FILMKRITIK (1957–1984)

Harun Farocki

FILMKRITIK

The first issue of the magazine Filmkritik (Film Criticism) was published in January 1957, it had 16 pages and cost 40 Pfennig. It was called Aktuelle Informationen für Filmfreunde (Up-to-Date Information for Film Lovers), the first sentence mentioned Walter Benjamin. In the second issue there was an excerpt from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Enno Patalas was in charge of editing; there is a paper in which Adorno confirms that Patalas could call himself an Adorno pupil, even though he was not, literally speaking.

In the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957, cinema had nothing more to do with Jutzi, Lang, Murnau, Pabst or von Sternberg, nor did writing about film have anything more to do with Eisner or Kracauer. These names themselves were hardly familiar anymore and it was the task of Filmkritik to spell them out again. Literature and art magazines also had to re-establish the connection to the world that had been severed with Hitler, but they had already started that in 1945. When Filmkritik began in 1957, there was a film industry in the Federal Republic, which acted as though it were as self-confident as the automobile industry, but without producing a world success like the VW Beetle or a work of art like the Porsche.

The German word “Filmfreund” in the subtitle (literally “film friend”) is most likely a Germanized version of the term cinéphile. In Berlin in the twenties there was an interesting connection between intelligence and film, similar to Paris, where Cocteau, Man Ray or Léger had worked on films. Brecht worked on films and also Moholy-Nagy, and Ruttmann was a painter before he made the “Symphonie.” More important is perhaps the fact that Döblin used filmic narrative techniques in his writing, that he wanted to learn something from the cinema. At that time the writers and intellectuals regarded cinema as a kitsch event, according to Wolfgang Koeppen in his post-war novel Pigeons on the Grass. There cinema stands for an escape from reality, the cinema business even for decadence. Adorno, too, as a proponent of the New Viennese School, did not think much of film, which seemed to him to have come from the spirit of the operetta. Filmkritik did not in any way intend to be a promotional vehicle for the film industries, and even polemicized against a magazine feature-like film criticism noting ideas and impressions; the point was to “detect structures.”

Filmkritik wanted to teach something, the love of film, of which the lack was not really felt. It did so stringently and with little enthusiasm, as though it were a duty. The magazine was somewhat pedantic in the early years and read films according to a very narrow schema, judged the behavior of film figures as though in a school book, and when it uncovered an unconscious attitude in a film, it did so in the tone of school psychology. Yet it had the power to change, and it developed the terms itself, with which its early praxis could be criticized. During the next ten, twelve years, Filmkritik changed, usually continuously, sometimes in leaps, and it always stayed ahead of its readers, including myself.

Initially it was the Nouvelle Vague that inspired this re-thinking, the special proximity between everyday life and art, which was its program. It could be learned from a film like Vivre sa vie how close together these could be: documentary film, the lyricism of dime novels, essentialism, fashion, star cult, philosophy. The influence of the Nouvelle Vague also led to a reassessment of American cinema, which had previously been all too easily dismissed politically. Almost all the authors of Filmkritik came to film from books and not from music; they did not already experience the pop revolution with Elvis, but rather not until Warhol. Many people from the founding years of Filmkritik left in the mid-sixties, such as Ulrich Gregor, who wrote a film history with Patalas and later continued it, and who initiated the program cinema Arsenal in Berlin. He also founded the Forum, the section of the Berlinale for independent film, of which he was the director for over thirty years.

It is remarkable that Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas, who were involved from the beginning, were on the side of renewal. Frieda Grafe paved the way to the Russian Formalists and strictly rejected the semiotic trends from France and Italy, which proclaimed an exact linguistics of film in the late sixties. After 1968, Filmkritik was occasionally as carnivalesque as Cahiers du Cinéma at the time. A text was to be rooted in the vital interest of an author and not at all in a derived notion of usefulness—it was specifically a matter of jarring the false impression of how a cultural operation functioned. Headstrong works were created at the same time, for instance by Helmut Färber, Uwe Nettelbeck, Gerhard Theuring, Wim Wenders, which did not copy films, but could instead be models for films.

Filmkritik was successful in that what it proclaimed actually happened: film academies were founded, communal cinemas and film museums, television provided space for cinematheque series and co-produced films, which would have been impossible before, and government funding also contributed to the process. All this was already there, when the group, to which I belonged, took over the magazine in 1974. The magazine fell into our hands like an inheritance. We thought there was still room for much more. In the ten years that I was with Filmkritik, perhaps 1000 authors made their first films, but I can only remember one who wanted to conjoin his film praxis with a text praxis.

We had to close down the magazine in 1984, and we could not find anyone who wanted to continue it, which shows our greatest failure.