Where the audience is is still the big question in the cinema industry.

Hopes for an autumn that allows people to breathe are dampened, even if the official figures for the first half of 2022 suggest that things can only get better.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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The number of visitors fell by a little more than 38 percent compared to 2019, the last year before Corona.

Neither "Top Gun: Maverick" nor "Fantastic Beasts" were able to significantly improve the balance sheet.

The situation is even worse for German films.

The market share of 21.2 percent is distributed across 109 films (including co-productions);

the 49 American films released in the same period achieved 67.1 percent.

The fact that Karoline Herfurth's "Wonderful" went surprisingly well, that "The Kangaroo Conspiracy" or "Guglhupfgeschwader" are currently also getting decent visitor numbers, does not lessen the concern that runs through the industry.

When you write about German film, it's always like visiting a patient with an uncertain diagnosis.

A critic is not a doctor and knows no therapy.

Such worries are, however, superfluous with Edward Berger's “Nothing New in the West”.

The first German-language film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 bestseller - after the 1930 American adaptation and a 1979 American television version - is a big-budget Netflix production.

If it doesn't go down so well with subscribers, it won't ruin anyone.

Apparently it's still a matter of prestige for Netflix to get such a film in theaters for a short period of time before streaming it worldwide.

However, it is strange that a committee from German Films, the company that annually selects the German entry for the Oscars, chose Berger's film of all things.

Another Oscar for Netflix?

One speculates on the aura that surrounds the book and on the undisputed anti-war message in times of war.

The extent to which such a decision further undermines the status of cinema films, not only at the Oscars, does not seem to be of interest.

Just as little as the absurdity that Berger's film is clearly made for the big screen and its effect is lost when it is streamed on the usual end devices.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Berger said it was important to him to put the audience in the perspective of Paul Bäumer, the protagonist who volunteered with his high school classmates in 1917 and was sent to the front.

According to Berger, every shot, every camera position, is shaped by this intention: "I wanted to make it physically noticeable, as if we were walking through it with him."

It's not that he didn't try, handheld, close-ups knee-deep in the mud and dirt of the trenches.

But at the same time there is a different narrative attitude, she works with oversights, showing a gray battlefield full of corpses, craters, puddles, tank blockades from a great height.

There are extensive parallel drives, which the camera does not register discreetly at all, but always makes itself noticed spectacularly.

This is the gesture of an omniscient narrator, but not narration in the first person singular.

The montage supports this effect.

Again and again meaningful images, a bottle in a trough, a piece of bread, a fluttering piece of paper – these fleeting still lifes have hardly anything to do with the perception of the soldier Bäumer.