-
28. Conclusion
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Conclusion In writing this book, we intended to be neither uncritical champions of Volker Schlöndorff nor completely detached reporters. Rather, the book’s goal has been to assess a film career whose significance has come largely from works categorized either as qualified successes or interesting failures. Schlöndorff is important not because he has directed an astonishing string of indisputable masterpieces but because he has pursued strategies of film production that defy easy categorization. Any conclusions drawn about this body of work must consider Schlöndorff’s penchant for jumping into waters whose currents pull in two directions. To sum up this study’s concerns, let us propose five axioms for the appreciation of Schlöndorff’s movies. 1. Schlöndorff’s films are not for those who would create a false dichotomy between film and literature. Critics who decry the disfiguring of literature by cinematic adaptation usually believe that something has been lost of the complexity , the vividness, or the resonance of the original. We have instead seen how Schlöndorff’s works, when successful, have a cinema-specific complexity, vividness, and resonance. This applies to both successful adaptations and works written directly for the screen. Too often, those who complain about the oversimplifications of popular movies locate their lack of complexity in the medium itself, as though literary expression by definition is more complicated than cinematic expression. These critics automatically oppose literature to film and refuse to value the cinematic pleasures of direct sensory involvement. Schlöndorff’s films make the compelling argument that screen adaptations need not be simple-minded nor mere illustrations of an author’s story. Rather, they may combine the immediacy of a visual medium with at least some of the reflectiveness of the written word. In response to cinema purists who argue that the director’s repeated reliance on literary sources merely indicates a lack of a fully developed cinematic imagination , we counter that Schlöndorff in no way proposes his style of literary adaptation as the only mode of filmmaking. Indeed, in an interview from the 28 319 mid-1990s, Schlöndorff advocated that a revived German cinema needed to come from projects that would not be literary adaptations, would be set in the present, would use popular genres, and would speak to mass audiences about current issues in society (“Ich dachte” 14). He acknowledged immediately that on at least three of these points his own work was different. Schlöndorff’s movies call not for a move to an institutionalized cinema of literary adaptation but rather to a pluralism whereby the use of prior works of literature is one of many resources at the filmmaker’s disposal. 2. Schlöndorff’s films are not for those who would create a false dichotomy between art and commerce. Critics have sometimes reproached Schlöndorff for striving for popular success, as with A Degree of Murder, Michael Kohlhaas, and Palmetto. At other times they have simply seen him as part of a dour, unappealing New German Cinema popular only with non-German intellectuals . It is perhaps more accurate to conceive of Schlöndorff’s cinema as one calculated to achieve popular success as part of its artistic success; that is, the project of bringing important images, thoughts, and ideas to a mass audience involves, for Schlöndorff, an aesthetic strategy as much as a commercial one. His colleague Alexander Kluge, for example, has written of The Tin Drum, I don’t consider it right to say that The Tin Drum is a commercial film; because a part of the success of this film could not be explained in this way. The conception of the one public sphere (contrast: ghetto formation), which Schlöndorff advocates ; the self-confidence, which is the quality of an auteur, and which grows out of the manner in which he proceeds with the history of 1945. . . . Things, which would not stir in the case of a literal adaptation, are in motion in this film. . . . That’s something I could not reduce to the simple formula of a commercial film; there is within it a piece of realism. (“Künftige Filmpolitik” 111–12) Schlöndorff’s use of conventional film genres is as much an artistic choice as a commercial one. His exploitation of conventions from the Western, the Heimatfilm, the thriller, the love story, and the war film has allowed for accessible storytelling. At the same time, many of his works contain elements of irony, reversal of expectations, caricature...