International Audience
W
iththe production of The Tin Drum (1978–79), Volker Schlöndorff moved into a new phase of his career, a third period in his work that we call his international period. This period comprised two other major features, Circle of Deceit (1981) and Swann in Love (1983), as well as documentaries and contri- butions to omnibus films. Schlöndorff’s feature work during this period grew out of far more international production structures than before, was somewhat more stylistically conservative than much of the preceding efforts, and involved a move away from the earlier films’ feminism and confrontational activism. Although the three features still have critical elements to them, much of Schlöndorff’s oppositional energy shifted to the small-scale, less mainstream films. With this period, Schlöndorff began to work increasingly for the opera, and although we do not examine in depth the director’s output in live theater and opera, we consider it in the context of his film production.Schlöndorff’s new international status had much to do with both the more restrictive film production situation beginning to unfold within the Federal Republic and the positive reputation of the New German Cinema by the end of the 1970s. We have discussed earlier the dependency on state and public tel- evision funding that the New German Cinema had developed. With the emer- gence of a more conservative political climate in the wake of the fall 1977 climax to the terrorist crisis, institutional subsidy of alternative filmmaking became far less reliable. Of equal or even greater importance was the near desperate situa- tion of German film exhibitors. The number of filmgoers in West Germany had steadily declined from 320 million persons in 1965 to 128 million in 1975 and to 104 million in 1985. “The hardest hit were Germany’s small movie entrepreneurs
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who do culturally ambitious programming . . . and, what is more, relate strongly to the German film” (“Jetzt hilft” 233). This economic situation was leading to the decline of the Programmkino as an institution that could be relied upon to bring adventurous German moviemaking to a domestic audience.
On the bright side, West German film producers were to see foreign busi- ness triple between 1979 and 1981, amounting then to nearly 62 percent of total turnover (Deutsches Institut 91). Clearly, the future of the New German Cinema lay in the international market. This change was due largely to the international prestige and box office clout generated in the late 1970s by works like Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), Wenders’s The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977), and Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1978). Schlöndorff himself was quite aware of this situation, which he saw in 1980 as comparable to that of the Weimar period: “At that time, as today, the German cinema could only survive through exportation” (“Der Wille” 248).
The first step in this process of internationalization would be the shooting of works in English, which occurred with Fassbinder’s Despair (1977), Herzog’s Nosferatu (1978), Wenders’s The State of Things (1982), and Peter Lilienthal’s Dear Mr. Wonderful (1981–82). In other cases at this time, German filmmakers have even shot in Portuguese (Lilienthal’s The Autograph [Das Autogramm], 1983–84) and the Philippine native language, Tagalog (Werner Schroeter’s The Laughing Star [Der lachende Stern], 1983), in order to continue working. Perhaps because The Tin Drum was both Schlöndorff’s most successful film to date and one of his most distinctively German, Schlöndorff lagged behind these colleagues in making the transition to English. One can, however, understand through this inhospitable domestic context why he might choose to shoot his next fiction feature in Beirut and to follow that with a French-language Swann in Love.
This international production context is distinctly echoed in the films them- selves. To an extent not seen in Schlöndorff’s earlier work, cities take on a sym- bolic function, starting with The Tin Drum. The cosmopolitan and metropolitan emphasis grew noticeably between The Tin Drum and Swann in Love at the expense of what is regional and ethnic. Matzerath’s Danzig embodies, besides the site of the historic German-Polish conflict, the locale of Kashubians, shop owners and petite bourgeoisie. In contrast, Swann’s much more homogeneous Paris can claim—as Schlöndorff remarks in his production notes—to be “the essence of all cities” (“Notes on Making” 3). In all three films, the relationship between setting and central role can be described in the terms used by the film- maker for Circle of Deceit: “The leading role in the film besides Laschen is the city of Beirut. . . . In my film there is correspondence between the setting and the character” (“Oskar Matzerath im” 12).
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The progressively increasing familiarity of the cities used as settings goes with a tendency toward cultural mediation, often in the sense of an “interna- tional reconciliation.” The Tin Drum mediates between Poles and Germans, Circle of Deceit between Germans and the residents of Beirut in particular and citi- zens of the Third World in general; Swann in Love mediates between French high culture, especially its higher literature, and interested parties internationally.
A Male Point of View
In contrast to this sense of intercultural mediation, we see Schlöndorff continue his exploration of the theme of the mismatched couple who cannot communi- cate. Although this narrative motif is relegated to minor characters in The Tin Drum, it comes to the fore in both Circle and Swann. In these two works, we see rather passive men in love with independent women. Indeed, these men are victimized by them, and one cannot help but be struck by the shift in Schlöndorff’s sensibility from a feminist bias to a more male-centered con- sciousness.
One can speculate here about whether this reorientation may be a result of the filmmaker’s increasing professional separation from his wife. It may also have to do with the blossoming of the West German women’s film movement in the late 1970s: with women filmmakers finally able to speak for themselves and other women, there was perhaps no longer need for Schlöndorff to be their advocate. In any event, all three features from this period center around male protagonists who, unlike the heros of Georgina’s Reasons and Coup de Grâce, are not in struggle with their female counterparts to provide for the audience’s point of view.
Indeed, all three works are drawn from fictional sources that emphasize the extreme subjectivity of a male narrator or author. For all, Schlöndorff has created first-person narratives in which he has set up for himself the challenge of converting fictions centered around thoughts, memories, and emotions to an entertainment medium that conventionally emphasizes action and physical conflict. Schlöndorff renders these stories cinematic by emphasizing the voyeuristic qualities of his heros. They are always looking and observing, and derive sexual and ego-enhancing pleasure from doing so.
With this new emphasis on subjectivity comes something of a loss of the political partiality in Schlöndorff’s earlier work. These new heros are not polit- ical rebels seeking social change. Even the high-spirited Oskar Matzerath does not qualify as an activist, and he is a grotesque figure, meant as much to be read as a metaphor or symbol than as a real character. Georg Laschen is a journalist A German Consciousness for an International Audience 159
whose job is to report on what he sees, not to change it. And Swann is merely solipsistic, a figure of bourgeois decadence. Yet all are also sympathetic char- acters who thereby position the audience’s point of view.
As a result, some observers have seen in these movies a retreat from Schlöndorff’s previous political engagement. If so, that retreat is hardly total, for The Tin Drum surely addresses political and cultural issues surrounding fas- cism, Circle of Deceit raises major questions about journalistic ethics and respon- sibility, and Swann in Love contextualizes Proust’s narrative with observations about class and sexual politics. In terms of form, none of these three films fol- lows up in any systematic way on the Brechtian strategies of Schlöndorff’s pre- vious period. At best, all three movies offer elements of self-reflexivity, use episodic structures, and draw political analysis through typed minor charac- ters. But Schlöndorff holds back somewhat from the conscious mixing of polit- ical content with alienating form.
If one is to look for confrontational activism and radical form during this period, one will find it more easily in Germany in Autumn’s (1978) analysis of the aftermath of terrorism, The Candidate’s (1980) acid portrait of right-wing Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss, and War and Peace’s (1983) pessimistic observation of militarism. Made without state or television subsidies, these films represent attempts by the new German filmmakers to intervene in sig- nificant issues of the time. All are collective efforts, and Schlöndorff’s contri- butions to them are varied. Related to this documentary and agitprop work but far less directly political is Schlöndorff’s documentary study Just For Fun, Just For Play—Kaleidoscope Valeska Gert (1979).
This third period in Schlöndorff’s filmmaking career represents a bifurca- tion into an even more issue-specific activism than ever before and the simul- taneous establishment of himself as a specialist in adapting to cinema what might be considered unfilmable texts. This latter literary side connects to the economic issues discussed above. To increasingly skeptical and politically and socially cautious subsidy boards, a recognized literary source becomes pro- tection against accusations of bad decision making. In commercial terms, Schlöndorff’s projects increasingly become Hollywood-style packages in which a literary property or topical tie-in to the Lebanon war provides for immedi- ate audience recognition, a set of bankable stars contributes to box office poten- tial, and a brand-name director becomes the ribbon that ties it together. Schlöndorff’s detractors would argue that this new positioning makes for the worst of both worlds, with the result being a cinema that has neither the energy and vitality of popular culture nor the intellectual depth and challenging struc- tures of important alternative art.
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Our position in the pages that follow is far kinder. It is probably simplistic to see this new direction in Schlöndorff’s work simply as opportunistic and compromising. One may admire Schlöndorff’s more aggressively radical works without necessarily taking as insincere or totally reactionary his attempts to extend more conventional cultural traditions. Indeed, part of the pleasure of a film like Swann in Love is its ability to embrace very real contradictions about society and aesthetics. The films deserve to be judged on their individual mer- its, not on the production system out from they arise.
Work for the Opera
Schlöndorff’s ambivalence about the traditional arts shows up in somewhat different form in his acceptance of directorial assignments for the opera. Schlöndorff’s involvement with opera begins somewhat prior to this period, in 1974, with his staging of Leos Janácek’s Katia Kabanova for the Frankfurt/Main Opera, and has continued into the 1990s for a total of seven productions. Despite this overlap of periods, let us here briefly consider Schlöndorff’s opera career, for it can perhaps throw some light on the director’s attempts to work within established institutions in positive and progressive ways.
Schlöndorff’s involvement with opera has exemplified a pattern also exhib- ited by several of his colleagues in the New German Cinema, such as Werner Herzog and Werner Schroeter. Because the opera is an institution so central to German culture, it should not be surprising that so many German filmmakers should both work in the medium and use it as a subject for film, as in, for exam- ple, Werner Schroeter’s portrayal of and shorts about Maria Callas (1968), his Eika Katappa (1969) and The Death of Maria Malibran (Der Tod der Maria Malibran, 1971), Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Moses and Aaron (1975), Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1981), Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982), and Alexander Kluge’s The Power of Emotions (Die Macht der Gefühle, 1983). We have already discussed Schlöndorff’s ambivalent presentation of the opera-loving industrialist in The Morals of Ruth Halbfass.
The appeal of creative activity with the opera would have several aspects. Schlöndorff himself has commented on the pleasure of working within the well-subsidized system of European opera companies (“Der Filmregisseur”). Particularly after the decline of state film subsidies during the Kohl era, to enjoy the significant resources of German and French opera houses became, accord- ing to Schlöndorff, a chance to recharge his creative batteries (“Avec l’opéra”). In addition, opera for Schlöndorff “has to do with child-like fantasy” (Methner). The operas Schlöndorff has committed to have tended to be twentieth-cen- A German Consciousness for an International Audience 161
tury works, although he has directed Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1981, Montepulciano, Italy) and Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (1984, Frankfurt). His second effort at twentieth-century opera renewed his collaboration with both Hans Werner Henze and Edward Bond, who wrote the music and libretto, respectively, for We Come to the River, which Schlöndorff directed in Berlin in 1976. That same year, he was involved with Matthieu Carrière in presenting Thomas Jahn’s Zoopalast (Montepulciano, Italy), a production broadcast on tel- evision as Der zoologische Palast in 1978. He returned to Janácek once again with the version of From the House of the Dead staged for the Paris Opéra Comique in March of 1988. Dimitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk is a similar modernist creation that Schlöndorff put on stage for the reopening of the ren- ovated Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1993. Clearly, Schlöndorff has favored challenging, unusual works, not mere fodder for mindless fans. He has also indicated a rejection of the Wagnerian tradition with its “enclosed uni- verse” (“Avec l’opera” 87).
The Henze, Janácek, and Shostakovich works are grim, serious operas that emphasize collective oppression. In the case of both Katia Kabanova and Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk we also find protofeminist heroines, the latter of whom is, like Katharina Blum or Kate in The Handmaid’s Tale, willing to kill to escape her oppression. As Shostakovich himself has said of his female protagonist, “her crimes are an expression of protest against that form of societal existence in which she lives, against the sinister and choking atmosphere of the world of merchants during the previous century” (Schostakowitsch 39). These mod- ernist operas are thematically of a piece with Schlöndorff’s film work.
By contrast, Schlöndorff’s choice of La Bohème at first seems out of place. The director himself, however, has admitted to the difficulty of staging Puccini without cheap sentimentality and saw it as his challenge to get to the authen- tic emotion in the work (“Notes on Making” 3). As a device to focus on La Bohème’s emotions, Schlöndorff devised a staging that involved the creation of a second framing rectangle within the proscenium stage, a visual strategy immediately evocative of the cinema. Critics have found other filmlike aspects of Schlöndorff’s opera stagings. The visual look of both his La Bohème and From the House of the Dead has been compared to that of a black-and-white film (Engelhard; Beuth). The elaborate stagecraft of Lady Macbeth involved the use of scrims and multilevel playing areas to allow for presentation on stage of simultaneous actions and fluid movielike transitions. In keeping with Schlöndorff’s Brecht-influenced side, however, we see a counterbalancing of operatic emotion with devices that produce detachment. In the last act of Lady Macbeth, for example, Schlöndorff uses a low-lit, darkened stage, which he
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pierces with a roving spotlight that calls to mind both a prison searchlight and a hand-held camera.
Critical reception of Schlöndorff’s opera activity has been mixed, and some traditionalists have been upset with his attempts at innovation. Reviews have been most positive for Katia Kabanova and, particularly, La Bohème. The mix of opinion is not surprising, for we can see in Schlöndorff’s opera work the same synthesis of contradictions that characterizes his work in film. On the one hand, he has worked within a cultural system of the establishment. On the other, he has gravitated toward substantive, often noncommercial work that challenges the cultural clichés of virtuoso divas, vocally acrobatic arias, and knee-jerk emo- tional responses. He seems to be striving in the operas, as in his films, for both an appealing, dreamlike world and analytical objects of cultural reflection.
As we look at Schlöndorff’s third period, let us bear in mind this bipolar pull in his work between working with the establishment and rebelling against it. A German Consciousness for an International Audience 163