"What are you doing in Germany?"
As a sequel to "Cursed Love German Film", this essayistic documentary film by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert premiered at the Berlinale 2017. The question addressed here is what attempts there were to make genre films in German cinema (as an alternative to auteur films) after 1960.
The genre that is still successful today is German comedy, but it only works in German-speaking countries and is therefore not exportable. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a great desire for American films. As a director, Howard Hawks was a great role model who many young genre-savvy filmmakers followed. In the 1970s you could actually only do that on television. An example of this is Wolfgang Petersen, who basically conceived the Tatort episodes as a cinema. When WDR television maker Günter Rohrbach became head of Bavaria Film, this also led to a brief flowering of genre films (Das Boot, Abwärts / Downward) in the early 1980s. A director like Jürgen Goslar was also able to make strong contributions to genre cinema with "Slavers" and "The Whispering Death". After 1990 there was an even greater decline, as television became even more influential as a co-determiner, and certain materials were simply phased out. As an example, the fantasy genre is used, which, after periods of prosperity in the 1910s and 1920s and the beginning of the 1950s (Alraune, Roses Bloom on the Heidegrab), no longer took place in the cinema, but migrated to dime magazine literature. After all, there is reference to countermovements in cinema in the 2010s with "Der Nachtmahr" and the action gangster film "Harms".
An enlightening film that encourages you to take a closer look at genre films themselves. Since the 1990s, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese (for American and Italian cinema) and Quentin Tarantino (the all-rounder also praises the oeuvre of Alfred Vohrer, which surprised many in German-speaking countries) have been raising the importance of genre films for the respective cinema cultures ) out.
The interview partners are: the actors Christiane Krüger, Mario Adorf, Werner Enke / the directors Wolfgang Petersen, Eckhard Schmidt, Ralf Huettner, Roger Fritz, Wolfgang Büld, Niki Müllerschön, Peter F. Bringmann, Klaus Lemke, Jürgen Goslar.
Christiane Krüger talks about how she was a guest on the Johnny Carson Show in the late 1960s, where he told her that he didn't know a single film from Germany. And it would be the same for the rest of the Americans.
"What are you doing in Germany?"
