To propose a "different" history of German cinema is by necessity experimental. The revisionist attempt at hand treats existing traditions as a kind of quarry and abandons any hope of proposing a rounded whole. Germany in the Night, on the one hand, challenges the German film canon which (in spite of several important rediscoveries), has become even more sedentary during the last decade. On the other hand, the fragile, ambiguous images of history that appear in many films of the retrospective may also serve as a modest antidote to the myth-making prevalent in German television and cinema today. Critical memory vs. somnambulant conformity; unfettered gestures of cinematic thoughtfulness and presence vs. the self-assured "know-it-all" position toward history as embodied by German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Baader Meinhof Complex.

German cinema: a nocturne, a passage through gray areas and various states that were all Germany: the Weimar Republic, the "Third Reich," the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR. A cozy feeling of home cannot take hold, rather there is a sense of alienation or an increasingly obsessive longing. The tangled threads brought together in this program may perhaps join up in the ever-present anxiety and failure of reconciliation also felt by Heinrich Heine, exiled in Paris: "Should I think of Germany at night / it puts all thought of sleep to flight."

Established masters such as Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau, and icons of the New German Cinema such as Fassbinder, Kluge, Herzog, and Schroeter have as much vested in this restlessness as those flickering figures that each succeeding generation discovers anew, and often returns to oblivion: Phil Jutzi, Frank Wysbar, Peter Pewas, or Roland Klick. Those who returned from exile after the war-Peter Lorre, John Brahm, or Robert Siodmak-as well as the foreigners who worked in Germany during the seventies and eighties, such as Sohrab Shahid Saless or Želimir Žilnik. Those, whose radical view of Germany came ‘from the outside' (such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) and those like Herbert Achternbusch, who cast an ‘insider's stare' until their homeland would take notice. The unredeemed families (Veit and Thomas Harlan) and those who counter them-through a belated late remake (Christoph Schlingensief's paraphrase of Opfergang) or through self-reflexive parallel action (Robert Kramer's Unser Nazi, commissioned by Thomas Harlan as a mirror-film to his own Wundkanal). And in between: outsider films made by well-known directors, such as Helmut Käutner's Schwarzer Kies (1961), which drew the collective hatred of film critics at the time, and whose "moment" only arrived 40 years later.

Featured Works:

In an analogue to Romuald Karmakar's oeuvre, the program devotes as much space to documentary and essay films as to narrative cinema. Two key films from East and West Germany about the reality of genocide will be presented, films with a ‘canonical' reputation but hardly seen: Eberhard Fechner's Der Prozess (1975-84) and Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's Der lachende Mann (1966). Germany at Night unearths small treasures of left-wing Weimar film culture (by Albrecht Viktor Blum and Ella Bergmann-Michel) and brings to light works which were actively suppressed at the time of their completion, such as Thomas Heise's Volkpolizei (1985) or Želimir Žilniks Öffentliche Hinrichtung (1979) by Klaus Volkenborn, Johann Feindt and Karl Siebig. This film examines two parallel German lives: that of a Nazi general who continued in his job during the democratic era and a communist bricklayer who could hardly make ends meet after the war. Both had fought in the Spanish Civil War, but their stories can't be merged; the audience gazes into a wound that will not heal. (1974). The program also pays tribute to another key document: Unversöhnliche Erinnerungen

Some of the works selected are direct references to Romuald Karmakar: Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene and Fassbinder's Händler der vier Jahreszeiten are among his favorite films; Siodmak's Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam and Utopia by Sohrab Shahid Saless were studied by Karmakar and his creative team during preparation for Der Totmacher and Ramses. In other cases the relationships are more speculative: nothing in Karmakar's work indicates an interest in Georg Büchner, yet watching his films, the poor soldier Woyzeck might appear as a distant relative. Groups and couples of films-such as the two selected Woyzeck films-structure the selection, and sometimes the associations reveal an entire network. The volcano at the end of Achternbusch's Das letze Loch leads perhaps to Hölderlin's Tod des Empedokles as adapted by Straub/Huillet; Hölderlin and Straub, in turn, might lead to Christian Geissler, one of the great forgotten figures of German literature, and to his teleplay Wilhelmsburger Freitag, directed by Egon Monk in 1964: one day in the life of a couple, with a radical ending-a strange mirror of Karmakar's Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder.

This program is designed in a fragmentary manner-no monuments shall be erected. It is more about process, dialogue, questions than any definitive answers. It intends to evoke the rich culture that German cinema represented once upon a time, including all the personalities that did not quite "fit in" (or fit too well). A few shards of this culture are gathered here.  

Program information:

Germany in the Night. A Film History

Romuald Karmakar, born in 1965, is one of the towering figures produced by the German cinema. His consistently exciting analysis of life in Germany and his formal precision have secured him a unique position in European film. The response to his work in other countries (and in other artistic disciplines) seems to be stronger than at home where the official film industry has remained suspicious of his non-conformism. Karmakar, who spent his school years at the German School in Athens and his military service in the French army, feels more in tune with the exiles and "foreign legionnaires" of German cinema (or with American mavericks like John Cassavetes and Monte Hellman) than with the established film business of the Berlin Republic.

Karmakar's first feature, Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985), starts with a phrase that can be applied to the entirety of his work: "In this film, everything that is documentary is true, and everything that is fiction is not necessarily false." Traditional boundaries between modes of film are less important to him than the passionate quest for repressed or neglected themes-and the development of a sharpened and resistant form. Applying his deep-drill machinery to many sensitive areas, Karmakar has created some of the key films in the last two decades. Das Himmler-Projekt (2000) is a prime example. The actor Manfred Zapatka recites a notorious three-hour speech by Heinrich Himmler, but there is no attempt at historicist "reconstruction". Instead, the audience becomes part of a re-concretization of history-a performative act that places the film squarely in opposition to the prevailing discourse about the Nazi era (as well as the "Bonn Republic" that followed).

Karmakar's early work-Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (with Karmakar playing Adolf Hitler), or the auto-erotic apotheosis Candy Girl (1984)-already shows a highly independent aesthetic, his main interests at the time being punk music, soccer, and the history of cinema. The following three shorts made his name: Coup de boule, Gallodrome, and Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1987-89) triggered a very public debate over Karmakar's preference for "intolerable" subjects and characters. With his epic documentary Warheads (1992), this confrontation reached an early climax: For the more pedagogically minded parts of his audience, Karmakar's unbiased portrayal of two soldiers of fortune was hard to accept. The people he films are not "pre-classified" via commentary or written text, and are not relegated to easy moral or political categories. Which is exactly what makes his work so rich: Karmakar forces himself to look at the world with wide-open eyes and allows himself to be led astray-not by evil but by the profusion and the contradictions of lives lived under a different set of ethics.

It is precisely this refusal to prejudge his subjects which also characterizes Karmakar as a fiction filmmaker. The chamber-piece Der Totmacher (1995) about an imprisoned serial killer in the 1920s is emblematic of his work with historical sources-and of his understanding of the actor's role: a probe that can be lowered into the text. Karmakar's ethos of filmic construction makes no distinction between the underlying materials: literary texts are worked through and staged with the same meticulousness as archival documents. Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998), an adaptation of Jörg Fauser's radio play, and Manila (2000), his masterful collaboration with the writer Bodo Kirchhoff, are equally strong examples. With Manila, Karmakar presents a choral tragicomedy about air travelers in a state of waiting and wasting away-a disturbing cross section of German society at the dawn of the millennium. This was followed by Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004): a dance of death between two people frozen with alienation. Adapted from a play by Jon Fosse, the film represents a high-water mark of Karmakar's lifelong preoccupation with language and/as music.

The Himmler project allowed the director to free himself from the constraints and delays of the film subsidy system: since then, he has almost single-handedly produced a steady series of challenging digital documentaries. Hamburger Lektionen (2006) extends the methods used in the Himmler film: Manfred Zapatka's performance now reveals the deadly rhetoric in the "lectures" of an influential Imam, given in a Hamburg mosque where some of the 9/11 perpetrators-to-be were regular visitors. Land der Vernichtung (2004), which resulted from Karmakar's research for a fiction film about Nazi war crimes, delivers a harrowing essay on memory and its denial-in the year when Downfall made the headlines. In a parallel movement, the director has followed his passion for techno and electronic music, exploring this cinematically uncharted terrain with a groundbreaking trilogy. 196 bpm (2002), Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005) and Villalobos (2009) give us a direct and unapologetic representation of how music is produced, performed, and experienced. Like everything in Karmakar's cinema, these films reveal unexpected truths as they listen to a world which might otherwise have remained closed.

The retrospective will be held in cooperation with the Diagonale in Graz, where a selection of Karmakar's work will be presented. Romuald Karmakar and Manfred Zapatka will be guests in Vienna and Graz. They will offer workshops, lectures and introduce films.

Featured Works:

Adelheid und Konrad (1984); Candy Girl (1984); Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985); Coup de boule (1988); Hellman Rider (1988); Der Tyrann von Turin (1989-94/2001); Gallodrome (1989); Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1989); Sam Shaw on John Cassavetes (1989-93); Warheads (1989-92); München - Berlin - München: Der Filmkritiker Michael Althen (1991); Demontage IX - Unternehmen; Stahlglocke (1992); Infight (1994); Der Totmacher (1995); Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998); Das Himmler-Projekt (2000); Manila (2000); 196 bpm (2002); Die Nacht von Yokohama (2003); Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004, pictured); Land der Vernichtung (2004); Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005); Hamburger Lektionen (2006); Ramses (2009); Villalobos (2009) 

Program information:

Romuald Karmakar