Archive for the ‘Konrad Wolf’ Category

Goya

Posted: February 8, 2012 in DEFA, Konrad Wolf
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Epic is not a term one often uses with East German movies. As a rule, the films of DEFA keep to a human scale, charting life’s courses for ordinary people. Even the Märchenfilme (fairy tale films), while often dealing with fantastical kingdoms and imaginary worlds, keep the scale down to everyday proportions. But Goya or the Hard Road to Enlightenment (Goya – oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis) is an epic. Its scale is huge and its sets are opulent. Using the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya is shot in eye-busting color on 70mm film, with over 3,000 costumes, and locations in four different countries. Goya’s artwork was carefully reproduced by master artists, and an actual antique press was found to recreate the production of his Caprichos, right down to the recreation of the copper etching plates and hand-made paper.

From the opening moments of this film you know you are in for something different from any other film that ever came out of the GDR. Over somber chanting, a religious procession moves through a street in Spain. Some of the people in the procession wear white robes and capirotes, looking for all the world like members of the Ku Klux Klan. Others wear the same outfits in black. Men, stripped to the waist, their faces covered in white cloth, flagellate themselves as they walk in the procession, moaning in pain and religious ecstasy. Along the way, people kneel and make the sign of the cross as the statues of Jesus on the cross and the Virgin Mary trundle by in wooden carts.

To cast the film, director Konrad Wolf chose actors from seven countries, from Russia to Spain. Donatas Banionis, who played Goya, hailed from Lithuania, while Olivera Katarina, who played the sexually rapacious Duchess of Alba, came from Yugoslavia; Tatyana Lolova, who played Queen Maria Luisa was from Bulgaria, and Charles IV was played by the popular East German actor, Rolf Hoppe. To ensure the best possible performances from everyone, actors played their parts in their native languages. The set for this film must have sounded like the lobby at the United Nations.

Since the government of Francisco Franco was not exactly on speaking terms with the GDR, Wolf could not film in Spain, so the back streets of Dubrovnik were used instead. To add a more authentic flavor to the film, a film crew made up of West Germans was assembled and sent to Spain. Supposedly, this team was there to make a documentary about bullfighting, but they were really working for DEFA, shooting the movie’s bullfight sequence.

The film is based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s book about Goya, chronicling the years in the painter’s life when he went from a celebrated court painter to an enemy of the church—roughly from 1789 to 1803. At the beginning of the story, Goya is perfectly happy to be a pawn in the game that people in power played with the public. It is only after a series of tragic events that he comes to realize that these people are not worthy of admiration and he begins to evolve as a painter. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote the book in response to the anti-communist trials that were being held by Senator Joseph McCarthy in Washington. Feuchtwanger is better known for writing the book, Jud Süß, a sympathetic retelling of the story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, the Jewish financial planner for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. Jud Süß was first published in 1925 and was a huge hit in Germany. So much so that the Nazis felt compelled to make a film of the same name that challenged nearly every detail in the Feuchtwanger book.* In the book, it is Joseph Süß Oppenheimer’s daughter who is raped and killed by the Duke, while in the movie, Oppenheimer is the rapist. Although he lived in the United States, Feuchtwanger was especially popular in East Germany, partly due, no doubt, to his defense of Stalin in his book, Moscow 1937. Feuchtwanger died in 1958 in Southern California and his works were donated to USC create a Feuchtwanger library.

As a director, Konrad Wolf is a hard man to pin down. A quick look at his list of films demonstrates his versatility, but it also makes it impossible for proponents of the auteur school film criticism to pigeonhole him. Some of his films are small and intimate, some are gritty, some are grand. That is, perhaps the point. Wolf was a communist director working in a communist system in a communist way. Nearly everyone involved in making Wolf’s films had a say in the production, giving the cinematographer, composer, actors, screenwriter, and editor nearly as much influence as the director. Fans of the Hollywood’s bloated egomaniacs are not going to find much to like about someone like Wolf, who managed to keep his personal life out of his films (the key exceptions being I Was Nineteen, which is literally about his own experiences during WWII, and Professor Mamlock, which is based on a play by his father). Anyone who thinks they’ve got a pretty good handle on Wolf’s style after watching his first ten movies will be blindsided by Goya. It is like nothing he ever did before and like nothing he did after. It is majestic, intense, and unsentimental.

The film that it is intended as much as a criticism of government repression as it is as a story about eighteenth-century Spain. In an interview that is included on the DVD, the screenwriter, Angel Vagenshtain (author of Stars), admits this, but says that they weren’t as clever as they thought when it came to hiding this intention. As a co-production with Russia, the film was screened in advance in Moscow. The Russian official who screened the film asked that the final lines in the film—where the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition states that the name of Goya would be forever stricken from the records and forgotten by history—be removed from the film. Having recently made a similar pronouncement about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his work, they weren’t too happy about this inevitable comparison. To his credit, Wolf refused to remove the lines. Had it been any other director, this refusal would have either been ignored, or the film would have ended up on a shelf alongside the films of the 11th Plenum, but Wolf got away with more than most directors in East Germany. This was in part due to the fact that his father was one of the most-well respected playwrights in the world (and especially in Russia where he was exiled during WWII), but was mostly because his brother, with whom he was very close, was the head of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence division. Like J. Edgar Hoover, Markus Wolf was a man of such power that even government officials trod lightly around him (it was long believed that he was the blueprint for John Le Carré’s communist spymaster, Karla, although Le Carré denied this). Considering how often Konrad Wolf pushed the boundaries—most notably with Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny—there is a suggestion of truth to this.

Lithuanian actor, Donatas Banionis, was already known in the eastern bloc countries for his work in films such as, Watch Out for the Automobile (Beregis avtomobilya) and a Lithuanian version of The Little Prince (Malenkiy prints). He first achieved a measure of international recognition when he appeared in The Red Tent (Krasnaya palatka), the last film made by the brilliant Russian director, Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes are Flying, I Am Cuba). But Banionis would become best known to western audiences as Kris Kelvin in Tarkovsky’s classic, Solaris. Also, it is reported that it was his portrayal of a spy in The Dead Season (Myortvyy sezon) that convinced Vladimer Putin to join the KGB. Banionis would return to DEFA to play yet another deaf genius in Horst Seemann’s Beethoven: Tage aus einem Leben (Beethoven: Days in a Life), and he would work again with Konrad Wolf in Mama, ich lebe  (Mama, I’m Alive). One of his most unusual roles was in the Russian TV-movie, Poka ya ne umer (Before I Die), in which he portrays the corpulent New York detective, Nero Wolfe. Banionas makes a good Goya, passionate and confused, quixotic and vain, yet still sympathetic.

But it was lead actress, Olivera Katarina, who was best known to western audiences at the time. She had appeared a year earlier in the West German horror film, Mark of the Devil (Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält) under the name Olivera Vučo. Mark of the Devil was a big hit with the grindhouse crowd in America, in part because of its explicit scenes of torture, but mostly thanks to its exploitation advertising campaign which included barf bags handed out with each ticket in case an audience member couldn’t take the gore. Ms. Katarina was already an extremely popular singer and actress in Yugoslavia She starred in in the Aleksandar Petrovic’s Skupljaci perja (I Even Met Happy Gypsies), which featured both her singing and her acting. She sang songs in a variety of languages, including many gypsy tunes, and the Serbian folk songs of her native land. In 1984, when the relationships between the various states in Yugoslavia started to heat up, the Yugoslavian government decided that her songs were too nationalistic, she was quietly blacklisted and made no further albums until 1999. Today, a remarkable number of her songs are available in video form on YouTube. She continues to perform, and has her own website.

Although Goya contains no songs by Ms. Katarina, it does contain a couple wonderful numbers by Carmen Herold, who plays the folksinger, Maria Rosario Gomez. Ms. Herold sings in Spanish, and in the few scenes where she speaks, she seems to be speaking Spanish, but there is very little information available on this wonderful singer. Goya appears to be her only film, and her name does not turn up in any sources I could find outside of references to this movie. She has a remarkable face and a powerful singing voice, and she deserves more fame than she has received.

The music for the film was composed by the Azerbaijani composers Kara Karayev and his son, Faradsh. The Karayevs were trained as classical musicians, and Goya has an outstanding score. It could be played by an orchestra without any reference to the film and it would impress people. It is richly textured and classically structured, while at the same time experimental with many unexpected touches, such as the frenetic solo organ piece used to reflect Goya’s inner turmoil. The elder Karayev wrote over 100 pieces of music, including ballets, symphonies, and chamber pieces. Today, his work is still performed around the world and an annual festival in his honor is held every April in Baku, Azerbaijan. Goya was one of his last film scores. He died in 1982. Faradsh Karayev has gone on to become a well-respected composer in his own right, having composed almost as many pieces as his father at this point.

As with most of Konrad Wolf’s films—at least until Solo Sunny—the cinematographer was Werner Bergmann. This time, however, he was assisted by the Russian cinematographer, Konstantin Ryzhov. These two men have very different styles of filming. Bergmann often used a freer, hand-held technique. This was especially impressive considering he had lost one arm during the war. To compensate, Bergmann devised a special sling mount for his camera. Ryzhov, on the other had, seemed to prefer the more traditional, tripod-mounted approach, which was particularly well-suited to convey the opulence of the ballroom scenes. It is fun to watch the film with this in mind and try and guess which cinematographer handled which scenes.

Cinematography was not the only technical aspect handled by a tag team. Costume design, production design, and many of the other tech credits appear to be split almost evenly between East Germans and Russians. This wouldn’t have been a problem for Wolf. Having spent his formative years in exile in Russia, he spoke that language better than his native German. One credit that did not have shared billing was the editor. As always, Wolf used a woman editor, but this time it was Russian film editor, Aleksandra Borovskaya. It is the only time he worked with Ms. Borovskaya. On his previous film, I Was Nineteen, Wolf used the talented editor Evelyn Carow, and returned to her after Goya for all his subsequent films. How well or badly he meshed with Ms. Borovskaya, is not known, but he obviously was not predisposed to work with her again.

As an example of Wolf’s directing, of a DEFA film, or any other yardstick you care to use, Goya stands apart from the other films in the DEFA library. It is powerful and grand, and does a good job of portraying the turbulent times in which Goya lived. Its attention to detail is remarkable, with an accuracy that Hollywood seldom attempts.

IMDB page for this film.

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* Feuchtwanger was on the Nazi’s enemy list even before they came to power because of his book Erfolg (Success), a fictional account of the rise and fall of a dictator who very much resembled Adolph Hitler. Within a year after Hitler was elected Chancellor, the first of many lists was published announcing the expatriation of undesirable German citizens. He was included on the first list of 33 citizens, alongside Heinrich Mann (author of The Kaiser’s Lackey), and future president of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck.

Divided Heaven

Posted: December 4, 2011 in 11th Plenum, Dean Reed, Feminism, Konrad Wolf
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East Germany’s history is surprising, paradoxical, and weird. Just when you thought things were going to to lapse into a bleak recreation of 1984, the government would make a U-turn on some policy and relax the rules. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film community, where periods of creative freedom were followed by vicious clamp downs, and vice versa. The most pronounced example of this shift happened right after the Berlin Wall was erected. Touted as an “anti-fascist protective barrier,” authorities in the GDR were eager to demonstrate that the wall would help their country blossom by keeping out the insidious influences of American capitalists and West German Altnazis. Filmmakers and writers were granted a level of freedom of expression they had not seen before. It was during the first few years after the wall went up that some of the best books and films that the GDR had to offer were made. Meanwhile on the other side of the wall, West German films had gotten so banal that a group of young filmmakers at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen delivered their famous Oberhausen Manifesto, declaring that the “Old film is dead. We believe in the new” (Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen).

One person who would take full advantage of this renaissance was a talented writer named Christa Wolf. Ms. Wolf’s first book, The Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel) was an immediate hit on both sides of the Wall. Shortly after its publication, filmmaker Konrad Wolf (no relation) decided to make a movie of it. Ms. Wolf and her husband Gerhard were hired to write the screenplay, along with Kurt Barthel, a poet and author who had already demonstrated a talent for screenwriting with the scripts for Kurt Maetzig’s Castles and Cottages (Schlösser und Katen) and Vergeßt mir meine Traudel nicht (Don’t Forget My Little Traudel) under his pseudonym, KuBa.

The film follows the book closely. A young woman named Rita Seidel is shown staggering along the train tracks in a railroad car factory in Halle when she suddenly collapses. The rest of the film is told in flashback, relating the story of her love affair with Manfred Herrfurth, an ambitious young chemist. Manfred is a cynical young man whose personal ambition is in direct odds with socialist ideology. Rita, on the other hand, remains positive, and wants her work to benefit the community, not just her own ego. Most of the action takes place in the months prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall. Disgusted with the initial rejection of his new chemical process, Manfred moves to West Berlin. Rita goes to join him but finds the rampant consumerism, endless street noise, and the interpersonal alienation too much to bear. Accepting that she and Manfred live in different worlds, she returns to Halle where she collapses on the job (in the book, her collapse is due to an attempted suicide, in the movie, it seems to be simply her sadness overwhelming her nervous system).

What makes this film (and the book) so unique is the even-handed way in which it deals with both sides of the divided country. While its heart is admittedly closer to the socialist side of the things, the film does a good job of making us understand Manfred’s frustration with a system that is sometimes its own worst enemy. The portrayal of the work brigade in this film is similar to that in Frank Beyer’s film, Trace of Stones, which came out after the 11th Plenum and faced heavy criticism in spite of the fact that the book it was based on was already a best seller in East Germany.

As with some other Konrad Wolf films (e.g., Stars, Sun Seekers, Solo Sunny), the lead is played by a relatively unknown actress. Here it is Renate Blume, who was still in drama school when she got the part. After graduating in 1965, she started working primarily in theater and later as part of the East German television (DFF) ensemble. From 1965 to 1974, she was married to director Frank Beyer, but worked with him on only one project: the TV mini-series, Die sieben Affären der Doña Juanita (The Seven Affairs of Doña Juanita). After divorcing Beyer, she lived with the popular Indianerfilme actor, Gojko Mitic, whom she met while working on Apaches. In 1976, while working on Kit & Co, she met the American actor, Dean Reed, and fell in love. The were married in 1981, and Ms. Blume stayed with Reed until his death by suicide in 1986 (for more about Dean Reed, see Blood Brothers). As with many other East German actors, she found it hard at first to get film work in the newly unified Germany and began teaching classes in acting and appearing on stage. After a few guest roles on popular German TV shows (e.g., Tatort, Edel & Starck), she was hired to play Ingrid Lindbergh on the series, Fünf Sterne (Five Stars). which ran from 2005 to 2008 on NDF.

The cinematographer was Werner Bergmann, whom Wolf used for all but his last two films. As with other DEFA films from this period, the camerawork is stunning. Armed with the newer lighter cameras, and inspired by the work of the French New Wave, the filmmakers in East Germany were pushing the boundaries of filmmaking with each new project. One of the most startlingly photographed scenes occurs when a group of scientists are sitting around a coffee table, chatting. The camera continuously circles them while they speak. Ten years later, West German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus would be lauded for inventing this same sort of shot in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV-movie, Martha. From the very first time we see Rita and Manfred together, we notice that there is often a dividing element occupying the space between them. Sometimes it is a lamp pole, and other times it is a window frame or a railing. These act as subtle clues to the division facing the lovers, at first, ideological and after the wall, physical.

Helga Krause’s editing in this film is flawless. It seems to be intentionally following the jazzy rhythms of Hans-Dieter Hosalla’s score. The counterpoint between these two elements is exhilarating. Scenes jump from melancholy music to voice-overs to complete silence in startling and imaginative ways.

Also worth of mention is Konrad Walle’s sound work. Since film is primarily a visual medium, it is all to easy to overlook the sound mixing, but sound in this film, is as important as the images. At times it is remarkably subtle, such as the muted whir if a tape recorder rewinding in the background, or the dissonant banging on an organ that is meant to imitate car horns. Sometimes it is in your face, like the recreated broadcasts of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space.

Christa Wolf is now regarded as one of Germany’s foremost authors. Her novel, Cassandra, is considered a classic of feminist literature and has been translated into nearly every major language. After her Stasi files were released to the public, it was revealed that Ms. Wolf had worked briefly an informer for the Stasi in 1959, but her benign reports led them to believe that she wasn’t really cooperating with them and they let her go, choosing instead to spy on her for the next thirty years. In 1976, she was one of the many signatories to the letter of protest against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. An action that got her banned from the East German Writers’ Union (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband). Sadly, Ms. Wolf died December 1, 2011 in Berlin while I was writing this blog entry.

Divided Heaven was one of the last films to take full advantage of the new creative freedom the wall afforded. A year after its release, the 11th Plenum of the SED would put and end to this brief but shining period in East German film history, blaming the media for the country’s economic problems and banning wholesale an entire years worth of films. After that, any film with even the slightest criticism of the way things were was seen as a threat to the system. Christa Wolf’s next film project was made with Kurt Barthel, whom she met while working on Divided Heaven. That film, Fräulein Schmetterling (Miss Butterfly), was banned before it was finished and relegated to the storage facility at DEFA. After the Wende, nearly all the footage was found, but much of the soundtrack was missing. Although it already had been shown on both sides of the wall, Divided Heaven also found itself banned from time to time throughout the rest of the GDR’s existence, but remains as one of the best films that DEFA ever made.

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Solo Sunny

Posted: October 4, 2011 in Berlin, DEFA, Konrad Wolf, Wolfgang Kohlhaase
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In the mid-seventies, Wolfgang Kohlhaase—arguably the GDR’s best screenwriter—became friends with a talented young film reviewer named Jutta Voigt. Ms. Voigt met Kohlhaase at “Die Möwe” (The Seagull)—a popular Künstlerklub (art club), where film people and other artists met—and introduced him to an exotic social misfit named Sanije Torka. Torka was the daughter of Crimean Tatars working in Germany in 1944 (Ostarbeiters). At that time, the Third Reich did not allow Ostarbeiters to have children and Sanije was put up for adoption. Her jet-black hair and dark eyes automatically made her an outsider in Germany. She was a wild and headstrong little girl, and she bounced from foster home to orphanage to juvenile detention, raising Cain at every turn. She occasionally worked as an actress, appearing in bit parts in films. She also worked as a singer, although, by all accounts, she was a better actress than singer. Her headstrong ways often put her at odds with the rest of the world. Kohlhaase became fascinated with Torka, who seemed to defy the very nature of a socialist government, barely scraping by, doing things that were tolerated but not officially sanctioned. He listened carefully to her stories of growing up as an orphan in East Germany and turned her tale into the screenplay for Solo Sunny.

Solo Sunny is the story of Ingrid Sommer, nicknamed “Sunny.” Sunny is a modestly talented singer who tours Germany as part of a low-rent variety show. She is a free spirit, who is not afraid to call it like she sees it, and who sleeps with whomever she wants. When we first meet her, she is the lead singer for “The Tornados,” a jazz-pop band. The band’s saxophone player has the hots for Sunny, no doubt spurred on by her carefree attitude toward sex with strangers; but Sunny has no interest in him which leads, indirectly, to an altercation between the sax player and a bar patron. While his lip heals, the sax player is temporarily replaced by Ralph, a cynical philosopher with a penchant for western culture (which is sometimes code in DEFA films for an amoral person). Sunny falls for Ralph, which proves to be a bad idea, sending her into a self-destructive, downward spiral. After a feeble attempt to tow the line, Sunny comes to the realization that she is who she is, and that’s not going to change.

Around the same time as Kohlhaase was finishing his screenplay, Konrad Wolf was fishing around for a new film project. Deputy Minister of Culture Klaus Höpcke had expressed a desire for more stories that reflected everyday life in the GDR. Höpcke was one of the people responsible for the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, a move that resulted in a substantial talent drain from the ranks of DEFA. Now, in typical GDR fashion, he wanted to show that this move had nothing to do with repression. As long as a story didn’t directly challenge the state, nothing, they claimed, was off limits. When Kohlaase came along with his story of the untameable Sunny, Wolf was not sure at first if he was the man to film it. The film would be a major departure from anything he had done before and he knew it. At first he balked, but during a car ride from Potsdam to Berlin, he figured out what to do. He could not rely on techniques he used in the past. The film had to be new and it had to be different.

While some members of his film crew remained the same as in previous films—most notably, Evelyn Carow, and Alfred Hirschmeier—other old favorites were jettisoned for new blood. The most startling of all was Wolf’s decision not to use Werner Bergmann, the man who had filmed every Konrad Wolf film up to that point. Instead he chose Eberhard Geick, a newcomer at DEFA, whose only work up to that point had been a TV show and some shorts. Wolf felt that Geick—who lived in the Prenzlauer district where much of Solo Sunny was filmed—would have a better feel for the neighborhood. In another first, Wolf shared the directing credit with Kohlhaase.

While Solo Sunny is enjoyable to those who don’t speak German, it’s real treasures belong to those who do. Sunny’s speech is littered with slang and Berlinerisch. Her famous statement upon getting out of bed the morning after a romp with a stranger, “Is’ ohne Frühstück.” can be translated with some accuracy to: “I don’t do breakfast,” but her closing statement defies easy translation: “Ich würde es gern machen. Ich schlafe mit jemandem, wenn es mir Spaß macht. Ich nenne einen Eckenpinkler einen Eckenpinkler. Ich bin die, die bei den Tornados rausgeflogen ist. Ich heiße Sunny.”* In fact, even on the U.S. DVD, the term Eckenpinkler (literally, “corner pisser”) ends up with two different translations (I went with “pig,” although I find it less than satisfactory).

The irrepressible Sunny was played by Renate Krößner. Krößner had been appearing in films since the mid-sixties, but it was her performance in Hener Carow’s Until Death Do Us Part (Bis daß der Tod euch scheidet) in 1979 that caught Konrad Wolf’s attention. Krößner’s unusual and expressive face was the draw for Wolf, even though Krößner had no training as a singer. Having lived in Berlin for many years, the dialect was no problem for her. In 1985, Krößner was allowed to leave East Germany with her longtime partner, Bernd Stegemann, whom she finally married in 2005. Since leaving the GDR, she has appeared in dozens of movies and television shows. She is best known in the states for playing the club owner in Daniel Levy’s Go for Zucker (Alles auf Zucker!)

One area where Konrad Wolf never showed much loyalty was in the music department. Unlike many western directors who tie themselves to specific composers (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone), Wolf changed his composer with every film (I suspect that this is the main reason fans of the auteur theory have so much trouble pigeonholing his films). This time, the music was provided by Günther Fischer. Fischer got his start in feature films with the Gojko Mitic western Tecumseh, but it was his work on his next film, Eolomea, that really caught people’s attention. While other DEFA composers—most notably Karl-Ernst Sasse—came from the world of classical music, Fischer hailed from the jazz world. In the mid-sixties, he played saxophone and flute with the Klaus Lenz Band, forming his own band in 1968. Fischer was a prolific composer, who wrote the scores for no fewer than ten movies in 1978. Since the fall of the wall, most of his work has been in television. He currently lives in Ireland, and still performs with his band.

Nowhere in the film is Kohlhaase’s inspiration, Sanije Torka, mentioned. In the west, this would have been cause for a lawsuit, but in the east it was for Torka’s own safety. East German society was not noted for its hearty acceptance of non-conformists (unless, like the American singer, Dean Reed, they moved from right to left), and drawing attention to a born troublemaker like Torka in the GDR would have done her no favors. She might have been forgotten altogether if not for filmmaker Alexandra Czok, whose film, Solo für Sanije – Die wahre Geschichte der Solo Sunny (Solo for Sanije – The True Story of Solo Sunny), brings her story to light. The film portrays her as headstrong and individualistic as ever. At the time of filming, Torka was about start a two-year sentence for shoplifting. It is through her reminiscences in this film that we learn the full extent of Torka’s influence on the making of Solo Sunny.

The message of Solo Sunny seems to be that it is more important to stay true to yourself than the system—a message that seems to be in direct conflict with the perceived East German stance. This fact didn’t elude all the officials, but it did get past the important ones. By the time that the authorities decided that the film might actually be subversive, it was too late. It had made it to the west and was entered in the Berlinale, West Germany’s prestigious film festival. There it won the International Film Critics’ Award for best picture, and garnered a best actress honor for Renate Krößner. That same year, it won the Gold Plaque at the Chicago Film Festival. After that, there was nothing to do but let the film play. It went on to become one of the top-grossing films in East Germany; the country’s biggest box office hit since The Legend of Paul and Paula.

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* Roughly: “I do what I want. I sleep with someone if I feel like it. I call a pig a pig. I’m the one The Tornados fired. I’m called Sunny.”