Movies Uber Alles

You know those weekends when the movies you watch just happen to go together? Well I had one of those weekends last weekend when I wound-up watching not one- but two German foreign films from the early '80's. So grab your currywurst and sauerkraut and read on!






Kamikaze '89 (1982)

Director/actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder is weird. If I hadn't known that after watching his uber gay sailor fetish flick Querelle (1982), Vulture.com told me Kamikaze '89 was the weirdest movie I could see. To top off this weird cinema-streudel, Fassbinder died a month before the film was released. So that's all I needed to know to hightail it to BAM and check out what all the schadenfreude was about.

Kamikaze opens on a shot of a corpulent and sweaty Polizeilleutnant Jansen (Fassbinder) playing some sort of racket game in the flashing lights of a policeman's disco club. It's 1989 folks, and disco is the music of the masses. That opening shot pretty much sums up the movie- an exhausted, cheap noir set in a future full of junky pieces of the past.

Wolf Gremm shot the film in distressed neighborhoods in Berlin and Dusseldorf reminiscent of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), used trashy retro costumes including leopard print suits and feather boas that look like they were bought at Screaming Mimi's, and utilized a soundtrack from Tangerine Dream that reminds one of Vangelis' score for Blade Runner (1982).

The slick media offices that should stand in stark contrast to the graffiti-covered slums come off more as abandoned office space that Gremm filled with strange props for the two days that he had access to it. In a sense the film does feel punk, in that you can imagine the cast and crew running through abandoned work complexes one step ahead of the Polizei. But it doesn't feel like there was a conscious choice in the styling of this future world.

The movie looks like it was shot on a ten mark budget with Jansen following strange leads through a world of beat-up Audis, grungy images of American Idol-esque laughing contests, and klunky "Steve Jobs would never approve this" technology. For a film that purports to show a future dominated by an all-powerful media company, the budget makes it look more like the world is run by NY 1. Everytime I saw Fassbinder sweat through a scene, I wished he had directed this film instead of just acting in it. Then there would have been a chance at an interesting, cohesive style.

What does intrigue me about the film is its place alongside other early Eighties films that were focused on futuristic societies. Films like Blade Runner, The Apple (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Mad Max 2 (1981) each had distinct views of the future- all dystopian. The early Eighties projected its fears about the Reagan Era onto its cinema, and it would appear that trend made it all the way to the art-film scene in Berlin.

Das Boot (1982)

So after watching Fassbinder run through an industrial German ghetto with a leopard-print gun, I came home to find the Netflix DVD of classic German language film, Das Boot waiting for me. The universe was telling me to go full-on Deutschland Eighties with my weekend.
Das Boot is the story of a German U-boat crew hunting Allied freighters in the North Atlantic. Lt. Werner (Herbet Gronemeyer) joins the crew of Captain-Lt. Lehmann-Willenbrock (Jurgen Prochnow- or Duke Leto Atreides to you Dune nerds) aboard Boat U-96 to document the lives of these seafaring heroes. The tense action/drama follows the crew as they attempt to survive the devastating naval battles with Allied destroyers.

Now I know what you're saying. "Who cares if they survived? They're Germans. In World War II. I hope all those Nazi sons-a-bitches made excellent fishfood." It's a tough sell. We don't typically want to watch movies about "the enemy." But like its excellent predecessor All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), this film explores the ugliness of war by showing what it did to the work-a-day German soldiers.

The film opens with the harrowing statistic that out of 40,000 German U-Boat sailors in WWII, 30,000 of them were killed. So right off the bat, we know not to get too attached to the characters we meet. Director Wolfgang Petersen (of The Neverending Story (1984), Air Force One (1997), and Troy (2004) fame) takes great care to separate his characters from the evil shade of Nazism.

In the opening scene the officers in their uniforms drive towards a French whorehouse to celebrate before shipping out. Their car is pissed-on by a line of drunken sailors. Once inside the aforementioned Katze-house, a revered, but dead drunk Captain raises a glass, then roasts Herr Hitler, mocking this apprentice painter's naval genius.

From this scene on, there are very few "uniforms" and next to no symbols of the Nazi party. The uniform for the sailors is flannel and pull-overs, or stripped to their undershirts. The men appear less like evil Nazis, and more like working-class soldiers- going where and doing what they're told.

We also don't see their adversaries, the Allies, except through the lens of binoculars, or as dark shadows cruising over their sub. We are immersed in the world of this submarine. And in this world there are no good guys or bad guys- just a team of men fighting to survive.

The world of the submarine is brilliantly conceived with camera movement that smoothly shoots through the ship like a bullet through a gun muzzle- squeezing past crowded men, equipment, and hanging meats that take up every available piece of space.

The shots are close, with the men's faces  filling the frame- sweating, confident, terrified, joyous, broken. The claustrophobic inside of U-96 becomes our world and we don't care whether these men are the enemy. Their struggle is our struggle. And their tragedies affect us. Das Boot uses cinematic space to envelope us in the world of the "other" and contemplate the filth and despair of war.

Das Boot was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Director. Not sure why one of those nods wasn't for Best Foreign Film, but since I've never heard of the other four nominees, it's hard to say what Oscar was smoking that year. The director's cut that is available is three-and-a-half hours long, but don't be afraid of the length. The time swims by.

Auf wiedersehen for now, faithful readers!