World Cup of Cinema, Round 2: Germany vs. Argentina
We conclude our World Cup of Cinema with a rematch of the final game from the 2014 soccer World Cup: Germany and Argentina. As with soccer, both nations are formidable forces in international film.
Argentina is home to the current best soccer player in the world, Leonel Messi, and, in my opinion, the world’s top film director, Lucrecia Martel. Her movies are like great works of literature, dense allegories about her nation and its perpetual class struggles. Her debut, La Ciénaga (FS), focuses on a middle class family in northern Argentina during a stretch of the summer rainy season. The family’s matriarch spends her days in bed, drinking wine and complaining about the family’s Indian maid, while her children run wild in and out of the house and the surrounding hillsides. Their crumbling estate is perilously messy, not even remotely up to code, and there’s an air of constant danger around them; thunder and gun shots are always rumbling in the distance. The plot is subtle, difficult to follow, but by the end it leaves patient viewers with a feeling of having witnessed something wholly unique and profound.
In truth, you have to watch Martel’s films more than once to really get them. The director purposely tries to disorient viewers with her narrative ellipses, beguiling frame compositions, and ghostly sound designs. Her third film, The Headless Woman (A), begins with an upper middle class woman hitting something while driving distracted. We never know if it’s a kid or a dog, because she decides to keep driving without looking back. For the rest of the film, she loses her mind a bit as she comes to terms with what she’s done, which she does in a most unsettling way. Like La Ciénaga , the film can be seen as a metaphor for Argentina – both its dark past, when the upper and middle classes ignored the atrocities of the dictatorship of the 70s, and its present struggles with class divisions and racism.
Great as Martel and Argentinian cinema are, in the end they’re no match for Germany, which has been a film powerhouse since the early days of the silent era, home to such great directors as Friedrich W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and, above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who is arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time. He was certainly the most prolific. In a career that spanned just 13 years before his death at age 37, Fassbinder made nearly 30 films. He started off in the late 60s doing highly experimental films, but in the early 70s, inspired by Douglas Sirk, he started making melodramas aimed at critiquing German society, and these are some of the most profound and interesting works of the 20th Century.
It can be difficult to know where to start with Fassbinder. A lot of his fans suggest starting with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (K) or Fox and His Friends (FS). The former is the tale of a white woman in her 60s who has a love affair with a black man half her age, and the reactions of her family and community around her reveal the racism that lay barely hidden in German society. The latter is the first and perhaps only film ever with all gay characters that isn’t about them being gay. In it, a working class guy wins the lottery and falls in love with an upper class man who, along with his snobby friends, string the newly rich man along and take him for all he’s worth. But my favorite is The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (K). Shot entirely in one room, it’s a drama about an aging beauty who falls madly in love with a younger woman who is indifferent to her. Margit Carstensen gives a tour de force performance as the jilted lover, and despite the claustrophobic setting, the style of the film is quite satisfyingly cinematic.
Advantage: Germany
FS=FilmStruck; A=Amazon; K=Kanopy
by Joe Miller