QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

To encourage domestic motion picture production, Germany, like many other European countries, subsidises its film-makers. The resulting films – made on a limited budget – are made as art pieces rather than the formulaic Hollywood blockbusters. Film-making is a form of national expression that is open to all members of our society, whether it is on SBS television’s World Movies or at one of our many international film festivals in our ‘art house’ cinemas. An important element of each annual program, the Festival of German Films, has been presented by German Films and the Goethe Institut in Australia in close cooperation with enthusiastic sponsors and supporters for more than a decade. German film

Germany has always been at the forefront of filmmaking. Although the first paid public showing of a movie is generally credited to the Lumière brothers in Paris in December 1895, the world’s first public demonstration of moving pictures using Max Skladanowsky’s “Bioscop” took place in Berlin almost two months earlier. However the Bioscop proved impractical for general use, although its experiment marked the origins of the famous Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam. The ‘Golden Age’ of early German cinema from 1920 to 1932 began with the great pioneering silent films of the 1920s such as Metropolis and Nosferatu and continued after the introduction of sound in 1929 with Der blaue Engel and Die Drei von der Tankstelle .

The s e and other German films had a great influence on Hollywood – until the National Socialist regime diminshed the reputation of the German filmmakers with around 1,000 pieces of propoganda thinly masked as feature films being pumped out of Babelsberg between 1933 and 1945. For many years after World War II the German film industry was in dire need of a jumpstart. In 1962, during the German Festival for Short Films, a group of 26 young German directors wrote and signed the Oberhausen Manifesto , which boldly declared the old German cinema dead. Many of the young German filmmakers were strongly political. Disdainful of ‘artistry’ and ‘entertainment’, they believed that film should serve as a forum for the dissemination of ideas and philosophies, which challenged the established order. This early movement was rejected by the great majority of German filmgoers and was a financial disaster. This attempt at a new, meaningful film culture, although not economically successful, did eventually evolve into a strong industry that was receiving international acclaim by the late 1960s and on into the ’70s. Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Volker Schlöndorff stood in the forefront of this Neu Welle – the German ‘New Wave’. It is difficult to define the ‘New German Cinema’ because all the directors have their own unique styles, which are specific to their films. The fact that there is an association between artist and product does, however, say something as to how people feel a sense of connection and/or loyalty to a particular director.

Meanwhile in Berlin, 2012 marked the 62nd Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival) – now the largest in the world. The festival showed films on more than 50 screens all over the city: 659 screenings in DCP (Digital Cinema Package) format, 627 in 35 mm film, and some 1,100 in diverse video formats. The day cannot be far off when all films will be shown in DCP format. Perhaps then the Brisbane German Film Festival will be one of many worldwide sites able to share the Berlinale live. On the opposite page is a snapshot of the 16 films – all made in 2010 or 2011 – which screened in Brisbane for the 2012 Festival of German Films

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