahms or in the fireworks of the bizarre fantasy of Ulrike Ottinger, one of the most visionary talents of the Neuer Deutscher Film. Unlike Munich, which remained the industrial center of the BRD cinema until its unification, the films born in Berlin were characterized by a more marked ideological sign and by the use of low cost. Thus, in the early seventies, some Arbeiterfilme began to turn in the divided metropolis, which staged a social subject, the working class, which had been removed for decades. Strongly linked to the student movement and in an entirely ideological reference to 'proletarian cinema' (see Neue Sachlichkeit) of the Weimarian age, the so-called Berliner Schule, whose main representative was Christian Ziewer - from Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut (1972) to Der aufrechte Gang (1976) -, translated the suggestions of European militant cinema into German. The experience was short-lived, unlike feminist or gay cinema, which began when R. von Praunheim, having completed the underground experience, shot the manifesto film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (1971). For von Praunheim, too, cinema is a weapon of struggle and his films represent a final attempt to make cinematographic reportage in that uncomfortable space between kitsch and sensationalism. Therefore he is always looking for taboo subjects (homosexuality, old age, death, AIDS etc. ) or eccentric and extravagant characters, in dealing with whom the militant commitment and the documentary structure are sometimes supported by a strong theatrical vocation, by a sour taste for parody and by a neo-expressionist style. To complete the picture, only a nod to the activity of Peter Lilienthal, a typical intellectual figure of a wandering Jew, who has long resided in the German metropolis. After training on television, Lilienthal exhibited the 'distracted' narrative, the poetic montage, the melancholy undertones characteristic of his style in Malatesta (1970), an interesting portrait of the Italian anarchist played by Eddie Constantine. The theme of the relationship between the individual and violence - that is, violence as a political weapon - would return as a leitmotiv in Lilienthal's cinema and in particular in the five films - from La victoria (1973) to Das Autogramm (1984) - dedicated to drama socio-political situation in Latin America (which the director knew well, having resided as a young exile in Montevideo). Although one of the most politicized filmmakers of the BRD, there is also a dreamy and lyrical vein in him, which emerges in David (Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival in 1979) or in Dear Mr. Wonderful (1982; played by a good Joe Pesci), perhaps the two best works of his filmography. One of the few moments of unity of the Neuer Deutscher Film was born once again from a political motive: the deterioration of the internal political climate of the BRD for the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) terrorism emergency. Already denounced by V. Schlöndorff and M. von Trotta in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975; The Katharina Blum case, from the text by H. Böll), the mounting anti-terrorist hysteria and the dangers for democracy would have found an effective answer in the episodic film Deutschland im Herbst (1978; Germany in autumn). It was the first of a series of collective products led by A. Kluge and at the same time one of the most effective on the phenomenon of terrorism, a theme also addressed by Messer im Kopf (1978; The knife in the head, played by a Bruno Ganz plus a gigion and likeable than ever) and Stammheim (Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986) both by Reinhard Hauff, and by Die bleierne Zeit (Years of lead, Golden Lion at the 1981 Venice Film Festival) by M. von Trotta, to get to the beginning of the 21st century .: V. Schlöndorff returned to the topic of terrorism in Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000; Silence after the shot) while, among others, a young filmmaker, Christian Petzold, with Die innere Sicherheit (2000), has revisited the theme from the perspective of those who have not experienced that era in person. Since the death of Fassbinder in 1982, we have returned to breathe air of crisis in the Neuer Deutscher Film - and not for one of the usual economic issues (yet another sharp drop in the number of spectators). The magical atmosphere and the innovative charge of the previous decade had suddenly disappeared, while the debuts of real interest were rare. At the same time, after many years of lethargy, a profound restructuring of the film industry, accompanied by the production turnaround of some Neuer Deutscher Film authors who have abandoned the low budget. Under this sign lies the whole last phase of Fassbinderian cinema or the birth of some blockbusters such as Die Blechtrommel (1979; The tin drum) by Schlöndorff, Fitzcarraldo (1982) by Herzog or Der Zauberberg (1981; The mountain enchanted, from the novel by Th. Mann) directed by Hans W. Geissendörfer. But it was also necessary to rebuild a commercial cinema worthy of the name. In Bavaria's Munich studios, the 'pilot' of this project was born, a work that is anything but despicable, Das Boot (1981; U-boot 96) directed by Wolfgang Petersen, a director who then emigrated to Hollywood, and produced American style by an intelligent Munich producer, Bernd Eichinger, the founder of a new way of understanding industry. At the same time, Neuer Deutscher Film has experienced an irreversible diaspora, favored by the liberal politics of the new government coalition. However, the narrowing of economic aid to quality cinema found a partial counterbalance in the development of grants on a regional basis, in particular those of the two Länder with a social democratic majority, Hamburg and Nordrhein-Westfalen. Thus for a short period the Hanseatic city allowed the creation of films, aesthetically and / or politically difficult, such as Stammheim by R. Hauff or Klassenverhältnisse (1984; Class relations), in co-production with France, by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, or significant debuts such as 40 qm Deutschland (1986; 40 m2 of Germany) by the Turkish-German Tevfik Başer, the forerunner of métissage cinema in Germany. The development of Autorenfilm suffered a halt mainly because the new players preferred to opt for genre films, in particular comedies and detective films. The most interesting of the directors who emerged from this turn was a woman, D. Dörrie who triumphed at the box office in the third feature, Männer (1985; Men), thanks also to the comic vein of an actor very close to her, Uwe Ochsenknecht. Far from the somewhat stale comedy of the rest of German neocomedy, Dörrie has carried out contamination, drawing from the so-called Bezieungsfilme or other genres to create a pleasant existential sophisticated comedy whose best results have been: Happy Birthday, Türke ( 1991; Happy birthday, detective!), Keiner liebt mich (1995), another great public success, or more recently Erleuchtung garantiert (1999), a fun excursion to contemporary Japan. In the field of light entertainment but full of intelligence,Percy Adlon , who achieved international success with the comedy 'mestizo' Out of Rosenheim (1987; Bagdad Café) thanks above all to the bursting physicality of Marianne Sägebrecht. After fifteen years spent in various experiments, not always lucky, Rudolf Thome has made a decisive turning point in his career with the delicious and remotely Rohmerian Der Philosoph (1989; Three women, sex and Plato). This was followed up to Paradiso (2000) by modern fairy tales of the same tenor, where starting from an autobiographical incipit, but with mixed results, a wise search for love and a stress-free life in the new Berlin and in the beautiful countryside is described of the surroundings.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)

The golden age of DEFA: 1949-1966. - In the beginning, DEFA had followed, as mentioned, a 'liberal' policy, so much so that of the twenty-six films produced between 1946 and 1949, less than a fifth referred to socialist ideals. However, already in this first period the bases of the genres and themes that would later characterize the GDR cinema would have been laid: the anti-fascist film, the analysis of anti-Semitism (Ehe im Schatten, the debut of K. Maetzig, on the case of actor Joachim Gottschalk who committed suicide with his family for refusing to leave his Jewish wife), the search for the roots of National Socialism (Affaire Blum, directed by E. Engel), the historical commemorations (Und wieder 48 !, 1948, by Gustav von Wangenheim , on the bourgeois revolution of 1848) or literary adaptations such as Der Biberpelz (1949, film by E. Engel taken from G. Hauptmann) and Wozzeck (1947, by Georg C. Klaren, taken from G. Büchner). With the birth of the two republics, the flow of filmmakers between East and West slowed down considerably (and would have stopped completely with the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961), while the cinematography of the newly created GDR aligned itself with the Soviet model. Two communist filmmakers returned from exile to give her strength, G. von Wangenheim andSlatan Th. Dudowto which the first 'socialist' film by DEFA is due: Unser täglich Brot (1949). Then followed a series of films with a strong 'propagandistic-agitatory' character, such as Der Rat der Götter (1950, on the responsibility of the IG Farben industry in the rise of Nazism) by Maetzig, or Familie Benthin (1950), directed by a collective under the leadership of Dudow. In this pioneering period W. Staudte shot, after Rotation, what is perhaps his best film, Der Untertan (1951), a vigorous satire of the petty bourgeois German, from the novel of the same name by H. Mann, while Maetzig directed the prestigious superproduction Ernst Thälmann, in two parts (1954, Ernst Thälmann - Sohn seiner Klasse, and 1955, Ernst Thälmann - Führer seiner Klasse), hagiographic color biography of the great leader of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), not without, however, in the folds of the propaganda discourse, some happy moment. In 1953 DEFA returned completely into German hands, transformed into Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB), and in the same year, after Stalin's death and under the pressure of the workers' revolt in East Berlin, the 'new course' policy began, marked from an increased corporate responsibility and from a greater respect for the tastes of the public, with the consequence that production went up rapidly, reaching its peak in 1960 with twenty-six feature films. In addition to a number of entertainment films, a fair production of children's films emerged, with good examples, from Irgendwo in Berlin (1946) by G. Lamprecht a Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (1953) by Staudte a Sie nannten ihn Amigo (1959) directed by Heiner Carow. In the documentary field there is instead the couple Andrew and Annelise Thorndike, whose Archivfilme on recent German history, despite the explicit propaganda matrix, aroused interest at an international level. Next to the 'veterans' it began to become light, in the middle of the decade, a new lever of directors:Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer, Gerhard Klein and H. Carow started a cinema that marks a certain difference from the past. This is demonstrated by the series of the three Berlin-Filme - topical works on the life of the divided metropolis - directed by Klein and written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, the best writer of the GDR, who already in his debut test, Alarm im Zirkus (1954) , he took Italian Neorealism as a model. Thus, in the last film of the series, the most successful, Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser ... (1957), the propaganda controversy is accompanied by a realistic description of the environment of the rebellious youth, whose existence is also recognized in the East. a continuous alternation of timid openings and political restraints began to establish with Lissy (1957) the talent of the greatest director of the GDR, K. Wolf, while the marked commitment to renew the second generation of GDR directors would have resulted in a 'cinematographic spring' interrupted in December 1965 by the eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) which accused DEFA of "promoting harmful ideological phenomena of skepticism and alienation ". These are the so-called rabbit films, so called by Das Kaninchen bin ich (produced in 1965, but released in 1989) by K. Maetzig, of which the importance was understood only after the fall of the wall, when they left the cellari in which they had been buried for a quarter of a century. The ideological crackdown of the SED involved all the production of the two-year period 1965-66: they were for example. precipitously withdrawn from the market, or not included in the programming, in addition to Das Kaninchen bin ich, also Denk bloss nicht, ich heule (shot in 1965 and then released in 1990) by Frank Vogel and Spur der Steine ​​(1966) by F. Beyer, while several works, such as Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary maker Jurgen Böttcher, were interrupted during the production phase. The consequences of this drastic change would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. in addition to Das Kaninchen bin ich, also Denk bloss nicht, ich heule (shot in 1965 and then released in 1990) by Frank Vogel and Spur der Steine ​​(1966) by F. Beyer, while several works, such as Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary maker Jurgen Böttcher, were interrupted during the production phase. The consequences of this drastic turn would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead, politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. in addition to Das Kaninchen bin ich, also Denk bloss nicht, ich heule (shot in 1965 and then released in 1990) by Frank Vogel and Spur der Steine ​​(1966) by F. Beyer, while several works, such as Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary maker Jurgen Böttcher, were interrupted during the production phase. The consequences of this drastic turn would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead, politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. ich heule (shot in 1965 and then released in 1990) by Frank Vogel and Spur der Steine ​​(1966) by F. Beyer, while several works, such as Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary filmmaker Jurgen Böttcher, were interrupted during the manufacturing phase. The consequences of this drastic change would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. ich heule (shot in 1965 and then released in 1990) by Frank Vogel and Spur der Steine ​​(1966) by F. Beyer, while several works, such as Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary filmmaker Jurgen Böttcher, were interrupted during the manufacturing phase. The consequences of this drastic change would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. like Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary maker Jurgen Böttcher, they were interrupted during the production phase. The consequences of this drastic change would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. like Jahrgang 45 (produced in 1966 and also released in 1990) by the future documentary maker Jurgen Böttcher, they were interrupted during the production phase. The consequences of this drastic turn would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead, politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. The consequences of this drastic turn would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead, politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public. The consequences of this drastic turn would have brought a widespread climate of disengagement and insecurity among the directors of DEFA, blocking a possible rebirth that would never have happened again. Once the production block was over, instead, politically more innocuous and hitherto unknown genres such as historical adventure films or oriental sauerkraut flourished, which moreover gained a lively success with the public.

Accanto a Wolf, la figura emergente della cinematografia della DDR fu, all'inizio degli anni Sessanta, F. Beyer, che realizzò una notevole trilogia antifascista: Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960), ambientato durante la guerra civile spagnola e interpretato dai suoi due attori preferiti, Erwin Geschonneck e Armin Mueller-Stahl; Königskinder (1962) e Nackt unter Wölfen (1963), il film più famoso dei tre, tratto dall'omonimo romanzo di B. Apitz sul campo di concentramento di Buchenwald. Quando Beyer passò ad affrontare temi di attualità del socialismo, con il già citato Spur der Steine, un'anticonvenzionale ballata sul mondo del lavoro interpretata dallo spavaldo attore-cabarettista Manfred Krug, il regista si trovò al centro di una violenta campagna diffamatoria che lo obbligò a lavorare prima in teatro poi in televisione; sarebbe passato quasi un decennio, prima che Beyer realizzasse, dal romanzo di J. Becker, uno dei suoi film migliori, Jakob der Lügner (1974), una bella tragicommedia di stampo brechtiano ambientata in un lager (nel 1999 ne è uscito il remake di Peter Kassovitz, con Robin Williams tra gli interpreti) che gli valse, oltre a un premio alla Berlinale, la nomination all'Oscar (unico caso di tutta la produzione DEFA).

Sempre nel campo del film antifascista si segnala ancora Der Fall Gleiwitz (1961) realizzato da G. Klein, sulla base della sceneggiatura scritta da W. Kohlhaase, in cui si ricostruisce con moduli semidocumentari il caso dell'assalto alla stazione radio di Gleiwitz messo in scena dalle SS per offrire un pretesto a Hitler per invadere la Polonia. Il successivo tentativo di Klein e Kohlhaase di continuare l'esperienza dei Berlin-Filme fece la fine di tutti i 'film dei conigli': Berlin um die Ecke (prodotto nel 1965, ma uscito nel 1990) venne bloccato a lavorazione quasi ultimata, restando così l'ultima opera di lungometraggio diretta da Klein.

Il realismo documentario e il documentarismo nella DDR: 1966-1989. - Having recovered very slowly from the shock of the two-year period 1965-66, DEFA began towards the end of the decade to deal with the problems of the so-called technical-scientific revolution in their repercussions within the life of the Republic. No longer characterized by the pathos of the 'heroic' years of the construction of socialism, this renewed interest in the world of work was characterized by the 'micrological' and substantially aideological perspective that led the filmmakers to turn out of Babelsberg's studios, in places and real environments, often with non-professional actors. It was the tendency towards 'documentary realism' to which most of the directors of the 'third generation' of the GDR would refer, albeit with different or even opposite styles: Horst Seemann, Siegfried Kühn, Ralf Kirsten, Lothar Warneke, Roland Gräf, Rainer Simon, Hermann Zschoche. The emergence of this trend was closely related to the evolution of the documentary in the GDR. From the compilation works of A. and A. Thorndike we moved with the couple Walter Heynowski-Gerhard Scheumann to an extremely 'aggressive' type of audiovisual journalism that mainly focuses on Congo, Vietnam and Chile while the first work he said international fame for the pair of filmmakers was Der lachende Mann (1966), an interview conducted in disguise to the head of the Congolese mercenaries, Siegfried Müller. The counterpart to the sensationalistic documentaryism of Heynowski and Scheumann, whose method has often been contested for its extreme and preconceived propaganda rigidity, is represented, however, from those expeditions into daily reality conducted, as well as from the pioneering work of Karl Gass, first of all by J. Böttcher and then by Winfried Junge, Gitta Nickel and Volker Koepp. Influenced by the Cinéma vérité and its techniques (direct sound, 16 mm etc.), the documentary school of the GDR managed to distill and document fragments of reality from the squalor of real socialism with all German diligence and patience (the cycles of films that follow individuals and / or social groups for decades and decades). The meticulous attention to the daily aspects of reality, combined with the adoption of 'light' shooting techniques (albeit with the classic difficulties of technological adjustment, characteristic of socialist systems), would have been an example that fiction cinema, however,

Erich Honecker's election as secretary general of the SED in 1971 marked a short five-year political-cultural opening. However, the 1976 crisis, with the deprivation of citizenship of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, again had serious consequences on the production of DEFA, marred by the continuous loss of artistic staff, gradually passed to work in the West: so the actors Angelica Domröse, Renate Krössner, Manfred Krug, Jutta Hoffmann, Armin Mueller-Stahl (who has become an international star) and Katharina Thalbach, as well as director Egon Günther. Furthermore, the death of K. Wolf, a bit like that of Fassbinder in the Neuer Deutscher Film, deprived the GDR of his 'heart': by a curious coincidence the two authors died in the same year, 1982.

In a political climate always oscillating between repression and liberalization, the GDR fiction cinema exhausted its best strength in the 1980s. Few were the works worthy of being remembered outside a local context, while the accusation of knowing only three b's acquired: "brav, bieder, bildarm" (good, respectable, visually poor). While trying to reflect on the grayness of everyday life, on the private outside the ritual manifestations of collective life, the new levers of DEFA lacked the objective of narrating more complex stories. Exceptions are the rule: R. Gräf's Märkische Forschungen (1982); Die Frau und der Fremde (Golden Bear ex aequo at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985, from a short story by the expressionist writer L. Frank) by R. Simon, director who had suffered yet another case of political censorship with Jadup und Boel, produced in 1980, but only released in 1988; perhaps Die Beunruhigung (1982) by L. Warneke, an 'exceptional' work for DEFA's production modules, built without script and in black and white, shot in just three weeks with the live sound that thematizes the fear of having thrown away its existence.

H. Carow replied to the minimalism of 'documentary realism', who, after the censure suffered by his Die Russen kommen (1966, it would only come out in 1987), was the author of two fortunate and controversial melodramas of daily life, among the greatest hits of the public DEFA: Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973, from a screenplay by the writer and scenarist Ulrich Plenzdorf) and Bis dass der Tod euch scheidet (1979), from a screenplay by Günther Rucker, both characterized by a solid professionalism in the direction of the actors and by a direction careful to dose the effects and emotions. He would have had to wait until the fateful 1989, with the fall of the Berlin wall, to review his talent in Coming out, a film in which he was able to tell a homosexual story.

Already reported in 1965 with a good debut on the problems of divorce, Lots Weib, who continues the tradition of Dudow's Frauenfilme, Günther returned to shoot two films (both starring Jutta Hoffmann) on interpersonal problems: Der Dritte (1972) and Die Schlüssel (1974). The failure of the latter forced Günther to return to those literary adaptations of which in the GDR was undisputed master: Lotte in Weimar (1975, by Th. Mann, with Lilli Palmer as protagonist) and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1976, by JW Goethe). He then left the GDR to continue his work on German-federal television where, with the exception of the remarkable drama Exil (1981), in seven episodes, from the novel of the same name by L. Feuchtwanger, he was unable to match the previous tests.

Back in vogue with Jakob der Lügner, but always in the balance to emigrate to the West, F. Beyer made a fun double comedy first, Das Versteck (1978) and then Der Aufenthalt (1983), from a screenplay by W. Kohlhaase, film who, in the resumption of the parabolic structure of Jakob der Lügner, explores the stay in an internment camp of a young soldier victim of an exchange of person with Kafkaesque accents. Finally, he shot another beautiful 'criminal' comedy set in the second post-war period, Der Bruch (1989), which gathers a large cast of Eastern and Western performers (Götz George, Otto Sander, Rolf Hoppe). Involuntarily the political and state unification that would shortly be accomplished was anticipated in the cinema.

From the fall of the wall to the beginning of the 21st century: to the reconquest of the public

The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 caught the cinemas of the two opposing states in difficult conditions, so that, in unification, the new G. found itself adding up two weaknesses. Apart from a few isolated cases, by authors who have finally tasted complete expressive freedom like R. Gräf in Der Tangospieler (1991), the great turning point (Wende) has not delivered, despite numerous attempts, truly significant fiction films. However, it must be added that the nonfiction cinema has instead experienced an exceptional moment of renaissance. This is demonstrated not only by the numerous 'hot' documentations that have 'stalked' the events but above all by two extraordinary works of reflection, both born in the East: Die Mauer (1990) by J. Böttcher and the monumental Drehbuch: die Zeiten (1993) by Barbara and W. Junge with which, together with November Days (1990) by the French Marcel Ophuls (the son of the great director Max), unforgettable pages on the end of the GDR have been written. In the nineties the Neuer Deutscher Film was reduced to a pale memory of the past: Wenders has become an international filmmaker, more at home in Paris or Los Angeles than in his home country; Kluge has devoted all his efforts to auteur television; Schlöndorff, returning from an emigration to the United States and after the experience of director of studies in Babelsberg, returned behind the camera with very unequal results; Achternbusch continued to repeat himself in a mannerist way; Lilienthal, von Trotta, Schroeter and Herzog have stopped or slowed down their work in fiction as Syberberg has lost track. E. Reitz, with the exploit of Die zweite Heimat, made in 1992, it constitutes the exception that confirms the rule, but now the generation of 'veterans' has ceased to play that decisive role of the past. The psychological disorientation of Wende has passed and after 'indispensable rearrangement of the market, something radically new began to happen in the new G. at the turn of the millennium. The cinematographic situation, at least from an economic point of view, has never been so favorable: the cinemas are full and strong investments (public and private) keep production going, which is constantly moving to feed the needs of a rich internal media market. Not to mention the investments (equal in size to those made at home) in the United States, where the Germans have always enjoyed a leading position and where directors such as Uli Edel, W. Petersen or Roland Emmerich are active, to which curiously Hollywood often entrusts 'archinationalist' films such as Independence day (1996) or Air Force One (1997 ). In this era of market-oriented cinema, new talents continue to exist, such as Romuald Karmakar or Fred Keleman, who continue with research, with stubbornness, a research far from fashion, while an interesting Turkish-German cinema is flourishing. Thanks to a small film and television firmament (which includes G. George, Heiner Lauterbach, Jürgen Vogel, Katja Riemann, Uwe Ochsenknecht, Till Schweiger etc.) and the distribution of the US majors, German genre cinema is experiencing a box office renaissance . As is known, the comedy has been the tread and in it we must point out the bitter personality of Helmut Dietl, who uses comic material for scratchy analysis of costume: so in Schtonk! (1992), where he satirizes the sensational 'case' of Hitler's false diaries, as in Rossini (1996), a merciless radiography of the cinematographic environment of the Bavarian capital. At a much lower level, for example, the monks from Munich Sönke Wortmann and Katja von Garnier, author of a nice experimental debut, Abgeschminkt! (1993; Women without make-up), or Berliner Detlev Buck with the blockbuster Männerpension (1996) or Francofortese Rolf Silber by Echte Kerle (1996; Too bad he is male). But comedy is not the only genre awarded commercially;

Finally, in Berlin, reborn, cinematically speaking, after unification, there is the collective X-Filme Creative Pool, aimed at an auteur cinema revised and corrected by the depressed techno air of the nineties and characterized by the desire not to imitate the path of the 'fathers'. This new Berliner Schule, composed of a combative, enterprising group of thirty-year-olds, moves between expressive research and market needs and has as its spearhead Tom Tykwer, author of Lola rennt (1998; Lola corre), a film he has represented the greatest international success of a young German author. Beside him Dani Levy and especially Wolfgang Becker, who in Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (1997), however, did not match the goal of the previous Kinderspiele (Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1992),

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