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Roland Emmerich had to brace himself. The German director of such U.S. blockbusters as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow was leaving behind the warm breezes of Hollywood to plunge into wintry Berlin, because he heads the judging panel at this year's Berlin Film Festival, which starts this week. That a Hollywood player like Emmerich was chosen for the job hints at the profound changes that have swept the German movie industry. Though his country's art house élite despises his commercial movies, he can expect a warm welcome this year from a film community that has matured and broadened during his 20-year absence.
German film is more popular than at any time in recent memory. Homegrown movies broke records in German cinemas in 2004, taking nearly 25% of tickets sold, up from 17.5% the year before, according to spio, a trade group. And following the surprise international success in 2003 of the east German comedy Goodbye, Lenin!, German-language films have gained wider European and U.S. distribution as well. Downfall, a movie produced by Bernd Eichinger about Hitler's final days, has been nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar and looks set to become one of the most internationally successful German-language films ever. The Edukators, about the generation gap between the former rebels of 1968 and their children, competed in Cannes last year. Starting next week, British audiences will be able to see Head-On, a wrenching look at a Turkish woman in Germany, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin last year and is already a box office hit across the Continent.
Hollywood has been cherry-picking Germany's outstanding talents for its own insatiable industry. German director Robert Schwentke is making Flightplan, a transatlantic hijack thriller starring Jodie Foster. And Eichinger has teamed with fellow German Tom Tykwer, director of the international hit, Run Lola Run, to make Perfume, based on the award-winning novel by German author Patrick Süskind, about an 18th century serial killer who tries to mask the stench of decadent French society with fragrances distilled from his victims' bodies (Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman are tipped to star).
As Hollywood reinvigorates its product with injections of European culture, Tykwer's compatriots are relaxing and becoming more catholic in their approach to filmmaking. Volker Schlöndorff, the director of such classics as The Tin Drum and Homo Faber, whose latest, The Ninth Day, is about a Luxembourg priest in a Nazi concentration camp, interprets this as a sign of confidence. "For years young German directors have tried to make genre movies that just imitate the French," he says. "But over the past three or four years they have rediscovered day-to-day reality." Tykwer's 1998 Lola is a good example, set in Berlin's pulsating rave culture.
There's another reason directors working in German keep finding new ways to explore the humor and drama within their own culture: money. Modern domestic themes don't require hefty budgets; historical epics and blockbusters do. That's why Perfume is being filmed in English. "The language barrier is a big barrier," says Eichinger. "You cannot do big-budget movies in Germany because of the limited market. I think the generation making movies today is much more oriented toward a global film language."
His own production company, Constantin Film, is one of few to survive the 2000 collapse — and closure three years later — of Germany's Neuer Markt, the "new market" in media and technology. Today Constantin is the only German production company that can go toe-to-toe with Hollywood. Eichinger makes films for the German market mixed with big productions co-produced with U.S. partners like The Never Ending Story, The Name of the Rose, or, more recently, the Resident Evil films. "It takes a lot of money to make a film," he says. "The average American film costs around $70 million to produce. The average German film costs just $6 million. If you want to do a bigger movie you have to do it in English and choose a subject that's international."
The German film industry may be destined to remain a poor cousin to Hollywood even as its creativity is feted and copied. After all, even the organizers of the Berlin Film Festival limit the number of German films in competition to three out of 21 international entries. That's because they hope one day soon their festival will attract as much attention as its flashier counterparts in Cannes and Venice. But maybe it's time they added a few more slots for homegrown movies. Because these days, "small" German films are big enough to take on the world.
- WILLIAM BOSTON | Berlin
- German movies are winning international fans. The Berlin Film Festival shows why