It's one of the oddest quirks in screen history that Louis and Auguste Lumière are credited with giving the first cinema show to a paying audience in Paris on 28 December 1895, when German siblings Max and Emil Skladanowsky had already achieved the feat on 1 November using their Bioscop camera-projector to give a 15-minute presentation of eight short subjects at the Wintergarten in Berlin. A century later, Wim Wenders paid tribute to the brothers in A Trick of the Light. But, in the interim, the German film industry had endured more vicissitudes than any of its competitors and the nation that had once influenced the entire world has never quite regained its international prominence.
Moving pictures were viewed with disdain by educated Germans well into the 20th century. Yet pioneers like Oskar Messter helped refine the burgeoning artform by experimenting with artificial light, cross-cutting, close-ups and synchronous sound. Messter was also a great discoverer of talents like Emil Jannings, Henny Porten and Conrad Veidt, as was Paul Davidson, who turned Dane Asta Nielsen into one of the first screen superstars. Nielsen did much to earn cinema a degree of social and intellectual respectability, as did Autorenfilme (the German equivalent to film d'art) like Max Mack's Der Andere (1912). But the most influential pictures of the period were Stellan Rye's The Student of Prague (1913), Paul Wegener's The Golem (1915) and Otto Ripert's serial, Homunculus (1916), which anticipated the look and tone of the Schauerfilme ('shadow films') that dominated the postwar age of Expressionism.
As a result of radical reforms instigated by General Erich Ludendorff, the majority of German film companies were amalgamated into a single organisation, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, in 1917. But, while its studios at Neubabelsberg were among the biggest in the world, UFA acted as much as a distributor as a producer during its Weimar heyday under Erich Pommer. Its output was certainly varied, with Richard Oswald's Different From the Others being among the first gay movies, while Rippert's Hyenas of Lust (both 1919) was tantamount to sexploitation. By contrast, Ernst Lubitsch satirised Germany's Great War adversaries in sparklingly sophisticated Kostümfilme like Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920), which earned Hollywood invitations for both Lubitsch and his leading lady, Pola Negri. But the most influential exports were Schauerfilme and Kammerspielfilme.
Taking their visual cues from pre-war Scandinavian melodrama and contemporary art and reflecting the prevailing national mood, German horror films of the 1920s were ambiguous and psychologically disturbing. Yet only Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) was truly Expressionist, thanks to its stylised sets and brooding use of shadow, movement and subtext. Nevertheless, Wegener's remake of The Golem (1920), Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921), FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924) had a profound effect on film-making, from the Universal horror cycle and film noir to comic-book art and its current representation on screen. Lang's Metropolis (1927) would prove equally pivotal to the development of graphic style and the science fiction genre. But chamber dramas like Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) had an even greater impact, as they introduced the subjective camera and invisible editing to the screen lexicon. Moreover, Strassenfilme ('street films') like GW Pabst's Pandora's Box (1927) and Joe May's Asphalt (1929) incorporated a stark realism that contrasted with the experimentation of montage documentaries like Walter Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) and the avant-garde animation of Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Lotte Reineger and Oskar Fischinger.
However, this age of audacity ended abruptly in the early 1930s with the coming of sound and National Socialism. Although foreign-language versions of popular films were initially made for overseas consumption, German cinema suffered greatly from the passing of silence. While the likes of Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), Pabst's The Threepenny Opera and Lang's M (both 1931) were admired worldwide, the Bergfilme ('mountain films'), Heimatfilme 'homeland films') and operettas that were churned out for the remainder of the decade travelled less well. Propagandist efforts like Franz Seitz's SA-Mann Brand and Hans Steinhoff's Hitler Youth Quex (both 1933) also had a limited audience, although Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) were admired for their technique, if not their ideology. But, as Jews and opponents of totalitarianism were driven from the film industry and Europe drifted towards war, pernicious anti-Semitic pictures like Veit Harlan's Jew Süss and Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (both 1940) began to emerge.
In fact, only a sixth of the 1150 features made in Germany between 1933-45 were overtly propagandist, as Joseph Goebbels believed messages could be more effectively disseminated within escapist entertainments. While the similarly state-approved pictures released in Stalin's equally barbarous Soviet Union are now regarded as classics, their Third Reich equivalents have scarcely been seen. Yet, with the exception of the occasional Trümmerfilm ('rubble film') like The Murderers Are Among Us (1946),Wolfgang Staudte's neo-realist snapshot of a vanquished and divided nation, few West German films enjoyed international success into the 1960s. Romy Schneider proved popular in the 'Sissi' costume dramas, while 'krimis' based on the works of Edgar Wallace and Norbert Jacques and 'sauerkraut' Westerns derived from the novels of Karl May attracted cult followings. The DEFA studio in East Germany also did a nice line in so-called 'Red Westerns' and foreign critics were often more admiring of works by the likes of Frank Beyer, Kurt Maetzig and Konrad Wolf than they were of their counterparts on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
In 1962, a group of aspiring cineastes chose the Oberhausen Film Festival to launch a manifesto declaring the death of 'Papas Kino' and calling for a 'Junger Deutscher Film'. The government responded by subsidising the Kuratorium that saw Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta and Wim Wenders establish themselves in the vanguard of Das Neue Kino, whose often politicised perspective coincided with a period of upheaval sparked by the Red Army Faction and whose sheer diversity and ingenuity was complemented by the more avant-gardist offerings of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and the husband-and-wife team Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who deserve to be much better known in this country. Indeed, while directors like Percy Adlon, Doris Dörrie, Michael Verhoeven and Joseph Vilsmaier produced the odd breakout hit and Wolfgang Petersen and Tom Tykwer were tempted to try their luck in America, West German film struggled to fire the imagination at home or abroad.
The mood of the country during this period was impeccably captured by Edgar Reitz in his Heimat tetralogy (1984-2006) and the past quickly became a key topic following reunification in 1990, with Oliver Hirschbiegel and Marc Rothemund respectively revisiting the Nazi era in Downfall (2004) and Sophie Scholl - The Final Days (2005), Hans Weingartner and Uli Edel reassessing the turbulent 70s in The Edukators (2004) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and Wolfgang Becker and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck mining very different strands of ostalgie for Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006).
Yet post-Wende reality often finds its way on to the screen, whether it's in the migrant dramas of Fatih Akin or the detached studies of the new normality produced by Christian Petzold and his fellow members of the 'Berlin School', who have succeeded in advancing the aesthetics of German cinema for the first time in a generation.
David Parkinson [-]
