Seeking Planets That Do Not Exist

By Gerald Clarke

The new German cinema is the liveliest in Europe

In the '40s it was the Italians and neorealism. British comedies made the world laugh in the '50s, and the '60s saw the crest of the French New Wave. But as far as foreign films are concerned, the '70s belong to the Germans. With little encouragement, less money and no older hands to guide them, a few extraordinary young directors have given birth to a phoenix--the brilliant German cinema of Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch that Hitler consigned to ashes 45 years ago. "We had nothing, and we started with nothing," says Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who at 31, with 33 films to his credit, is probably the most prolific film maker alive. "For a generation nobody made important films in Germany. Until us."

The achievement is remarkable: the Germans are now producing the most original films outside America. Their very lack of experience, otherwise a handicap, is a spur to creativity. They are ignorant of what they are not supposed to do, and they look at movies with the same fresh and vigorous eyes that the pioneers did 50 and 60 years ago.

Their boldness sometimes causes them to stumble and make mistakes that more sophisticated directors would laugh at. But more often it produces exciting new visions, unexpected perspectives, a world in which the sun rises in the west and spring follows summer. "We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones," says Werner Herzog, 35, who, with Fassbinder, is a leader of the group. "I see something on the horizon that most people have not yet seen. I seek planets that do not exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed."

In pursuit of those images, Herzog has made one film in which the actors were hypnotized, another in which all the actors were dwarfs, and a third in which the leading character, an old woman, was both deaf and blind. His best work, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), might serve as a metaphor for the whole German school. Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador played by Klaus Kinski, revolts against the crown and attempts to build a new empire in the jungles of Peru. The film, a kaleidoscope of the fabulous and the bizarre, would be noteworthy even if it stopped after the first riveting scene: 50 or so Spaniards, in armor and heavy battle gear, slowly descending a steep jungle hillside, a rivulet of quicksilver melting into nature's green vastness.

Fassbinder dares in different but equally bold ways. Instead of seeking stories in the strange and the exotic, he finds the strange and exotic in stories he knows. In one of his finest films, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), he evokes intense drama out of what would seem to be a supremely undramatic situation: three lesbians enclosed in a small, claustrophobic apartment who do nothing but talk, talk, talk.

Led by these two young visionaries, the new German wave--Die Neue Welle --has emerged with astonishing speed and surprise. At the beginning of the decade, the Germans were producing virtually nothing but soft-core pornography and sentimental sludge called Heimatftl-men (literally, homeland films). Few of their movies were ever seen outside Germany, and as recently as 1971 the New York Times thought that the lack of news in German films was news in itself. "The persistently dismal situation of German film art is unique," said the Times. "A listing of new films comprises a greater proportion of trash than anywhere else."

In fact the wave was already breaking. Fassbinder, who shoots a movie in the time it takes most directors to set up their cameras, had already made ten films, and Herzog four. The critical time lag was perhaps excusable; the Germans themselves have often seemed unaware that, helped by small government subsidies, their national cinema had returned to life. "Until recently Germans did not have the confidence to speak out," says Volker Schloendorff, 38, whose 1966 film Young Toer less started Die Neue Welle.

Americans were first exposed to the movement in 1972, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a series of new German films in Manhattan. Though New Yorker Films, a leading distributor of foreign movies, began showing them soon afterward, it was only in 1976 that there was any kind of breakthrough. The New Yorker Theater on upper Broadway began holding Fassbinder festivals, and local critics announced the arrival of a major new director. At the same time, Herzog was becoming a cult director among U.S. college students, who were captivated by his lush symbolism and his stories of heroic, mystical quests. Herzog is still more popular on the college circuit and in the art houses than is Fassbinder, who has yet to find much commercial acceptance outside Manhattan.

During the recurring Fassbinder festivals, there are New Yorkers who for weeks at a time fill their nights with nothing but his films. Wim Wenders, another of the movement''s leaders, made his own U.S. breakthrough last fall with a slick, existential thriller called The American Friend. Starring Dennis Hopper, the movie is fascinating but unsatisfying, with the most complicated and puzzling plot since Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep. It is perhaps a tantalizing harbinger of major work to come.

The other German directors are even less well known in the U.S. The films of Alexander Kluge, 46, and Schloendorff (who has co-directed many of his movies with his Actress Wife Margarethe von Trotta) are shown periodically to respectful and occasionally enthusiastic reviews. So far neither man has demonstrated the extravagant talents of Herzog and Fassbinder, however, or even the clear potential of Wenders. Others, like Jean-Marie Straub and Reinhard Hauff, have yet to make any impact at all in the U.S.

Some of the young directors live in Berlin, where the great movies of the past were made. But most have gravitated toward Munich, which has a long history of artistic patronage, not to mention the finest beer brewed anywhere. "Munich is like a pleasant afternoon," explains Kluge, the doyen of the film tribe. "It's a fun city, a Disneyland." An added attraction is the technical facilities of the established film industry. Because of German tax shelters, major Hollywood movies, like Twilight's Last Gleaming and Cross of Iron, are often made in Munich studios.

Oddly enough, in a city of almost mandatory friendliness, there is no Munich equivalent of the Malibu colony, and there are no Irving Lazars or Sue Mengers to press the flesh at luaus around the pool. Instead, the directors tend to form friendly, but distinct factions. "Wenders is the guru of the Munich sensitivities," says Schloendorff, only half-jokingly. "He and his followers shy away from politics. Fassbinder is the Puccini faction. He can make any kind of movie you ask. Herzog is also a one-man faction, of the existential school of Heidegger." When Ingmar Bergman moved to Munich in 1976, the young Germans thought that he might become their spiritual leader. Instead, the first week he was seen sitting with Franz Josef Strauss, a former Defense Minister and a leading right-wing politician. "It was a bit of a disappointment," says Wenders.

Most of the directors live in separate parts of Munich, and when they do meet, it is only by accident. "When I see Fassbinder, I say something like 'I like what you're wearing,' " says Herzog. "After that I don't know what to say. We always feel too embarrassed to speak."

No wonder. Except for their talent, the two have nothing at all in common. Herzog, a man with a sad, drooping mustache and basset-hound eyes that seem to make him irresistible to women, is a fanatic, a man with a mission. "I don't think that there exists a world for him outside of his own angle of vision," says Munich Critic Florian Hopf. "There's a wonderful Latin word for someone who creates everything, demiurge. Herzog is a demiurge."

To test mind and body, Herzog will suddenly tie a pack on his back, say goodbye to his wife and children, and go walking. A few years ago his feet took him from Munich to Paris, a distance of 500 miles. When he is not walking, he is usually in flight, scouting locations or merely visiting for a few hours in New York or Peru. "I am still looking for a dignified place for men to live," he explains. "It is an impossible search for a place that perhaps only exists in my dreams." Wistfully he adds: "My heart tis very close to the late Middle Ages."

It is hard to imagine Fassbinder, contrast, very far from the pavements of a modern city, whether it be Munich, Berlin or New York, his favorite place. Though he dresses in dirty jeans and a leather jacket, and looks like a Hell's Angel, Fassbinder is rigidly disciplined. Since he finished his first film in 1969, he has turned out, on average, one full-length movie every three months. "I want to build a house with my films," he says. "Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in the end there will be a house."

Fassbinder is a homosexual, and some of his films, like Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends, have homosexual themes. Even in those, however, his concern is not really homosexuality, but power, its uses and abuses. His movies assert that in any relationship, personal or political, there will be the oppressor and the oppressed. But the worst tyrant of all is love. Says he: "Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression."

The story of Petra von Kant is the enslavement of love. Petra, a dynamic dress designer played by the wonderful Margit Carstensen, dominates all around her until she falls in love with a younger woman (Hanna Schygulla). Her young lover soon rules her, and poor Petra is literally sent to her sickbed. Only when she falls out of love is her fever broken. Critics have speculated that the trusting, innocent title character of Fox and His Friends is Fassbinder's portrait of himself, particularly since Fassbinder, who is also a talented actor, played the part. His friends, however, know that the dominating-dominated Petra von Kant comes closest to autobiography. "I once asked Fassbinder why he works so hard," says Hopf. " 'To escape the loneliness,' he answered."

Dirk Bogarde is the star of Pass-binder's newest, yet unreleased film Despair, an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Though he has worked on more than 30 pictures, he says flatly that working with Fassbinder was "the most enjoyable experience I've ever had in the movies." Director and star understood one another instinctively. "Rainer and Tom Stoppard, the scriptwriter, came down to my house in the south of France to talk about the film," says Bogarde. "After four minutes we knew that we would get along, and I said that I didn't see any need to talk about it further. He then took a pile of motor magazines and went out to sit on the terrace."

Wenders, shy and bespectacled, lives in a house in the suburbs with Lisa Kreuzer, one of the leads of The American Friend. There he has surrounded himself with Americana--a jukebox, gadgets of all kinds and, bizarre as it may seem for a Muenchner, a collection of Coors beer cans. Kluge, a practicing lawyer, is an intellectual from an older German tradition, and ideas cascade from his mouth, almost drowning those who are not used to swimming in such icy waters. He abjures possessions and sleeps only an hour or so at a time, waking constantly to continue his work. Only Schloendorff and Von Trotta, who live in a pleasant walk-up in one of Munich's oldest quarters, maintain what might be regarded as a normal life.

Unlike most film makers in Europe, the Germans are still fascinated by America. Herzog set most of his recent Stroszek in northern Wisconsin, with three ill-assorted Germans unsuccessfully trying to adjust to the good life, American-style. Fassbinder titled one of his movies The American Soldier, and American characters wander in and out of several others; the major influence on his work was Douglas Sirk, the director of such Hollywood glossies as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. Like Sirk, Fassbinder loves melodrama and favors highly stylized camera compositions, characters endlessly reflected in mirrors or seen from odd, striking angles.

Wenders is the most Americanized of the lot. "All of my films have as their underlying current the Americanization of Germany," he says. "I saw the German films of the '30s, for instance, only after having seen a thousand American films. I see my own films as American movies, even though they don't tell American stories." The only director who attended film school, Wenders is the most visual of the group, says Edward Lachman, 32, an American cameraman who has worked with him, as well as with Herzog and Fassbinder. Despite the confusions of plot, The American Friend is beautiful to look at, without once falling into the stereotypes of the merely decorative. Paris, for instance, is not the Eiffel Tower, but the sleek corridors of the Metro; Manhattan is not the Empire State Building, but the dramatic vista of the abandoned West Side Highway. Wenders is now going completely American. This week he is going to San Francisco, where, with Francis Ford Coppola producing, he will film the fictionalized life of Writer Dashiell Hammett.

An era, perhaps by definition, becomes recognized only when it is ending, and there are signs that even as it nears its zenith, the German movement may be approaching its conclusion. Not only is Wenders decamping for America, but next year Herzog is hoping to make his first big international film, with Jack Nicholson. Set, like Aguirre, in the jungles of Peru, Fitzcerraldo, as it will be called, is planned as a saga of the South American rubber boom at the turn of the century. For his part, Fassbinder constantly talks about moving to New York; but so far he has done nothing about it.

Most of the directors are pessimistic about West Germany's political future. They believe, with varying degrees of alarm, that Germany, frightened of terrorists, is moving into a repressive stage hostile to creative film making. "Schloendorff and I are sick every time we come back from New York or Paris," says Von Trotta. "Being away we had a breath of fresh air, and then we are shut in again." Schloendorff adds: "The danger has nothing to do with Nazism. It is rather of a new form of fascism like the one seen by Orwell, totally data-controlled."

A permanent move to America is unlikely, however. Wenders says he plans to return when Hammett is finished, and Herzog, that most rug ged of rugged individualists, will make German films wherever he is. Fassbinder, much as he longs to live in Manhattan, cannot escape the destiny that has made him not only German, but a distinct kind of German, the Bavarian. "The new German directors are like airplanes always circling the airport but never landing," says the philosophical Kluge.

"Fassbinder may go to America. But he will crash and come back."

Those who love their movies can only wish him and his comrades an easy landing and a safe passage home. It is, as Herzog says, "difficult to be German and to have our historical background." Perhaps. But out of that background have come some of the most exciting films of the decade. -- Gerald Clarke

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