Volker Schlondorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate"

26. Billy, How Did You Do It? and Palmetto

Billy, How DidYou Do It? and Palmetto During this period, Schlöndorff’s model became Billy Wilder, whose negotiation of the commerce-art high wire was the subject of Billy, How Did You Do It? (1992). Schlöndorff’s relation to Wilder had gone back to the 1970s when Wilder, having seen The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, sent the younger director a note, calling it the best German film since Fritz Lang’s M. Later, the two met in Hollywood when Schlöndorff screened Coup de Grâce for Wilder (Schlöndorff, “Nobody” 12). As head of Babelsberg, Schlöndorff honored Wilder at the studio several times, most notably in connection with Wilder’s receiving the 1992 Felix, the European film prize, for lifetime achievement (Schäfer and Schobert 393; Jurczyk). This moment publicly proposed a symbolic family line between the seasoned Central European, who embodied Hollywood professionalism, and the new enterprise, which would connect the cinema of a newly reunited Berlin with that of its pre–World War II predecessors. Wilder as a Model: Billy, How DidYou Do It? In the context of the 1990s, Billy, How Did You Do It? may well provide a key to understanding Schlöndorff’s evolving attitudes toward the profession of filmmaking . Let us look at this work in some detail. Schlöndorff began the documentary in 1988 as an oral history drawn from interviews with the Hollywood filmmaker. It was not completed until 1992, when it took the form of a six-part television presentation broadcast over several weeks in August and September of that year. Billy, How Did You Do It? is a career survey of the director’s major works, and one gets the sense that Schlöndorff wanted to capture, as he had done about a decade earlier with Valeska Gert, the personality of an artist advanced in years, before death would make such a venture impossible. In this effort, as well as in Schlöndorff’s subsequent work to revitalize Berlin’s 26 303 Babelsberg Studios, we see the filmmaker trying to connect to a whole set of German filmmaking traditions, including those that arose in Hollywood after the exile there of much of the Weimar Republic’s top filmmaking talent. Billy, How Did You Do It? consists of a collage of materials including interview footage with Wilder himself, direct-address commentary by Schlöndorff, clips from Wilder’s films and other related works, and newsreel footage and stills from the periods treated. Technically, the work mixes both film footage and materials shot on video, which gives it a somewhat patchy appearance. The credits indicate Gisela Grischow as codirector and Hellmuth Karasek as cointerviewer. Karasek, longtime editor of the movie and theater pages of the prominent Der Spiegel magazine, was working with Wilder on their book Billy Wilder: Eine Nahaufnahme (1992) during this period. The documentary is oriented toward the television medium, and most of it consists either of the talking head of Billy Wilder answering questions from offscreen interviewers or Volker Schlöndorff addressing the audience with observations about Wilder’s work. In these latter segments, the only visual variation comes from occasional changes of clothing and the change of still images, mainly of Wilder’s face, that appear on video monitors positioned behind Schlöndorff. Interspersed among the talking heads are the clips and stills, making for a somewhat minimalist document drawn from deliberately restricted materials. There are, for example, no interviews with anyone other than Wilder—no collaborators or critics. Just as the documentary switches between film- and video-generated materials , it also constantly shifts between German and English. The effect of this constant alternation reminds the viewer of Wilder’s central European roots and repositions Wilder as part of a German filmmaking tradition. Schlöndorff’s entire career as a filmmaker has contained homages to his predecessors in both the German film and in Hollywood. A Degree of Murder cites the film noir at a time when the very term film noir was in general use nowhere outside France; one can see the hallway murder of Tötges in Katharina Blum as an homage to the scene in Double Indemnity in which Phyllis Dietrichson shoots an incredulous Walter Neff; the Wilder documentary then is only an extension of this historically conscious, cinephilic temperament. Of all his affinities, Schlöndorff’s attachment to the tradition of Weimar film and its surrounding culture may be his most central. Schlöndorff’s Wilder television project can...