Wim Wenders for the Record

I shared some of this information in class today, but for those of you who were absent or just want the information for your own record, here are a few tidbits about the life and career of Wim Wenders!

Born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders in Dusseldorf (1945), there is little current information about hist childhood. Between 1963 and 1965 he studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg. After a few short years he dropped out of university and moved to Paris with the intention of becoming a painter. By '67 he had developed a fascination with cinema however, and after rejection from French national film school, he moved back to Germany and enrolled in “Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München”.

Between 1967 and 1970 he worked as a film critic for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Twen Magazine and Der Spiegel. His film career would take of in the early '70s and he would emerge as one of the most influential figures of the New German Cinema along with directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Characterized as the “existentialist” of New German Cinema, his films combine Hollywood with elements of counter-cinema and explore states of consciousness-loneliness, yearning, irresolution and anxiety. Many of his films also look at the impact of American culture on Germany. His notable movies include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), Alice of the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). In 1975 he was even able to establish his own production company "Road Movies" in Berlin.

Desolate landscapes and open roads would play a role in many of Wenders' films. He also had an affinity for American culture. This fascination, as well as his successes in Germany, afforded him the opportunity to take on American Cinema (of course the significantly more money there was to be made in America was likely a factor as well).

Wenders' notable documentaries include Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and, most recently, Pina (2011), an incredible look into the world of dance. Both earned him Oscar nominations. For a more complete look at Wenders' life and work, take a gander at his official website.

A few questions on the Weber text

Here are a few of the questions I had last week for our speaker but that I was unfortunately unable to answer. If maybe some of you guys can help me answer them it would be great!


My first question is about the plane example on page three and the idea that with modernity there is an accessibility that was unthinkable barely a century ago. This idea can be extended to internet and social media of course. My question was if maybe he could extend on that concept and tie it to some of the main ideas of the Franfurt School, notably the concept that modernity is what keeps the lower classes enslaved to the dominant minority.

Secondly, this is more of an observation. It seems that Heidegger's idea of shadows is very close to Althusser's concept of Ideology and the idea that the Truth is never accessible because it is wrapped in Ideology, just as Truth is here covered with shadows. 


Finally, on page 92, Weber refers to a quote made by Benjamin were he claims that the spectator of a movie is an absentminded one. What do you think of this claim, especially since we are taking a course about German cinema and intellectualizing the movies that we watch? Do you believe this refers to every type of cinema? 

Into the Abyss

Sophie listed Herzog's films in an early post. The most recent is "Into the Abyss," about death row inmates in the United States. It got a very positive review in the New York Times.

A.O. Scott, the reviewer, links it to some of the films we have been discussing:

Mr. Herzog is an excellent listener, a quality that distinguishes his recent documentaries, notably “Grizzly Man,” “Encounters at the End of the World” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” All of those, come to think of it, could have been called “Into the Abyss” — the title would also suit “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and just about anything else starring Klaus Kinski — and this film is linked to its predecessors by a fascination with human behavior in extremis. What is most disconcerting for an American viewer is how close to home the extremity is, as if the heart of darkness lurked among your friends and neighbors.

Natassja Kinski (born 1961)

Klaus Kinski's daughter Natassja continued in the provocative, scandalous, outrageous footsteps of her father for a while. This poster, taken when she was 20, adorned many a college wall in the 1980s.
At 15, she had an affair with the acclaimed director Roman Polanski (right about the time he had to flee the United States on charges of statutory rape with another underaged girl). She eventually broke with her father and did not attend his funeral. In the 1990s she lived with Jazz musician Quincy Jones; they had a child together. She has been in 60 films, most recently with a cameo in David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006).

Music from Fitzcarraldo

As I noted in an earlier post, Herzog has quite a history of involvement in the musical arts. He directed 14 operas during his career, and even though he has noted on several occasions that Fitzcarraldo is primarily a visual movie, the music is still a major focus.
The music of the film is done primarily by the German Band Popol Vuh (who broke up in 2001). Popol Vuh, who take their name from an Ancient Mayan story and are described as "electronic avantgarde," partnered with Herzog on a number of films, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Cobra Verde, Heart of Glass, and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (in which group founder and keyboardist Florian Fricke appears on screen).

Here is the link to an interesting analysis of the role of music in Herzog's films: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557489

If you are interested in hearing some more of Popol Vuh's music, here is a playlist that someone created on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=AL94UKMTqg-9C1qv5ar77lBehMBF7UHC7Y

The Making of Fitzcarraldo

Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the film of the week, has an interesting production background. The inspiration for the film was a real-life Peruvian rubber baron from the 1890s, Carlos Fermin Fizcarrald. Fizcarrald also managed to drag a tanker over a hill between two rivers (like what happens in the film), but unlike in the film, Fizcarrald disassembled his ship and dragged it across in smaller pieces, then reassembled it when every piece had crossed.


The most famous scene from this film is undoubtedly the part where a 320-ton steamship over a hill without using any special effects. Herzog has stated that the film's spectacular production was partly inspired by the engineering feats of ancient standing stones. Herzog believed that no one had ever performed a similar feat in history, and likely never will again, calling himself "Conquistador of the Useless".


Three similar-looking ships were bought for the production and used in different scenes and locations, including scenes that were shot aboard the ship while it crashed through rapids, injuring three of the six people involved in the filming.

The part of Fitzcarraldo himself was particularly difficult to cast due to issues with the various actors that were involved. Originally the part was played by Jason Robards, but after 40 percent of the filming was finished, Robards came down with dysentery and was forbidden by doctors to return to set. Herzog attempted to get Jack Nicholson and even considered playing the role himself before it was accepted by the German actor Klaus Kinski.


Kinski was born in 1926 in Zoppot in the Free City of Danzig (now Poland). He is half Polish and half German. In 1943, he was conscripted into the German army. He actually deserted and was captured by the British army and sent to a POW camp in England. In the camp, he got his first taste of acting in camp theatrical productions. He returned to Germany in 1946, and acted with a small theatrical troupe, but was fired for unpredictable behavior. He was jobless in Vienna until the early 1950s, when he began playing small parts in both German and American films. His big break came when he partnered with Werner Herzog for five films: Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1978), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and finally Cobra Verde (1987). Ironically, Kinski was a huge source of tension on the set of Fitzcarraldo, arguing constantly with Herzog and various crew members and angering local people who were living in the areas of Peru where filming took place. Herzog was obviously not deterred by this behavior, however, because he continued to work with Kinski for another film (Cobra Verde, 1987).

Fitzcarraldo Literature

After watching Fitzcarraldo, I was left with the vague feeling that he was a very self--centered character.
Sure, he remembered the armchair for the pig, and he wanted to bring Opera to the masses so they could experience the joy that he did -- but he exploited his undefined partnership with Molly to fund his whims. When she asked if he loved her, he gave an indirect answer. She would gaze longingly at him, but he would always seem to be somewhere else...
Another example of his (probably unintended and unconscious) self-centered-ness is when the native died in the attempt to move the ship up the mountain. He ignored the warnings and continued jumping around, and didn't even seem that upset until he wasn't able to get the rest of the tribe to stop staring at the river.

This movie was very different from the others that we've watched so far in class, so I took the liberty of searching through a few Jstor articles for interesting sections to share with you guys.

From Gitlin's review of the film:
After rumors spread that Werner Herzog was going to work them to the bone and steal their land, even boil them down into lard, angry Amazonian Indians drove him and his crew from their first encampment.

In one memorable sequence, late in the film, Herzog fulminates against the very Nature he went halfway around the world to find. Just as the Romantic idetfies with Nature's unspoiled qualities, its wildness or peace, now the thwarted Herzog inverts the image, and some decidedly unpretty themes leap out of the German past: "I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and rotting. The trees here are in misery. the birds here are in misery - they don't sing, they just shriek in pain. Erotic? No! There is an overwhelming fornication! There is a curse on this landscape, and whoever goes too deep into t has a share of this curse! We are cursed for what we are doing here! It is a land that god, if He exists, has created in anger!

(He goes on about the lack or order and harmony, but you get the point. Herzog was not a fan of the Amazon. This quote reminds me of the other articles we've read about the underlying fixation with eroticism in Germany.)

[About the sacrifice of the ship to the angry river god] The conquistador has met his match; he has defeated nature but been defeated nevertheless. Momentarily, he's crushed.

From Davis and Jenkins' Exotic and Perverse

Both the historical figure of Fitzcarraldo and Herzog himself were brutally motivated aliens penetrating deep inside a strangely vibrant environment. It is not accidental that the maps of the region, shown in close-up three times during the course of the film, suggest fertility symbols, nor that Fitzcarraldo is given precisely nine months to exploit the jungle's natural resources.

(See the similarities?)

There are a number of disturbing similarities between Fitzcarraldo and Herzog's relations to Indian affairs. They both used the Indians to drag a ship over a hill. They both took Indians from a variety of areas to work a long way from home. They both paid the Indians very little. In short, they both exploited the indigenous people for personal gain...Herzog himself underwent the hazards faced by his protagonist, sharing the same mental and physical agony.

Without scripts or cutting-room access, the Indians souls are literally stolen in the sense that their image can now be flashed onto a screen anywhere in the world without their knowledge and without them having any say in how they are portrayed, or even how their occasionally subtitled speech is interpreted.

(Related to Walter Benjamin, perhaps?)


From Koepnick's Colonial Forestry

[The film] staged a colonial enterprise destined to fail due to the hero's inability to escape his Western imagination, to relate to the semantic multiplicity of the jungle, and to demarcate the kind of boundaries that provide for personal and collective identities in the first place.

Werner Herzog

Here's a little background on Werner Herzog, the director of this week's film, Fitzcarraldo.


Herzog was born Werner Herzog Stipetić in 1942 in Munich, Germany. His family moved to a Bavarian village after their house was destroyed during bombing late in WWII. His father abandoned the family early in his life: however, Herzog chose to adopt his father's last name later in life because he thought it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker.
Herzog studied at the University of Munich despite earning a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In the early 1960s, Herzog worked nightshifts as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films. He has spoken of how, even before leaving school, he bought a house in the UK, in what was likely the Moss Side area of Manchester, relating how it was there that he learned to speak English.

Herzog has been married three times and has three children. In 1967, he married Martje Grohmann, with whom he had a son in 1973, Rudolph Amos Achmed, who is a film producer and director as well as the author of several non-fiction books.


Herzog has a prolific filmography that includes both documentary and fiction feature films. They include:

• Signs of Life (1968)
• Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)
• Fata Morgana (1972)
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
• Heart of Glass (1976)
• Stroszek (1977)
• Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
• Woyzeck (1979)
• Fitzcarraldo (1982)
• Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)
• Cobra Verde (1987)
• Scream of Stone (1991)
• Invincible (2001)
• The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)
• Rescue Dawn (2007)
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
• My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

His documentary work includes these films:

• The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969)
• Handicapped Future (1971)
• Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
• The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)
• How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976)
• Huie's Sermon (1980)
• God's Angry Man (1980)
• Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984)
• The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984)
• Wodaabe – Herdsmen of the Sun (1989)
• Echoes From a Somber Empire (1990)
• Jag Mandir (1991)
• Lessons of Darkness (1992)
• Bells from the Deep (1993)
• The Transformation of the World into Music (1994)
• Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995)
• Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
• My Best Fiend (1999)
• Wings of Hope (2000)
• Wheel of Time (2003)
• The White Diamond (2004)
• Grizzly Man (2005)
• Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
• Into the Abyss (2011)

He has also written and acted in numerous films. He has directed numerous operas and theatrical productions. He also wrote three books, all on film.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982)

Fassbinder is one of the great auteurs of the New German Cinema. Incredibly productive, he directed something like 40 feature films before he died of a drug overdose in 1982.

Some of my favorites include:

• "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972), a highly stylized depiction of a lesbian love affair between a fashion designer and a working class girl.
• "Fox and His Friends" (1975), about a working class gay man who strikes it rich in the lottery and is mercilessly exploited by his new friends.
• "Satan's Brew" (1976), an absurdist comedy about a modern poet who decides to recreate the cultic world of Stefan George. (This one is a bit of an inside joke, so you probably won't like it unless you know about Stefan George.)
• "Lili Marleen" (1981), like "Marriage of Maria Braun," a melodramatic film about a strong woman. Lili is a successful actress in Nazi Germany ... with a Jewish boyfriend.

Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) and Melodrama

Douglas Sirk was born Hans Detlev Sierk in 1897 in Denmark. He grew up in Germany and was involved in the arts scene in Weimar Germany. Married to a Jewish woman, he left Germany in 1937, and started directing films in Hollywood.

He is known for amazing melodramas, such as "All That Heaven Allows" (1952), about a woman who chooses to defy convention and fall in love with her gardener, and "Imitation of Life" (1959), about a Black woman who passes as white.

Sirk's melodramatic style fell out of fashion, but Fassbinder loved it. Fassbinder visited Sirk (who had moved to Switzerland) and the two frequently discussed cinematic matters.

Zarah Leander (1907-1981)

Maria and her friend Betty sing the chorus to "Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen" (don't cry because of love), which is a big hit by Zarah Leander, a Swedish actress who was very successful in Nazi film.

After the War, Leander became something of a cult figure in the gay scene in Germany, in part perhaps because of the erotic playfulness of many of her songs. This one, for instance, asks, "Kann denn Liebe Suende sein?" (Can love be a sin?)

Comparison between The Marriage of Maria Braun with Lola and Veronica Voss

Hey everyone. Looking up stuff I ran into this comparison a guy did on these three German movies, The Marriage of Maria Braun, with Lola, a resembling movie to The Blue Angel and as well the main characters share the name, and Veronica Voss. These movies are made during the time of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland or West Germany and have the same theme reoccurring on them. They portray the German woman being seen as an object, at a time when everything and everyone was for sale. All the movies tell a different story on them but the one thing in common is the general suffering witnessed from the population and the price that these women had to pay in order to go on and live a semi-normal life.

Check this link for more info.

The article I read talks about the consequences of war on the post-war Germany. As the people lived in harsh conditions and with the thought they had lost their most beloved ones, they sought for a living, the foreign armies that had come into Germany were seen as an opportunity to make a living from. Many German ladies turned to paths of prostitution and forms of selling themselves to earn their food and shelter. The article talks about what was left after this era in Germany, and it specifically talks about children of brown color born in Germany to German mothers and foreign fathers, in this case, African American men. It relates to our movie,particularly to the first half of the movie where the main character Maria Braun meets a black colored guy with whom she goes to bed to. She ends up getting pregnant by him, and decides she will bare the child. Her plans change when her husband comes, and she gives off pregnancy so that she can go on with her plans for her future life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DguhskrdFok&feature=related

Click here for the link to the article.

Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich

I just saw this advertised for tonight, and it reminded me of Kracauer's article about the bourgeois disposition of Germans, and how unchanged it seems to be. I think it'd be an interesting film to see.

"Between 1904 and 1908, three quarters of the Herero people were killed, many in concentration camps, under German colonial rule. Not only does this documentary show that the German government was genocidal years before the Holocaust, but it also highlights an extremely overlooked tragedy in history. This genocide still impacts Harero today, as the descendants of the survivors are seeking reparations from the German government."

When: Wednesday, March 14, 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

Location: Sackler 121

Elisabeth as Joan of Arc

Remember at the end of Ehe im Schatten, after Elisabeth drank her coffee and started going on about rainbows?

It sounded too much like a reference for me to let it go, so I looked into it. The quote is from play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans) by Friedrich von Schiller, the same playwright who wrote Intrigue and Love, acted out in the beginning of the film. The quote is as such:

Seht ihr den Regenbogen in der Luft? Der Himmel öffnet seine goldnen Tore, im Chor der Engel steht sie glänzend da, sie hält den ew'gen Sohn an ihrer Brust, die Arme streckt sie lächelnd mir entgegen. Wie wird mir? Leichte Wolken heben mich - der schwere Panzer wird zum Flügelkleie. Hinauf - hinauf - Die Erde flieht zurück. Kurz ist der Schmerz, und ewig ist die Freude.

Spoken by the character Johanna (Joan of Arc), it roughly translates to:

Do you see the rainbow in the sky? The heavens open their golden gates, in the choir of angels she stands so shiny, she holds the eternal Son in her bosom, she stretches her arms toward me, smiling. How will I? Light clouds lift me - the heavy armor becomes the winged dress. Up - up - the earth flies back. Short is the pain, and eternal joy.

In Schiller's play, this quote comes after "Joan prays that she be granted strength like Samson to break her bonds and destroy her enemies, and her prayers are granted: she tears her heavy chains apart and rushes forth to join the fighting. Her intervention in the battle turns the tide decisively in favour of the French, but she pays the price of this triumph with her life. She rouses momentarily, long enough to recognize Charles and the banners of France; she calls for her own banner, and is granted a final, ecstatic vision of her patroness, the Virgin Mary" (Kerry's Friedrich Schiller: Playwright, Poet, Philosopher, Historian, p281).

I don't even have to stretch to find parallels between this scene and the final scene of Ehe im Schatten. Both women are being persecuted and punished, yet both manage to die in an ecstatic state. Neither has abandoned her country: Joan is granted a flag for her loyalty, but Elisabeth's loyalty gives her only a sense of "decency." And both women pay the price of this loyalty with their lives.

Casting the character of Elisabeth as a "Joan of Arc"-esque heroine seems to clash with Kracauer's statment that no German was decent enough. Elisabeth was, after all, a German. And what could be more decent than a hero?

What do you guys think?

Germany in 1947 and 1949

Immediately after the War, Germany was divided into 4 zones, each occupied by a different one of the Allies:

In 1949, the areas occupied by the Western Allied powers became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), known in English as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The zone occupied by the Soviet Union became the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), known in English as the German Democratic Republic (GDR):

Kurt Maetzig (born 1911)

Kurt Maetzig is a highly esteemed director, who worked primarily under the German Democratic Republic.

Here, he is talking about his disappointment with the censorship in the GDR:

Hildegard Knef (1925-2002)

Hildegard Knef, who went on to an international career as an actress, singer, and memoirist, made her first big appearance in "Murderers are among Us," the first film to be made in Germany after the War.


Here is an English-language cover of Knef's world-famous song, "Fuer mich soll's rote Rosen regnen" (For me, let red roses rain), with great footage from "Murderers are Among Us":

And here is Hildegard singing the song herself:

"Decent" Suicide

I was really struck by Kracauer’s conclusion that suicide was the only decent response to the events that took place during the Nazi era.

Does this mean that Germans see pride as more important than life? I find this hard to believe, because the predominating religion at the time was Christianity, which preaches that suicide is a sin, from what I understand. So doesn’t that negate the “decent” aspect of it?

I also looked up (on Wikipedia, so apologies if you have issues with this as a source) the suicide rates in Germany following this era, and apparently there were three waves of mass suicides in the final days of the Nazi regime, suggestive of “fear and anxiety [as] common motivations.”

Fear and anxiety of what was to become of them for their previous indecency toward the Jews? Or fear and anxiety over what a new regime would be like? Or something else all together?

Quite the article, Kracauer. It made me think a lot. The farther I got into the essay, the more shocked I grew. I may have freaked out a bit when I read that the “mentality has not really changed” and that it was very possible that a similar situation could arise again.

Connected through Chopin

While watching Ehe im Schatten today, I was struck by the music Elisabeth plays in the final scene, recognizing it as a piece by Chopin. You can hear it starting at 1:27:15 on youtube. I've always thought Chopin's Ballade in G minor had a certain haunting quality to it, containing some sort of wistful longing. This mood rather fits this scene where as Elisabeth plays, the camera pans out to show her apartment, her framed portrait and snapshots from her time on stage. Juxtaposed with these fond memories is the empty table set for two (a bit of foreshadowing) and her grim husband framed in the doorway.

This piece of music stood out to me for another reason. I first heard it play quite a few years back in another film of a similar theme. The Pianist, a biographical film directed by Roman Polanski, tells the story of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist, and his struggle to survive WWII.

Like Elisabeth Wieland, the Nazi's rise to power corresponds directly with Szpilman's diminished career and eventual deportation. Chopin's music plays a substantial role in The Pianist, and about three quarters of the way into it, Szpilman too plays Chopin's Ballade in G minor. Similar to Ehe im Schatten, we feel this sense of loss and the dreadful impact that the Nazi regime has had on this performer's livelihood and very existence. Yet while Elisabeth's playing of Chopin signals her death, it is Szpilman's performance that saves his life. Check it out on in this clip. You'll have a bit more context if you watch the entire scene, but the piece of music starts about 4 minutes 20 seconds in. I would definitely recommend that all of you watch the entire film at some point.

Ein Folk?

I was talking to one of my German friend about this class and ti led on a discussion about Germany as a nation. He told me that there was never a true feeling of belonging to a unified nation in Germany. Every region had a different dialects, different accents and different customs making it difficult to feel as part of the same country. I was even more surpised when he told me that it was only in 1908 that the different regions agreed on a common grammar system for the German language. This led me into thinking that this disparity can be one of the reason why. firstly an Austrian was able to come to power but more importantly how the whole speech about being one nation was appealing. This idea of being one unified force probably was something that the country had been waiting for; the idea of finally being part of a nation.
What do you guys think?

Nuba

There is at the moment a great exhibit in Berlin on Gerard Richter and I was surprised to see that one of his piece was of the Nuba tribe, the same one Leni portrayed. It was very interesting to see how the same people were perceived and showed in a complete different way. Where Leni was aiming for perfection and beauty, Richter gave a blur to a scene that already looks pretty chaotic. The contrast between the two work is fascinating and to my opinion refutes a bit her claim that she did not intend to base her pictures on Nazi estheticism. Richter's work proves that it is possible to give a variation in interpreting the Nuba tribe.

Riefenstahl and Hitler

Look at this gem I found while finishing my bibliography:


"Mind over matter: Hitler and Riefenstahl during the making of Triumph of the Will. Despite the grandiloquence of scenes from the film, such as the mass banners march-past, it is arguable that the whole adds up to less than the parts."