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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. "Schlöndorff 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." Schlöndorff 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."