UC Irvine Expert on German Film Missed Berlin Wall Drama by Days : Movies: Other demands including preparing for an exhibit of experimental films in Irvine forced his departure before history unfolded there.

By the time he boarded a plane to leave after five weeks in West Berlin, Eric Rentschler had witnessed a remarkable slice of history--but little did he know that the most amazing was yet to come.

“One feels rather stupid,” Rentschler offered sheepishly in his office at UC Irvine, where he is director of film studies and a professor of German. He left West Berlin on Nov. 4 to make a scheduled appearance at a film panel in Toronto, “so I missed everything by about five days.”

By “everything,” he means the opening of virtually unrestricted travel between East and West Berlin and the euphoria that has accompanied the symbolic demise of the Berlin Wall. In retrospect, he says he would have canceled his Toronto appearance, but “there was no way in the world of foreseeing the events that have unfolded in the past few days.”

Rentschler, a self-confessed case of “disciplinary schizophrenia,” has managed to combine a lifelong study of German culture with an interest in film; he came to UC Irvine in 1982 because it was the only university that would allow him to freely pursue, and combine, both areas of study.

German film, naturally, is his specialty (he has arranged for four examples of recent German experimental cinema to be screened at the university Thursday through Sunday). He has written or edited a number of books on the subject, and was in West Berlin to conduct research on the latest--”Nazi Film Aesthetics: Fantasy Production of the Third Reich,” to be published by Harvard University in 1990.

Nazi films? There is more to this neglected corner of film history, Rentschler says, than propaganda: “Most people seem to think they all look like ‘Triumph of the Will,’ ” Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 propaganda classic, a staple in film-history classes.

But in fact, according to Rentschler, 85% of the films produced between 1933 and 1945 were features. The period mirrored Hollywood’s own Golden Age, with crowds packing movie houses to see hugely popular and well-crafted musicals, biopics, costume epics and screwball comedies--even a 1936 remake of the American classic “It Happened One Night.”

The movies are still as popular in Germany as Hollywood “Golden Age” films are here. While in West Berlin, Rentschler could view Third Reich films on East German television Monday nights and on West German TV Friday and Saturday afternoons. On Wednesdays, he would go to one cinema to watch films of the period with a crowd of nostalgic older Germans.

Films produced during the Third Reich have a following here as well; Rentschler has a library of 100 videocassettes purchased through American distributors.

But while the films are seemingly innocuous, escapist fare, they are all in fact imbued with subtle propagandistic messages, Rentschler says. Every script of the period had to be approved by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, and by the early ‘40s the entire film industry was firmly in the hands of the state. Jewish directors, meanwhile, had long since emigrated or been sent to concentration camps.

Although there were once 10 film journals, film criticism had been officially banned in 1936.

The movies, in theme, tended to stress working for the good of a community, usually against threats from the outside. Every movie ended with a moral reinforcing the collective spirit. Heroes were sometimes nonconformist geniuses, “but in the end, these heroes are serving a national interest,” Rentschler said.

In Germany, the ideological underpinning of Third Reich films has been largely forgotten. “These are not in any way seen as contaminated,” Rentschler said. “They’ve been neutralized, cleansed of historical meaning.”

While some of the films of the period are “very impressive formally,” Rentschler balks at calling any of them masterpieces because, he says, all are “politically insidious”--there are no nonconformist films. “My belief is that you can’t divorce form from content.”

Rentschler said that only one previous book has been published in the United States on Nazi cinema and that that was written in 1969 by someone who didn’t even speak German. One reason the field has been neglected, Rentschler believes, is the tremendous amount of archival research required; the professor has seen 300 of the 1,100 films made from 1933 to 1945 and has read all the film journals of the period, some of which were published daily.

Also, he said, while the movies of the time are historically significant, they are “not necessarily rewarding films to watch.”

But their influence continued to linger well beyond the defeat of the Nazis. In 1960, for example, 70% of the films produced in West Germany were made by directors who had worked under the Third Reich. It was not until the ‘60s that a new generation of film makers--Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog--came along to topple the old order.

An experimental edge continues in West German cinema. The four films screening at UC Irvine this week are part of a traveling festival organized by the Goethe Institut in Munich entitled “Border Crossings: A German Film Festival.” The films are:

* “Das Beil von Wandsbek” (“The Ax of Wandsbek”), a 1982 film directed by Heinrich Breloer and Horst Konigstein, which portrays memories of Nazi Germany reconstructed 50 years later through the study of a butcher in Hamburg;

* “Zeit der Stille” (“Time of Stillness”), a 1986 film directed by Thorsten Nater, is the story of two young people in Berlin on a day just before Christmas;

* “Geschichten aus zwolf und einem jahr” (“Tales of Twelve and One Years”), a 1985 film in which director Manfred Stelzer revisits a group of fellow student activists after 12 years;

* “Zwischenzeit” (“The Time Between”), 1985, in which directors Roswitha Ziegler, Gerhard Ziegler, Niels Bolbrinker and Jochen Folster investigate a community’s reaction to a planned atomic-waste dump.

The four films are a blend of documentary and fiction, in which story values are often minimized in favor of “lived details,” Rentschler said.

West Germany’s healthy experimental cinema is largely underwritten by generous government subsidies, “in a way that we don’t have in this country,” Rentschler said. In fact, some U.S. film makers travel to West Germany in search of funds.

While Rentschler labeled some products of the film subsidies self-indulgent and amateurish, overall the program allows the creation of some remarkable films that would not otherwise be made. “They’re not meant to be box office hits,” Rentschler said. “They are films made by artists.”

The movies in “Border Crossings: A German Film Festival” will be shown in Room 178, Humanities Hall, UC Irvine. All films will be shown in German with English subtitles. “Das Beil von Wandsbek” (“The Ax of Wandsbek”) will screen at 7 p.m. Thursday. “Zeit der Stille” (“Time of Stillness”) will be shown at 7 p.m. Saturday. “Geschichten aus zwolf und einem jahr” (“Tales of Twelve and One Years”) will follow at 8:45 p.m. Saturday. “Zwischenzeit” (“The Time Between”) will screen at 7 p.m. Sunday. Nightly admission is $3.50 general, $2.50 for students, faculty and staff. Information: (714) 856-5386.