The Hollywood Reporter
By Scott Roxborough
As Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin and the
Coen Brothers “True Grit was welcomed by an audience wild for Westerns.
Germans have a long and enduring love affair with the
most American of genres. Wild West tales from “High Noon” to “Once Upon a Time
In the West” to “Dances With Wolves” have been huge hits here. There are more
than a hundred Wild West clubs across the county where grown men (and a few
women) gather to play cowboys and Indians on stage sets of saloons and hitching
posts. Iconic Western images of the wide, unbroken horizon, the solitary cowboy
on the lonely trail or the sheriff bringing justice to a lawless land are as
engraved on the German mind as the characters of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
But there is also a tradition of Westerns made in
Germany. In West Germany in the 1960s there were the Winnetou films, based on
the Wild West novels of Karl May, a German writer who never visited America.
The adventures of the Apache brave Winnetou and his white-skinned blood brother
Old Shatterhand were instant hits and are still staples on German TV.
Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to the franchise in
“Inglorious Basterds” in the scene where German soldiers are playing a who-am-I
guessing game where the answer is "Winnetou, chief of the Apaches!"
Bavarian director Bully Herbig went one step further with
his 2001 western spoof “Mannitou's Shoe”, which lovingly mocks the Winnetou
films. It earned some $90 million, making it the most successful German film of
all time.
It was a different story in the East. If anything, in the
former GDR, Westerns were even more popular.
"When I was a kid in Leipzig, East Germany, playing
Indians was an antidote to the Young Pioneer's indoctrination and propagated
anti-Americanism," says Peter Bischoff, president of the German
association for the study of the Western, a non-profit group which boasts the
world's largest collection of Western literature worldwide outside the Library
of Congress.
But Bischoff, like most Germans, sympathized more with
the redskins than the palefaces.
"When the roles were chosen (to play cowboy and
Indians), everybody wanted to be an Indian," he says. "It was left to
the losers to play the cowboy. Playing Indians connected us to the land of our
dreams, the officially scorned capitalist America."
But love of these "imperialist" movies didn't
suit East Berlin's communist regime. Instead of fighting their people's love of
Westerns, they decided to replace American cowboy movies with state-approved
homemade "Indianerfilms" or Indian Films. In these East Germany
productions, the traditional hero roles are reversed.
"The imperialist cowboy was substituted by the
anti-imperialist Indian who was honored for his brave resistance to Yankee
greed and imperialism," says Bischoff. "They were really just
agitprop. But popular from 1966 through 1975, DEFA studios made one
'Indianerfilm' a year."
The Western has gone in and out of style in America. Many
hailed “True Grit”, with its 10 Oscar nominations and U.S. box office success,
as a return to form for the genre. But in Germany, East and West, there's no
need for a Westerns comeback. German cowboys and Indians never hung up their
guns.
No comments:
Post a Comment