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A Gathering of Old Men To some extent, Volker Schlöndorff’s well-received Death of a Salesman may have been something of a “calling card” picture, a work designed to prove to American producers that Schlöndorff could work in English and make a film acceptable to a mass American market. For much of the late 1980s, Schlöndorff worked from a New York base, and his next project, an adaptation of black American novelist Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, was a fully American-made work. A Gathering of Old Men (1987) was realized for CBS television and shown in the United States as a Sunday night movie before a subsequent video release as Murder on the Bayou. Coproduced with Hessischer Rundfunk, the film was shown at the 1987 Cannes film festival, had a theatrical release in Europe, and was therefore more characteristically “amphibious” on the other side of the ocean. The result is filled with tantalizing contradictions, as the work simultaneously meets requirements of cinematic genre, of the made-for-TV movie, of serious literary adaptation, and of calculated political statement. Let us consider it from two general perspectives—first, as genre film, specifically a variant on the Western; and second, as literary adaptation of a major work of African American literature, one that examines significant issues of race, culture , and civil rights in the United States and experiments with the use of multiple points of view. German-American Precedents In A Gathering of Old Men, Schlöndorff returns to the theme of collective rebellion that he explored in Michael Kohlhaas and The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach. The film is set in rural Louisiana in 1972 and shows how a group of African American men successfully avoid a lynching after the shooting in self-defense of a white man by a black. The story harks back to Kohlhaas and 21 234 Kombach in its portrayal of the sudden self-assertion of an exploited class and the reactions against such rebellion by the dominant class. Like Kohlhaas and Kombach, it is a quasi Western, a work that takes elements from the Western genre and applies them to a different historical and geographic setting. A Gathering of Old Men differs from earlier works in one major way: in this case, the rebellion is successful. Where Kohlhaas and Kombach are pessimistic works that portray the crushing of rebellion as a near inevitability, Gathering shows the willful blacks as victorious in changing an oppressive social system. In this respect, as Schlöndorff’s second American film, A Gathering of Old Men stands in marked contrast to Death of a Salesman. Where the latter work portrays U.S. society as one in which economic ambition has destroyed family and social values, A Gathering of Old Men suggests just the opposite, a vigorous society with a capacity to correct its faults, with the potential to become more open to all classes of people. Schlöndorff is of course not the only representative of the New German Cinema to work in the United States and explore aspects of the country’s life and culture. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this are Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), not to mention Percy Adlon’s Bagdad Cafe (1988), all works set at least in part in the American West. Yet Schlöndorff’s approach to looking at the United States is almost antithetical to that of Herzog, Wenders, or Adlon. The other filmmakers put an emphasis on landscape and environment, on the beauty and grandeur of nature and the simultaneous encroachment of commercialism and urbanization. Both natural landscape (bleak and desolate) and urban cityscape (forbidding and alien) become metaphors for characters’ internal states. Schlöndorff’s emphasis, by contrast, is on the social situation of the American South: places are specific rather than metaphoric; people are representatives of real social classes rather than demonstrators of any existential human condition; and the narrative becomes a specific demonstration of social change rather than a device for musing on philosophical questions of language, identity, and communication. Both Schlöndorff and Wenders have in their American films looked back to the American work of Fritz Lang, perhaps the major father figure of the New German Cinema. The major elements of A Gathering of Old Men’s story line— the lynch mob, the fugitive seeking freedom and vindication, the manipulation of evidence and testimony to call into question...

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