KRIMI! Magazine

Little did I know that two months after my last blog post (gulp, has it really been that long?) promoting the heavily Krimi-focused Death at the Grindhouse blog, I would be involved in an exciting new project with Boris Brosowski, the founder of that blog!

During a recent trip to Germany earlier this month I met up with Boris in person and geeked out over four hours about Krimis and adjacent genres. 

We also finalised plans for a new English language magazine dedicated to the Krimi genre. There will be a 0 Number out at around Christmas and then from next year with the proper Number 1 a regular series of releases.

Needless to say: I am super excited about this.

The cover and design ideas are still very much in the planning stages but Boris has already started a new blog that will provide updates on the progress of this so go and check it out.

Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin (Book review)

Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin (“Klaus Kinski - I’m just the way I am”) is quite possibly the best value film book I have ever discovered. 

Last year I bought this for only €2.76 (plus international postage of about €5 to Ireland) from one of Amazon Germany’s market sellers. Up until very recently it was still available along that priceline though the same seller (MEDIMOPS) that I also got my copy from and who is willing to ship internationally has recently raised the price to around the €15 mark but even at that price it is still a Must Have in my eyes.

This is for what they call the paperback version. The hardcover usually goes for considerably more but even the paperback version is not too far off from being a softcover coffee table book, not a standard sized paperback as one would expect from the description. 

Published in 2001 by DTV this is a 288-page book that is also of interest to international movie fans with no German language skills as it is chock full of often lesser known photos tracing Kinski’s career from his start on the German and Austrian stage to his numerous film parts. 

For those who only know Kinski as a film star, seeing nearly one half of the book dedicated to his theatre work, reciting, recordings etc. will probably come as a surprise but he was indeed first and foremost a serious classical actor, something that from an international point of view had never been that well reported. At one point in his career he had even played with the idea of opening his own theatre and his manic and excessive speech practises had become notorious. 

The book collects essays from a variety of different authors like Georg Seeßlen about the different stages of his life and career as well as a reprint of a famous cover article by leading German news magazine Der Spiegel from as early as 1961. The book also quotes from Kinski’s letters to his first wife. 

The emphasis of this book is very much on Kinski the actor. As such it leaves out most references to his private life. 

Something unknown to me was that prior to any acting success whatsoever Kinski had actually tried making it as an artist and in 1954 even had managed to get a gallery in Berlin to display his charcoal drawings but just two days prior to the opening managed to annoy the gallery owner so much that the grand opening ended up being cancelled on short notice. Kinski, seriously underweight and underfed, had visited the gallery owner at his apartment. The owner took pity on him and gave him a couple of sandwiches that Kinski then shared with the owner’s bull terrier. Despite being repeatedly told not to feed the dog, Kinski kept this up even more aggressively until he was told to leave and to forget about his exhibition. 

Even when Kinski was an up and coming star of the German language stage, he was already prone to scandals and pretty much got fired from just about any theatre that had employed him. He broke stage conventions at the time by throwing kiss hands to an enthusiastic audience or argued excessively when he even heard the slightest murmur from them. 

During stage performances he often changed the classic texts and got in trouble with Bertold Brecht’s wife and publishers over that whereas Schiller had no way to intervene. 

These antics turned him into a Bête Noire for Classic Theatre but also highly successful especially with a younger slightly more rebellious audience. His one-man recitations are sold out. His LP recordings break all sales records for Spoken Word albums. There is traffic chaos at his first public signing and in 1958 he even enthrals an audience of a staggering 80.000 people during an open-air event. 

And as much as he makes financially during that time, it is never enough to finance his life style which eventually brings him to a career in international cinema where he accepts roles based on the money he’ll make with them and only once more in 1971 returns back to the stage in a radical new interpretation of the New Testament that became notorious due to Kinski’s excesses and attacks on audience members. The book highlights how very physically Kinski got involved in the Spaghetti Westerns in scenes that would usually require a stuntman and also points out that in contrast to his stage antics he never really "ruined" a film as such but was often commented upon for his professionalism. This was helped by the fact that he for the most part was never the star of the films and the "lesser" the director the more he could often shine.

 A notable exception to all those points was of course Werner Herzog with whom by chance he had already shared an apartment house for a while when the director was still a teenager. (Of course Kinski ended up being thrown out of the house.) 

Not just his behaviour but also his looks were quite transgressive carrying both male and female traits or looking both young and old. No wonder that he never quite fit into the Hollywood system with his later films but instead had his biggest success with his European roles. 

Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin is an amazing richly illustrated book and at the price this is currently still going for a worthwhile addition to any cult film aficionado's book shelf.

You can BUY THIS BOOK ON AMAZON GERMANY. Please find below some sample images of it.

Tim Bergfelder: International Adventures

I first heard about Tim Bergfelder’s International Adventures - German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s when reading Nicholas Schlegel’s excellent German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon: Dark Eyes of London. International Adventures makes a fantastic companion piece to Schlegel’s book as it provides the general cultural and business framework that Schlegel then focuses on specifically for the Krimi genre. Bergfelder includes a chapter on Krimis in his book but also includes Karl May and other adventure and genre movies as well as the wave of sex movies that started in the late 1960s. 

International Adventures is again an academic book so it’s not necessarily easy reading but it rewards the patient reader with a plethora of otherwise hard to obtain info. 

It also generally doesn’t come cheaply though I managed to get my copy for a measly tenner during a special promotion on Book Depository so it may be worth setting up an alert for other similar promotions. (At the time of writing though it still can be obtained fairly cheaply... at least for my neck of the woods.) 

Though the main focus is on the 1960s, the book also provides a wealth of info on the German film industry in the decades before and after, specifically the 1950s and 1970s. 

In contrast to a lot of other film books, this work is not so much about the creation of individual films (i.e. directors, stars or individual reviews) but on film as a business. As such this book has a much bigger slant on the big business of production and distribution companies as well as their marketing and general societal shifts and sociological acceptance of film as a product. 

One of biggest insights is how little Hollywood was of importance to German cinema goers up until the 1970s. Despite being faced with a potential avalanche of US productions after the end of WW2, Hollywood movies only on occasion featured in the Top 10 of the top grossing films each year. 

Instead the (West) German audience favoured homegrown or European productions or even older German movies that were being re-released. Even the most popular stars then were rarely American but usually German or European. 

Following an initial phase of more depressing Trümmerfilme (rubble films), more similar in line to Italian Neo Realism, the audience demanded more carefree entertainment to help them forget about their troubles so after an initial reluctance to support a new German movie industry, the Allies started granting permissions to build that industry back up from scratch, often with the assistance of de-nazified talents from the Hitler era or German writers and directors that had emigrated to Hollywood during the Third Reich and now gradually returned home. 

One popular genre during the 1950s were the Heimatfilme (often saccharine weepies set in German and Austrian mountain ranges). It was often symptomatic that the most successful productions were set abroad or in past times. This was gradually helped by a complex system of European co-productions that ensured that the films could be produced at higher budgets and be guaranteed to also sell abroad. Looking at a lot of German films at the time, it does appear that Germany may not have welcomed US movies that much but instead still celebrated a newfound cosmopolitanism regardless as displayed in the settings the films are based in and the stars featured there. 

The high time of those co-productions was during the 1960s and the author makes a very poignant claim that even ostensibly “German” films and series could not have been possible without this newfound cosmopolitan mindset. 

A case in point are indeed the Krimis. The Rialto series of 32 Edgar Wallace productions e.g. started off as Danish-German co-productions and ended up as Italo-German Giallo/Krimi hybrids and in between also saw mutual deals with French and English companies. 

 And needless to say their plots were also not based in Germany but in an imaginary England full of clichéd but sympathetic aristocratic and eccentric characters, based on the works of an author who had long since fallen out of favour in his home country but had still remained popular in Germany. 

Other similar productions would include the Mabuse, Jerry Cotton or Kommissar X movies. 

International Adventures features a lot of detail on the main business people behind distribution companies like Gloria (Ilse Kubaschewski) and Constantin as well as production companies such as Rialto (Horst Wendlandt) and CCC (Artur “Atze” Brauner) and even dives into some of the later bargain basement producers such as Wolf C. Hartwig’s Rapid. 

The author even makes a highly unusual but valid point that Harry Alan Towers’ co-productions may even count as “German” genre films given their often significant financial and talent involvement from there and as some of his movies were released much earlier in Germany than in the UK. 

He also highlights that Krimis and other German popular cinema usually tends to be reviewed from a typical Hollywood B-movie perspective, yet in their home country these were the most successful mainstream productions at the time so the traditional Anglo-American division of A and B pictures is just not suitable when analysing those films. 

All in all, a lot of food for thought in this book (this review really only covered the broad surface) and I for one will often return back to it. 

Book review on CINEPUNKED

 

CINEPUNKED just published my review of Nicholas G. Schlegel's German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Phenomenon: Dark Eyes of London, the first full length English language book on Rialto's Edgar Wallace Krimis.

Check it out and while you're at it also explore their podcast and everything else they have happening right now.

Nicholas G. Schlegel: German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon

Just finished reading Nicholas G. Schlegel's new book German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon, the first full length English language book dedicated to the 32 films that make up the Rialto Edgar Wallace series.

A proper review will be published elsewhere (and then also announced here) but in short: This is a quintessential book for anyone even remotely interested in those films. It's an academic publication but in no way a dry read. The only drawback is its price which will be unaffordable for most but if you can make do without a few meals to pick up the required shekels to purchase this, do. Else, see if you could at least possibly get a loan of it from a public or university library.

Joachim Kramp/Gerd Naumann: Das große Album der Edgar-Wallace-Filme

Shortly before Christmas German publishers Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf finally brought out Das große Album der Edgar-Wallace-Filme, a book that was 5 years in the making. Joachim Kramp, the original author, sadly never saw his project come to fruition as he had passed away a year previously. Kramp is known as one of the major Krimi- and Wallace aficionados and had previously written a number of other Wallace related tomes.

Though there have been other German books about the Wallace series Das große Album is especially of interest to an International clientele as it is primarily a lavish coffee table tome with little text. Other than some short introductory texts and forewords/interviews from Matthias Wendlandt, Peter Thomas, Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor and Karin Baal the bulk of the hernia inducing hard cover is dedicated to the publication of 2000 Wallace related PR photos, lobby cards and behind-the-scenes shots. A good number of those have previously never been published before. A good chunk, however, already has. The 5-year wait has unfortunately diminished the rarity of some of the material. Especially the German lobby cards which make up a good portion of the book have in the meantime already been reproduced elsewhere. Instead of some of those I would therefore have loved to see a stronger focus on International promotional material, an area that to this moment remains largely unexplored. Still, this is a lavishly illustrated labour of love and something I am proud to have on my book shelf.

Even better.....

Prior to the regular edition that is going to be out later this year, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf have released four sets of 500 limited copies each with autographs by Karin Dor, Peter Thomas, Karin Baal or Uschi Glas respectively at no additional costs. My own is signed by Miss Krimi, Karin Dor, herself.... and so is pretty much everyone else's who has ordered a copy so it appears that the Dor version is likely to sell out very quickly.

The downside.... ?

Well, what can I say? It ain't cheap.

The book goes for EUR 99.95 and can be ordered from the publisher or from Amazon.de. Postage within Germany, Austria and Switzerland is free, within the rest of the EU consecutively higher and as a rule and due to prohibitive postal charges the book is not being sold outside that area.

Unless you ask nicely. 

It appears that the publishers may ship to the US once it is requested by direct email request. Be, however, prepared to pay a shipping fee of around EUR 65.

Wanna get a good idea what the final product looks like? Head over here for a glance at some of the pages.