In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.

Doomed Love: A Journey Through German Genre Films (Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film)

WED. April 10, 2019 – 7:00 PM

Germany, 2016, 90 min.

Director: Dominik Graf, Johannes F. Sievert

Cast: Klaus Lemke, Roland Klick, Werner Enke, Olaf Möller, Lisa Gotto, Stefan Lukschy, Gisela Hahn, Martin Müller, Frank Tönsmann, Artur Brauner, Wolfgang Büld, Mario Adorf u.a.

Dominik Graf, himself an acclaimed director of both feature and TV films, begins on a provocative note: In 2012 an unexploded WWII bomb was found in Munich-Schwabing. The bomb proved impossible to defuse, and the subsequent controlled explosion caused considerable damage – also to the buildings of German film distributors Constantin. Decades earlier, Schwabing had been popular with young German film makers. Graf interprets the explosion as the end of an era of Schwabing Film History, even if that era had ended long before, with the disaffection of protagonists like Roland Klick, Klaus Lemke having faded into obscurity, and Rudolf Thome moving to Berlin in 1973.

Lemke and Klick were left frustrated by their unsuccessful careers – in the wake of their once-cult status with early films, which were wittily influenced by Hollywood and the Italo-Western genre. However, even the Schwabing scene was far from homogenous. Towards the end, director Eckhart Schmidt declares that film is “music, fashion and design“; thus positioning himself in radical opposition to his Oberhausen compatriots as well as differing considerably from the likes of Lemke or Klick in his aspirations – even when Klick categorically states, “physis is of the mind“. Graf’s documentary is an original and insistent attempt to rehabilitate especially the latter two. He resorts to pathos when applying vocabulary such as “snubbed, damned, ignored, cursed“, as if the Schwabing gang had ever been persecuted. With the public and with critics, they and others like Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz, all shared similar reactions, ranging from rave to total slam. At the box office, too, everyone faced similar challenges.

Graf and his witnesses, some of whom had not been born yet at the time of the Oberhausen Manifesto, all agree on where to assign the blame: “German Film is dead. Subsidised to death, written off for dead, declared dead.” Klaus Lemke is convinced that any official support is tantamount to censorship. But perhaps German Film could never have come into being without the available subsidies. German film support legislation until 1976, anyway, made support contingent on previous box office successes. The role of TV, on which so many of those young directors depended, is omitted.

Dominik Graf’s film presents a stimulating retrospective of German film history, in the context of a very German tradition over 200 years of differentiating between high art and trivial entertainment. He ignores Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Werner Herzog, or their anarchic and very independent colleagues Herbert Achternbusch or Vlado Kristl, German filmmakers, who bridged that divide successfully. Instead Graf dedicates a long passage to Italian cinema and in particular to the Italo-Western.

DOOMED LOVE: A JOURNEY THROUGH GERMAN GENRE FILMS is a documentary full of daring theses; often eagerly polemical, sometimes wonderfully enlightening, occasionally unsound in its combative claims. It is nonetheless a fruitful debate, and a worthwhile re-appraisal of many facts and views on a nearly-forgotten trajectory in New German Cinema, where it was, unjustly, just an episode.

Biography

Dominik Graf was born 6 September 1952, to actor Robert Graf. In 1972 Graf takes up undergraduate studies in German philology and musicology in Munich, switching to University for TV and Film Munich in 1974. His final year diploma film DER KOSTBARE GAST (1979) (The valued guest) is awarded a Bavarian Film Award. Graf works prolifically for TV, making episodes for early evening series and establishing himself as an expert for crime and action features. Some of his films make it onto the big screen. He is awarded a German Film Award as best director for his thriller THE CAT. Graf proceeds to work mainly for TV, where he switches between controversial genre presentations such as SPERLING UND DER BRENNENDE ARM (Sperling and the incendiary arm), melodrama like BITTERE UNSCHULD (Bitter Innocence) and poetical works such as DIE FREUNDE DER FREUNDE (Friends of friends). He also won wide acclaim for his series IM ANGESICHT DES VERBRECHENS (Encounters in crime), on the Russian Mafia in Berlin. It won a number of awards, among which the German Television Award for best series, the Grimme Award for the category fiction as well as the Bavarian TV Award 2011 for best direction. BELOVED SISTERS premiers in competition during the 2014 Berlin Film Festival Berlinale, it’s his first cinema feature in eight years. Since 2004, Graf has also been professor for film direction at the international filmschool of Cologne.

Filmography (Selection)

1979 DER KOSTBARE GAST (The valued guest)
1981/82 DAS ZWEITE GESICHT (Janus face)
1983/84 TREFFER (Right hit)
1984/85 LAUTER GUTE FREUNDE (All good friends
1986 DER KLEINE BRUDER (Little brother
1986/87 BEI THEA (At Thea’s
1987/88 THE CAT
1988/89 TIGER, LÖWE, PANTHER PANTHER (Tiger, lion, panther)
1989/90 DER SPIELER (The gamer)
1990/91 BIS ANS ENDE DER NACHT (Until the end of the night)
1993/94 DER SIEGER (The victor)
1995 FRAU BU LACHT (Miss Bu is laughing)
1997/98 SPERLING UND DER BRENNENDE ARM (Sperling and the incendiary arm)
2001/02 DER FELSEN (The rock)
2004-06 DER ROTE KAKADU (The red Cockatoo)
2008-10 IM ANGESICHT DES VERBRECHENS (Encounters in crime
2012-14 BELOVED SISTERS
2014/15 WAS HEISST HIER ENDE? (What do you mean by end?)
2014/16 DOOMED LOVE: A JOURNEY THROUGH GERMAN GENRE FILMS

Hans Günther Pflaum, 17.08.2016