Alexandra H. Bush Book Review: Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager, eds., The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Wayne State University Press, 2010 $39.95 (paperback)

The Collapse of the Conventional is a scholarly It has become nearly impossible to speak response to the popular and critical perception uncritically of “national” cinemas in film studies, of a “return” in German cinema since 2000. After and Fisher and Prager approach the topic with twenty years of movies intended more for national due caution. Taking a cue from Randall Halle’s entertainment than international prestige, excellent German Film After Germany, they adopt a German films of the last ten years have received discursive approach to the “nation” in the collection, renewed attention and respect from audiences, which includes studies on several transnational critics, and scholars alike.1 Jaimey Fisher and productions and works from German-speaking Brad Prager’s ambitious collection identifies re- nations outside Germany that nonetheless engage engagement with 20th century German history and with specifically German historical and political politics as the defining aspect of this new period discourses.5 Working from this critical concept and sets out to examine this engagement across a of the nation, The Collapse of the Conventional is broad selection of films. Their introduction offers loosely organized around three main themes: films a brief outline of German film history, identifying that revisit World War II, cinema that investigates a new “Third Wave,” following Weimar and the East and West German identity post-unification, New German Cinema of the 1960s, ’70s, and early and films that “engage the present moment and its ’80s.2 The collection should, they state, consider most contemporary trends.”6 The lack of formal contemporary political films in relation to the division between sections allows for enlightening New German Cinema movement of the 1960s to thematic interplay across the collected essays, the 1980s, from which the volume takes its name.3 enabling several threads to appear and reappear Keeping that earlier period in mind, the editors throughout the book, regardless of the period “intend for the category of politics … to serve under scrutiny. as an optic” for understanding the landscape of The first of these threads, and a major contemporary German cinema.4 hot-button issue in Germany today, is the

58 “F” is for Failure James Crawford and Mike Dillon, editors, Spectator 32:1 (Spring 2012): 58-61. BUSH representation of German victimhood. This Kapczynski’s essay on Wortmann’s earlier narrative debate usually centers on World War II films, film, The Miracle of Bern (2003), about West as it did prominently with the release of 2004’s Germany’s victory in the 1954 World Cup, is the Downfall. Elizabeth Krimmer’s contribution true highlight of the chapters on German national addresses this issue through a side-by-side identity and victimhood. Kapczynski’s piece is not examination of Downfall and another blockbuster, only an addition to German film studies but an 1993’s Stalingrad. Critically investigating both exemplary contribution and call for more work in films’ uses of melodrama to mythologize World “color semiotics.”11 She examines the implications War II soldiers and NSDAP leaders, Krimmer of Wortmann’s imitation of Agfacolor, Germany’s asserts that “the focus on Germans as victims of early competition for Technicolor, which Hitler and the war serves to elide questions of came to characterize early Nazi propaganda. responsibility and guilt.”7 Wilfried Wilms and Her innovative and incisive exploration of the Anna Parkinson offer similar criticisms of the TV industrial and aesthetic qualities of this particular miniseries Dresden (2006) and Rosenstrasse (2003), process opens up questions about the political respectively. In their essays, Krimmer, Wilms, implications of nostalgia and the romanticization and Parkinson all identify uses of melodrama of a moment (1954) when German nationalism to disguise real political relations in World War was still thoroughly haunted by the memory of II-era Germany. This concern about portraying Nazi horrors. perpetrators as victims or eliding different kinds of Kapczynski’s is the first in the volume, victimization resurfaces in Jaimey Fisher’s genre- although certainly not the last, to spotlight the based examination of the 2006 Oscar-winner The political implications of aesthetic decisions. In Lives of Others, whose heroization of a Stasi officer fact, this focus on the importance of aesthetics raised eyebrows in Germany for its historical is another thread that connects essays across inaccuracies. Fisher makes the controversial but, thematic groups. In chapters on Berlin School in this case, convincing argument that melodrama luminaries Christian Petzold and Christoph generically works at cross purposes with politically Hochhäusler, respectively, Marco Abel and Kristin critical filmmaking, raising the question of Kopp expound upon the filmmakers’ deployment whether the portrayal of German victimhood is of alternative aesthetics and narrative techniques a result of production trends rather than a more to promote engaged viewership, itself a political sinister and “deliberate political negotiation of act. The implication, of course, is that high- a long-time political and moral quandary” that budget, Hollywood-style productions, which Wilms sees.8 have become increasingly common in German It is not just narrative structure that plays cinema since the 1980s, are a sign of conservative into the debates around victimhood. Both Lutz support for the status quo. By contrast, Roger Koepnick and Jennifer Kapczynski examine the Cook’s striking—if contrarian—piece on Hans politics of aesthetics in depictions of German Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004) insists that patriotism in films by Sönke Wortmann. the director “appropriates the cinematic strategies Koepnick looks at Wortmann’s documentary of Hollywood and turns them back against the about the 2006 World Cup, which took place capitalist system that invented them” in this in Germany and saw a resurgence of patriotism story of contemporary young political activists.12 in a country (rightly) skeptical of nationalism. Unlike the auteurs and activists of the 1970s, He notes Wortmann’s desire “to picture soccer today’s filmmakers and activists flexibly deploy “all as a site where powerful passions reroute the discursive weapons, even those most effective in course of national history and shape new forms the service of global capitalism.”13 Cook celebrates of collective identification.”9 Koepnick makes an the departure from the “leaden” aesthetics of 1970s insightful connection between Wortmann’s use political filmmaking.14 of new technologies—“postcinematic forms of In contrast, Johnannes von Moltke contends digital filmmaking”—and the changing nature that, as auteur cinema, Oskar Roehler’s 2000 of “postnationalist German patriotism.”10 But film No Place to Go is an act of resistance to the

“F” IS FOR FAILURE 59 THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL BOOK REVIEW

“mainstream of German cinema,” which “strives to movement—as their lens to examine contemporary ‘Europeanize’ or continues to emulate Hollywood cinema, the editors and their authors fall into models.”15 The aesthetic-political debates running the common trap of excluding East Germany through this volume recall cinematic discourse in from German cinema history. Only Michael D. the 1970s and 1980s, when filmmakers like Rainer Richardson makes a substantial reference to an Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner East German film from the 1970s, and the editors Herzog used cinematic form politically. The make no mention or apology for their omission question of whether Hollywood-style gloss can of East German film history. While this exclusion make a subversive statement in the contemporary occurs frequently in German film studies, it is still moment of German cinema still circulates. impossible to compile a comprehensive history of Regardless of their position in the aesthetics German cinema while leaving out East Germany. debate, several scholars in this volume agree that, The other glaring omission in the book in a newly “normalized” Germany, films about the is insufficient discussion of films that engage past have become a way to “neatly sidestep the with issues of immigration and Germany’s difficulties of the present,” a way of “deflecting (and Europe’s) changing ethnic makeup. With criticism away from current potential sore spots some of the country’s most prominent young without being labeled escapist.”16 Perhaps the filmmakers—Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan, collection’s most promising area of scholarship for example—telling stories that touch explicitly is this third thread: a focus on how some or obliquely on questions of immigration, the contemporary filmmakers are working through under-representation of essays on these films is issues of globalization. Barbara Mennel makes both striking and troubling.19 This is particularly a convincing case that some of New German noticeable due to the volume’s attempts to focus Cinema’s true heirs are in the art world, specifically on globalization and its effects.20 Germany’s in Biemann’s video piece Remote Sensing (2001), problematic position as a leader among “First which investigates international sex trafficking in a World” nations points to issues of immigration, way that recalls radical feminist filmmaking of the citizenship processes, and labor practices, but 1970s. Brad Prager’s essay on utopias underlines these discussions are absent from The Collapse of the “totality” of the neoliberal ideological system the Conventional. and how, under changing concepts of space and These absences aside, this is a carefully time, “utopias are less about the divisions between compiled, well-informed collection that East and West than they are about finding convincingly introduces a new period of cinema intimate and often romantic avenues of escape.”17 into German film history. While the essays do For the most part—again, Cook is an exception— not find a reemergence of New German Cinema’s these scholars find dissections of globalization and “critical and demystifying engagement with the contemporary geopolitics in those works that also past, especially with Nazism and World War II”— adhere to the more subversive aesthetic practices indeed, quite the opposite—the focus on New found in New German Cinema.18 As they did in German Cinema enables enlightening insights the West Germany of the 1970s, debates center on into just what has changed in contemporary whether a film’s Leftist politics loses its importance political discourse.21 The collected essays employ if the filmmaker sacrifices audience appeal to the an impressive range of approaches to a broad, purity of the message. What has changed seems to yet coherent, selection of contemporary German be that now World War II is fodder for apolitical films, from theoretical to historically contextual. A mainstream cinema, whereas engaging that dark mix of aesthetic- and narrative-based perspectives past was a subversive political act for Fassbinder, provides an illuminating, if not comprehensive, Wenders, and Herzog. view of the landscape of German cinema today, For all its strengths, The Collapse of the which has indeed made an impressive return to Conventional runs into two central pitfalls. The the international stage, as Germany itself has first is historiographic in nature: by referring to increasingly become a leader among Western the New German Cinema—a West German film nations.

60 SPRING 2012 BUSH

Alexandra H. Bush is a graduate student in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Her interests include transnational media, Turkish-German cinema, and the relationship between film culture and the changing shape of the European Union. End Notes

1 Eric Rentschler coined the much-cited phrase “cinema of consensus” to describe the lighthearted, apolitical films that dominated Germany’s output in the last twenty years of the 20th century. Fisher and Prager note what they term a “collapse of the consensual” in this current period. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager, “Introduction,” in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 3. 2 Ibid., 8. 3 The Oberhausen Manifesto, the foundational document of New German cinema, described the “collapse of the conventional German film” Ibid., 2. 4 Ibid., 13. 5 Randall Halle. German Film After Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 6 Ibid., 31. 7 Elisabeth Krimmer, “More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall,” in The Collapse of the Conventional, 103. 8 Wilfried Wilms, “Dresden: The Return of History as Soap,” Ibid., 150. 9 Lutz Koepnick, “Public Viewing: Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema,” Ibid., 65. 10 Ibid., 67. 11 Jennifer M. Kapczynski, “Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema,” Ibid., 43. 12 Roger F. Cook, “Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Edukating the Post-Left Generation,” Ibid., 324. 13 Ibid., 323. 14 Ibid., 324. 15 Johannes Von Moltke, “Terrains Vagues: Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go,” Ibid., 164. 16 Marco Abel, “Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold,” Ibid., 259; Cook, 317. In writing of “normalization,” I take my cue from several authors in the volume who use the term to refer to the process of coming to terms with Germany’s extraordinary history in the 20th century. Normalization is related to the widely accepted theory in German studies that, historically speaking, Germany has had a Sonderweg, or unique path, in its relatively short national history. 17 Brad Prager, “Glipmses of Freedom: The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema,” Ibid., 369. 18 Such subversive practices are exemplified by the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose relationship to melodrama included both an embrace and an aggressive departure from generic conventions. 19 Fisher and Prager do touch on Akın’s work in their introduction, and Prager’s essay takes up a film that centers on two young undocumented immigrants, but neither essay focuses on immigration itself as a political issue that filmmakers are engaging. Rather, they use the lenses of aesthetic similarity to Fassbinder and the trope of the utopia to examine the films, respectively. 20 For a thorough overview of how immigration has played into 20th century German history, see Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany In Transit: Nation and Migration, 1954-2004 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 21 Fisher and Prager, 6. An exception to the otherwise general consensus that German political filmmaking skipped a generation is John E. Davidson’s chapter in this volume, “Playing Hide and Seek with Tradition: Games, Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema following the Wende.” Davidson persuasively highlights continuities from New German Cinema through to contemporary filmmaking that can be found in the oft-dismissed “cinema of consensus” era.

“F” IS FOR FAILURE 61