Films made outside the dominant mode of (film) production, or how films looks when exploitation isn't just exploitation of others (mostly friends) but also massive self-exploitation: a labor of love :)
I'd love to see you at one or both of the screenings. Please help me spread the word. Thanks.
WHEN: Saturday 4/12, 715p & Sunday 4/13, 305p. The filmmaker will be in attendance at both events. He will give brief introductions to his short films throughout the program and will be available for a Q&A afterwards.
WHERE: Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center
In the fall of 2011, the Ross first introduced Nebraska to a
group of German filmmakers that are collectively known as the Cologne Group when it screened the
“Westend” film cycle by Markus Mischkowski and Kai Maria Steinkühler. Bernhard Marsch is another key
filmmaker of this group—indeed, he’s a Cologne Group filmmaker of the first hour, with his earliest
filmmaking efforts hearkening back to the mid-1980s.
The Cologne Group
The
Cologne Group had its beginnings in the mid-1980s, when Marsch and Reiner
Knepperges first met at the University of Cologne. Having discovered their
common cinematic preferences, these two autodidacts decided in 1987 to make Marsch and Knepperges Present, which was
Marsch’s second foray into (short) filmmaking. The film’s DIY,
cinephilic attitude pointed the way for many Cologne Group films to come, not
least for Marsch’s own. For as simple as this documentary effort is in terms of
its production values, structure, and content, it constitutes an early example
of the desire of the group in general, and Marsch in particular, to engage
their own city and its many interesting yet under-represented locales, such as
its relaxed bar scene (Café Contact)
and bustling student food joints (8 Meals
No.3), its outdoor swimming pool culture (Young Dogs and Hallelujah),
or its quarry ponds and the temptation to skinny dip on a rare warm and sunny
summer’s day (Naked at the Lake). This
documentary specificity differentiates these films from the majority of
post-wall German film productions, which predominantly eradicate their
geographical, and thus socio-cultural, specificity. Yet, Marsch’s films are
precisely not “topic-of-the-day,” message-driven films; instead, they seek to
realize cinema at its most light-hearted, which has led one critic to write
that they exude a “lightness” of being and constitute “invitations[s] to flit.”
Indeed, when watching these films it’s hard to escape the feeling that they’re
on some basic level all about
flirting, indeed, about being in love, including, crucially, with their chosen
medium of expression itself (Cologne
Movements). It’s not coincidental that Marsch doesn’t display any desire to
make anything other than cinema. For
his autodidactic exuberance with which he approaches the cinema recalls the
early films of the French New Wave and, in Germany, of the New Munich Group
around Klaus Lemke, Rudolf Thome, May Spils and Werner Enke, Marran Gosov, and
Roger Fritz. Like his heroes from the 1960s, Marsch can be said to embrace the
famous concluding sentiment of the Oberhausen manifesto (1962)—that Daddy’s
cinema is dead—only to counter it with an attitude of “Long live Daddy’s
cinema!” That is, Marsch, like his friends and colleagues of the Cologne Group,
eschews avant-garde attitudes and aesthetics and instead desires to entertain, to make films that appeal to
an audience through their narratives and characters—characters, it must be
said, whose charm frequently results from their desire to do not much of
anything at all, their lack of careerist ambitions, their simple wish, that is,
to just hang out and talk and have another Kölsch—and,
perhaps, dream the dream of Hollywood as
nothing but a dream (Café Contact). (Marco Abel, excerpted
and modified from his essay, “Underground Film Germany in the Age of Control
Societies: The ‘Cologne Group’,” Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 27.2 [2010])
Bernhard Marsch
“The rhizomatic oeuvre of Bernhard Marsch, a total filmmaker par excellence,
constitutes a special cinema-micro cosmos unto its own. Simply put: his cinema
miniatures open a viewer’s heart. Perhaps this is due to the mix of nostalgia
and a spirit of optimism or departure that characterizes his films; it is
certainly due to the poetry and drive that permeates his work. Added to this is
his precise and loving gaze at the seemingly trivial. With his short films,
Marsch in a sense writes a minor history of Germany from the margins: a
trash-history, a Ramsch-history (“Ramsch”
[junk or trash] is the name of his film production company). One only has to
watch a music video clip such as Mauerblümchen,
a mini-melodrama about former East Germany and larger-than-life longing at the
Baltic Sea, in order to be enchanted by spotted images, by landscapes and
stories. Marsch is without a doubt an impressionist of German sensitivities, an
ethnographer of the by-products of love and life. His first filmic effort dates
from 1986: Kölner Bewegungen is
something like a Cologne mini-version of Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City. What lingers is especially the neon sign “Köln –
4711,” which flashes through the night and turns the film into a Cologne noir. Marsch and his colleagues have a sensibility for the aura of
signs. In Marsch and Knepperges Zeigen
from 1987, one can frequently see the marquee of the Cologne cinema Filmpalette. Written on it: “Nonstop
film program.” This comes across as poetically rebellious in the context of a
film that documents the Filmpalette’s last screening: Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour runs as last picture show. The young viewers, among them Marsch and
Knepperges, drink beer, talk, and ask questions of the cinema’s old owner.
Everything’s a lived B-picture; everything’s detour.
Some of Marsch’s films are ensemble
films, boys-films in the tradition of the Munich school of the 1960s (Lemke,
Thome, Gosov). In 8 Essen III from
1996, perpetual students converse in the University of Cologne’s central
refectory about women, the relationship between East and West Germany, and the
course of time. In 1992’s Junge Hunde
or the love-thriller Nackt am See
from 2010, Marsch indulges his fondness for public outdoor swimming pools and
lakes that for him represent everyday oases like cinemas or Mischkowski’s
kiosks, where everything and nothing can happen. Halleluja from 1995 is a tremendously comical road movie set in the
early 1980s on the streets between Cologne and Hennef. A stoned Bhagwan couple
hitch a ride in a VW beetle driven by a guy who is played by Marsch himself. The
two hippies have their eyes set on the old VW, figuring the driver to be a
greenhorn. In reality, however, he is a savvy desperado. At one time in the
film, we see him driving through Marsch’s hometown, Hennef. A local cinema is
screening Summer Night Fever, a trash
film by Sigi Götz, a pseudonym for Sigi Rothemund, which he used for his
countless sex- and disco films. Ever since Halleluja
used this reference, a small cult developed between Cologne and Munich around
Sigi Götz and all the psychedelic moments scattered throughout the history of
German cinema.
Marsch’s [most personal film] to
date is Wohnhaft from 2004 (the title
has to be understood as a double-entendre: the guys from Cologne love word
play). Inspired by Ulrich Schamonie’s Chapeau
Claque, Marsch guides us through his own small apartment in
Cologne-Ehrenfeld that is filled to the brim with records, books, newspapers,
and all kinds of memorabilia. The apartment resembles a grandiose art
installation and presents an act of rebellion against any kind of “beautiful
living” marketing discourse. While the camera searchingly glides through the
collector’s labyrinth with an ethnographic attitude, we hear Marsch talking
with his idol Werner Enke from the off about rooms and cleaning up—a wonderful
dialogue about cinema and life, history and stories.” (Excerpt from Hans
Schifferle, “Something New by the “Cologne Group: Cine-desperados from the
Rhine—The Cologne Group and Their Lived Cinema,” translated by Marco Abel)