Karl May (1974) - Hans Jürgen Syberberg
The pacification of the existential crisis cannot be achieved through political means alone. Art, especially film, must play the role of that confrontation, of directing the gaze to the most painful place: hence the regret, but also the provocativeness. Syberberg's radical mise-en-scène which gives history, its dreary and burdensome presence, a different topography through Brechtian rigor and sublimating scenography.
In this reworking, history is not only the territory of driving ideas and larger-than-life characters, but also of trivialities, kitsch and stupidity, which quickly acquire an unexpected analytical relevance for the director.
Syberberg's crucial strategy seems to have come from the very depths of philosophical irrationalism: his overriding idea consisted in the fact that persons who, each in their own domain, represented (at least outwardly) eccentricity - Ludwig II u Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (Ludwig - requiem for a virgin king, 1972), Hitler u Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler - one film from Germany, 1977) i May - of a nation and (cultural) history, done in his own mise-en-scène central figures, parameters according to which a much wider drama unfolds.
Thus, eccentricity becomes central and ecstatic, which is a new mode for organizing the film text. Casting some of the most famous actors of the Nazi entertainment industry, Syberberg u Karl May considers the creator of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, among others, and as a writer who more than any other German author was the bearer of literary imperialism, the man who - within the framework of populist iconography - penetrated the most deeply into the Western imaginary and appropriated the most American of all genres.
Faustrecht der Freiheit (Poetry of Freedom, 1975) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
At the beginning The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972) reads the dedication: 'for him who here became Marlene', while Faustrecht der Freiheit addressed to 'Armin and all others'. (The act from the picture from the first film will become the real act of the director in the second: the transition from lesbian 'metaphorical' to homosexual mimesis?)
The film as a dislocation of desire and responsibility, as an aesthetic substitution, as a subsequent and probably insufficient compensation, a combination of life and fictional elements in an effort to strengthen the author's concept again. However, although it has an autobiographical subtext (or at least refers to external reality), although Fassbinder puts himself in an emphatically melodramatic position, thus taking on the role of victim, this does not mean that Faustrecht der Freiheit it in any way softens the director's conclusions about marriage, regardless of the fact that it has moved to the terrain of homosexual interaction.
On the contrary, the director is in Faustrecht der Freiheit just brutally consistent in describing emotional exploitation and blackmail: fate is inexorable, a mechanism that grinds everything before it.
Im Lauf der Zeit (In the course of time, 1976) - Wim Wenders
Wenders poetics - which rests on the American fascination that serves to underline domestic anxieties and desires - takes as its starting point the statement of one of the film's protagonists Over time: 'The Yankees have colonized our subconscious'. For the director, therefore, the national question becomes an eminent film, filmophile and genre question.
If it is Falsche Bewegung (Pogrešan pokret, 1975) was an unsuccessful - although not uninteresting - attempt to road movie synchronizes with the process of artistic self-realization, then it is Over time Wenders' welcome counterpoint, returning the subgenre to its near-zero degree, to its inherent masculinist construction where sentimentality finds its focus in male friendship in a renegade effort to avoid socially canonized obligations.
Over time is a film of relaxing unpretentiousness in which Wenders, instead of arranging 'dramatic' episodes, finds in the passage of time a dramaturgical element that will fulfill the content of his creation. Instead of stuffing the scenes with symbols, the director usually empties them, and he achieves this precisely with a refined feeling for the composition of the frame, which ultimately gives the realism of the film a delirious character, a special slow rhythm that makes people, things and "events" really unusual in the midst of their typicality.
Over time je road movie in slow-motion, which gains its meaning not because of dynamics, but because of volume mise-en-scène.
Der starke Ferdinand (Strong Ferdinand, 1976) - Alexander Kluge
After it became obvious at the end of the sixties that the leftist paradigm could not be channeled institutionally, in the seventies Germany faced a direct consequence: urban terrorism.
In the new context (as it is today), there was a special emphasis on security and on those grounds Kluge has made his wittiest and most relatable film yet: Der starke Ferdinand is a story (finally this term can be used justifiably!) about a security expert who is so dedicated to his work, so preoccupied with the possibility of making a mistake, that in the end - in a kind of parody reversal of the ethos of professionalism - he would prove his own ideas, but also confirmed the fears that haunt him, he becomes a terrorist himself.
With the necessary humor and satirical causation, Kluge describes a (social) process in which normal logic is gradually turned upside down, in which the obsession with total security is transformed into a danger to the system itself.
Stroszek (1977) - Werner Herzog
In what way was Germany present (or suppressed!) in Herzog's opus? As a traumatic point that prevents a direct view. Hence the director's dislocation - made possible by numerous trips and adventurism - which consequently gives his films a metaphorical structure.
Herzog is, since his feature debut Signs of Life (Signs of Life, 1968), in a kind of depressive escapism, an almost self-torturer's ambition to experience the extreme landscape and extreme human conditions in order - precisely in that intensity of escape into a different kind of problem - to indirectly touch on national anxiety, poetically equalize external and internal pressure and so on created a sharpened type of allegory, which is all the more effective the more radically it was displaced. The director thus Teutonically wandered between extremes, in order to 'avoid' the center of the existential vortex: the autobiography has the form of a parable.
Herzog's adventures, persistent journeys from one end of the world to the other, took their most depressing trajectory when the director decided to visit and describe the American 'promised land'.
Three outsiders leave Germany for Wisconsin and try to secure a normal existence for themselves, only for their troubles to deepen even more, only for their despair to grow even more. But, Stroszek it is not a one-way criticism of America, it is not a cynical statement of the disproportion between expectations and reality that primarily grows out of constant capitalist pressure: rather, the film is Herzog's specific version of melodrama, bitterly humorous and realistically devastating, which has a sentimental culmination in an effective but ultimately 'indiscernible' metaphor dancing chickens.
Miraculous and futile, somnambulistic and metaphysically uncanny, demented and dead serious, burlesque and sad.
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