Berlinale | Retrospective
German Cinema Could Once Make Genre Films

Under the lurid motto “Wild, weird, bloody”, the retrospective presents German genre cinema from the 1970s.

Horror cinema is currently booming and is considered a reliable indicator of times of crisis. At festivals, however, horror and the genre have a hard time. This is especially true for the Berlinale. So what could be more obvious than turning its own section into a fantasy film festival? “A long-standing prejudice is that German film doesn't master genre,” says Retrospective director Rainer Rother. This year's selection aims to prove the opposite – at least as far as the past is concerned. “Wild, weird, bloody. German genre films of the 70s” is the motto, and it doesn't promise too much.

Of False and Real Vampires

In Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (Tenderness of the Wolves, 1973), Ulli Lommel focussed on the serial killer Fritz Haarmann, also known as “the vampire of Hanover”. During the Weimar Republic, he was sentenced to death and executed for the murder of at least 24 boys and young men. In the film, he kills them with one bite. In its stylised theatricality, the film is clearly the work of the Fassbinder clique, to which Lommel himself and several actors such as the fabulous lead actor Kurt Raab, Ingrid Caven and Brigitte Mira belonged. However, Lommel does not spare any silent film references to Fritz Lang's masterpiece M (Germany 1931), which was based on the same material.
Real vampires are the subject of Hans W. Geißendörfer's Jonathan (1970), an indispensable milestone for vampire completists. If you're looking for a contemporary reference to the Biedermeier gothic saga, you'll probably find it in the students who motivate frightened villagers to revolt against their vampire rulers. Aesthetically, the later Lindenstrasse director is not always stylistically confident, but a certain influence on Werner Herzog's Murnau remake Nosferatu – Phantom of the Night (1979), made ten years later, can hardly be denied.

Art or Commerce?

The blatant non-relationship between the internationally renowned New German Cinema of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders and genre is actually the focal point of any thematic discussion at the time. Genre was seen as commerce, never as art. The brilliant director Roland Klick fought tooth and nail against this “hostility to the senses”, as he called it. His psychedelic late western Deadlock (1970) – with music by Düsseldorf krautrock pioneers Can – is not, strictly speaking, a new discovery. After the late appreciation of Klick's work in recent years, it is more likely to be one of the audience's favourites.

Plenty of Genre Ingredients

The international influence of Italian westerns and Italian giallo on the “violence wave” of German 1970s cinema can also be seen in Rolf Olsen's Blutiger Freitag (Bloody Friday, Germany/Italy 1972), starring the bearish Raimund Harmstorf in the role of an ultra-brutal bank robber. Gangsters with huge sunglasses and cheeky remarks, shootouts and wild chases in a VW Beetle – this bloody drama really does have everything the genre heart desires. And in keeping with the times, there's also some windy class struggle talk to legitimise the evil deed.
The films also feature the early work of great cameramen such as Robert van Ackeren, Jürgen Jürges and Robby Müller. Women, on the other hand, are criminally underrepresented, which is also a sign of the times. It remains to be seen whether Lady Dracula (Franz Josef Gottlieb, Germany 1978), criticised by critics as “scary trash”, will be seen with different eyes today.

What Did the GDR Show?

In terms of its self-image, the GDR naturally had no vampires or serious criminals — bad conditions for the genre. To compensate for this, the retrospective offers the cheerful sports musical Nicht schummeln, Liebling (Don't Cheat, Darling!, Joachim Hasler, 1973) or the advertising slapstick Nelken in Aspik (Carnations in Aspic, Günter Reisch, 1976), an over-the-top satire on the abuses of the real socialist planned economy.

Don't Take Everything So Seriously

You can find so much humour subversive or highly questionable. But that's the crux of the genre: not taking things so seriously, for better or for worse. In both East and West, it opened up wild, confusing, sometimes grotesque spaces of possibility that German cinema has entered far too rarely.