Underground film: Queer cinema: The sky full of Lamberts

“When I go to my cinema on Sundays/ and see the sky full of violins,/ I’m still dreaming on Monday morning:/ Live once, like them,/ but you never get to something like that.” Yes, you come, if you make the films yourself like Lothar Lambert. He is Germany’s last cooper and is celebrating the premiere of his 42nd film since 1971 in Berlin’s Bundesplatz cinema on Sunday afternoon, almost all of which he financed himself. This year the underground filmmaker turned 80 and received the Special Teddy at the Berlinale for his queer life’s work.

Lambert’s “Heaven Full of Violins”, which Willy Fritsch sang about as early as 1932, always played in the human, all-too-human aspect; it was mostly about obsessions, loneliness and desires. The old German film in which Willy Fritsch performed such songs is shown in Berlin at the Eva-Lichtspiele, whose visitor Lambert introduces here. A woman raves that these films still have a joke that you can laugh at, which is hardly possible with the new films.

What is always possible with Lambert: very entertaining self-reflection. His new film is a semi-documentary episodic film, assembled from “one-act plays,” as Lambert calls these fragments: He made a new film from canceled film projects and partially reassembled material from his old films, similar to the way a writer creates fragments, workshop reports or short stories composed into an entertaining book. “Always remember: it’s not like real life,” a director warns her actors in one of those unfinished Lambert films, “it’s artificial, it’s theater. The movements that seem artificial to you look completely natural in the film!”

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Lambert once again made it all very charming and called this film “Fore and aft”. On the one hand, this refers to “Top around, bottom around”, his first “one-act” film from 2019, and on the other hand, to his apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg, which you can see here. It has a front and a back entrance, which was important to Lambert in the past because he long feared that he would be attacked in his apartment to punish him for his films, which he considered “dirty.” He believes he could then have escaped through the back entrance.

In general, he consists of nothing but fears – if you take these away, little of his identity remains, he is quoted in a psychiatric report in which he is attested to have an “estimated intelligence in a high normal range”. It played a role when he didn’t want his landlady to sue him out of his apartment. She registered her own use for her daughter and her boyfriend. He could be happy that he should make room for two special people, “an artist and an educator,” she let her lawyers explain. Isn’t that also what he meant? Actress Claudia Jakobshagen speaks from this bizarre correspondence. Luckily the landlady, a local SPD politician from West Germany, failed.

Lambert also visits Harry Baer, ​​Fassbinder’s old friend and assistant. Baer used to live around the corner from Lambert. Now he points to his small balcony, which is more like “an exit,” but still the “most beautiful balcony far and wide.” His apartment is quite large, everything he made himself, as he emphasizes; as homemade as the Lambert films, one might add. Baer has finished making films, he says – after having to play a corpse in his last three films. But Lambert carries on like all great masters; he can’t do anything else.

“In front, behind,” Germany 2023/24. Director: Lothar Lambert. 71 min. Premiere on Sunday, September 8th, 3:30 p.m. in the Bundesplatz Cinema, Berlin.

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