Ein Bild. Eine Ecke in einer Kneipe, ein Mundharmonikamann, mit Alkoholschweiß im Gesicht und mit seinem Instrument in selig kitschigem Einklang, neben ihm eine nicht mehr ganz junge Frau mit starkem Willen und verklärter Schwäche in den Augen. Sie singt mit zu seiner Melodie, aber sie blickt nach links aus dem Bild hinaus. Zu einem anderen. Einem auch nicht mehr ganz jungen Mann . . .
Vielleicht liegt es am ewigen Schisma im germanischen Kino zwischen ersehntem Kommerz und intendierter „Filmkunst“ – beide zu gleichen Teilen einander beschimpfend und sich selbst idealisierend –, vielleicht liegt es an diesem kontinuierlichen Riss, dieser umkämpften Demarkationslinie von Hoffnung oder Enttäuschung oder Ablehnung, dass der deutsche Film ideologischen Strömungen immer wieder die Einfallstore öffnen muss. Die Historie kann ein Lied davon singen. Und ihre impertinent überbürokratisierte Gegenwart bedroht derzeit zum x-ten Mal das filmemacherische „Faustrecht der Freiheit“. Der Begriff des „Staatskinos“, den vor Jahren Klaus Lemke prägte, wird damit über seinen Tod hinaus täglich an den Werken des BRD-Filmausstoßes virulenter und beschämender sichtbar.
Eine Geschichte vom Nachhausekommen
Wie glücklich man dann doch ist, wenn man einen Film aus Deutschland lieben kann. Und so wie „Gibbi Westgermany“ von Christel Buschmann nun plötzlich als DVD nach 44 Jahren aus der Versenkung zurückgekehrt ist und sich dabei als kleines Fanal erweist – so kommt anfangs der Matrose Gibbi von seiner Seefahrt zurück in den Hafen. Er stiehlt sich von Bord, man weiß nicht, wie lang er angeheuert hatte, wohin es ihn auf Reisen getrieben hat, jetzt ist er back. Der lange Schlacks mit Mick-Jagger-Anmutung im Gesicht findet sich schwer wieder zurecht. Die Mutter im Fettdampf ihrer Imbisskneipe hat einen Neuen.
„Gibbi was here“ schreibt der Heimkehrer an eine verschlossene Tür. Mythologische Vorlagen, das weite Meer, die Mutter, der Sohn. „Mamma Leone“, ein nervensägender Jukeboxhit, den man sich damals nie und nimmer als echten Liebessong hätte vorstellen können – was hat er hier für eine Wucht! Er trifft zwischen den beiden Hauptfiguren von Anfang an den richtigen Ton der Sehnsucht, die sie jeder vor sich versteckt gehalten hatten. Die verranzten Kneipen, der edle Nikotinnebel, der in den Räumen liegt, der Schweiß auf den Gesichtern, der Exkurs in eine wahrlich irre Irrenanstalt mit dem Regisseur Hans Noever als geduldigem, weil resigniertem Oberarzt und mit dem sadistischen Claus-Dieter Reents als Wärter.
The sweat of the people on the positive copies cannot really be adequately reproduced digitally, but Frank Brühne’s neon light saves a certain amount of authenticity in the thoroughly cleaned present of the cinematographic image. Christel Buschmann’s directing ideas, her or perhaps Gibbi’s dialogue ideas – “Nuclear strike on the miserable humanity here!” The unbelievable faces of the minor actors and actresses and the tender and fatal ending. Homecoming. A myth since Oedipus and Odysseus.
Life, hard life
What suddenly comes from behind, the ghosts of West Germany at the end of the 1970s appear and show their unexpected, forgotten beauty, their hunger for life, their despair with such pride and some of them with such proud ugliness that you no longer want to encounter in mainstream German cinema. Jörg Pfennigwerth is Gibbi and is an asshole and a brazenly crazy guy all in one. It is his love for his mother that has driven him home from the sea. The mother is Eva-Maria Hagen, who, in strong identification with her character, visibly torn between a lack of love and then, in the last quarter, desire for her son.
Eric Burdon haunts the scenes as a hotel porter from the neighborhood, always with a number of annoying dogs on the way – from whatever Animals heaven he fell from at the time. “When I think of all the good times I’ve been wasting – having good times.” He also gave Buschmann the guide to the English musician Paul Millns, whose gentle piano songs with a voice that faintly echoes Jo Cocker give the film stability and grounding from the very first moment. (A few years later, in Christel Buschmann’s second film, Burdon played the lead role of a rock musician between LA and Berlin.)
Then the woman who whistles happily at Gibbi from a distance on the street and who subsequently articulates only incomprehensible, invented things in his hotel room (the legendary Barbara Ossenkopp, who died in Java in 2021 as an animal rights activist). And when he dances to a strong guitar rock in the large, neon-lit drinking hall in a strangely restrained, frenetic way, the camera stays on him for a whole minute, and the scene ends with a small pan to a laughing, amused young woman – who he has obviously been courting the whole time. She then goes with him to his bedridden grandmother, where she immediately falls asleep on the sofa. Life, that’s life. Hard life.
Between top and bottom
One thinks for a moment of Roland Klick’s “Supermarkt” five years earlier, and here especially of Eva Mattes in the famous Reeperbahn vomiting scene. Of Vadim Glowna’s “Desperado City” (1981) and there of Beate Finckh. And before that . . . of course of Lemke’s “Rocker” (1971) and “Paul” (1974). And again before Lemke, one remembers Jürgen Roland’s Hamburg thrillers par excellence: “Polizeirevier Davidswache” (1964) and “Die Engel von St. Pauli” (1969), and then Wolfgang Staudte’s last film, the wonderfully dubious “Fluchtweg St. Pauli” (1971) – and a few years earlier, there was a black and white Francesco Rosi in Hamburg “I magliari”, in German “Auf St. Pauli ist der Teufel los” (1959), with weekend mass brawls in the harbor district, the likes of which German cinema had never seen.
Hamburg inspired stories. There you can always see the contrast between the top and the bottom. The mother of Gibbi’s child has married a villa owner, “Paul”, the gangster, breaks into a Pöseldorf party with primal force – West Germany “right at the bottom”. How to tell a story? Some people believed at the time that cinema could be healed by proletarian adventures or documentary elements through the precariat community, healing through the unvarnished proximity to the people the establishment overlooks every day, casual workers, idlers, small-time gangsters.
“That is real life, the other is the false one,” Rolf Basedow had his West Berlin pimp Hotte ponder many years later. We down here, at least we are alive, even if we suffer, you up there are already dead. Uwe Schrader’s West Berlin garbage ballad “Kanakerbraut” (1983), in the same city Uwe Frießner’s prostitute song “Das Ende des Regenbogens” (1979). And in 1992 Schrader also shot the amusingly melancholic “Mau Mau”, a kind of early farewell to the West German neighborhood as we knew it, both in German film and in the reversed reality.
Old films tell more
In addition to the people we meet, the best thing about the cinema is always the places and the wide or narrow spaces in which what has to happen takes place. And from time to time certain areas have been popular in German film. Berlin has always been popular, of course, Munich sometimes more, sometimes less. In the late 70s and into the 90s there was a NRW wave, from “Theo against the World” to “Little Sharks”, even if the protagonists quickly end up in Munich.
And of course Hamburg, St. Pauli, where you can see in every decade how the shabby Wilhelminian facades, the mind-numbing wastelands, the uncontrolled growth in the city are being renovated and redesigned by the city planners who know nothing about life, only about glass and steel and profits.
The old films often depict the layers we walk around on today, without being aware of the subterranean lines that once led directly from people to us. You would need infrared cameras for the soul to find the deposited outlines of our inherited psychoses. The old films are like emotional archaeology; they often know more. And they also know more about filmmaking. For example, that every creation of authenticity, of simulated “realism” in film, also contains the deepest artificiality. “Gibbi West Germany” has just seen the light of day again, and you can see and celebrate how far Christel Buschmann, the author and director, dared to venture into the wastelands of the soul in the Hamburg neighborhood in 1979. How comforting.
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