Wende Flicks: The Mistake

The personal should not have to be political, but it always was in the former DDR, often with tragic consequences. As a still attractive woman of advanced years, Elizabeth Bosch ought to be able to pursue a September romance with a handsome visitor to her provincial town in relative peace and privacy. Yet, since he is West German (a Hamburger), their affair attracts the wrong sort of attention in Heiner Carow’s The Mistake, the best and final film of the Anthology Film Archives’ Wende Flicks retrospective, which concludes at the landmark East Village theater this coming Wednesday.

Elizabeth Bosch has always cleaned up after other people, yet she does not even have hot running water in her modest pre-Wende East German home. That means she and her visiting grandchildren must take their baths in the yard, which catches the eye of the wandering Jacob Alain. Though he starts off on the wrong foot, he quickly wins over Bosch. It is not as if he has much competition, aside from Bosch’s boss Reimelt, a small man unfortunately blessed with a measure of power. The town’s slovenly mayor, he blusters about the hard work of building socialism unaware that it sounds like a punch-line to the weary Bosch.

While Bosch and Alain might ordinarily prefer to take things slowly, they simply do not have the time. For a while they make do with letters and all-too brief rendezvouses in East Berlin, but the situation is clearly not sustainable. When Bosch’s older Party loyalist son announces his promotion, it further complicates matters. Now family contacts with the West will come under increasing scrutiny.

Mistake is a sad but wise love story that also serves as a pointed reminder of what life was like under Communism. Bosch does not even have hot water, yet the Stasi still takes an active interest in her romantic affairs. It also pays tribute to those who stood up to injustice in the DDR, bringing together Alain, Bosch, and her younger son Holger at a candlelight Christmas prayer service for East German dissidents. Yet, it all has remarkable emotional heft thanks to finely nuanced work of its leads.

Angelica Domröse and Gottfried John look like an attractive, warts-and-all couple who we would like to see together. Yet, we know the system is stacked against them. Domröse is especially compelling, finely balancing strength and vulnerability as Bosch. It is one of the great unsung performances of world cinema.

One of the best cinematic depictions of mature romance, Mistake is an outstanding film. It is also a heartrending and infuriating document of life under the oppressive Communist system, yet its inescapable political implications never eclipse the human drama. Highly recommended, it screens this Wednesday (11/3) in New York as the concluding film of the Anthology Film Archives’ Wende Flicks retrospective of the East German DEFA film studio’s final productions.

Wende Flicks: Burning Life

Thanks to the reunification process, the former DDR was spared most of the “Wild East” lawlessness that some former Soviet satellites had to work through (and has since been institutionalized in Russia). Despite the orderliness of Germany’s transition, two East German women bandits could still be embraced as cult heroes in Peter Welz’s Burning Life, which screens next Wednesday during the final night of the Wende Flicks retrospective of post-Fall of the Wall films from the East German DEFA studio at New York’s Anthology Film Archives.

Anna Broder is the outgoing one. A could’ve been jazz singer, she is seriously scuffling, with only a vintage Soviet Chaika sedan to her name. Always the quiet type, Lisa Herzog hardly reacts to her father’s suicide. Instead, she decides to take her pains and frustrations out on a bank. When Broder just happened to be there to provide a timely assist, it starts something bigger. Suddenly, they are on the lam with Herzog’s pet rat (named Nikita in honor of old Khrushchev), playing Robin Hood after each bank job. Of course, it is all rather embarrassing for the reconstituted post-Wende local authorities striving to re-assert their legitimacy.

Considering Burning’s unambiguous riffs on Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, it is difficult not to draw parallels between the two films. However, Welz keeps the tone lighter, down-playing the feminist victimization themes that defined its American predecessor. By Hollywood standards, it is a decidedly apolitical film, aside from its cynical regard for authority.

Rather than document the still lingering decay of the East, Welz does his best to mask it, primarily going for humor instead, using Nikita in several gags and staging some musical numbers that stretch the boundaries of credible verisimilitude. If seen in conjunction with some of the other Wende Flicks that combine gritty naturalism with surreal absurdity, Burning will feel like an easygoing respite.

In fact, it is pleasantly amusing, in large measure due to the chemistry between leads Anna Thalbach (not playing her namesake) and Maria Schrader (who is an appropriately okay but not great vocalist). Though deliberately intended as a commercial road movie, Welz twists the genre enough to be interesting to American audiences. While it might be one of the slighter films of the Wende Flicks series, it was one of the more popular of its day. A likable diversion, Burning screens this Wednesday (11/3) at Anthology Film Archives.

Wende Flicks: Latest from the Da-Da-R

A small school of late East German filmmakers came to embrace the anarchic surrealism of dada as the only logical artistic response to life under Communism. After the fall of the wall, the movement’s leading light was not about to go bourgeoisie. Produced in 1990, Jörg Foth’s Latest from the Da-Da-R puts East Germany (pre- and post-Wende) into an absurdist blender, invoking Beckett and Brecht in equal measure. Highly political but resolutely anti-ideological, Foth’s Da-Da-R screens next Monday as part of the Wende Flicks retrospective of post-Fall of the Wall films from the East German DEFA studio at New York’s Anthology Film Archives.

The humor of Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel was always edgy. The poet-singer-actors had adopted the clown personae for their provocative stage shows. Their clear debt to Brecht might have been a reason the DDR authorities tolerated their act, but their friends in high places (with impeccable “anti-Fascist” credentials) surely did not hurt. Yet, their iconoclasm must have raised brows. In Foth’s film, they essentially reprise their stage roles, as Meh and Weh, two clowns recently released from prison, set loose on Wende-era Germany. Have white-face, will satirize.

Trying to impose an ideology on their lunacy will result in migraines, but it is fair to say the old regime takes its lumps. Particularly cutting is a send-up of an old style Soviet medal ceremony that degenerates into a scene worthy of the Three Stooges. There are also pointed references to the extreme shortages endured under Communism. Yet, the new reality is also highly problematic. Indeed, Da-Da-R unmistakably questions whether it is truly merciful to free them from their apparently benign prison. All the while, Foth and cinematographer Thomas Plenert capture the DDR’s blighted landscapes and dilapidated public housing in all their depressing glory.

There are indeed moments when Mensching and Wenzel’s physical comedy is legitimately funny and some of their songs are actually quite catchy (albeit bizarrely so). Yet, Da-Da-R is hardly light comedy. There is a profoundly dark edge to their antics, which are clearly intended to disturb more than amuse.

Some interpret Da-Da-R’s journey and ultimate conclusion in hopeful terms. However, the most optimistic aspect of the film was probably the mere fact that it was allowed to be produced. Uncompromising in its Dadaism, it is a pointed summing-up of the DDR experience. Like most of the Wende Flicks selections, it is a film of tremendous historical importance that ought to be more widely seen and debated by cineastes. It screens this Monday (11/1) at the Anthology Film Archives, with an introduction from Foth, the filmmaker, who will also be in attendance for the screening of Miraculi.

Wende Flicks: The Land Beyond the Rainbow

Arthur Koestler and his fellow apostates from Communism called the ideology “The God that Failed.” One can see how apt a term that was in Herwig Kipping’s The Land Beyond the Rainbow, a scathing critique of the secular religious fervor mandated by Stalinism. A selection of the 1992 Berlinale, Beyond remains a scorching critique of Communism, which screens next Tuesday as part of the Wende Flicks retrospective of post-Fall of the Wall films from the East German DEFA studio at New York’s Anthology Film Archives.

It is hardly a coincidence Beyond takes place during the eventful year of 1953. Of course, that was the year Stalin died. Three months later, Soviet troops invaded East Germany to suppress an outbreak of strikes and demonstrations. However, life appears peaceful in the fictional provincial collective of Stalina. Both Hans and Rainbowmaker have eyes for Marie, the film’s ethereal narrator. However, Rainbowmaker’s grandfather, a strict Party leader, brings the isolated community to grief.

From his cowl-looking cloak to his prayer-like invocations to the recently deceased Stalin, Rainbowmaker’s grandfather is an unambiguous figure of orthodox faith. He also appropriates whatever he pleases from the collective and purges members at will. However, his greatest specialty appears to be encouraging children to inform on their parents. Unlike more allegorical films produced behind the Iron Curtain, there is absolutely no question what he represents. In fact, Stalin’s apologists are probably watching Beyond in Hell for the rest of eternity.

Yet, the blistering Beyond cannot be dismissed as mere post-Wall score-settling, given the eerie rendering of the hyper-Communist community and Kipping’s occasional flights of surrealist fantasy. This is an angry film, but an artful one as well. It also features some surprisingly compelling turns from the then young trio of Stefanie Janke, Thomas Ewert, and Sebastian Reznicek, as Marie, Hans, and Rainbowmaker, the pre-pubescent love triangle.

There may truly be no more viscerally anti-Communist film than Beyond. However, Kipping’s in-your-face Christ-like imagery might put off some Christian audiences. Indeed, there are strong visuals throughout the film, the cumulative effect of which is a damning indictment of the DDR. Accordingly, anyone with a scrap of interest in the Communist and immediate post-Communist eras should make a special effort to see Beyond when it screens next Tuesday (11/2) as part of Wende Flicks at Anthology Film Archives.

Wende Flicks: Miraculi

Filmmakers working behind the Iron Curtain had a natural affinity for the absurd and the surreal. Given their experiences under Communism, they could easily relate to such Kafkaesque cinemscapes. It also behooved them to keep their social critiques obscured by layers of allegory and symbolism. A passion project only made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall (or the epochal “Wende”), Ulrich Weiß’s Miraculi represents the culmination of such cinematic strategies. Finally produced in 1991, Miraculi screens next week as part of Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany (series trailer here), a retrospective of the East German DEFA studio’s final years (1990-1994), presented at Anthology Film Archives in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut New York.

In the Czech Republic, one of the few annoying holdovers from the Communist era are the plain clothes transit inspectors looking to fine riders who cannot produce their appropriately punched tickets. Evidently, East Germany had these transit narcs as well. Through a series of chance circumstances, Sebastian Mueller, a mild mannered juvenile delinquent, joins the ranks of the volunteer transit inspectors. In truth, he is not very good at his duties, but he takes them very seriously, alienating his father, who labels him a traitor to the workers.

Episodic and trippy, Mueller’s story defies pat description. In a strange way, Weiß invests Mueller’s reviled voluntarism with strange and cosmic dimensions. Yet, one can easily glean the power dynamics at work. As one character explains, stiffing the tram is truly the only safe method of rebellion available to her, so who cares if she is caught.

Miraculi’s dense layers of meaning are thought to be fully grasped only by those who experienced the oppressive drabness of the GDR. That may well be so, but there are plenty of signifiers astute westerners should be able to catch. Indeed, the significance of an abnormal psychology lecture delivered to Mueller and his fellow inspectors is hard to miss, if viewers have any familiarity with the Soviet bloc’s record of institutionalized psychiatric abuse.

Undeniably both subversive and demanding, there is no possible way Miraculi could have been produced under the Soviet-dominated GDR regime. It is a world away from Soviet Realism, even though it scrupulously captures the depressed grunginess of industrialized East Germany. It is a rich, challenging work, recommended to viewers who do not have to “get” everything they see, to appreciate a film. It screens this coming Monday (11/1) at Anthology Film Archives as part of the remarkable Wende Flicks series. Truly a cinematic event, many of the Wende selections have never been subtitled or shown outside of Germany, until now. Yet, films like Miraculi are both historically important and fascinating in their own right. The Wende Flicks series runs in New York from November 1st through the 3rd.