Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

More documents

Recommendations

Info

xx Steffen Hantke More importantly perhaps, it also raises the question why, of all places, the splatter film should have flourished as much as it did in Germany from the 1980s on, linking it particularly to anxieties about German reunification and its aftermath. With these basic questions addressed, the second essay in this section, Mikel J. Koven’s “Buttgereit’s Poetics: Schramm as Cinema of Poetry” performs a reading of what one might call splatter aesthetics. Using Jörg Buttgereit’s serial killer film Schramm, Koven demonstrates the basic visual and narrative mechanisms of splatter films and points out stylistic influences that link Buttgereit to more respected oppositional filmmakers, most notably Pier Paolo Pasolini. Focusing on the two films that established Buttgereit as the enfant terrible of postwar German cinema, Patricia MacCormack picks up the issue of cinematic style where Koven’s analysis left off. Style, in MacCormack’s analysis, is more a matter of collective than individual expression, an index of cultural obsessions and taboos. With the non-judgmental eye of the anthropologist, MacCormack’s “Necrosexuality, Perversion and Jouissance: The Experimental Desires of Jörg Buttgereit’s NekRomantik Films” provides a perspective on what, to many viewers and critics, is perhaps the most controversial aspect of Buttgereit’s work—his preoccupation with the body after death. The fifth and final section of the book, entitled “Interviews: Three German Horror Film Directors” gives three contemporary German filmmakers an opportunity to speak for themselves—Jörg Buttgereit, Robert Sigl, and Nico Hoffmann. While American readers may be somewhat familiar with Buttgereit, Sigl and Hoffmann are still relatively unknown outside of Germany, yet deserve wider recognition. It is their maneuvering between auteurist and commercial cinema, between directing and producing, as well as between film and television—more so perhaps than Buttgereit’s more straightforward career path—that illustrates some of the problems for contemporary German filmmakers who operate in or around the boundaries of popular genres. In conversation with Marcus Stiglegger, all three, in discussing their careers and the social and economic circumstances under which their films were made, provide valuable insights into the current German film industry. All three interviews are made available in English for the first time. For their hard work, patience, and perseverance, I would like to express my gratitude, first and foremost, to the contributors to this project. I am also greatly indebted to Jay McRoy and Donald Bellomy for editorial favors beyond the call of duty. My thanks also goes to all those friends and colleagues who have contributed ideas, criticism, and encouragement in casual and not so casual conversations over a long period of time, most notably among them David Willingham and Elisabeth Frazier, as well as Jack O’Connell. And, as always, I wish to thank my family, especially my mother, without whom nothing ever would have happened.
Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film xxi Notes 1. One example of such well-informed discourse, situated between journalistic or even fan discussion and scholarly analysis, is the web journal Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film, which has devoted considerable space to the discussion of new German horror films (see Kinoeye, at www.kinoeye.org/archive/country.germany.php). 2. Discussing the cycle of German horror films based on the Edgar Wallace adaptations in the 1950s and ’60s, Ken Hanke echoes this sentiment when he states that his own topic, specifically, constitutes “one of the most under-explored areas of the horror genre, and quite possibly the ultimate in the realm of ‘international horror cinema’” (Hanke 111). 3. Prawer admits that the “influence of Caligari on later film-makers has often been indirect rather than direct, mediated rather than unmediated” (Prawer 199). 4. One might want to add to these examples films produced by RKO, like Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s King Kong, as well as, a few years later, the films produced by Val Lewton at RKO. Tod Browning’s Freaks also belongs in this list. 5. Thomas Elsaesser’s magisterial Weimar Cinema and After, for example, opens with the statement: “The German cinema of the Weimar Republic is often, but wrongly identified with Expressionism” (3) Elsaesser’s objection to this equation, which I myself have been embracing in my own discussion, is based on his rejection of its implied oversimplification. “No single stylistic label,” he writes, “could hope to cover the many innovative ideas about film décor, the distinctive mise-en-scène of light and shadows or the technical advances in cinematography usually attributed to Weimar film makers” (3). 6. Individual critics have made attempts, in raising these questions, to demonstrate the relationship that exists between individual films made under the aegis of Goebbels’ Reichspropagandaminsterium and the horror film (see, for example, Claire Sisco King’s essay on the use of the dissolve in The Eternal Jew and Jud Süss and its relation to the same device in Weimar horror films, entitled “Imaging the Abject: The Ideological Use of the Dissolve,” in Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, Steffen Hantke, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 21–35. A systematic study of this phenomenon, however, has yet to be written. 7. For a detailed account of German film exile in the U.S., see Barbara Steinbauer- Groetsch, Die Lange Nacht der Schatten: Film Noir und Filmexil (Berlin: Bertz, 2000). It is important to note that the migration of German talent into the U.S. film industry did not exclusively affect film noir or the horror film, but that, cutting across a variety of popular cinematic genres tended to affect primarily mid-level and B-production—of which film noir, thrillers, and horror films were typical examples. 8. Let me raise one question in this context that strikes me as crucial for the assessment of horror film in general. While the question why German film production under the Nazis did not continue the tradition of horror film might have a concrete political and historical answer, the larger question why totalitarian regimes—from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia or Communist East Germany—have such an aversion toward horror films is more complicated. While none of these three film industries has a particular aversion to genre film per se, none of the three has contributed substantially to the legacy of horror film. The East German DEFA, for example, produced a fair number of Westerns— not exactly a genre that appears to be easily reconcilable with the pronounced anti-
Page 1 and 2: Postwar German Cinema and the Horro
Page 13: Postwar German Cinema and the Horro
Page 17 and 18: xxiii Postwar German Cinema and the

Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?