A German Director Between Science Fiction and Art: What Happened to German Sci-Fi?

Under Hollywood's monotonous but overpowering influence, how can German science fiction film sound a voice of its own and reach more people?

In 1927, a black-and-white silent film called Metropolis opened in Germany. It portrayed a future world split in two, one half above ground and one below. Above: towers everywhere, flashing neon, elevated roads thick with traffic linking the buildings, planes and airships weaving between them — the world where the rulers lived. Below ground: dormitory blocks with no balconies, only rows of small windows, home to workers whose eyes had been rubbed blank by a day on the assembly line.

Class division in a materially advanced future is hardly a rare subject now — cyberpunk films of the past few years have been fond of exactly this picture of the future, from last year's Ready Player One to Alita: Battle Angel, released not long ago.

But in the early 20th century, when most science fiction films were still after pure spectacle, Metropolis gave the genre a deeper humanist dimension — which is why it is called "the first work in the history of science fiction film with intellectual depth". Beyond its ideas, the film's rendering of the future world and its special effects were the best science fiction filmmaking could do at the time.

This film, which shaped so much of the science fiction that followed, was not a Hollywood production. It was a German film of pure blood, directed by Fritz Lang and produced by the German studio UFA — and it opened the golden age of German science fiction film.

Two years after Metropolis, on October 15, 1929, Fritz Lang held the premiere of his second science fiction film, Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond), at the UFA-Palast in Berlin.

The film told the story of a human journey to the moon, and Lang reconstructed the rocket technology of the day on screen in a strictly positivist way. To make sure the moon rocket held up scientifically, he hired the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth to build rocket models for the film. They came so close to the real thing that, after the Nazis took power, they ordered every rocket model made for the film destroyed and banned the film from being shown in Germany, to keep work on the new V2 rocket weapon secret. The launch countdown the director invented for the film later became fixed procedure before real rocket launches — probably the most powerful illustration there is of science fiction shaping reality.

The German media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, the American ambassador and even Einstein turned up at the premiere. German science fiction film had never shone brighter. UFA went on to produce a string of science fiction films — F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (F.P.1 antwortet nicht), The Tunnel (Der Tunnel), Gold — right up to 1933.

The Nazis' rise to power in 1933 transformed German society, and it dealt the German science fiction film industry a fatal blow. The Nazi government had no interest in technological heroes who brought benefits to humanity; mainstream films mostly sang the praises of historical leaders. German science fiction film never recovered.

"Fascist regimes proclaim that we have no future — we are the future. There is no imagining a future at all; the future is what we are living through now, and it is embodied in our Führer. So during the Nazi period, and during Germany's war years, films of this kind were basically all banned," says the German film critic Georg Seeßlen.

In the 1950s, after the war, Germans battered by it lost their appetite for films about technological prospects and the conquest of space. They preferred to look for belonging and quiet in films about home. Seeßlen's comment on this: "They didn't want to look ahead to the future, they kept looking back at their own history. They weren't dreaming about what the future might be like; they were dreaming of having a better history than the one they had."

The German science fiction tradition did not disappear, though. As television spread in the 1960s, science fiction reached German audiences as TV drama rather than film. In 1966, West Germany's public broadcasting consortium spent 3.4 million marks on a seven-episode science fiction series, Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion (Raumpatrouille – Die phantastische Geschichte des Raumschiffes Orion); it drew extraordinary ratings when it aired and became a classic.

The other enormously influential piece of science fiction television was World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), a two-part TV film made in the 1970s by West German Broadcasting (WDR) and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Its treatment of the question of what is real would deeply inspire The Matrix, the later film series built on the same question.

But in the thirty years after World on a Wire, almost no original German science fiction films or TV series appeared at all. Most of the people keen to make science fiction left for Hollywood — among them Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.

Money is a big part of the problem. Science fiction has burned money since the day it was born: the effects, sets and props needed to conjure up scenes that do not exist in reality cost enormous sums. In a sense, science fiction filmmaking is a capital game. Hollywood's complete film industry and its way of working with capital keep science fiction relatively well funded, but for filmmakers in other countries, making a Hollywood-style science fiction blockbuster is simply not realistic.

Robert Bramkamp, a German director with more than thirty years in the business, knows this perfectly well. Unable to match Hollywood on money or production scale, he knows the best option open to German science fiction film now is to widen the genre's boundaries and try more varied elements inside it.

Two films by this director, little known to Chinese audiences — Test Stand VII (Prüfstand VII, released 2002) and Art Girls (released 2013) — were screened recently at "Imagined Universes: A Science Fiction Film Series and Discussion", held by the Goethe-Institut in Beijing, alongside Metropolis, Woman in the Moon and World on a Wire, as representative works of German science fiction film.

Strictly speaking, it is hard to file Test Stand VII and Art Girls simply as science fiction. Both contain some technological elements, but they look more like art films or experimental films. Bramkamp says so himself: "you can quite clearly also call both of these films art films."

In Test Stand VII, he combines documentary and fiction to tell the story of Nazi Germany's development of the V2 rocket during the Second World War. In Art Girls, he uses a great deal of imagery to work out the relationship between art, technology and life.

Bramkamp says he "hopes to make films that suit a broader public taste," but his way of telling a story and his narrative logic can be hard to follow for viewers used to Hollywood science fiction blockbusters. This is not Bramkamp's problem alone. It is the problem German science fiction filmmakers face as a group: under Hollywood's monotonous but overpowering influence, how can German science fiction film sound a voice of its own and reach more people?

On the afternoon of March 30, QDaily met Bramkamp, in Beijing for the event, at the Goethe-Institut in the 798 Art Zone. The 58-year-old director talks a great deal, and over an hour-long interview he came back again and again to his thinking about where German science fiction film is going. As he sees it, the globalization of the film industry and the rise of streaming are both chances this era has handed German filmmakers to widen their influence.

Below is an edited transcript of the interview:

Q = QDaily

B = Bramkamp

Q: You often try something different in your films. In Test Stand VII, for example, you used a narrative method that combines documentary and fiction, which makes your films more experimental and more niche than most. Why did you start down the road of experimental filmmaking in the first place?

B: In fact, neither of my two films, Art Girls and Test Stand VII, was made for some experimental television slot or cinema. They are ordinary films. When they came out in Germany, they played in the cinemas everyone goes to, and there were DVD editions too, and you can find them on Netflix. The distribution channels were the same as for any ordinary film.

Choosing this experimental way of telling a story wasn't my own wish either. It came from what the film had to present. Test Stand VII, for instance, was about presenting the rocket, and while writing the screenplay I took a lot of inspiration from Gravity's Rainbow, the novel by the famous American postmodernist writer Thomas Pynchon — a novel that was also very widely discussed in the United States.

Wanting to show the rocket's many different faces forced me to use different kinds of material, including a lot of documentary footage of all sorts, sometimes to show something interesting, sometimes to show painful facts from history. Handling such a complicated subject forced me to choose a great many ways of telling it. The rocket actually has an extremely minimal shape; you can't see through it. It holds not only a high degree of technical complexity but also all the complicated historical phenomena and factors that went into producing that technology. To get past that minimal exterior and show the very complex layers at its core, all I could do was use my imagination to create highly experimental narrative forms.

What surprised me, though, is that audiences understand experimental things far better than we imagine. Don't underestimate what audiences can take in — they understand experimental work very well. One look and they know what I want to say.

Q: So is it having that kind of audience in Germany that gives you room to do experimental work?

B: You have a point. Our Test Stand VII, for instance, aired on television in a cut-down version in 2001, and the ratings and reviews were decent. But the times keep changing, so we have to keep trying new things. Art Girls, for example, has no documentary or historical footage in it at all. It shows more of the variety of art; we wanted the film to present a more varied collaboration between art and technology.

An audience base isn't just sitting there of its own accord. You have to fight for it through your own work, and hope you can win over more people to come and watch. Filmmakers everywhere in the world are in the same position. We certainly want to make films that suit a broader public taste. Susanne Weirich — the art director on Art Girls — and I are working together on a new film now. It is also quite experimental, and it has a lot of historical archive material in it, but we hope to make it a comedy, to make it more fun, so more people come to the cinema to see it. This new film is a new challenge for us too.

Q: In science fiction, Hollywood is unquestionably the mainstream of the genre worldwide right now. From your experience, what is the general working situation for people in German science fiction film? What difficulties are there in making science fiction films in Germany?

B: Filmmakers in German science fiction face great difficulties at the moment. Germany does have a tradition of making science fiction films, but it basically broke off after Fassbinder's World on a Wire in 1972.

I tried making Test Stand VII in 2000, and Art Girls after that, hoping to show that we German filmmakers can have a say in science fiction too, rather than everyone just watching Hollywood's kind of science fiction. A lot of Hollywood science fiction repeats the same themes: heterotopias, the end of the world, the search for a new place to live.

We German filmmakers hope to ride the tide of globalization and new technology such as streaming, and take part in more international collaboration. I think international collaboration on science fiction films is the road the future has to take.

It doesn't have to mean an especially large production budget, either, because there is no way to compete openly with Hollywood science fiction anyway. So I think these internationally co-produced films can be small-budget films. Science fiction on the one hand uses special effects to show technological development, but on the other hand we can also show things that happen inside a person's head — the psychological world combined with new technology, and so on. That doesn't require a large investment to shoot, or very big sets.

So I think only international co-production can bring a real renewal of science fiction film. German filmmakers achieving a real breakthrough in science fiction on their own is unlikely.

Q: I also feel science fiction subjects are becoming more and more alike. Do you think a change of subject matter could be a breakthrough for German science fiction on the world stage?

B: Of course I hope so. Right now, only through collaboration can we gather the scattered strength of teams in different countries into a breakthrough that surprises people, including a renewal of subject matter. I hope there will be more international collaboration in future, and if that becomes a trend for science fiction filmmaking, I would personally be very glad to see it.

Q: As you just mentioned, science fiction films cost a great deal to make, which is one important reason why few countries other than the US make them at all. In fact, while many European films solve the funding problem by co-producing across several countries, that approach doesn't seem to work in science fiction. The critic Seeßlen thinks the problem is that every European country imagines the future, and imagines what the elements of a science fiction film should be, differently. Do you think that is why European science fiction never rose the way Hollywood did?

B: He has a point. And it isn't only Germany. Many of the big, well-known directors in European science fiction went off to Hollywood — Britain's Ridley Scott (director of Alien), for instance, and a number of German directors.

The only one who stayed and became fairly well known in Europe is probably France's Luc Besson, and he has done reasonably well: single-handedly he made French science fiction a success in cinemas too. The thing is, in our European countries people understand film itself somewhat differently. Each country has its own distinctive film language, and there is no way to reconcile them.

Take Germany's Fritz Lang, who shot Woman in the Moon in 1929. He shot it in three languages, because the market covered by a single language on its own was simply too small to achieve that kind of box-office success. So he had to make one film in three languages, so that when it was distributed it could cover more territory.

The strength of European countries working together still isn't enough to mount an effective resistance to Hollywood in science fiction. What's more, Hollywood film production is already highly internationalized. Its investors come from Japan, China, Britain, Germany and elsewhere; it pools the money and then makes a lot of famous films — Tarantino's work, for instance, which was shot in Berlin, in Germany. They gather global resources and then deploy them globally; a film might be shot in several countries around the world. So it is hard to say that European filmmakers collaborating among themselves could take on Hollywood. That certainly won't work.

A breakthrough or a renewal in science fiction film can only be hoped for from a few directors with real ideas of their own, who can collaborate across borders, on small, low-budget film projects. That, I think, is the trend for the future.

Q: Germany has made its own science fiction TV series before — Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion and World on a Wire, for instance — and both caused a ratings sensation. But like the films, science fiction television in Germany was a flash in the pan, without sustained development. Where do you think the problem lies?

B: The reasons are very complicated. Fassbinder's World on a Wire, for instance, was made in two parts, adapted from a French novel, and aired in 1972. After that, German technology took a leap forward, and in some ways that actually held science fiction film back. It isn't the way people assume, that a country with highly developed technology must have a thriving science fiction cinema. The opposite: Germans were so fanatical about technology that it made them rigid and unimaginative. Technology suppressed imagination instead of feeding it. Some big companies pursued technological development single-mindedly, and they felt that they had realized the dream themselves, so there was no need for a film to present any dream at all. Many Germans think that as long as we have especially fast cars and especially fast railways, that's fine, that's enough — we don't need science fiction films to achieve anything more. That's one reason.

The second reason has to do with German reunification. After the two Germanys reunified in '89, the overall level of German filmmaking was dragged down, especially in television drama. It all turned into one uniform realist approach — a particular enthusiasm for crime series, for example. Germany's Tatort has run for hundreds of episodes, and there's Der Alte too, hundreds of episodes, and people have kept watching all along. That has made German television development very narrow. And many Germans aren't very confident: they always look at what subjects America is making and wonder whether we could take a page from it. Germans do have imagination; what's needed is to get beyond this realism and let that imagination out.

Cover image: a still from Metropolis, via Douban