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Welcome To Germany

1988, Movie, NR, 102 mins

Welcome To Germany: Review

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In WELCOME TO GERMANY, German director Thomas Brasch creates a film within a film that emerges as a fictional speculation on the process of fictionalization itself. Brasch's meditations center on the figure of Cornfield (Curtis), a successful Hollywood producer-director who arrives in West Berlin to shoot a film set in 1942 Germany. The still-unscripted film is based on a true incident: in 1942, 13 Jews were taken from a concentration camp to appear as extras in a propaganda film directed by a man named Koerner. Though promised free passage to Switzerland after filming, the Jews were in fact returned to camps. As Curtis begins filming this story it becomes apparent to all that for him it is as much a therapeutic exercise as it is a filmmaking effort. Testing distinctions between reality and illusion, WELCOME TO GERMANY works on a number of levels. As a cinematic depiction of the process of fictionalization, lacking any inherent philosophical or psychological context and using a story within a story to make its point, WELCOME TO GERMANY inevitably collapses under the weight of its various illusions. Brasch resorts increasingly to a hallucinatory symbolism as the film nears its end, with structurally confusing and inconclusive results. Ultimately, the film lacks a message, emerging instead as a suggestion--presumably finding its final formulation in the psychology or philosophy of the individual viewer--that no picture of human action can be accepted as an ultimate truth. Despite its lack of closure, however, it is a compelling, very well-made film. Curtis gives a fine performance as Cornfield, the bearer of Brasch's symbolic weight, in a role that must be played with both recognizable passion and a measure of ambiguity. The cinematography by Axel Block is especially fine, giving an assured, lucid underpinning to the scenario-spinning script (by Brasch and Jurek Becker) and to Brasch's protean direction. (In German and English; English subtitles.) leave a comment
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