Tuesday is Cinema Day at Dortmund Cinestar, so I went with a fellow assistant to get some German film watching on the go.
I’ve made a pact with myself for the duration of my stay here in Germany; that is, to only watch German-language films, and I’ll tell you why.
Dubbing. The god-damned dubbing. I understand that Germans love American films too, but I just can’t stand this habit they have of dubbing anything English-language into German! I watched ‘The Ugly Truth’ auf Deutsch, and the way in which the voices in no way matched up to the movement of the actor’s mouths completely irritated me to no end. I’ve asked my students about it a few times now, and the majority of them shrug and say ‘but we can’t understand it when it’s in English’, unless they’re so enthusiastic about English that they’ll have made sure to have watched the German and the original version.
It surprises me that a country which places so much importance on learning the English language has this awful habit. It irritates me just as much when Japanese Anime is dubbed (Japanese voice acting works so much better for Anime than American ones do) and it would irritate me equally to see German films dubbed in English. There’s nothing wrong with subtitles!
Occasionally the cinemas will show the original version auf Englisch, there’s even a cinema in Cologne which shows original versions of English-language films. It just baffles me how anyone can put up with it – sadly the dubbing rule is extended to television programmes too, and anyone who has watched German T.V will know that it is, on the most part, terrible, so they have a lot of American programmes.
I wouldn’t say the same of German cinema however – Germany produces a lot of really excellent films. Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) is a favourite in German classes everywhere, as is Goodbye Lenin and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).
My new pact has produced interesting results; last week we went to the cinema spontaneously, ended up seeing Zeiten ändern Dich without having any clue as to what it was about… ended up being an autobiographical pic about a German rap star named Bushido, whom I’ve never heard of before I saw the film. It wasn’t a bad film actually, though I’ve got the impression from my German friends that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go see it had I been familiar with the rapper Bushido – I enjoyed it regardless, though the cinema was full of really annoying wannabe-gangster kids.
Yesterday I saw a film called Friendship!, which was just brilliant. It tells the tale of two East Germans (Ossi is slang for a person from East Germany), Tom and Veit, from Berlin who decide to travel to America when the Berlin wall falls in 1989. Their plan is to travel to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge, ‘der westlichen Punkt der Erde’ (the most western point of the world), though we find out later that Veit wants to find his father, who has been sending postcards on his birthday from San Francisco for twelve years since he fled the GDR. Their money only buys them a flight to New York, and thus follows a hilarious trip across America in the attempt to reach San Francisco in time for Veit’s birthday.
Friendship comes 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it was interesting to see the situation that arises when two lads from East Berlin decide to plunge themselves entirely in the deep end of the western world, having previously had only covert exposure to it (East Germany was very strict about Western media). There’s a scene in the film where they attempt to explain that they are from East Germany, that they have come because the wall has fallen, only to find that the two American girls have no idea what they’re talking about. I get much the same reaction from people when I tell them about what I’ve learnt of the split between Eastern and Western Germany; most people know about the Berlin Wall, but, particularly people my age, have no idea why it was such a big deal when it came down and don’t have a clue how different the two Germanys were from everyday life to politics. If I hadn’t studied German, I doubt I would have known either.
The film plays a lot on the comedy of the situation Veit and Tom find themselves in, and I loved all the little misunderstandings and attempts at constructing English sentences because this was almost the exact situation that I found myself in not so long ago! I think the highlight of the film has to be when Veit and Tom dress up as Russian soldiers for a gay strip club in Las Vegas in order to make some money.
Well worth a watch! Excuse the massive rant on dubbing, it just seriously winds me up and detracts from my enjoyment of a film a great deal!
