Dominik Graf

[zedz]

zedz, I'm sorry to hear you got off to a bad start with Graf - I hope you're not seriously proposing to write him off solely on the basis of that experience! While I liked Beloved Sisters well enough, and didn't have a problem with that scene or find it incongruous with the rest of the film (or indeed with Graf's style in general, which always tends towards the hyper instead of hypo, and certainly doesn't shy away from melodrama either) - AND while I'm glad a film of his is finally getting wider distribution - I'm not at all sure if this particular one is makes for a good point of entry into his work. (To see what he's capable of, check out his magnum opus In the Face of Crime, a rapturous, high-paced mash-up of German Schicksalsmärchen and basically every imaginable mafia film trope, with virtually all his main influences - Aldrich, Penn, Roeg, Rohmer, Eustache, 70's Eurocrime/Poliziotteschi - playing into the mix: English-subbed DVD available cheaply, or from your nearest Goethe-Institut library)

Well, it's a start! I'll no doubt see other films of his, but honestly, I couldn't see any evidence in that film of anything remotely approaching an original voice. There are dozens of young European directors goosing up ordinary material with the same familiar stylistic flourishes, and who are just as in the dark about how human beings - rather than movie characters - actually behave. Nothing new here.

[swo17]

I've never seen anything by Graf, but his fandom apparently runs long and deep. For example, a forum lurker recently voted one of his '80s films as the best film of that decade!

[domino harvey]

Maybe Graf is pulling a Nothing

[swo17]

You may be right, Peter Bogdanovich.

[domino harvey]

"(In Cary Grant voice)" should really be my special rank

[repeat]

zedz, I'm sorry to hear you got off to a bad start with Graf - I hope you're not seriously proposing to write him off solely on the basis of that experience!

Well, it's a start! I'll no doubt see other films of his, but honestly, I couldn't see any evidence in that film of anything remotely approaching an original voice. There are dozens of young European directors goosing up ordinary material with the same familiar stylistic flourishes, and who are just as in the dark about how human beings - rather than movie characters - actually behave. Nothing new here.

It's true that while a viewer familiar with his earlier work will notice a number of Graf's long-running thematic obsessions in Beloved Sisters, his stylistic idiosyncracies are far less apparent here; in that respect it's probably a classic case of a film where "fans will find a lot to enjoy", but newcomers might be left scratching their heads as to what the fuss is about. I still think it's a fine film by its own merits though!

For a quick overview of what the fuss is about, I recommend the appreciations by Chris Fujiwara (brief) and Daniel Kasman (extended) - and for further research, this indispensable interview at Senses of Cinema.

[repeat]

David Ehrlich hits several nails on their heads re: Beloved Sisters, screening next week (Tuesday & Wednesday) at the NYFF:

Beginning with a garish and blocky title treatment that plays like an explicit nod to Resnais’ final films, Graf’s film takes almost every available opportunity to violate the established precepts of stuffy period pieces. Snap zooms suffuse the saga with an undying buoyancy, characters read their letters (and there are so many letters) directly to the camera, and Graf even busts out a wipe around the halfway point in order to keep the melodrama at a gentle simmer. On the other hand, this isn’t Moulin Rouge! – the film’s style is ultimately submitted to the same compromises that limit the expression of the Beloved Sisters, themselves, concluding with a breathtaking final shot that finds a fleeting harmony between Graf’s two modes (real talk: it’s as beautiful a composition as the cinema has ever seen).

I'm working on a small article (in my native language) on the half dozen or so Graf films I've managed to get hold of, including my thoughts on Beloved Sisters - will try to translate & post some bits here when it's done. Would be great to see some posts from some of the other users familiar with any of his work (James43? A?) as well!

[domino harvey]

Apparently In the Face of Crime received a R1 release via MHz in September (and you can get it for ~$16 at DVDPlanet right now)

[zedz]

I have dutifully made my way through In the Face of Crime and can now merrily write off Graf with a clear conscience!

Any director of any worth should be embarrassed to have this completely and utterly ordinary cop show hailed as a 'magnum opus.' It's entertaining enough, in the way that a ten-hour marathon of Law and Order or The Bill would probably be entertaining, but as storytelling and filmmaking it's banal bordering on trite.

Spoilers follow, but they're not really spoilers if you've watched any cop show over the last thirty years, because Graf does nothing that hasn't been done many times over in pretty much exactly the same way.

Characters:
All are numbingly standard types: the good cop from a bad background (who - can you guess? - is therefore treated with suspicion by his superiors); the whore with a heart of gold (doubled for good luck); the hunky partner who's a ladies man but a bit of a slob - end of characterization - and (can you guess?) gets (non-mortally) wounded just before the final showdown so that Our Hero has to go up against the Big Bad all on his lonesome (despite the site of the confrontation being literally surrounded by hundreds of conveniently absent cops); the corrupt cop(s), who are corrupt (one of them has a scene vaguely alluding to a personal crisis about being corrupt, which last about 90 seconds and is only there to provide minimal motivation for his next, foolish, actions as required by the plot); the Russian mafia (sadistic! devious!) and their thugs (thuggish!); the corrupt businessman (corrupt! drunk! cruel to who-oores! obese! has ludicrously pampered adult-baby son with no distinguishing features whatsoever!) The women in the show are generally stripped of agency and given almost no personality (prostitutes, deceived wives, romantically-obsessed fellow cops who a) Lady Macbeth their corrupt partner, or b) sleep with the baddies because Our Hero won't sleep with them). I'd call it out as misogynist, except the male characters are scarcely any better written.

Plot:
The whole thing is lazily constructed on a raft of convenient coincidences: a key location in solving the crime just happens to be an apartment the cops burst into by accident in the first episode; the corrupt cop subplot floridly ties itself up just in time to allow for the denouement; the whore with a heart of gold who is 'fated' to love Our Hero (seriously, this is all the motivation we are given for their relationship - she once had a vision of him underwater) just happens to be all tied up with the crimes he's investigating; girly ex-partner cop with a crush just happens to have slept with one of the bad guys and can provide useful info about him. Some of these coincidences are among the hoariest cliches in crime fiction: the Big Bad Our Hero is investigating just happens to be Da Guy Dat Shot My Bruddah. Can you guess which one of the several bosses / gangsters / thugs they corner in the climactic scene gets away and has to be tracked down by Our Hero through a flooded basement all on his lonesome? Can Our Hero possibly escape? Will the Big Bad accidentally fall through a hole in the floor that was put there by the screenwriters, just in time? Some beats are simply mystifying, and clearly there just to get the story past the current hurdle and back to the main action (as when Our Hero travels to another country, kidnaps his girlfriend's girlfriend and drives off with her, pursued by smalltown thugs with machine guns, who chase them into the woods, trying to kill them; the next morning, they've already repaired his car (!), which they'd shot full of holes the night before and send him happily on his way, stolen whore and all.

My wife, who normally has a pretty high threshold for entertaining nonsense (as long as it's entertaining) remarked, when the corrupt cop subplot reached its ridiculous, melodramatic conclusion (they shoot one another, then swerve into a river on their way to the hospital, and their illegally gotten money, which must just happen to be lying around all over the car, not, like, in a bag or something, floats out the car window and down the river for all to see): "well, it's not exactly The Shield, is it?"

Style:
I'll grant that the show is directed in a slightly more kinetic way than some of its US or UK equivalents - but only marginally: those are getting more and more flashy all the time, and this is well below the level of quirkiness and visual invention you'd see on, say, Breaking Bad (which I wouldn't rate particularly highly on thoise grounds). And much of Graf's flash is triter than trite, just part of standard genre cliches reaching back a couple of decades now.

To wit: crash zooms to make a point; accompanying a cut to a different scene (or a 'shock cut' within a scene with a percussive sting on the soundtrack); if that's too subtle for you, then sometimes he'll stick a flash of white into the cut as well to make sure you Don't Miss The Point! (Hasn't this grammar been standard issue for Law & Order since Day One?); whenever a character mentions a past plot point (Dat's Da Guy Who Shot My Bruddah! The Corrupt Cops are Corrupt! I Had a Dream Underwater That We Were Meant To Be!) it's accompanied by a flashback to the appropriate clip, some of which we seem to see every single episode, sometimes more than once. Graf has absolutely no respect for his audience's intelligence, and it's not as if this is a particularly twisty or complicated plot. The best / most gratuitous example is probably in the final episode, after the dumb corrupt cops subplot has been dumbly resolved and no longer has any bearing whatsoever on the main plot. The boss (probably thumping his fist on the desktop) mentions that The Corrupt Cops Were Corrupt! ("And they were my best and most trusted cops!") and we dutifully get a flashback of the two of them, because obviously anybody who's watched the preceding nine hours, a couple of which had been devoted to the shaggy-dog Corrupt Cops Are Corrupt! subplot is way too retarded to have any idea which Corrupt Cops he might be referring to.

Over the ten episodes, I could single out only two sequences that step outside standard cop-show visual style. The first, a sex scene that's intercut with the undressing before the sex scene (or vice versa - who cares?) is directly lifted from Don't Look Now. The second, which involves multiple split screens, is directly lifted from any number of Brian DePalma films. Seriously, this is the Great White Hope of German cinema?

I just had another look at the initial recommendation for this series. Rohmer? Eustache?!! Oh boy. . . Let's just throw in Dreyer, Breer and Charlie Bowers while we're at it, huh?

[lubitsch]

Man, you're harsh. To put Graf into context: genre cinema was essentially killed off when the dilettantes of the New German Cinema took over. However especially crime dramas remained very popular, but were mostly made on TV with the monumental Tatort series concept being the embodiment of this success, until today up to 13 million viewers tune in every sunday for it. The very stodgy quality of the 70s crime dramas was enlivened in the 80s by the actor Götz George as he played the iconic Schimanski a rough and messed cop in the decaying industrial city of Dortmund, all within the Tatort framework. And then there was Graf who at the same worked in different crime series and brought a quirky, more stylish approach until he reached an iconic status, his 1987 feature Die Katze was hailed as the rebirth of German genre cinema.
I think you underestimate his stylistic qualities e.g. the elaborate sound design as well as his ability to throw off genre constraints, don't forget e.g. the extended family feasts. He's well versed in classical genre cinema and basically a modern day Fuller or Aldrich. And considering the often rather tame approach to genres in German cinema he's championed by critics who would like more of his kind. There's a boyish desire for hard boiled films among some prominent critics and Graf is more or less the only one to satisfy it.
Undoubtedly he has also weaknesses, there's e.g. a strong streak of misogyny running through his films regardless of the writer and indeed he often merely embraces empty cliches, he does so with gusto, but still it doesn't amount to much.
Personally I don't think this series is his magnum opus. I'd recommend the Tatort Frau Bu lacht which is considered the best of the 900+ Tatort films, but there are no English subs for it.

[zedz]

I don't really care if Graf's cop shows are really good compared to really bad German cop shows of the past. This series was made in 2010, and it really does have to compete with current genre television from around the world. As such, it seemed to me more than ten years behind what's been happening in the US and UK. Extended family feasts in a crime show? Eleven years after The Sopranos debuted? Stop the presses!

[repeat]

Well, I guess I should have deduced from your reaction to Beloved Sisters already that your sensibilities are more or less diametrically opposed to those of Graf - and, in this particular case at least, mine! As for the use of clichéd tropes, improbability and melodrama (three qualities the intrinsic damningness of which to some I have never been able to comprehend) in Graf's work, I humbly suggest you read this very short appreciation of Kalter Frühling (2003) by the critic Ekkehard Knörer.

As for the comparisons to Rohmer and Eustache, they were very specific indeed, not intended to communicate some obscure general idea of Great Cinematic Art (or am I missing the point in your mentioning Dreyer?), but quite simply the fact that both directors placed unusually heavy emphasis on dialogue (albeit to different ends), and that both were direct influences on Graf in this respect.

By the way, as your ire seems to be aggravated by the mysterious assumption that Graf is being hailed as a saviour of German cinema by some significant proportion of the critical community (I wish), I can assure you that your reaction is by no means unusual, and that in fact the vast majority of German TV viewers would definitely rather watch any of those American series you mention - or indeed a domestic carbon-copy of them - than Graf's provocatively over-the-top concoctions...

Anyway, to each their own - I hope you didn't waste a lot of money on this one!

(Edit: While the feasibility of generalizations like "misogynist" (or "sadist", "fascist" and what have you) in connection with directors like Aldrich, Fuller et al. is a subject for another discussion, it is true that there's definitely a pronouncedly masculine streak - likely a consequence of his admiration of said directors - in most of the Graf-films I've seen: but it's not as if it's unconscious, in fact he discusses it quite directly in the Filmmuseum book)

[zedz]

Oh, how I wish there actually was something (anything) that was over the top about that series, or indeed, a 'sensibility' to be opposed to. The problem is, it's just bog standard. I fail to see how 'using dialogue' makes any director comparable to Rohmer, especially when it's dialogue Babelfished from 80s Hollywood cop films, but I guess I underestimated the dire plight of German TV.

[repeat]

Well, I doubt it's humanly possible to underestimate the plight of European market-research-formatted television - but anyway, simply comparing your description of Beloved Sisters to the above betrays the fact that you do actually register the very sensibility I'm talking about (cf. the Knörer piece), it just doesn't agree with you, and that's that!

[zedz]

Well, I doubt it's humanly possible to underestimate the plight of European market-research-formatted television - but anyway, simply comparing your description of Beloved Sisters to the above betrays the fact that you do actually register the very sensibility I'm talking about (cf. the Knörer piece), it just doesn't agree with you, and that's that!

To clarify, what I saw in Beloved Sisters was generic, derivative flashiness (and cliched melodramatic content); what I saw in The Face of Crime was more generic, more derivative and less flashy (and, content-wise, more cliched). I suppose replicating extremely common stylistic tics from American film and TV could be termed a 'sensibility', but that's definitely not the way in which I'd use the word.

And also to clarify: both works were entertaining enough and I wouldn't discourage anybody from checking them out. It's just that neither of them even remotely sustain the inflated reputation Graf seems to have attained in certain circles (e.g. "one of Germany's foremost auteurs"; "the best hidden secret of German-language cinema").

[James43]

I have never thought of Graf as an innovative auteur, he makes no films for the cinémathèques but rather films for intended daily use. If anything, he’s a solid craftsman who follows his instincts consistently and that is, unfortunately so, a rare quality in German cinema and television. Probably no argument for his films when seen internationally but it makes very much sense regarding to current German filmmaking, where is practically no difference between cinema and television.

A key to his output might be his earlier TV work, the popular „Fahnder“-Series until his first features „Die Katze“ and „Die Sieger“ as well as his hommage to the Nouvelle Vague, „Der Spieler“. One can describe his style as cranky, brash, cheap, cliché-ridden – and yes, he prefers to be over the top but that’s his way to take pleasure in genre filmmaking and to tell something about a country of petit bourgeois and middle class in a more direct if not vulgar mode.

His films are not for everyone (he is not exactly popular in Germany) but I don’t think one can judge his work alone from those two examples („Beloved Sisters“ is a polished distraction from his better work). Have you seen „Der Skorpion“, „Eine Stadt wird erpresst“, „Cassandras Warnung“ or „Das unsichtbare Mädchen“? His contribution to the „Dreileben“-trilogy? Or his short in „Deutschland 09“, a love letter to the often hideous and imperfect architecture of West Germany set against the clean cityscapes of today?

[zedz]

His films are not for everyone (he is not exactly popular in Germany) but I don’t think one can judge his work alone from those two examples („Beloved Sisters“ is a polished distraction from his better work). Have you seen „Der Skorpion“, „Eine Stadt wird erpresst“, „Cassandras Warnung“ or „Das unsichtbare Mädchen“? His contribution to the „Dreileben“-trilogy? Or his short in „Deutschland 09“, a love letter to the often hideous and imperfect architecture of West Germany set against the clean cityscapes of today?

No, and I'm not going to fall for that trick again! I'll happily see more of his work if it falls in my lap, but I'm done with the wild-goose-chase "ah, but his real masterpiece is. . ." hunt.

[James43]

I can't remember I tricked you by any means... and I didn't name neither "In the face of crime" nor "Beloved Sisters" masterpieces. I was merely trying to point out that he is not exactly the director of ideas and has still something to go for.

[Numero Trois]

And also to clarify: both works were entertaining enough.....

If anything, he’s a solid craftsman who follows his instincts consistently......

That's the impression I got after watching Bittere Unschuld, even with my nonexistent German. Decently crafted, traditional genre piece that held my attention. But I can see where the straight-up genre tropes (discernible even w/o subtitles) could be a major turnoff.

[zedz]

I can't remember I tricked you by any means... and I didn't name neither "In the face of crime" nor "Beloved Sisters" masterpieces. I was merely trying to point out that he is not exactly the director of ideas and has still something to go for.

See the first post in this thread for the context.

[repeat]

Neither did I actually, but they're certainly not far from it in my book, and I fully stand by that opinion! Admittedly I should've tried to be more objective and recommend something a bit more markedly different, like the Dreileben episode for instance. (Still recommend the whole trilogy to all if you can find it.)

But yeah, Graf is a polarizing guy for sure. Maybe it's worth noting that the non-German critics who have most cottoned to his work (Fujiwara, Kasman, Vishnevetsky...) are perhaps more than average interested in and sympathetic towards genre films and people like for example Tony Scott or Richard Fleischer - and also, as James43 said, that Graf himself is certainly not aiming to please "arthouse audiences", on the contrary he has frequently expressed ambivalence (if not derision) towards contemporary "art films" (mainly German ones - although he has also championed people like Petzold and Ulrich Köhler). It's obvious from his work (in writing and on film as well) that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, but it combines with a sincere, non-ironic love of schlock and melodrama, which is probably too much for some: just a look at the list of "underrated favorites" appended to his collected essays would probably be enough for any respectable art film forum to write him off without having seen two frames of his work!

[Lighthouse]

Dominik Graf is one of the most fascinating directors alive. Since the 80s he created a strong body of tight and spirited films which belong to the best ever made in Germany.

His Best films:

several episodes of the TV series Der Fahnder (1984 - 1991)
Treffer (1984)
Die Katze (1987)
Die Sieger (1994)
Der Skorpion (1997)
Bittere Unschuld (1999)
Die Freunde der Freunde (2002)
Hotte im Paradies (2002)
Kalter Frühling (2004)
Eine Stadt wird erpresst (2006)
Er sollte tot (2006)
Cassandras Warnung (2011)

[repeat]

Just watched Kalter Frühling (2004) and boy, if anyone thought Beloved Sisters was overwrought... I think this film certainly clarifies his ideas about and approach to melodrama; it's actually more like a film about melodrama - I'm not even going to put this in spoiler tags - the plot involves: a potentially lucrative family business in financial trouble; a wanton heiress with serious parent issues; an incestuous plot by her father and orphaned cousin to displace her; an escape to the big city; vagrancy, prostitution and syphilis (but not in this order!); one romance with a random criminal picked up from a bar, another with a self-destructive alcoholic and aspiring junkie; and finally, a diabolical and complex plan of revenge involving hooking up the mother with said syphilic criminal, the whole thing culminating in a suicide (I won't spoil whose though) - and ending with this exchange of dialogue between the father and daughter: "Is everything all right?" "Yes." All sprinkled over with a jarring, atonal score and Graf's trademark nervy zooms and cuts (although the visual style here is slightly more restrained than usual). Very, very interesting film, with something of a late Roeg vibe occasionally - it's on YouTube but no subs of course and the dialogue is, as always, fast and plentiful (starting to think of launching a Kickstarter in order to hire some idle native speaker to type up some English subs for some of these!! I can follow the plots, but no hope of catching all the jokes and extra banter...)