Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films

Director’s Portrait Angela Schanelec
natural quality of the dialogue here is not the result of improvisation,
but of precision work with the actors, whereby
Schanelec can of course call upon her own experience.
Basically, her first career is already behind her: she trained as an
actress and worked on stage for seven years, at such well-known
theaters as the Hamburg Thalia Theater, the Berlin Schaubühne
and the Schauspielhaus in Bochum. “A time came when the chapter
’acting‘ was over for me, I wanted to make films, I knew that
with great clarity and intuition.”
From 1990 onwards, Schanelec studied Direction at the
German Academy of Film and Television (dffb) in Berlin. Her
graduation film My Sister’s Good Fortune (Das Glück
meiner Schwester) was already something of a monolith on
the film scene. It tells the story of two sisters who love the same
man. The presence of the city of Berlin, which exists on the sound
track as uninterrupted traffic noise, forms a contrast to the almost
physical proximity to the characters.
In her next film, Places in Cities (Plätze in Städten),
Schanelec concentrated fully on the perceptions of her nineteen-year-old
protagonist: first sexual experiences, the reticence of
Director’s Portrait Michael Verhoeven
In many aspects, he is an exception to German cinema: Michael
Verhoeven first studied Medicine and became a doctor, just like
the lyricist Gottfried Benn or the songwriter Georg
Ringsgwandl. In the 60s, when young German filmmakers
demanded innovation of the German cinema, they considered
themselves a fatherless generation. Michael Verhoeven’s
father, Paul Verhoeven (not to be confused with the Dutch
cineast of the same name), had been a recognized actor and
director since the 30s. And his son stood in front of a camera
at an early age, in Kurt Hoffmann’s Das fliegende Klassenzimmer
and Julien Duvivier’s Marianne de ma
jeunesse. Was Michael Verhoeven then less ”fatherless“
than his colleagues? ”I too belong to the fatherless generation,“
says Verhoeven, ”the films my father made were not the ones I
would have wanted to make. For my colleagues, I was not only
the son of a director, I was also already married to a woman who
had a contract with Columbia – at a time when ’Hollywood’ was
a negative concept.“
With the Strindberg adaptation Paarungen, which was his
cinematic debut, Michael Verhoeven, who felt a sense
of belonging to the 1968 generation of student revolt and
film d’auteur, seemed to be walking on comparatively sure
18
puberty and everyday life in a wintertime Berlin. “In both films,
I remain very close to the characters. I wanted to portray the
city as you experience it as an inhabitant: as a constant, vague
presence, as a murmur, as a city per se.” Places in Cities
(Plätze in Städten) was the only German contribution to be
shown in the Cannes section “Un certain regard” in 1998.
Together with her colleague from student days, Thomas
Arslan, Angela Schanelec is one of only a handful of young
German directors who continue unswervingly along their own
paths, repeatedly seeking to give form to reality – with films that
really do succeed in accompanying life along part of the way.
Films which quite incidentally recount the fluctuation, radical
changes and existential decisions faced by an entire generation.
Katja Nicodemus spoke to Angela Schanelec
PROGRESSION AND
PERSISTENCE
ground, as his father, alongside Lilli Palmer, took on a leading
role in the film. ”At that time, when most filmmakers were filming
their own stories, no one understood it. But my film had a lot to
do with the present. I was concerned not only with a failed
marriage, but also with a sham existence – that was a current
theme.“
His Vietnam film o.k. also contributed to his status as an exception.
Shown in the official competition at Berlin in 1970, this was
the film that lead to a break within the competition. The film
caused quite a controversy among the members of the jury, and
when George Stevens (then jury president) pressured the festival
direction to ban the film from the competition, other directors
pulled their films out of the official running, resulting in a complete
cancellation of the festival.
Michael Verhoeven is one of the few German directors to
have received an OSCAR nomination, for The Nasty Girl –
a film that brought its director and author a series of other
awards, including the Critics’ Award in New York, a Golden Globe
nomination and the BAFTA Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film.