Germany and Australia: Sleeping Giants Awake

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2006

Goodbye Lenin

From the early seventies until the mid-eighties, Germany and Australia were film powerhouses, giving birth to top-tier directors and a steady stream of masterpieces.

From (then West) Germany, an incomplete list of filmmaking talent is still awesome. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sexual provocations and caustic putdowns of the bourgeoisie, Werner Herzog’s and Wim Wenders’s contrasting male dreamscapes, and Margarethe von Trotta’s and Volker Schlöndorff’s politically charged social critiques all coalesced around a desire to push cinematic language to its limits.

At the same time, Australia was creating a specific kind of realism, tinged with psychological horror and obsessed with landscape, issues of colonial history, Aboriginal culture and self-mythology. Several great storytellers emerged at once, with a bracing urgency: Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford and Phillip Noyce were perhaps the most prominent, but the list ran deep.

The magic in both cases came not only from the sheer volume of exceptional work, but also through a strong sense of shared goals and aesthetic direction. These films also expressed a strong national sensibility; they were instantly recognizable as German or Australian.

But then things changed. In Germany, Fassbinder died, Wenders and Herzog moved on and the political urgency of the seventies dissipated. Many of Australia’s leading lights left for Hollywood, gutting the ranks there.

The last few years, however, have seen the re-emergence of fascinating and unique cinemas from these very different nations, arising from identifiably grouped, like-minded directors. The boundless energy and punky sexuality of Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (98) inspired a group of young, male filmmakers to start making commercially minded, culturally adventurous cinema. Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (02) and Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (04) are perhaps the most prominent international success stories from this group thus far, but scads of young filmmakers, sharing a similar confidence and dynamism, continue to emerge: Hendrik Holzemann (Off Beat, 04); Marco Kreuzpaintner (Summer Storm, 04); Andreas Struck (Chill Out, 99); Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees, 03); and, in this year’s Festival, Stefan Krohmer (Summer ’04, 06) and Chris Kraus (Four Minutes, 06).

Much like Schlöndorf, von Trotta and (occasionally) Fassbinder in the seventies, this generation seeks to delineate some form of rebellion, but within the confined constructs of an age that seems less promising politically. Their characters are young and restless, their scripts mostly focused on generation-specific interactions. Many of these films contain dangerous, highly sexualized moments meant to disquiet conventional mores—and no one is seriously punished for crossing these boundaries. You might call this group the “Post-Unification punks”; they are wary of what Germany’s future looks like, yet they delight in the cultural specificities of their nation and its regions. At any rate, they are currently the only group of filmmakers in Europe presenting a credible cinema for and about about young people.

Counterbalancing these “bad boys” is another group, only now coalescing around a very different aesthetic approach. Notable for their broad dramatic palettes, often manifested outside Germany, these filmmakers concern themselves with fragility, both historical and personal, and advocate for a humble approach to the world. Also quite unlike anything else being made in Europe right now, these films are the work of deep cultural thinkers. They rethink and reconfigure the German historical experience through parable and deep skepticism about traditional social structures. In this way, they echo the cautionary historical tales of Herzog and Fassbinder, but often with their politics shifted to contemporary concerns like globalization and surveillance. Hugely successful films like Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa (01) and last year’s The White Masai (05), by Hermine Huntgeburth, certainly issue from these impulses. But the core of this group is formed by Hans-Christian Schmid (2003’s Distant Lights and this year’s Requiem), Florian Gallenberger (last year’s Shadows of Time) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (this year’s revelatory The Lives of Others). Sparkling returns to form by Herzog and von Trotta this year also seem inspired by this wary rapprochement with history.

Australia, by contrast, is still in a precarious place and not easy to read. Most of the successful new films come from directors who established their signature voices more than a decade ago, but are only now merging into a coherent cultural force. This group would have coalesced earlier but a tsunami of hugely successful (for a time) broad comedies, beginning with Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom (92), seemed to smother the national psyche and empty its bank accounts. When this wave finally dried up a few years ago, a cinema of quality re-emerged rapidly with, among others, Sue Brooks’s Japanese Story (03), Cate Shortland’s Somersault (04) and Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways (05).

2006 puts an exclamation mark on this return to form. There is little to rival Ana Kokkinos’s The Book of Revelation, Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth or Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes for extremely bold, almost reckless, cinematic experimentation. Shortland’s TV drama, The Silence, Murali K. Thalluri’s 2:37 and Paul Goldman’s Suburban Mayhem (scripted by sassy young scribe Alice Bell) indicate that a younger generation is waiting in the wings to push boundaries further. It’s no surprise that many leading lights of this new generation are women; the stamp of Jane Campion, a solitary and powerful transitional figure in Australian art cinema of the nineties, is imprinted upon many of these films.

These aggressive filmmakers break from their seventies forebears with a swashbuckling distaste for narrative conformity, but have reclaimed that palpable sense of Aussie terroir. They are interested in telling Australian stories and relentlessly seek new forms of cinema to do so. Simultaneously, there is a shift occurring from the fascination with outback landscape and Aboriginal culture that began in the seventies—though this is still represented strongly by last year’s The Proposition (John Hillcoat) or this year’s Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence)—to an emphasis on the urban mix of Australia’s sprawling, unique cities.

Any strong cinematic movement enriches us all, but when two great cultural leaders of the past re-emerge this solidly, we should truly rejoice.
—Noah Cowan