A police officer pulls up his arms, from the uniform of a third arm stands with gun. Nuns go on the crazy pace with a duck around the curve of a coast road, umbrellas get caught, a man with a pipe stakelt awkwardly on a tennis court.
My France was initially entirely of such summer movie images. The language was in the villages across the border. They came out with the bike. They were called La Calamine, Plombières and Aubel, run-down Walloon mining villages with gray stone buildings. In between endless, uniform built-ways: single-family houses with hipped roofs clinkered, copper door handles with sun symbols and English gardens. High unemployment and bored cows on wild scrap yards. Belgium. France was somewhere behind them.
had some point I get a pen pal. My French teacher had insisted. Friends from her hometown. The golf course was an enclosed sea. The old Center, the fishing village right on the beach had entered my pen pal before. My walk on his own shocked the whole family. What all could have happened. The pen pal despised French films. In his television said American film heroes and of course, Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill with incredible speed French.
in the only cinema in Aachen, a former porn cinema, I was a permanent resident, not only because it was comfortable armchairs and tables with bottle holders. The entrance fee for students was reduced significantly and we often had the six clock performance for ourselves. Were shown in principle series, one of the first was the French Cinema. The characters spoke German, quite against the lip movements. A man and a woman with a grotesque verbal duel, which ends with the man wrapping in a chaste and Flokati beside her to bed. A victory that tastes like a clear defeat. My Night with Maud. After that night I had no French film more.
In the 80 French films were not brittle treat for film buffs. The writer-director proved that European cinema successful and entertaining at the same time is possible without giving up his artificial right. The offensive line with American models I found, if they ever noticed me, rather disturbing. Belmondo I liked if he failed the coolness. The proximity of Italian films was noticeable. Again there were strong women, where men exerting themselves in an unequal battle of the sexes. Mostly the films were of men who apparently possessed enough irony, love affairs by telling its lost power games.
The men and women of these films were able to talk and set language and its uncertainty as a weapon to deceive their conversation partner. Dialogue was not problematic accessory strong imagery but equal. Literature, as it was in France has always been closer to the spoken word than in Germany. Bove, Queneau, but already Flaubert, Standhal.
The promise of the French government, the World a great European cinema to give is, as has been elsewhere made into film schools and highly subsidized Blockbuster attempts. The national art-house productions are rare and usually only seen as a television broadcast on ARTE abroad. Even in France, it is obviously not easy to compete with the apparatus. Eric Rohmer, who died this year, has been given for any of his movies funds. His last three films were no longer in the German cinema. Not even as an obituary. A detached generation, not a genre gone under, no spilled cinema scene. New shows are new and unexpected. And sometimes it takes because today going through the documentary or peripheral areas, such as North Africa or the French-speaking Belgium.
