Made in Germany and USA (1974)

 

Salt in the Wounds

Rudolf Thome's MADE IN GERMANY UND USA is without doubt the most astonishing German cinema undertaking in the last years and a radically convincing private film. The experiment with his own and other people's psyche lasts 145 minutes and cost 30,000 marks a normal feature film costs approximately 700,000 marks.

Thome rigorously breaks, but never speculatively, with all the conventions of the traditional cinema in order to make his minute study of a broken marriage directly understandable. The film shows the conflict and helplessness of his figures like an open wound and in the end pours salt in the wounds which are ones own.

Shown in MADE IN GERMANY UND USA were a couple (Karin Thome und Eberhard Klasse) who under the financial and occupational difficulties can no longer live together. The only real connection that still exists is their child. But that is also more reason for tension that for togetherness, because each makes an egotistical claim on the child and on the other hand reproaches the other for doing so.

The outbreak of the crisis really comes noticeably when the man feels his wife is deceiving him and she does not want to admit it. The over-sensitive husband leaves home, spends a night with a girl that he picks up in a local bar, and then uses an accidental opportunity to get himelf to New York. Finally the wife travels after him with money gotten together by begging and borrowing - wrecked and incapable of rational, feelingful commmication they sit across from one another. The only thing that still binds them is a sort of desperate and paradoxical togetherness that comes fram grabbing onto one another instinctually inside all this alienation.

The intensive naturalism, with which Thome has filmed his marriage odyssey, therefore beomes above all provocative because the spectator is mercilessly confronted by endless speech duels to which the couple adhere stubbornly and hide themselves behind them. Suddenly in the mass of hollow and helpless reproaches, questions and evasions emerges flashes of tiny particles of reality - as once when the wife speaks of 'sexual fantasies' that her husband cannot satisfy, and says directly that after some time it was always the same. As this was never spoken about before the couple get into a state of insincerity and deceit so that their living together must always become more and more unreal.

Thome said at the premiere (Berlin) that his film is a settling up with marriage and questions principally so-called 'Two people realationships'.

Siegfried Schober in Der Spiegel, 1.7.1974 (translated by Cynthia Beatt)