On Screen

...Four expressionist movies of that era were masterpieces of the silent screen: Mayer and Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr...

...The clearest statement of his intentions can be found in one of his Sprechstiicke, in a reference to another work: "This is no slice of life...

...After her marriage breaks up, the woman goes home and walks around her living room on stilts...

...Formally, their postmodernism is most evident in their abandonment of strict narrative logic and the conventions of plot and character development, plus a willingness to approach a diversity of subjects in a nearly uniform style...

...Handke's unsuccessful effort at overcoming that inherent bias is symptomatic of the postmodernist dilemma: The attempt to create art that is, not that means something, often results in art that is nothing at all...

...To Nabokov, committing this "perfect crime" is analogous to creating a "masterpiece...

...Only a now and a now and a now exist here...

...For all his concentration on minutiae, Handke is neither an absurdist nor a nihilist...

...Throughout the '20s and even after the stock-market crash, Hollywood began offering more lucrative career possibilities than Berlin...

...Certainly it is not philosophical...

...That year, Mayer departed for England, Pabst, Wiene and Max Ophuls left for France, and Billy Wilder went to the United States...

...A critical problem is the terrible acting...

...Caligari (1919), Wegener's The Golem (1920), Murnau's Nos-feratu (1922), and Lang's Metropolis (1927...

...he simply stripped the woman of most of her qualities by not describing them and made her nearly anonymous by consistently referring to her as "the woman" or just "she...

...No action that has occurred elsewhere is reenacted here...

...Fassbinder is the youngest (born in 1946), most varied and most prolific of the lot (33 films since 1965...

...Ganz mumbles and swallows his lines, as usual...

...Rather than tell a story, Handke examines in minute and banal detail the life of a woman (Edith Clever) after her separation from her husband (Bruno Ganz, seen last year in Wenders' The American Friend...

...As Andre Bazin noted long ago, in the medium of film the tendency toward realism is very strong...

...the cameraman Karl Freund...

...Fassbinder compounds these heavy-handed blunders...

...Nor did matters improve with the end of World War 11...

...As the narrator's literary fancies distance him ever further from the reality of his crime, the mystery plot is increasingly shrouded by Nabokov's layers of self-consciousness...

...while the narrator plans and then carries out the murder, he records his machinations in a journal in which he speculates about literature, linguistics and the problems of translation, and even compares the police working on the case to hostile critics (Despair, translated by Nabokov himself, was his First novel in English...

...Among them were author Peter Handke, playwrights Franz Xaver Kroetz and Wolfgang Bauer, and the directors Volker Schlondorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fass-binder, Alexander Kluge, and Wim Wenders...

...Practically nothing happens...

...the actors Conrad Veidt, Emil Jannings, Elisabeth Berg-ner, and Marlene Dietrich...

...And although Handke wants to offend the audience, he is not after Brecht's "alienation effect...

...the screenwriter Carl Mayer...

...he has no ideological axe to grind...

...Regrettably, Despair is enough to —well, make one despair...

...Murnau, Freund and Ernst Lubitsch (another Reinhardt protege) left Germany in mid-decade...

...The UFA studios were in the Eastern zone and were quickly assimilated by the newly established Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (defa...

...The pacing, in typical postmodern style, is completely discontinuous, rendering the action on screen incomprehensible...

...In the novel, the narrator is named Hermann Karlovich...

...Since it is his first big-budget feature, one could speculate that Fassbinder simply lacked the discipline imposed on him in the past by budgetary considerations...

...On the other hand, Handke meant these roles to be dramatically unmotivated and psychologically ludicrous...

...But events conspired to put an end to such achievements...

...The chief failing of the script is its inability to find the cinematic equivalent of Nabokov's convoluted prose structure...

...In addition, Handke's refusal to supply a semantics (to continue the linguistic metaphor), makes his film meaningless...

...For serial progression or plot and character development or any other "literary" connective tissue, Handke wants to substitute a purely visual style to give coherence to all these "nows...

...Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) and Lang's M (1931) were two of the first triumphs of the sound era...

...One confusing scene is joined to the next only by the director's and the writer's mockery of the characters, of the performers (notably Ferreol, whose gross nude body is frequently displayed to provoke smirks), and particularly of the audience...

...Things changed with the appearance in the mid '60s of a group of young—almost all were under the age of 30—dramatists, filmmakers and writers...

...With the exception of Leni Riefen-stahl's documentaries (Triumph of the Will and Olympiad), no films of any value were made in Nazi Germany...

...Strolling with his wife, the husband suddenly somersaults and then resumes walking as if he had done nothing extraordinary...

...Many were initially connected with Max Rein-hardt's famed Deutsche Theater in Berlin, and then went on to Univer-sum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the national film company started in 1917 with government funds...

...When the Nazis came to power in 1933, UFA and the rest of the industry fell under the control of Goebbel's propaganda ministry, which immediately banned Lang's The Last Wilt of Dr...

...two years later, Lang and Otto Preminger (still another former Reinhardt associate) also came to the U.S...

...Or perhaps because this is his first English-language project, he could not comprehend the wretchedness of the acting by Dirk Bogarde (whose eyebrows twitch as uncontrollably as his lips curl) and especially Andrea Fer-reol (whose native tongue is French), or of the writing by Stoppard...

...in the movie, his name is changed to Hermann Hermann, lest we overlook (as if we could) the character's dissociation...

...Schlondorff, for example, has directed both a costume epic {Michael Kohlhaas) and an examination of contemporary society (A Free Woman) in a similar fashion, as has Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God and Stroszek...

...Although it is difficult to generalize about his erratic oeuvre, in the past he has had better luck with adaptations (Jail Bail) than with his original screenplays (Kalzelmacher...

...If both the story and the characters are besides the point in the Left-Handed Woman, what is the point...

...Erich von Stroheim had already emigrated many years before, as had von Sternberg, who returned only briefly to make The Blue Angel...

...Mabuse...

...In the first two postwar decades some talented actors —Maximilian Schell, Kurt Jurgens, Horst Buchholz, Romy Schneider?did emerge, but their best work was not in German movies...

...The art, however, was hardly thriving in the West...

...I believe his motivation is purely esthetic: He wants to rearrange the syntax of the cinema, so to speak, to create films that do not refer to or represent anything...

...Supported by the Soviet Union, defa cranked out miles of qua-sipropaganda footage stressing Socialist realism and de-Nazification—again prompting a mass emigration, this time from East to West Germany...

...Unfortunately, nearly two hours of "nows" united only by Muller's lovely color photography—like two hours of foolishness unified only by Fass-binder's disdain—are excruciatingly boring...

...But in the movie, we are constantly aware that we are watching a particular woman played by a particular actress...

...Clever, who was excellent in The Marquise of O, stands around mooning like a cross between a Teutonic Glenda Jackson and a dimwitted calf...

...Produced by Wenders (who adapted the author's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick for the screen), the film was photographed by Robby Muller and edited by Peter Przygodda, two of Wenders' long-time collaborators...

...There were no new directors or technicians of any note, and the West German cinema mostly consisted of second-rate imitations of British horror films and American Westerns, starring has-beens like Stewart Granger and Lex Barker...

...there is no trace of Ionesco's humor or Beckett's ontological reduc-tionism in his movie...

...The novel's narrator is plagued by dissociation to the extent of becoming obsessed with the idea of murdering himself and getting away with it—by killing a man whom he takes to be his exact double...

...They have moved beyond the adversary culture esthetically by rejecting the expressionism of the Weimar avant-garde, and politically by shunning Socialist realism (even though some of them are nominally Marxists...

...Differing widely as artists, these Austrians and Germans nevertheless can be characterized as postmodernists...

...Prior to the period of decline, though, German and Austrian movie makers constituted a veritable pantheon of the fledgling cinema: the directors Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Robert Wiene, Paul Wegener, and G. W. Pabst...

...The protagonist has also had his social standing transformed—from a member of "the cream of the smug middle class" in Germany in 1930 to an emigre aristocrat—to deride his decadence, and some Nazis have even been included to underscore the point...

...The woman has dull conversations, takes a job and makes new friends (one is played by Rudiger Vogler, star of Wenders' Im Laufder Zeit...

...In the novel, for better or worse, Handke was able to succeed with such a minimalist approach...

...Thus there was some reason to be mildly optimistic about his latest movie, Despair, with a script by Tom Stoppard from the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov...

...Stoppard has reduced these complex, civilized ironies to a series of gags...

...German postmodernism, Peter Hand-ke, has himself entered the movie arena with an adaptation of his novel, The Left-Handed Woman...

...Then, as abruptly and arbitrarily as it begins, the film ends...