Oktoberfest?

There's little cheer at the HFA

by Peter Keough

"POSTWALL PROSPECTS: RECENT FILMS FROM GERMANY," At the Harvard Film Archive through October 29.

To judge from the entries screening in the Harvard Film Archive's series "Postwall Prospects: Recent Films from Germany," the prospects are not very cheery. The end of the Cold War and the German reunification seem, if anything, to have further darkened the traditionally dour Teutonic sensibility. Matching the diminished spirits is a diminution in style -- little of the rococo exuberance of the old silent Expressionism or the flamboyance of the New German Cinema of Faßbinder, Herzog, and Wenders is evident here. This is moviemaking at its starkest: harsh content, minimally presented.

Take Romuald Karmakar's The Himmler Project (2000; October 20 at 7 p.m.), a three-hours-plus literal transcription of a private speech given by Nazi SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to a select group of top brass in 1943. No attempt is made to re-create the occasion or even simulate the speaker. Instead, an actor (Manfred Zapatka, who looks imperious but nothing like the real Himmler) reads the speech verbatim from a sheaf of notes in a bare studio, a recitation that includes descriptions of background sounds and audience reactions. The magnitude of the horrific content -- the speech includes many of Himmler's matter-of-fact opinions on race superiority, war crimes, and genocide -- contrasts almost absurdly with the spare presentation. When Zapatka dutifully intones Himmler's repetitions and misspeakings or his suggestions to open the windows, the effect is deconstructive, laying bare the vapid horror of a monstrous, mediocre mind.

Nearly as long and cheerless is Fred Kelemen's Nightfall (1999; October 21 at 8 p.m.), a 140-minute exploration of anomie at the end of the century and, it seems, the end of the world. Set in a dankly generic European city, the film follows unemployed prole Anton (Wolfgang Michael) as he gets spurned at the labor exchange, gets mugged on the subway, and loses girlfriend Leni (Verena Jasch). Over the next two hours Anton and Leni wander the streets and meet other victims and predators in a morose search for lost innocence, purity, and love. It's like an update of Berlin Alexanderplatz without Faßbinder's baroque wit and inventiveness.

Even when these films try to be lighthearted, the result is mixed. Another Anton (Denis Lavant) struggles against postmodern alienation and dehumanization in Veit Helmer's Tuvalu (1999; October 13 at 9 p.m.), a darkly whimsical romp that calls to mind Jacques Tati or the comic surrealism of Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. In a non-specified Eastern European city that gives new meaning to the term "backwater," Anton tries to maintain a decaying bathhouse for his blind father, who's been deceived into thinking it's still a thriving concern. In fact, the whole world seems to have deteriorated into grotesque ruins exploited by scheming entrepreneurs, including the beautiful Eva (Chulpan Hamatová), who needs the bathhouse's steam engine to propel her father's tugboat to the title treasure island. An allegory of the power of dreams or of the realpolitik of post-Soviet Russia, Tuvalu relates its tall tale with little dialogue and broad comedy.

At least one can count on Doris Dörrie's Enlightenment Guaranteed (1999; October 14 at 9 p.m., with the director present). With this veteran director, it's more like amusement than enlightenment guaranteed. Since making a name for herself in 1985 with her sprightly Men, Dörrie has advanced the cause of German film comedy with a number of jaundiced but genial looks at the human condition, showing an especially acute and sympathetic insight into the male half of it. Enlightenment Guaranteed is one of her more engaging and lingering efforts.

Two brothers -- boorish family man Uwe (Uwe Ochsenknecht) and finicky new-ager Gustav (Gustav-Peter Wöhler) -- head off to a Zen monastery in Japan after Uwe's wife dumps him. There they learn detachment the hard way: they get lost in Tokyo and lose all their money, and by the time they make it to the harsh rituals and regimens of their final destination, their experience is almost anticlimactic. Perhaps in a nod to Dogma 95, Dörrie shoots her movie on digital video; the result ranges from coy to poignant. But this tactic wasn't necessary -- the low-key comic performances of the leads and Dörrie's bittersweet irony guarantee the film's humanity -- a quality that the other "Postwall Prospects" could use more of.