Essential World Cinema: 5 Best German Films

Writing a guide to five essential German films is daunting. There are dozens of films that might be called essential; there are a number of directors (Lang, Murnau, Herzog, and Fassbinder) who could easily fill up a list of five essential films all by themselves. Additionally, the German film industry stretches back as far as Hollywood’s, and encompasses numerous movements with various aesthetic and narrative concerns. As a result, it is difficult to define what exactly German cinema is, let alone reduce it to a list of five films.

Still, I have managed to select five that I think are among the nation’s best. There are plenty of great films excluded, of course, and some of those left out could easily swap places with the ones present. That said, these five films will give you a sense of the best Germany has to offer. I have also included some honorable mentions with each film, to point you in the direction of similar movies you may want to check out.

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

German Expressionism is the movement people most often associate with silent German cinema, and while Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is not the first example of the form (that would be the 1913 version of The Student of Prague), it is the film that defined the style. Apart from its historical significance, it is also one of the most beautiful and effective horror films ever made.

The film is a story told in flashback by Francis, a young man who runs across a sinister carnival barker named Dr. Caligari. Caligari runs an act where a somnambulist named Cesare predicts the future for his audience. Cesare is, in fact, Caligari’s slave and carries out crimes to pursue his master’s agenda. While the plot is fairly straightforward, even today the film is an effective, creepy horror film and leads up to one of the first great twists in cinema history. It is also visually stunning.

Expressionism as a movement was less concerned with realism and instead used heavy stylization to express the emotional states of the characters. In Caligari, Wiene uses set designs that rely on heavily distorted shapes and exaggerated character make-up and costumes to create a mood rather than accurately represent real places and people. The sharp, distorted angles of the village give the sense of a world gone mad (fitting for a film made in the immediate aftermath of WWI), and the characters constantly seem in danger of losing themselves to the chaos that surrounds them. A sequence in which Cesare kidnaps Francis’s fiancé and carries her across the impossible roof tops of the village remains brilliant and tense.

Caligari and other German Expressionist films would go on to influence filmmakers across the world for decades. It was the major visual influence for the Universal horror films of the 1930s, and later for the film noir cycle of the 1940s-1950s. There are plenty of other films to check out if Caligari piques your interest in German Expressionism. The films of F.W. Murnau are certainly essential here, and their absence from this list is my biggest regret. His horror masterpiece, Nosferatu and the kammerspiel (chamber drama) The Last Laugh are both must-see films for anyone interested in the Expressionist movement.

 

Metropolis (1926)

While at times we seem to believe that spectacle-driven blockbusters were invented in 1970s Hollywood with Star Wars, several silent German films established the template nearly 100 years ago. A number of these films remain brilliant today, with effects that hold up surprisingly well, but none of them are better than Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis, which was, at the time of its release, one of the most expensive films ever made.

Metropolis tells the story of a futuristic society that is divided between a privileged elite that lives high above the city, enjoying the sun-light and recreation in wide-open gardens, and an oppressed working-class who live and work beneath the city, maintaining the machines that make the leisurely life of the upper class possible. The son of one of the elites falls in love with a woman named Maria, who is from the lower levels. Maria is trying to raise awareness of the workers’ plight by taking workers’ children to the upper levels to see how the privileged live. Later a mad scientist uses Maria to create a robot that impersonates her and leads a worker revolt in an attempt to take over the city for himself.

The city and set design are beautiful examples of the art deco style. Even today the special effects are stunning. Using a combination of matte effects, stop-motion, and drawn animation, Lang makes the city seem just as alive as the alien worlds in any Star Wars film. The composite shots showing the city’s buildings, roaming search lights, and moving trains are astonishing, and go a long way to establish the film’s theme of conflict between the upper and lower classes. The action scenes towards the end, which involve an escape from the flooding undercity, are exceptionally well done and remain exciting action sequences.

If you are still looking for more silent, effects-heavy epics after Metropolis, Lang’s two-part Die Nibelungen, a fantasy film based on the Germanic myth that inspired Lord of the Rings, and F.W. Murnau’s horror fantasy Faust are also worth checking out.

 

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, inspired by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, is one of the best films in any language to address the viciousness of xenophobia. The film tells the story of Emmi, an elderly cleaning woman who falls in love with the much younger Ali, a foreign worker from Morocco. The two quickly get married and must deal with the bigotry of Emmi’s family, neighbors, and co-workers.

A plot summary fails to fully capture how enthralling the film is. I put it on, planning to rewatch only a few clips in preparation for this piece, and found myself unable to turn it off and get to work. The film is captivating in many ways, but it is the shot composition that sets this apart from a standard melodrama.

Fassbinder was part of the New German Cinema, a movement to adopt the arthouse techniques of directors throughout 1960s Europe to the German cinema. Here he uses the visual elements of cinema to explore his themes. Fassbinder stages the protagonists in tight frames, often doorways, to emphasize their isolation from the rest of society; he uses reverse shots of others staring off-screen to illustrate how the couple is shunned and ridiculed by the outside world. Emmi and Ali’s love story touches me more deeply than almost any romance I have seen on screen, and the story of an interracial couple nearly torn apart by prejudice is one that, sadly, remains as relevant as it was in 1974.

If you like the arthouse feel of Fear Eats the Soul, there are plenty of other great films from the New German Cinema to check out. Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is absolutely gorgeous, if it does lack the heart of Fear Eats the Soul. Werner Herzog is a must-see director, with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu the Vampyre (a 1979 remake of Murnaus’ film) being his best. Finally, Wim Wenders needs to be mentioned in any exploration of the New German Cinema. Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire (1987) are probably his best, but I recommend starting with Alice in the Cities. It gives a good sense of Wenders’ style and themes, but is much more accessible to newcomers.

 

Das Boot (1981)

Moving out of the arthouse for a moment, Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot is an exciting, thoughtful war story with plenty of action and suspense. The film follows the crew of a U-Boat during WWII. Controversial at the time of its release for portraying German sailors sympathetically, the movie remains one of the best war films ever made. The characters are complex, often conflicted about their duties, and well-realized considering how many the film has to juggle. As with most great war movies, the film does an excellent job of balancing the tedium of waiting for something, anything to happen with the terror of combat.

The battle sequences are tense, and use the blind nature of submarine warfare to their advantage. The viewer feels as uncertain about where the enemy is and where the next attack will come from as the sailors. Petersen emphasizes the cramped quarters by using tight medium-shots and dolly shots where the camera travels through the boat, brushing aside curtains and slipping through narrow doorways as it rushes along. Together these techniques allow the viewer to feel the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of submarine warfare. The film is long (depending on the cut, it runs around three and a half hours), but it never feels bloated; it is engaging from beginning to end, largely because Peterson is so effective at making you feel what it is like to be a part of this crew.

Some other great German action films that are worth checking out are Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and Philipp Stölzl’s North Face.

 

Phoenix (2014)

In recent years, German film and television has turned increasingly to heritage films that address 20th-century German history. One of the best of these films, and one that has not gotten nearly the acclaim it deserves, is Christian Petzold’s Phoenix. The story follows Nelly, a Jewish woman who has survived the death camps, but at great personal cost; she has had to have total facial reconstruction surgery and no longer looks like herself. She tries to go back to her old life, and returns to her husband (who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis), but is not recognized. The couple then attempts a con where Nelly impersonates herself to get her own inheritance.

The film’s plot is admittedly a bit complicated, and best viewed allegorically, but its themes are rich. It has been compared to Hitchcock’s Vertigo for how it explores issues of identity and performance, but it also has a lot to say about how society deliberately ignores or sanitizes the atrocities and trauma of the past in the name of moving forward. Nelly spends much of the film avoiding thinking about her time in the camp, and her husband has mostly forgotten about her, perhaps willfully failing to recognize her in an attempt to put his past with her behind him.

Apart from the fascinating themes, the film has a visual style that evokes old Hollywood. Petzold shoots the film like a noir, and Nina Hoss, the actress who plays Nelly, is reminiscent of a classic starlet. The final scene of Nelly singing in a bar is not only evocative of this noir tradition, but is an absolutely gorgeous scene in its own right.

If you are looking for other more recent films, there are a number of other excellent contemporary German heritage films, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, which is a paranoia thriller set in 1980s East Germany, is probably the best.

These five films, while some of the best 100 years of German cinema has to offer, obviously only begin to scratch the surface. I recommend watching these five films, and then, if you find any of them particularly interesting, go back and explore some of the similar titles that I have recommended.