Cinema: Bravado Is Their Passport

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Germany exports a -wave of taut, topical films to the U.S.

The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! Coming to financial success in their own movie market, to artistic maturity on theater screens around the world, to terms with a painful historical past. In the past few years the German film industry has become what Variety calls "one of the healthiest box offices in Europe," with annual ticket sales of about $450 million. Much of that business, as in any other European country, went to Hollywood entertainment, especially Disney and James Bond. But in 1981 there were significant local advances. A low-budget expose of youthful degeneracy in Berlin, Christiane F., became the biggest German moneymaker in the nation's history; and right behind Christiane F. was Das Boot (The Boat), a $12 million U-boat melodrama. Now, these two films and three others are entering American release, with hopes high and cinematic intelligence flaring. Make no mistake: the Germans are here.

At the Berlin film festival, which began its annual run last week, 80 German films were elbowing for attention. The rush of local productions is due in no small degree to generous federal and state subsidies for fringe film makers. But even these have started to pay off. Filmverlag der Autoren, the production company that has supported many pioneers of the new German cinema for more than a decade, finally went into the black last year. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders have earned reputations as world-class film makers. These and other directors who restored German film to artistic prominence after 40 years in the Nazi and postwar wilderness are winning dates in U.S. art theaters traditionally receptive only to French movies. Since October, Frank Ripploh's Taxi zum Klo, a sweet-souled, hard-core slice of homosexual life made for $50,000, has tallied $500,000 in only four U.S. cities.

Ripploh is not the only young German film maker to veer sharply from the baroquely stylized work of Fassbinder and Herzog. Four of the five new German films in the U.S. are rooted in headline reality. Christiane F. is based on interviews with a 15-year-old Berlin prostitute and heroin addict that appeared in the newsmagazine Stern. It is a tale to blanch the parental conscience, for here are children barely in their teens who whore, steal, shoot up and, too often, drop dead. Chic-pretty, lipsticked and long-haired, dressed in Annie Hall punk, negotiating puberty on stork legs, Christiane (Natja Brunkhorst) is a caricature of cover-girl womanhood. She comes home from a night of dance and dope, wipes the, blood off her face and goes to sleep with her kitten. She is a young adult who wants a childhood, who waits for her mother's discipline, or for a compelling reason to say no to any sensation. She gets none of it.