German Films, After the Wall

“ I don’t want to suddenly have to deal with the financiers right when I’ve escaped from the ideologues. “---- Frank Beyer, East German film director

In a flash, political developments have overwhelmed this cold city. The Wall has cracked. The spies have retired. The shopkeepers are leery. The artists are stunned. And everyone is afraid of the economic tornado sweeping in from Bonn and about to roar down Karl Marx Allee.

For the last three decades, German film makers have struggled with the Wall in one way or another. From West German directors Wim Wenders and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder to East Germany’s Frank Beyer and Heiner Carow, they have all dealt with the failures and contradictions of their respective worlds, divided by the Wall.

As both sides eye the future, however, they are uncertain if they know what to expect or like what they see.

“It will be ‘Batman’ and McDonald’s up to the Urals,” said expatriate West German director Volker Schlondorff, here to promote “The Handmaid’s Tale” at the just-concluded 40th Berlin Film Festival. “Reunification is big business. Real big business.”

East German film makers find the instant flip unsettling: For the first time since the Cold War, they have the controls lifted, but uncertain production funds and no guarantee of an audience that won’t desert them. Horst Pehnert, deputy culture minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), admits that while he would like to protect against the commercialization of the film industry, “Dirty Dancing” has been the most popular film in East Germany to date.

East Germany’s DEFA state-run and subsidized studio will restructure itself as an independent enterprise, something Pehnert believes will result in the studio having to “stop being the nice guys in Babelsberg” and to start “becoming tough negotiating partners instead.”

While both East and West Berlin are negotiating a joint production fund--in the wake of the dissolution of the film desk in the GDR’s culture ministry--the fear is that Hollywood will simply erase existing German culture. In 1989, U.S. films accounted for 70% of the West German box office, West German ones 15%.

There was an echo of this amid the two-week Berlin festival, which crossed over into East Berlin for the first time since 1951 and liberated seven feature films and two documentaries that had not seen the light of a projector for a quarter of a century.

There were eight U.S. films in the official selection, occasioning a fair amount of criticism. But if there were any doubts about the hunger for American culture, they were blown away at the black-tie ball held in the Soviet Cultural Mission in East Berlin: The Soviet Army Band played Glenn Miller songs all night long and the floor show featured Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson look-alikes whirring through costume changes and lip-syncing their way through “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Hollywood, of course, has already understood the significance of 1992, when the economy of Western Europe will be completely integrated. It’s investing in the likes of a continental Disneyland and scrambling to make and distribute film and television productions. Ed Pressman--in Berlin to support his and Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” which won a special prize--believes that the cultural reunification presents “an incredible opportunity for Eastern film makers to make films.”

This worries the East Germans, however. “We are increasingly skeptical about offers for co-productions,” said Pehnert. “The principle of ‘We make the costumes and the partner makes the art’ does not correspond to our notion of partnership.”

East German film makers are in something short of a panic. “We are holding an extraordinary Congress (this weekend) at the Cinema International in East Berlin about restructuring,” said Gunter Schoenfeld, vice chairman of the GDR’s Union of Film and Television Artists, which includes directors, cinematographers, editors, writers and animators. “We need new bylaws, new leaders and a new agenda. We have no certainty of production money.

“Formerly, we had money for production and no freedom. Now we have freedom--one kind of freedom--and no money for production,” Schoenfeld said with a sardonic smile. “After the March 18 elections, we’ll see whether the government will give money to the arts or not. Right now, all of our members have a lot of Angst about the future.”

Director Heiner Carow’s “Coming Out” broke ground by being the first East German film to overtly explore homosexuality. The film originally opened here on Nov. 9, the night the Wall fell, and the screening was interrupted by delirium. The film has sold 360,000 tickets since that night, according to Carow.

“Censorship is over, but under the state budget I always got money to make my film once the script had been accepted. Now, I don’t know what will be,” Carow said. “It took me three years to make ‘Coming Out.’ I made two films in my 50s, and at 60 I’m feeling pressed for time.”

While West Berlin audiences favored Michael Verhoeven’s “The Nasty Girl,” based on a young woman’s investigation of her Bavarian village’s Nazi past, and were far more hospitable to Costa-Gavras’ “Music Box” than U.S. audiences (it shared the festival’s top award), East Berliners have a different agenda to work out.

“The question for us is a bit different,” Schoenfeld said. “Right now, it is how could it be that for 40 years the people followed the party’s will? We must speak about what happened to us. It must all come to light and must not remain in darkness.

“That is the question now,” he added. “Things are moving so fast, we don’t know what the question will be tomorrow. History has overwhelmed us.”

“The times . . .,” began Jiri Menzel, the Czech film maker whose 1969 Prague-produced and banned film, “Larks on a Wire,” shared Berlin’s top award with “Music Box.”

“The times are still ripe for irony.”