Last Features by Steingröver Reinhild;

Author:Steingröver, Reinhild; [Steingröver, Reinhild]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2015-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Developing a New Aesthetic

Unnoticed by the Wiesbaden Film Board, the film’s unusual blend of realism and symbolism pays tribute to the style of earlier DEFA films from the period Banale Tage itself depicts in order to point to the missed opportunities so frequently cited in internal discussions among the film’s makers. While the script was being prepared in 1990, Welz revisited student films produced at HFF in the 1970s, including Jörg Foth’s Blumenland (1975). Foth’s film portrays GDR youth who spend their days making artificial flowers in the recently collectivized flower industry in Saxony, while dreaming tentatively of forming a rock band in their free time. At the HFF, Blumenland was an expression of a new aesthetic beginning by one of its then-youngest directors—a beginning that was undesired and thus largely stifled until the belated founding of the DaDaeR production group two decades later (see chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of Blumenland).

Welz’s consultation of Foth’s earlier student film during the preparation for Banale Tage is thus also a homage to the filmic renewal attempt by his predecessors. Sadly, the parallel between the long struggle by Foth’s generation for more flexible and independent production conditions at DEFA, which remained without response from the studio leadership until the very last moment, and Thomas and Michael’s meek attempts at rebellion are all too obvious. In this sense Banale Tage joins Peter Kahane’s Architekten in eulogizing DEFA’s last and, to a large extent, lost generation of filmmakers.

Despite being twenty years their junior, Peter Welz was intimately familiar with those earlier attempts at developing a new visual language for East German film. As a child actor, he performed in several important films by renowned DEFA directors.60 During his time at the film school in Babelsberg he was mentored by Jörg Foth and appeared in Foth’s 1989 feature film Biologie! His short student film Willkommen in der Kantine was based on a script by notorious theater director Frank Castorf. Castorf worked as director in the provincial East German town of Anklam, where Andreas Dresen would shoot Stilles Land (1990).61 Welz’s graduation film, Unsere Familie, was written by Leander Haussmann, whose breakthrough success as a film director was Sonnenallee (1999).

In Welz’s student films we find many of the same sensibilities, topics, and visual language of his feature debut. In a central scene of Unsere Familie, for example, a young boy declaims one of the core phrases that reappears in Banale Tage: “Strange, one arrives in a new place and everything looks the same” (Unsere Familie, 35:38).62 In both films this phrase succinctly expresses the fatalistic acknowledgement that true rebellion appears impossible under the ossified GDR regime. Both films also suspend laws of time and place and self-consciously incorporate film-within-film scenes. The phrase quoted above on the sameness of life, for example, is spoken by a younger version of the main character to his older self, thus ironically staging a self-reflexive monologue about the inability of emancipating oneself as a youngster in the GDR.

In another scene in Unsere Familie the father angrily chases after his adult son in an inn.

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