Since 2018, Ellen Harrington, Director of the Frankfurt film Museum. Now an important Institution to be added with the “Cooper Center”. What do you like about Cooper, so, says the American in the DW-Interview.
There are a few names of the Directors, who have dug deep with the people of your country, when it comes to the cinema outside of the USA to the 2. World war comes, Cooper will take a prominent place, told Ellen Harrington. You need to know. Since January of last year, Harrington is the “German film Institute and film Museum” (DFF). Previously, she was a long time where for many people in the world, the heart of cinema beats in Los Angeles and Hollywood.
Since 1993, the American worked at the “Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences”, which gives every year to the Oscars. Later, she stood at the top of the planned Museum of the Academy, the end of this year opened. Harrington has curated 50 exhibitions on the theme of cinema and Film.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: in the foreign value of the estimated
Since one and a half years now, the German Film is the focus of Harrington’s. On Monday, the DFF 70, celebrates-year anniversary, the state Minister for Culture Monika Grütters is expected. But more important than the anniversary will be celebrations of the same time as the inauguration of the new “Cooper center”.
Ellen Harrington in addition to the greatest treasure of the Cooper archives: the hand-written documents of the Director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder is for many film historians the most important German Director of the postwar period. “The Name Cooper as a Director of the 20. Century is really a term,” says Harrington, “in the whole world, but especially in the United States. Fassbinder and his films have always provoked strong reactions, especially in New York.” In order for Harrington to play on the groundbreaking Fassbinder retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
The German Director standing since then in the United States, at least in the culture of the interested part of the American Public, in the focus. Harrington refers to in this context, but also on comprehensive Fassbinder Retrospectives in other countries, the comprehensive exhibition of the Cinémathèque française in Paris last year, or the big movie show in Australia: “The Name of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a worldwide brand, and there is a wide range of activities to back up his work digitally for the future.”
Cooper stands next to Günter Grass and Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys
The like some surprise in Germany. The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) said in the run-up to the opening of the “Cooper center” on this mismatch in perception: “the fact That he was not recognised as the pre-eminent artists of post-war Germany, of the country no less important than Beuys or Richter or Grass, although clearly uncomfortable, that happened (…) for the first time not in Germany, not in Frankfurt, but in New York.” At the latest, with the major MoMA retrospective in 1997, his international rank is undisputed, the FAZ.
Files, files, files: The “Cooper Center” evaluates the analog age
Even if Fassbinder in Germany, the Experts, of course, is no stranger, as some of his movies have fallen a bit into oblivion. This of course has to do with the early death of Fassbinder in 1982. He died at the age of 37 and left behind an incredibly large factory. Unlike his companions, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, the Œvre of 1945 in the Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen, Germany-born Director, can be considered completed.
Or does it not? Now its doors for the science and all the other Film Interested in opening “Cooper Center” is to change something. Fassbinder’s films to speak especially today’s generations, is Ellen Harrington is convinced: “Because of Fassbinder’s films were so direct and so raw, so honest.”
Fassbinder’s films have a particular Aesthetic
His characters talked like real people, says the Director of the DFF. “Fassbinder’s stories are incredibly telling in a dynamic and expressive, this is why I believe that this is a cinema that can also reach out to young people today.” Cooper had never “been to a cinema of pure entertainment or even Escapism” interested in: “He really had something to say, he had a very special Vision.”
Tireless worker: The Director (second from right) in 1971, during filming of “the merchant of four seasons”
There is an example of this? “As Fassbinder’s women will be visible and prominent roles within its powerful stories told has given, which was very visionary and modern!” To see a Fassbinder Film, you don’t have the feeling to have a movie from previous decades, says Harrington: “they are very dynamic, and therefore also very close.”
Ellen Harrington: “A Moment of enlightenment”
She has a favorite film, a Cooper Film that has impressed you particularly? “As I films have started to, and I eventually realized that there is also a cinema outside of the United States, I discovered the international cinema, a cinema that appeals to a directly and directly and take, I saw Fassbinder’s ‘The marriage of Maria Braun’.”
Hanna Schygulla and George Byrd in “The marriage of Maria Braun”
She then became aware of what could be cinema outside of the Hollywood cosmos that relies more on conventional story-telling: “for me This was a Moment of enlightenment and wonderment.”
“The marriage of Maria Braun” described in 1979, the post-war experience of a woman (played by Hanna Schygulla), the in the Economic Wonderland of Germany arranged with the circumstances. The Film was also abroad a spectator success.
Fassbinder’s special view on German history
“If you come from the USA and with films about the 2. World war grew up, which can be described as propaganda, which were one-sided in terms of the assessment of the war that had a clear Good-Evil-scheme, then Cooper has brought forth something New,” says the American Museum Director in Germany.
Isabelle Louise Bastian captures everything that Fassbinder left behind
Ask for a collective debt had been considered in the case of Cooper, to personal responsibility, questions of how people behave and survive in such moments. Fassbinder had brought across with a very personal, powerful view: “This has me and other people who have seen the films of Fassbinder, very impressed.”
A little of this perspective on Fassbinder’s work, which was from overseas, other than in Germany, Harrington and the staff of the “Cooper center” beginning on Monday to convey to the Public. In close proximity to the Goethe-University in the heart of Frankfurt is located, wants to appeal to the research facility (in Conjunction with the film Museum in the Frankfurt Museum embankment, where Fassbinder’s films are then shown on the big screen) especially students.
You, but also scientists from all over the world, and others interested in film, then come to a treasure: The collections in 1986 by Fassbinder’s mother, founded the “Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation” from Berlin and New York (by Fassbinder’s former editor Juliane Maria Lorenz Wehling 1992 was taken over) have been combined with the holdings of the DDF.
Work screenplay of Lili Marleen: Fassbinder, a manic planner was, his films were created in my head and on paper
And not only that: The “Cooper Center” is not only collects Cooper’s documents, but also houses a focus of “New German Film”. The Following includes numerous and Vorlässe of companions such as Volker Schlöndorff and Reinhard Hauff, but also younger Directors such as Romuald Karmakar, and Dani Levy. Germany will have in the future, in Frankfurt, a very special historic cinema treasure.