Festivals : Germany

In Germany, festivals are not the prerogative of the big cities. They are also staged in many charming small towns with their own distinctive atmosphere, such as Schwetzingen with its Rococo theater.
There are more than 100 music festivals alone. Every three years in September Bonn stages its International Beethoven Festival, while in August and September Augsburg’s German Mozart Festival features concerts in a Rococo ambience. The festival in Eutin celebrates the opera composer Carl Maria von Weber, who was born there. Halle and Gottingen focus their festivals on George Frideric Handel; Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen devote theirs to Richard Strauss. The Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth has been staged since 1876. For Wagner fans throughout the world it is like a magnet, for nowhere else in the world can they see so many novel productions of the composer’s works with, as a rule, such spectacular casts.

There is hardly a major city that does not have a music festival: Munich has its Opera Festival (July), Frankfurt am Main the Frankfurt Festival (September), Stuttgart the European Music Festival (August and September), and Berlin its Jazz Festival (November). Dresden has several music festivals and Potsdam the Sanssouci Music Festival; Erfurt features summer concerts in the Bruhler Garten and Weimar its Art Festival. Other highlights include the MDR Music Summer, the Rugen Festival showcasing operas by Rossini, and the International Mosel Music Festival.

Financial Support : Germany

New creative films by young directors have also emerged as a result of financial and cultural support from the federal and state governments, which in recent years has averaged more than DM 150 million annually. In addition, the Young German Film Board of the federal states (which has an annual budget of about DM 2 million) awards prizes for first films of artistic value. Since 1968, the German Federal Film Board (FFA) established under the Federal Film Promotion Act (FFG) has provided financial assistance not only for film production but also for cinemas. The funds are obtained by means of a levy paid by all cinemas, the public television networks and the video industry.

Since 1951 the Federal Minister of the Interior has awarded the annual German Film Prize for the production of top-notch domestic films. Its categories are the Golden Bowl, which is worth DM 1 million, and film strips in gold and silver with prizes of up to DM 900,000. The Wiesbaden Film Assessment Agency, which was established in 1951 by an agreement among the federal states, issues ratings for feature films and short films. These ratings translate into tax exemptions or reductions, as well as subsidies under the Federal Film Promotion Act. They also provide guidance for the public.

Cinemas And Their Audience : Germany

In 1995, attendance at Germany’s approximately 3,500 cinemas topped 125 million. The number of cinema-goers is continuing to grow, due in no small part to the current German film boom. Numerous film festivals have played a key role in establishing the reputation of the German cinema abroad: In addition to the “Berlinale” (founded in 1951), which is the most important German forum for international encounters between members of the film industry, there are international days of short films in Mannheim, Oberhausen and Leipzig as well as film festivals with a specific orientation in Hof, Lubeck and Munich.

Notwithstanding the success of German film productions, elaborate Hollywood films continue to dominate the programs of the country’s cinemas. The German cinema must also fight ever stiffer competition from television and other media, especially from the continuously growing variety of entertainment provided by private television broadcasters, cable and satellite transmission, pay TV and video.

For this reason more resources are being invested in German cinema today than ever before - both in movie theaters and in feature film production. Since the early 1990s media corporations and international cinema groups have been investing more heavily in German cinema. Multiplex cinemas with as many as 18 screens and more than 5,000 seats have already opened in many major cities, and others are under construction or planned. By the year 2000, German cinema operators intend to invest about DM 1.2 billion in such huge cinemas. Today cinema films are often produced in cooperation with television networks. A general agreement between the film industry and the television corporations obligates the latter to provide funds for coproductions with film producers and to refrain from broadcasting such jointly produced films on television until at least two years after they have been released.

Current Trends : Germany

In recent years, German filmmakers have increasing dared to try their hand at comedy and satire
- and have been enthusiastically received by the public. Whereas Loriot relied on understated humor in “Odipussi” (1988) to bring out the comedy of everyday situations, the comic Otto Waalkes played up his talent for slapstick and tomfoolery in his four films. Helmut Dietl was extraordinarily successful with his biting social satires: In “Schtonk” (1991) he parodied the ostensible discovery of Adolf Hitler’s diaries by the illustrated magazine “Stern", and in “Rossini” (1996) he exposed the vanities of the Munich film community’s “beautiful people".

Comedies revolving around personal relationships have meanwhile become the most popular German film genre. Doris Dorrie kicked off this development in 1985 with “Men", her frivolous story of a triangular relationship. After experimenting with other genres such as the thriller ("Happy Birthday", 1991) - she returned to the art of intelligent comedy with “Nobody Loves Me” (1995). In 1994 Sonke Wortmann ("Alone Among Women", 1990; “Acting It Out", 1992) filmed Ralf Konig’s comic “The Most Desired Man", which became one of the biggest box-office hits in the history of German cinema. Detlev Buck has capitalized on the dry humor of his Frisian homeland, entangling his laconic heroes in abstruse situations in “Little Rabbits” (1991), “No More Mr. Nice Guy” (1993) and “Men’s Flophouse” (1995).
(more…)

Filmed Literature : Germany

German directors have shown themselves to be particularly ambitious and often successful as well when it comes to filming major literary works. An outstanding example is Volker Schlondorff (born in 1939), who brought Robert Musil’s “Young Torless” (1965) and Heinrich Boll’s “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” (1975) to the big screen. In 1979 Schlondorff was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for his adaptation of Gunter Grass’s bestseller “The Tin Drum"; in 1980 “The Tin Drum” won an Oscar for the best foreign film. In the years thereafter Schlondorff remained faithful to his genre. His adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel “Homo Faber” (1991) is considered a particularly successful example of filmed literature. In 1991 Werner Schroter filmed “Malina", a coded autobiography of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Wolfgang Petersen’s international success “The Boat” (1981) was based on a novel by Lothar Gunther Buchheim. Re-released in a newly cut version, this film packed the theaters again in 1997.

A prime example of the new realistic homeland film is “Autumn Milk” (1988) by Joseph Vilsmaier. Based on the autobiography of Anna Wimschneider, a Bavarian farmwife, this film was one of the most successful recent German productions. After depicting the gruesome reality of war in the blockbuster film “Stalingrad” (1993), Vilsmaier movingly recounted the tragic life story of a gifted musician in his latest work, “Brother of Sleep” (1995).

Cinema In The German Democratic Republic (Gdr) : Germany

While a wide variety of cinematic productions were gradually emerging in the western part of divided Germany, cinema in the east was financed and controlled by the state. Deutsche Film-AG (DEFA), the state-controlled film company in the GDR, released 15 to 20 productions of its own each year. Starting in the 1960s, however, as young directors became increasingly critical of the conditions under “real existing Socialism", DEFA films no longer invariably toed the official SED line.

This was evident from films such as “The Divided Heaven” (Konrad Wolf, 1964) and “Spur der Steine” (Frank Beyer, 1966), which the government banned from the cinemas shortly after their premieres. “The Legend of Paul and Paula” (Heiner Carow, 1973) and “Jacob the Liar” (Frank Beyer, 1974) were acclaimed outside the GDR as well. Later “Solo Sunny” (Konrad Wolf, 1979) and “Fariaho” (Roland Graf, 1980) probed the limits of thematic and artistic freedom in the GDR.

After the unification of Germany in 1990, DEFA ceased production. The DEFA studios in Babelsberg near Berlin have nevertheless managed the quantum leap to the future: They are presently establishing themselves as one of Europe’s leading locations for film and television production.

The “Young German Cinema” : Germany

In the 1960s and 1970s, the film industry in western Germany experienced a revival: Announcing that “Papa’s cinema is dead,” the “young German cinema” appeared on the scene in 1966. This new generation of German filmmakers went on to produce a series of remarkable films over the course of the following decades, films which exhibited an extraordinary diversity of genres and
themes.

Alexander Kluge, for instance, skillfully fused fiction with documentary material in the film “Yesterday Girl” (1966). Werner Herzog sensitively depicted the life and suffering of the enigmatic foundling Kaspar Hauser in his film “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” (1974). Berhard Sinkel and Alf Brustellin directed “Una Braake” (1975), a delightful comedy. Rainer Werner Fassbinder provided impressive panoramas of German society in films such as “Katzel-macher” (1969), “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1978) and the Berlin epic “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980). For “Veronika Voss” Fassbinder was awarded the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival.
(more…)