Why We Have the Best Television and Therefore the Worst Cinema

A new film that was not made as a mere object of speculation only stands a chance of being shown in our cinemas if it meets one of three conditions:
First, if the world rights are owned by a Hollywood corporation, which typically means that the corporation was involved in the production of the film.
Second, if it was previously shown on television.
Third, if it comes from Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Then, there is a chance:
In the first case, that the film will be released by the German branch of the Hollywood corporation (Mississippi Mermaid, Easy Rider, Topaz, The Damned, The Arrangement, Satyricon, Zabriskie Point).
In the second, that the distributor Neue Filmkunst Walter Kirchner further exploits the film at least in its own cinemas (nine in six cities) (Joy of Learning, Daisies, Antonio das Mortes).
In the third, that Constantin Film buys it (Flesh, and soon probably Lonesome Cowboys, Blue Movie).

But not even that is certain!
Robert Bresson’s A Gentle Woman was announced by Paramount and then withdrawn. United Artists, which usually released the yearly new Truffaut and Bergman, withdrew The Wild Child and did not even announce The Passion of Anna.
Bergman’s The Rite, Godard’s One + One, Bertolucci’s Partner, films by Rohmer, Chabrol, Skolimowski and Jancsó were released on television but not once in Kirchner cinemas.
Constantin Film only shows the Factory’s “commercial” films, leaving the earlier, more radical ones to television and the “underground”.

And entirely out of the question:
That someone makes a film in France, Italy, Hungary or Brazil, or in Germany itself, and a German distributor buys it and distributes it in cinemas one or two years after it was shot. Obvious as it sounds, this was never the rule in Germany, but there was a time when it did happen with twelve to twenty films a year. Many of the films were shortened, and almost all were dubbed. Some, however, were neither shortened nor dubbed, and occasionally they actually made an effort when dubbing them.
The obvious, which is still the rule in Paris, London, Zurich and Brussels, no longer happens here.

For a while, that’s what we believed and propagated: that cinema was now taking place on television, that Der besondere Film and Das Film-Festival and the programmes on the third television channel had taken over the tasks of premiere cinemas, studio theatres and film clubs. Films that previously could be watched only by a few hundred thousand cinemagoers, or perhaps only fifty thousand film club members, and films that didn’t even get that chance were now reaching several million viewers through television. A few crucial film lovers in the editorial teams of television, it seemed, would make more of a difference than the longstanding handful of well-meaning people in the film industry.
A cinema film on television – what is that? Even if it wasn’t filmed in colour and can only be watched in black and white, as is the case for nine out of ten spectators. Even if it wasn’t intended for Super or Cinemascope formats and has now been trimmed. Even if it hasn’t been Germanised but is shown in its original version, as occasionally happens in third-channel programmes, or if it is a silent film and is exceptionally shown at the correct frame rate. Even then, a film on television is only the echo of a film seen in the cinema.

“Cinema is a big head in a small theatre,” Malraux said: in cinema, the projected space becomes the real interior of the spectator. A television image is part of the spectator’s domestic environment and is not itself a space. Without external and internal contours, with a rounded, blurred edge, lacking in nuance and contrast, “light through” and not “light on”, as McLuhan says, a porthole in the wall of a room, the television image is only a sign of what it represents. That which cannot immediately be read as meaning, that which goes beyond it, all poetry becomes either invisible or a disturbing arabesque. Films that work with familiarity, narrative films, suit television. Hitchcock suits television much better than Sternberg. The possibilities of television do not lie in the images but between them and between the images and the sound. Unlike in cinema, the word, whether spoken or written, is not absorbed into the image but takes hold of it and presents it, turning it into an element of a rhetorical figure. Television is language, not spectacle. It is mediation, narration. Even when it broadcasts an event “live”, it turns it into a narrative, a sign. Past, light, space, movement, time: one has to experience them in the cinema in order to recognise them on the television screen. This could also be an opportunity: perhaps the film viewer only really becomes Walter Benjamin’s “absent-minded examiner” with the advent of videocassettes on the television screen.

The awareness of programme makers and especially of television critics about the medium they are dealing with, is still very low. Television blindly exploits what cinema, theatre, politics and other media produce. What could television be? No one is more reluctant to answer this question than television. Unproductive in its own right, it only appropriates film history in order to exploit and rehash it. This applies both to the forms developed by cinema and to the films themselves, the old ones from before the advent of television and the new ones still being made notwithstanding – elsewhere, where television’s destructive drive has been kept within the pale. Instead of sharpening the viewer’s eye for the changes and differences it brings about, and which are its essence, television hides behind adopted forms. The entire setting of a television evening, from the costumes of the announcers to the institution of the “moderator” to the conventions of camera positions and shot changes, is geared towards obfuscation.

In tacit complicity with the self-image of programme makers, television critics consider themselves as delegated (if not degraded) theatre or film critics, or political commentators – in which capacity they believe they have no inherent need for a sense of form anyway, which is also common among film critics. The aporia often expressed by them is that a separate discipline of television criticism does not even exist.

Fitted into the eternal television film, every form becomes material. The cinema film becomes a programme particle, which could be a good thing if awareness of it were taught to viewers. One would think that the editors and makers of film programmes on television, most of them trained as film critics, would provide their creations with at least some awareness of form and discernment. But they only help spread the medium’s lack of self-awareness. Programmes about Oberhausen look exactly the way the Oberhausen films that accompany them look on television. The introductions to sophisticated feature films only serve to adapt them to the programme level even more than is already the case through the broadcasting itself and the placement in the programme. They relativise, classify, weigh, excuse, defuse and reduce the unusual to the familiar.

Subtitled original versions present fewer difficulties on television than in the cinema. Seeing, hearing and reading come together. Television could do cinema a great service as an exercise in dealing with original versions. But television channels respect the film-industry-bred laziness of German cinemagoers. Even the third channels (apart from WDR) prefer dubbed versions. Why not take the opportunity to broadcast the original sound through VHF simultaneously with the dubbed version so that the viewer can choose? In Siam, it works. And in our country, too, it occasionally works when it’s not a film but culture (classical theatre) or education (school television) being broadcast.

It is well known that we have the best television in the world and therefore the worst cinema. Because television channels, which are so conscious of quality and receptive to criticism and novelty, still seem to offer a small chance, nothing is required any longer of the cinema industry. The fact that instead of film distributors we only have junk shops today is due in part to television programme makers. Barthel and Schmidt’s Constantin Film didn’t really need to be pushed to protect the usual rubbish instead of Buñuel or Bergman. They gladly pass over any producer or director who offers them a film whose launch would require imagination with a reference to television, which could show and pay for such films more easily. But television caps it off by not only grabbing films neglected or abandoned by distributors but also those in which a distributor might still be interested. If someone wanted to put together a balanced and attractive programme with good new and old films today, they could no longer do so without the goodwill of television. It is no longer possible to do so with films that television does not put its hand on immediately, often as soon as the filming begins. This hopelessness has paralysed for quite a while any initiative to persuade the few remaining solid distributors of more difficult material.

A German television director insists on premiere rights like a potentate on his ius primae noctis. What prevents him from giving a film he has bought a release in theatres before broadcasting it? You don’t really hear any other answer to this in television than, “If we (‘we’!) have already paid so much for it, we also want the premiere.” Who benefits from this? Not the broadcasters’ budget – it is fed by contributions levied by the postal service and could only benefit from a simultaneous sale of cinema rights. Not the viewers – surely only a small proportion of them would see the film in the cinema beforehand and they would be happy to see it again on television. After all, television has no qualms about repeating its own productions either.

Afterwards, when the film has been shown on television, it can be bought cheaply. But what is left of it then, of its potential? A large part of its potential audience, who switched on the television on the day of the broadcast, believes they have already seen the film, and nobody tells them how wrong they are. It may be a prejudice of despondent cinema owners that a film shown on television would no longer find an audience: this prejudice is also a reality. The remaining screening base for a distributor like Neue Filmkunst is so small that it no longer even allows the production of subtitles, let alone good dubbing.

We have a federal law that rewards the production and distribution of rubbish and nonsense and paralyses all other initiatives.

We have a decree from the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film, which financially supports the production of high-quality films that are not subsequently released in cinemas because we have a federal law that...

There have been recent reports of efforts to also support the distribution of those high-quality films that have been made with the help of quality subsidies. Once we get to that point, there will no longer be any cinemas that can afford to show the films.

And when the district councils will have set up officially funded 16 mm cinemas everywhere, there will be no one left who has experienced what that is, to see a film.

Television must stop plundering cinema and start promoting the projection of films. If every film were made available to cinemas for at least eighteen months before being shown on television, through a commercial or public distributor, in decent dubbed or properly subtitled original versions, that could be the beginning of the end of the destruction of cinema.