Retrospective Dominik Graf

»There‘s a crack, a crack in everything / That‘s how the light gets in« it says in Leonard Cohen’s song »Anthem«. There‘s a crack, a crack in everything, and the crack in the history of German cinema and TV-films since the late 1970s and early 1980s are the works of Dominik Graf. They stand at odds with the other film productions surrounding them.

This was already the case with »Treffer« (1984), a film that was originally produced for the TV Broadcaster WDR and then received a theatrical release only after first being broadcasted nationwide. A rare, almost unheard-of occurrence and at the same time an unmistakable sign of the power that emanates from Dominik Graf‘s story about three young men from the south-west German provinces and their dreams of freedom. A film like a melancholic song about adolescence in a place with no future. It feels like you hear the voice of Bruce Springsteen resonating in each shot.

Another characteristic of this crack that marks Dominik Graf‘s films. They always shed a different light on the often so hermetic, self-centred movie industry of West-Germany. Films such as »Treffer«, »The Cat« (1988), »The Gamblers« (1990), »The Invincibles« (1994), »Hotte in Paradise« (2002), »Eine Stadt wird erpresst«(2006), »The invisible Girl« (2011) and finally »Fabian: Going to the Dogs« (2021) are, like the episodes that Graf shot for TV-Series such as »Der Fahnder«, »Tatort« or »Polizeiruf 110«, firmly anchored in the
respective German reality. In retrospective these films write a history of German society and mentality in the ten years before the German reunification and the decades since then. If you want to know what it was like in Germany and what it feels like there right now, all you have to do is watch these films.

Then again, which brings us back to the light that enters through the crack, none of Dominik Graf‘s films feel »German«. The’re all infused with the cinema of the world, with the spirit of French Gangster Films and American B-movies, Italian Gialli and the new waves that swept Eastern European cinema in the 1960s and 70s. They radiate an openness, an absolutely self-evident internationality, with nothing arbitrary about them. All shots, all cuts, and above all, all zooms in Dominik Graf‘s works follow an artistic logic. Form is never just
form, it always expresses a thought, an idea of the world and reality. This also makes his works so unique. When »A Map of the Heart«, his first major experiment with the use of digital cameras, premiered in Berlin in 2002, it was critically rejected to the point of hatred. Graf‘s breathtaking handling of the texture of digital images was met with derision and incomprehension. Yet there is a power in these images, which seem to dissolve in front of the audience‘s eyes, that can change our consciousness. Like all great masterpieces of
modern art that have foreshadowed epochal changes, »A Map of the Heart« encourages us to look at the world differently. Today, more than 20 years later this is apparent. Dominik Graf was once again ahead of the curve. Yet those groundbreaking images of »A Map of the Heart« foreshadowed another path that German cinema could have taken at the beginning of the 21st century.

About ten years earlier, Graf created a similar situation where German cinema could have chosen another path. With »The Gamblers«, his playful and unruly ode to the uncompromising nature of love, he initiated a wave of German romantic comedies that defined German cinema in the 1990s. But this film as well has beennothing more than a crack. Graf‘s vision of love that can only exist if it is accompanied by absolute freedom
was an anarchistic attack on the very capitalist values and conservative ideas that German romantic comedies turned into cemented film images only a short time later.

The light that Dominik Graf‘s films have let into German cinema has not been able to dispel the dark shadows of restoration and affirmation of the status quo, but it has made them visible in an almost revolutionary way. In an interview with the film critic Olaf Möller, Dominik Graf confessed: »In the end, I have the impression that what I specifically want or what gives me the most joy, can only be found in its purity off the rack.« Each of his films, deeply rooted in the traditions of the most diverse film genres, confirms this impression. His
thrillers, his historical films such as »Beloved Sisters« and »Fabian: Going to the Dogs«, his comedies and his (melo)dramas find a freedom in the conventions of their respective genres that can only exist within a prefabricated framework. A freedom that lies in not allowing oneself to be restricted and knowing exactly how far boundaries can be pushed. Each film of Dominik Graf reminds us that the world can be changed. This is indeed a crack, a crack in everything, through which the light of veritable and therefore subversive freedom shines.

Treffer

A town somewhere in the south-west of the Bonn Republic. It was the time
when Helmut Kohl proclaimed the ‘spiritual and moral turnaround’ and West
Germany immediately felt much more petit bourgeois and narrow. Albi, Franz
and Tayfun are not interested in Kohl‘s idea of renewing West Germany, which
resembled a restoration. But they are all too familiar with the stuffiness and
desolation of the provinces. They want to escape it on their motorbikes, as if
the airflow would also ventilate their lives. But the repayments on their loans
are increasingly squeezing the air out of them. When they lose their jobs in a
garage, they are caught up in a maelstrom of events that can only end in tragedy.
Something of the spirit of the American biker films of the 1950s and 60s
pervades »Treffer«. Even today, 40 years later, Dominik Graf‘s film, which was
made for television but has found its way into the cinema, still fulfils a painful
longing. A longing that arises from the incredible density with which Graf
captures everyday life in West Germany in the early 1980s. No other film has
captured the dreariness of West Germany as clearly and artistically as this one.

The Cat

When Dominik Graf‘s thriller about a bank robbery and a meticulously planned hostage-taking was released in cinemas at the beginning of 1988, it was nothing less than a sensation. Such a precise, cool genre film with a star cast had not been seen in West German cinema for a long time, perhaps never before. And it has lost none of its appeal since then. Time seems to have done as little to it as it has to the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville or the noirs of Fritz Lang. Probek, a professional played by Götz George, who seems to anticipate Robert
De Niro‘s character in Michael Mann‘s »Heat«, has an almost perfect plan. While two of his accomplices take hostages in a bank, he observes and directs the action from his hotel room. In this way, he is always one step ahead of his opponent, Chief Inspector Voss. However, he is far from holding all the strings in his hands. Dominik Graf maintains the balance between control and ecstasy in an almost magical way. Every shot, every cut follows a grandiose economy. Nothing is too much here, everything fits together perfectly. This is how »The
Cat« develops a truly intoxicating maelstrom.

The Gamblers

Right at the beginning, a voice offscreen contradicts Kathrin and ‚Jojo‘. The two had just confirmed that they had not really fallen in love with each other. But the narrator knows better and turns the cinema audience into accomplices in a very special game. From this moment on, anything is possible. There are no rules or certainties in this exuberant homage to the French nouvelle vague. An almost overwhelming longing for freedom not only drives the player ‚Jojo‘,
played by Peter Lohmeyer, and his 18-year-old cousin Kathrin (Anica Dobra). It permeates every scene, no matter how small, of this film, which is completely devoted to the contradictions and madness of love. Like the two lovers who rely on their feelings like numbers at the roulette table, who turn every kiss and every touch into a bet whose stakes cannot be high enough, Dominik Graf also takes risks. A self-deprecating wink seems to accompany every moment in this wonderfully impetuous road movie that leads from Munich to the Côte d‘Azur. And yet „»Player« hits right at the heart of a society for which freedom actually means nothing but success and money.

The Invincibles 

For almost 25 years, »Die Sieger« was both a thwarted and unrecognised masterpiece. The interventions of the producers and distributors did not destroy Dominik Graf‘s vision in 1994, but at least damaged it. Even then, however, anyone who wanted to could see that this police film and conspiracy thriller about a Düsseldorf SWAT unit, and some powerful politicians acting in the background, was a great, truly unique achievement in German cinema. There is something breathtaking about the way Graf utilises genre conventions and at the same time
leaves them far behind. Compared to »Die Katze«, this extremely concentrated, almost minimalist genre study, ‘Die Sieger’ seems almost baroque, especially in the ‘director‘s cut’ version that was finally released in 2019. Again and again, Graf takes the time and space needed to bust open this story of obsession and betrayal, cover-ups and corruption, sometimes through images that create a ghostly atmosphere, sometimes through scenes that explore the abysses of the SWAT men. From a portrait of a group of inwardly broken men, permeated by violence and paranoia, the film becomes a panorama of an entire society that
has lost itself and its way.

Hotte im Paradies

»It‘s hard out here for a pimp« sings Terrence Howard on the soundtrack to Craig Brewer‘s »Hustle & Flow«. For Hotte, who ekes out a living as a small pimp in Berlin-Charlottenburg, it‘s usually tough too. But that doesn‘t particularly interest the survival artist played by Mišel Maticevic. For him, taking life as lightly as possible is a sign of professionalism. So, like all the other gangsters and pimps around him, he chases after money, only to squander it again immediately. When the Russian mafia poaches Jenny, his most successful ‘employee’, the fragile balance of his life collapses. Like Hotte, Dominik Graf balances on a very fine line in this television film. On the one hand, he recognises in the sensitive pimp, who exploits the women without any scruples, a romantic rebel who consistently defies the logic of bourgeois capitalist
reality. On the other hand, he portrays the milieu of his characters in all of its brokeness and finds unforgettable and unforgettably raw images that reflect this state in a darkly dazzling way.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs

The camera glides quietly through a Berlin underground station. Its path leads along the tracks and finally up a flight of stairs into the daylight. When it arrives on the street, it is 1931, and the camera travels back in time from the present to the late Weimar Republic. Dominik Graf makes a statement in the very first sequence of his film adaptation of ‘Fabian oder Gang vor die Hunde’. The world of Erich Kästner‘s novel has not disappeared, it lives on in and beneath our everyday reality. ‘Fabian’ is a radical break with all the slick literary adaptations that shamelessly exploit their source material and which are literally flooding
German and international cinema. Graf stays close to Kästner‘s novel about an idealistic cynic who is unable to escape his role as an observer and becomes someone who takes action, and tells a heartbreaking love story in the process. But he also repeatedly goes beyond his original. In its most radical moments, which casually focus on the rise of the NSDAP and the disintegration of Weimar society, ‘Fabian’ resembles an avant-garde essay on the seeds of Germany‘s past that seem to be sprouting again.

Masterclass

A Conversation about Cinema

Dominik Graf is not only one of the most important directors and screenwriters in the German-speaking world, but also a great cineaste who loves and knows cinema like hardly anyone else. A conversation about his work, in particular his genre films for cinema and TV in the context of this retrospective, will inevitably also be a conversation about cinema, the
development of cinema and the implications for social debates.

At the end of the 1970s, Dominik Graf entered the film stage as part of a generation of filmmakers that aimed to revolutionize mass entertainment. Many of his works were created for television, his works for the series »Der Fahnder« repeatedly became blueprints for larger genre productions and have already shown his particular preference for working with
authors with whom there is a harmony in the economy of storytelling could be found. With his thrillers »The Cat« and “The Invincibles” he created milestones in a genre that doesn‘t actually exist in German film. What French cinema respectfully
calls »Policiers« became the backbone of his work, branching out over the decades into ever-expanding genres, including essayistic documentaries, cutting-edge melodramas and period pics like »Beloved Sisters.«

A moderator who enjoys clear language and is not afraid of anything controversial will lead the conversation: Rüdiger Suchsland, an opinionated film critic for print, radio and online, as well as a film director, author and a long-time acquaintance from numerous conversations with Dominik Graf.