CHANDIGARH’S cinephiles were treated to a well-chosen assortment of works from the contemporary German cinema during a week-long festival held recently at Government Arts College and Alliance Francaise. The festival, organised by the Federation of Film Societies of India and the Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with the Chandigarh Film Society, featured films made in the 1990s, a period of great social and political upheaval in Germany. The pain and pleasure of interpersonal relationships was the key motif of most of the movies shown.

Though the German cinema has never enjoyed as much worldwide popularity as French and Italian cinema, it occupies an important place in the history of the medium. Its film industry was born in the pre-World War I years. The war badly hit film production in Europe but, surprisingly, a bruised and battered Germany spearheaded a revival. Film-making began again in 1919, the year which saw the making of one of the most influential and widely discussed movies ever — Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Strongly influenced by surrealist and expressionist art, Wiene showed not the real world, but the vision of the world as it might look to an insane man. According to film-maker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the film foresaw the emergence of Nazism and Hitler, foretold the future of a nation.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was the forerunner of many distinguished films in the 1920s, like Nosferatu and The Golem, macabre fantasies symbolic of the nightmarish post-war milieu.

Directors like Friedrich Murnau and George Pabst proved themselves great innovators with the camera, setting styles which were copied internationally. Hollywood lured many of them to the USA. However, very few of these imported artistes did any thing like their best work in Hollywood. Finding the control of the big studios too constricting, they either returned or wasted their talents in America.

The advent of Hitler in 1933 also forced most of Germany’s creative talent to move abroad. The only notable films of that period were two colossal propaganda pieces, Triumph of the Will and Olympiad, made by Leni Reifenstahl.

Hitler’s era stifled creativity in the country to such an extent that it was not until the 1970s, with the emergence of innovative film-makers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Ali: Fear eats the soul), Werner Herzog (Aguirre: Wrath of God), Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) and Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) that German cinema again rose from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix. Fassbinder’s death in 1982 was a setback to the movement, but his contemporaries have continued to make films which have won recognition at major film festivals. Herzog’s recent film My Dearest Enemy is a documentary about the love-hate relationship between the director and Klaus Kinski, the brilliant lead actor of many of Herzog’s films.

Among the films shown at the festival, the piece de resistance was Doris Dorrie’s Am I Beautiful? Based on her short stories, it is a poetic meditation on life, love and death. By skillfully interlinking the stories, the director creates a complex but fascinating mosaic which vastly widens the scope of the film. Although there are 20-odd characters, each with a story of his/her own, Dorrie handles them well. The film is packed with unforgettable scenes (one shows an errant husband frantically trying to clean up his flat — splattered with blood due to his mistress’ suicide attempt — with his wife likely to arrive any minute). An entertaining and moving film which was, inexplicably, snubbed by critics at IFFI-2000 in New Delhi.

Winter Sleepers is set in a snowy village in the Alps and is about people "who circle one another and are all a little confused," says its director-writer, Tom Tykwer. On seeing the film, it seems Tykwer was himself confused while making it, as it lacks focus and purpose. A dreary, meandering tale, presumably exploring the themes of guilt, chance and responsibility, its characters are so cold and distant that their emotional entanglements fail to keep the viewer even remotely interested.

Life is All You Get by Wolfgang Becker concerns the fragmentary and chaotic lives of Berlin residents. Sex and love in the time of AIDS, the deterioration of family values, the need for relationships to escape the big-city blues and the influence of American culture are the major themes of this noteworthy social document.

Peter Lichtefeld’s Trains ‘n’ Roses can be called an offbeat, downbeat romantic comedy. Weber, a low-profile van driver, requests his boss to give him a holiday as he wants to take part in a competition for rail time-table experts in Finland. When the latter refuses, Weber promptly punches him in the face and flees. His boss dies, the police launches a manhunt and the viewer looks forward to a hectic chase thriller. However, the director keeps the film’s pace so slow, languorously slow, that Weber’s destination acquires less importance than his journey, during which he befriends a Finnish woman. During the competition, he deliberately gives not the shortest but the most beautiful rail route, as told to him by the woman. He loses the contest but it hardly bothers him, as he has found love. At times entertaining, at times dull, Trains ‘n’ Roses is a stylishly-made fable about following your instinct, come what may.

Didi Danquart exhumes the ghosts of the Nazi era in Jew-Boy Levi. It is the story of Levi, a Jewish cattle dealer who comes back to do business in a valley in the Black Forest, circa 1935. With the arrival of an engineer and his team from Berlin, swastika flags start dominating the village skyline. Levi bears the brunt of their anti-Semitic campaign. The tyres of his van are split open, his pet rabbit is beheaded and he is labelled a "nothing". The father of his Christian girlfriend treats him with hostility. Humiliated and dejected, he is forced to leave the valley. The last scene, which shows the tail lights of Levi’s van melting into the darkness, is both subtle and powerful. It is commendable to see a German film-maker seeking redemption of his country’s past sins.

Andreas Dresen’s Night Shapes, like Dorrie’s film, is easier to describe than to define. It matches the latter in its variety of characters and the director’s compassion for them. The Pope comes to a deglamorised Berlin, teeming with punks, prostitutes, junkies and tramps. The characters see the Pope only on television, thus suggesting the yawning gap between an institution like the church and the ordinary people. It is an unflinching and perceptive portrait of the modern German society, directed with flamboyance and peppered with sarcastic humour.

Although there is no dearth of talent in the country today, all is not well with the German cinema. The market share of German films was just 14 per cent in 1999 (it was 17.30 per cent in 1997). As Hollywood is making deep inroads into the German film market, it is turning out to be an uphill task for film-makers to attract home audiences to their films. However, going by the history of the German cinema, one can say with some confidence that the present crisis will be overcome.