Discourse Both Internal and External – The German Film Academy

Logo of the German Film Academy (© Deutsche Filmakademie) After a somewhat skeptical start, the German Film Academy is now an established institution that not only awards the annual German Film Prize, but also strives to promote communication about German film.

The beginning was turbulent. The decision in 2005 to allow the German Film Academy to award the German Film Prize caused quite a stir, especially as it is endowed with 2.5 million euros. “In future the film people themselves are to say who gets the German Film Prize – it is like the farmers deciding for themselves who gets the subsidies,” harsh criticism indeed from Dr. Josef Schnelle, member of the executive board of the German Film Critics’ Association. In a newspaper article in the Berliner Zeitung on the occasion of the awards the year before, Schnelle, who also was heard by the Parliamentary Committee for Culture and Media, was not just airing his own personal grievance, but was speaking for about 400 other filmmaking professionals from Germany. Although they had not protested directly against the academy, they did in fact have some misgivings about the whole thing, because the then State Secretary for Culture, Christine Weiss, intended to place the decision on who was to get the prize money, which came from public funds, in private hands.

People were afraid that the members of the academy themselves would start awarding themselves the prizes – from one friend to another, so to speak. Even the authority of the new institution was questioned. “This academy is not,” said Josef Schnelle, “as the name suggests, a collection of the cleverest minds in the German film business, but more like a slightly enlarged Yellow Pages directory that lists the names of all the former film prize laureates …”

An expression of a new self-confidence

Enlarge image Actors Iris Berben and Bruno Ganz are now at the helm of the presidency. (© Deutsche Filmakademie) This so heavily criticized institution was established in Berlin in 2003 on the initiative of about 100 people from the film business. This amalgamation of creative people was to spawn a forum for the industry, as was already the case in many other countries. After many long lean years, the German film industry at last started to pick up after the turn of the millennium and the academy became an expression of this new self-confidence. Alongside fostering communication among each other the aim was also to promote contact with audiences.

When the academy held its first awards ceremony for the German Film Prize - the 55th time in the history of the prize with the highest endowment of any German cultural award, the institution was able to boast about 600 members. Today there are about 1,200 members from all sectors of the industry. Among them directors like Fatih Akin, Andreas Dresen or Wolfgang Petersen, actors like Jürgen Prochnow, cameramen like Michael Ballhaus or musicians like Klaus Doldinger. The presidency has now changed after six years. After the producer, Günter Rohrbach, and the actress, Senta Berger, there is now an actors’ duo at the helm of the academy – Iris Berben and Bruno Ganz.

It is not a self-service store

The criticism might not have completely died down, but in the meantime things have become much quieter. Right from the start the selection of the nominated films not only surprised the most hard-boiled skeptics, but also won them over. No way was it going to be the big productions alone – á la Bernd Eichinger, one of the academy’s initiators - that would win the prizes, as was feared so vociferously beforehand.

Logo of the German Film Prize (© Deutsche Filmakademie) At this year’s 60th awards ceremony of the “Lola,” as the German Film Prize is also known, the reviews were somewhat more moderate than in the years before. “When it first came into being 60 years ago the film prize served only as a means of promoting cinema and was a rather dull affair,” wrote the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

In the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper one could read that the “Lola” in the meantime had become “something like Oscar’s little sister” and the Sächsische Zeitung newspaper came to the following conclusion, “Initial discussions on whether a US-style academy would make the awards fairer have now fallen silent. After all anybody from the film industry can join, pay their dues and vote.”

Better communication

At the time the setting up of a German Film Academy was necessary and had been long in coming, says managing director, Alfred Holighaus. “It was just not feasible for a country that had something to say in the film world to not have an institution like this.” Today the academy is like “a higher-level institution in which all the people working in the film industry, no matter what associations they belong to, can meet on equal terms and communicate – be it a producer or a make-up artist.” Awarding the German Film Prize is of course still the academy’ greatest task. The fact that in the various nomination committees colleagues have to vote on the work of their fellow colleagues has led to a side effect that should not be underestimated. According to Holighaus, the fact that everybody has to be familiar with the nominated films led to a much more intensive focusing on the works of other people and, as a result, to much more intensive communication with colleagues.

Logo of vierundzwanzig.de (© Deutsche Filmakademie) The academy however did not just intensify the discourse on German filmmaking inside the established industry, it also made an effort to promote new, young talent with its “First Step Award.” This is an annual prize that awards winners the opportunity to become the “godchild” of an established member of the academy, who will then give them any practical or theoretical help they might need. Audiences have also benefited from the work the academy does. Above all from an ambitious project called www.vierundzwanzig.de, a comprehensive knowledge portal all about the “origins, development and workings of cinema.” It came into being two years ago and is maintained by the cutter, Peter R. Adam. “It is a sort of Wikipedia of film,” explains Alfred Holighaus. It is used by film fans, schoolchildren and teachers. In the meantime it has generated quite a lot of material for use in the realm of film education. That, too, is yet another contribution to the discourse on the functions of the academy.

Written by journalist and author Sabine Pahlke-Grygier.

Translation: Paul McCarthy

© Goethe-Institut