When you look at the career of director Dominik Graf, you ask yourself why he hasn't won all the major film awards in the world a long time ago.

After all, Graf has reinvented the German thriller (1988 with “Die Katzen”), the “Tatort” (1995 with “Frau Bu lacht”), the television crime series (“In the face of crime”) and the costume film (“The beloved sisters”) ).

He continued the Nouvelle Vague in German cinema and paved the way for digital technology.

The fact that the audience rarely followed him is not an argument against Graf's brilliance.

After all, Wim Wenders only reaches a larger audience when he makes documentaries about the Pope.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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But there is also a downside, or rather: a side effect of skill, as embodied by Graf. People like him are generally lonely in German film, not only because hardly any colleague can hold a candle to them, but also because the structures of the industry are not designed for them. Television and the film funding pots, which determine what happens in production in this country, prefer catchy topics and broadcast formats. Graf's new feature film “Fabian”, the adaptation of the novel of the same name by Erich Kästner, is shot in the old 1.37: 1 television format, which the broadcasters have long since abolished, and lasts three hours. In order to enforce this unusual shape and length, Graf had, as so often before, to cut back on the budget. But that's not the reasonthat “Fabian” didn't turn out to be the big movie that people had hoped for again. This reason has to do with the book itself - with what it is and what Dominik Graf made of it.

Not a costume film, but history as the present

The beginning of “Fabian” is terrific, one of the strongest positions that German cinema has made in recent years.

The camera glides down into the Heidelberger Platz underground station in Berlin, it's here and now, passengers get off the train, cross the tunnel to the rear staircase, the camera eye follows them, climbs the stairs and enters the year 1931. Fabian (Tom Schilling ) leans against the railing, a war cripple speaks to him and shows his mutilated face, a billboard advertises dance halls, then we are in a nightclub, couples turn to the music, a bob-haired lady throws herself on Fabian's neck, and so we dive into the time of the narration.

Graf's aesthetic program is part of this prelude. “Fabian” doesn't want to be a costume film, he doesn't want to historicize history, but rather to drag it into the present, and that's why he sweeps as good as all the conventions in which the classic narrative cinema and the new series television have established themselves. The pictures were taken with a digital handheld camera and Super 8 cameras and mounted against the grain in such a way that the eye can never make it as comfortable in them as in the smoothed scenarios of “Babylon Berlin”. The scenes also refuse to meet the usual standards, sometimes they seem particularly exquisite like the newly furnished villa in which Fabian's friend Labude grew up, then again brutally ahistorical like the café, in which some key scenes of the plot take place.

Once Fabian goes to the Potsdam suburb of Babelsberg, where his girlfriend Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl) is auditioning for a film. On the run from the pain that their appearance triggers in him, he gets lost in the outer buildings of the studio, he wanders through western, temple and Nibelungen cities until an empty wasteland opens up in front of him behind the last facade. In this way, the film stages its own fear of the scenery, the suffocation in the décor, which threatens every literary film adaptation. But his answer to this is not the wasteland of a violent actualization, but a historically alert look at the material.