May 2002 - Nr. 5
New York Film Series Highlights Lost Era of German Film
TWIG - German cinema had its first heyday between the wars, when Marlene Dietrich starred in The Blue Angel. It blossomed again in the 1970s, with the emergence of dynamic directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. Even the Nazi era had its moments of cinematic brilliance, in the innovative, if blatantly propagandistic, films of Leni Riefenstahl. But what happened to German film in the years that immediately followed World War II, when the divided state was reemerging from the rubble? New York movie buffs can find out this spring at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. From April 12 to May 5, more than 30 film classics from the early postwar era will be shown in the series "After the War, Before the Wall: German Cinema, 1945-60."
To most Germans, the 1950s was the era of the Heimatfilm, a sentimental genre that reached its zenith in the 1955 feature Sissi, staring Romi Schneider and Alain Delon. But at a time when German citizens were struggling to come to grips with their immediate past, many other films took a more serious turn. Taxi (1952) tells the story of an abandoned young black girl, the daughter of a German woman and an American GI, and addresses racial prejudice in Germany. Die Bruecke (The Bridge), a 1959 Golden Globe winner, describes the fate of seven teenagers recruited into Hitler’s army just before Germany’s defeat in 1945. The final feature in the series, The Avenger, documents the return of the crime thriller, a recurrent theme in the history of German film.
