The good column: Contemporary German cinema

Where everyone lives in huge, modernized old apartments in Berlin or Hamburg, where everyone is wealthy as a matter of course, where poverty and misery do not exist and money is never discussed, as if it were falling from heaven directly into our hands every month, we know: we we find ourselves in a German cinema film of the present. Its protagonists usually have highly respected jobs in the cultural sector, work at the university as a professor or are a conductor, writer or doctor. However, they don’t have anything sensible to say while they’re sitting on a piece of designer furniture with a cognac snifter in their hand. Rather, the pre-evening series-like and borderline idiotic dialogues that are recited sound as if the screenwriter had copied them from one of the dime novels that are sold as “literature” in this country, or from one of the collections of calendar sayings available on the Internet: “You have to follow the call of your heart.” , “Maybe I don’t know it, but I can feel it, you know?”, “There’s a fine line between death and life.” The “Spiegel” review often talks about “masterful dialogues full of emotional force”. There is also no skimping on pathos, kitsch and deep simulation. The media likes to call this “philosophical depth.”

I am not sure whether, in a better future, the production and distribution of such German film productions should be completely abandoned.

Of course, in addition to the bourgeois main characters of the film, there is now and then a good-natured, self-sacrificing neighbor or a merry widow who is a hairdresser by profession, or a funny, saying-speaking bar owner or taxi driver, but mostly these are peripheral characters (who we don’t find out about). whether they also live in huge old apartments) are just decoration, accessories, talking points.

The main actors, whose faces we have to look helplessly at in the advertising brochures, are always the same without exception: Lars Eidinger, Frederick Lau, Corinna Harfouch, Martina Gedeck, Tom Schilling, August Diehl, Nora Tschirner. It could be that there are others too, but then we didn’t notice. And they often play their roles in such an exalted manner that the viewer becomes resigned and sinks into the cinema seat as if torn by foreign shame. The following applies to German cinema: As soon as the film starts, they start shaking their heads. German actors have an extreme tendency to “act out”. They utter even the most banal sentences as if they were solemnly reciting a Stefan George poem. They grimace, roll their eyes and perform every little gesture as if they were taking part in a mysterious ritual.

Basically, it is always the same three to five roles in which they appear: the evangelical, conservative-uptight or modern-tolerant German liberal philistine; the loud-mouthed, shirt-sleeved (Lau) or shy androgynous (Schilling) young man; the glasses-wearing, sexy-perky student/academic; the indulgent and clever or funny and hysterical housewife and – not to forget – the always reliable, bumpy German with an exaggerated accent, the opaque/cunning or lively and excited foreigner.

Death – another one of the many problems for which the left has not yet found a solution – is always romanticized or aestheticized in German film productions. That means: Whoever dies in a German film dies slowly, with devotion and affectation, with final pathetic gestures (another opportunity to grimace and roll his eyes, close-up of the dying person’s hand in the hand of the person accompanying him, close-up of faces, fake tears, etc Soundtrack: greasy string music (or “string music,” as it’s always funnily called in the subtitles on Netflix)). Or the process of dying is left out entirely: the viewer only attends the funeral, which is always staged in the same way (burial in the “Ruhewald” or in a green, wooded, picturesque cemetery, the camera slowly zooms in on the mourners from above, faces in close-up , fake tears, greasy string music).

They all always want to be Ingmar Bergman, the German film directors, but they are just Til Schweiger. One thing is certain: Due to the way German film funding works, this crap will continue to flood cinemas in the future.