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‘Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street’: German TV thriller directed by Sam Fuller with soundtrack by Can
02.11.2016
03:46 pm
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My mother was from Austria, and it’s through her that I came to learn of the incredible Tatort TV series that has existed in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria since 1970. There’s nothing really comparable to Tatort in America, although CBS’s practice of setting up CSI franchises in different cities provides a starting point to an explanation, as does the revolving door of homicide detectives in Law & Order.

The basic idea of Tatort is that it’s a police procedural series that exists in roughly a dozen different German-speaking cities—all at the same time. So think of it as a dozen different series with different police protagonists, all of which use the same basic template. Berlin has its Kommissare (police detectives) who work for the Mordkommission (homicide department), and Hamburg has its Kommissare, and so do Munich and Cologne and Leipzig and Münster and Dortmund and on and on. If you shoot a handful of episodes every year in twelve different cities for 40 years in a row, eventually you’ll end up with quite a massive project, and sure enough, as of this writing they’re zeroing in on their thousandth episode.
 

 
Tatort means “scene of the crime,” and one of the central ideas of the series is to take that word Ort (place) very seriously. All episodes use a good deal of on-location shooting, so that viewers can really see the different cities in which the shows take place. In a more general way, it’s part of the series mandate for the shows of each city to have some regional spirit—as an example, the various regional accents one encounters in the different episodes are quite noticeable.

Every episode of Tatort is 90 minutes long, without commercial interruption, and a great many of them start with the discovery of a murder victim’s body and the associated crime scene/forensic palaver with which we’re all familiar. The running length is a mixed blessing: it allows the episodes to probe deeper than comparable American shows, but it’s a bit too long for what is ultimately a formulaic exercise, and I’m not the first to notice that many episodes tend to sag around the midway point. Still: if at its worst a Tatort episode would be on the level of any forgettable Kojak, at its best the episodes attain the same general excellence of something like The Silence of the Lambs.

For those who are interested in the series, Michael Kimmelman’s astute writeup, which appeared in The New York Times in 2009 is worth a read. 

The 25th episode of Tatort aired on January 7, 1973: The episode was called Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße (“Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street”)  The director was none other than that great American character Samuel Fuller, responsible for such masterworks as Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor, and the music was provided by a German outfit, credited as “The Can,” that just a few months before had released its fourth album, Ege Bamyasi.
 

 
The episode is set in Bonn and Cologne, mostly. I’ve watched the episode in full, and there’s no denying that it has a certain pulpy pizzazz—Fuller does know what he’s doing—but it’s not much more than a collection of espionage tropes jammed together without too much rhyme or reason. My knowledge of German didn’t enable me to follow the plot, so you shouldn’t worry too much about understanding it, either. A major character is named Charlie Umlaut, which is a tiny bit hilarious. Apparently the plot was inspired somewhat by the Profumo affair in the UK.

In the opening sequence viewers will hear the familiar strains of Can’s hit “Vitamin C,” which was also used to strong effect in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.11.2016
03:46 pm
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Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and Tim Robbins discuss Samuel Fuller


 
Ah, Samuel Fuller. The great director, on some levels, exists in his very own category, creatively hitting up in the Kubrick/Kurosawa/Bergman leagues and yet hardly most people outside of serious film geeks have ever heard of him.

Arguably, Fuller has been largely ignored historically because, even in the 50s and early 60s he was cranking up the intensity to levels that simply could not be tolerated by most cinema-goers or even movie critics. Confronted with Fuller’s incendiary vision, American society collectively slapped their hands over their ears and repeated, No, this can’t be the way things are. But they were that way, and Fuller presented it in such a way that you couldn’t deny it. Forget about mom, apple pie and the postwar American dream, Samuel Fuller’s films metaphorically lifted Marilyn Monroe’s skirt to reveal a maniacally grinning demon underneath.

For instance, here’s white supremacist Trent from Shock Corridor, and remember this came out in 1962:
 

 
See what I mean? If you’ve never experienced that scene before, right now you’re probably saying, “Holy Shit…”

Sam Fuller was a classic cigar-chomping old school man’s man who’d been a crime reporter in the 1930s and then shipped off to World War II. He fought on the beaches of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy before helping to liberate the concentration camp at Falkenau, where shot some of his earliest film footage.

By the time he made his first movie in 1949 at the age of 37, Fuller was already loaded for bear with levels of life experience most of us would never even wish for. His films combined newspaper sensationalism sprinkled with bits and pieces from his own life. Although not nihilistic, Fuller didn’t have heroes or villains in the classic sense but populated his films with real characters with good and bad all mixed together. You know, like in real life.

Like any artist or writer or, well THINKER worth a damn, you can’t easily pigeonhole his world view. In Sam Fuller, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a documentary about Fuller’s life, Jim Jarmusch describes the iconoclastic director as an “anti-totalitarian anarchist,” though Fuller took heat from both the right and left for Pickup on South Street (which was accused of “Red baiting” and anti-Americanism at the same time!). In the film you can also see Fuller describe both the fascists and mid-20th century communist regimes as “Enemies of humanity.”

Like Luis Buñuel,  Fuller got kicked to the curb for a number or years for just going too damn far, with the controversial White Dog—which never did see a US release—about a dog trained to hate black people [A neighbor of mine in Brooklyn had a doberman that hated black people, so this isn’t as far-fetched as you might think], whereupon he moved to France, where he was, of course, hailed as a genius, and finished out the rest of his creative career.

Here’s the entire film about Fuller, shot during his lifetime so that there are plenty of classic quotes from the man. Just as amusing are the shots of Quentin Tarantino and Tim Robbins rooting around in Fuller’s pre-France work-space, uncovering all sorts of Fuller’s old treasures, even as they imitate him and invoke his spirit at a distance:
 

Posted by Em
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05.28.2013
11:40 am
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