Ganz in 60 seconds
Berlin and Beyond pays tribute to Wings of Desire and American Friend star Bruno Ganz, the actor most likely to be in a great German film.

By Dennis Harvey

AROUND 1909, "Biograph Girl" Florence Lawrence first impressed her studio as a presence movie audiences would go out of their way to see – and the next year she became (via a fake-death publicity stunt) the first actor whose on-screen persona was deliberately confused with offscreen "drama."

That was a big turning point for the movies, which hitherto had taken their workplace norms from the ensemble model of traveling repertory theater companies. From then on, motion pictures would fundamentally be less about storytelling – let alone acting – than about personality.

Of course, there have been exceptions. But the star system, despite all the stylistic shifts over the decades, has staunchly favored dominant, singular temperaments over more chameleonic thespians. Then there's Bruno Ganz, the Zurich, Switzerland-born actor being saluted with a Lifetime Achievement for Acting award at the 10th-anniversary Berlin and Beyond Film Festival at the Castro Theatre.

Ganz will be interviewed onstage by critic David Thomson Jan. 9, amid a mini-retrospective of his memorable cinematic efforts. He's an actor whose palpable thought processes and pregnant character silences have attracted relatively few high-profile awards (though he inherited the near-mythic Iffland-Ring in '96 as the greatest living German-speaking actor). His stealth impact is part and parcel of an unprepossessing surface: age perennially not young, not old, hairline forever receding from a face at once haunting and nondescript. He has the ability to make the peculiar seem ordinary, and vice versa – a valuable skill for someone so often caught at the ominous, still center of narrative storms.

He was a considerable success onstage, a medium one on TV, and a nonstarter in movies during his first 15 professional years. Then, from 1976 to '77, he had an extraordinary run of movies. Among those films, he played the terminally ill man swept into mob violence in Wim Wenders's The American Friend; a rescuer-slash-rapist in Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O; and a husband abandoned sans explanation in Peter Handke's Left-Handed Woman.

Almost overnight, Ganz went from anonymous to ubiquitous. Since then, he's worked almost without pause (sandwiching in much stage work too) yet with such disinterest in showy opportunities that it's a shock to realize how many very good films he's made. Or how many important directors he's worked with: a selective list includes Gillian Armstrong, Jerzy Skolimowsky, Werner Herzog, Claude Goretta, Alain Tanner, David Hare, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Volker Schlöndorff. It's a filmography with a lot of intriguing but very obscure titles alongside the prestige recognizables. There isn't a single one to which you could apply the phrase "Well, he must've done it for the money." Instead there is a leaning toward literary pedigree, issues of conscience, intellectual challenge, and the occasional off-the-wall artistic concept.

All of which apply to Wings of Desire (Jan. 10, 1 p.m.). The Handke-written 1988 Wenders film should by any rights have been an embarrassing collision of New Age and old-school New German Cinema pretensions – like, alas, most of the director's subsequent features. Instead, it hit the bull's-eye as the all-time cerebral date movie. Ganz played an angel whose benevolent observation of everyday humanity fueled a desire to drop his wings and try mortality. Very few actors could have captured otherworldliness so casually, or expressed such wonder at the physical word without seeming ridiculous. (All-too-convenient comparison: check out Nicolas Cage's furrowed-brow saintliness in the 1998 American revamp, City of Angels.)

Observation seems an actorly speciality for Ganz, whether he is hired for that purpose or simply brings it to his roles. He's often found as a morally snared, helpless-to-intervene witness representing both the filmmaker's and the viewer's viewpoints amid distressingly extreme circumstances. Thus he delineates an everyman's response to horror as the journalist in Schlöndorff's Beirut-shot Circle of Deceit (Jan. 7, 3 p.m.); in the Kafkaesque shore-leave Lisbon of Tanner's In the White City; and as another unsettled investigator on a walk-through tour of 20th-century injustices in Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day.

He's been the terrified bastion of normalcy against über-freaky Klaus Kinski (as the title character in Nosferatu) and Dennis Hopper (as that American Friend). In Reinhard Hauff's 1978 Knife in the Head (Jan. 13, 5 p.m.) his character recovers from gunshot-wound neurological damage, while police, media, and radical leftist agitators all try to turn his plight to their advantage. His presence accuses them all – even as it keeps his degree of complicity veiled.

Ganz may be an introverted actor, but he can also pull off impossibly extroverted characters. The extreme case in point is his Adolf Hitler in the last-days-of-the-Reich epic Downfall (Jan. 9, 5 p.m.). Due to open theatrically here later in the year, Oliver Hirschbiegel's historical drama has sparked great controversy in Europe – especially Germany – where many consider its portrayal of Der Führer and co. not nearly condemnatory enough. I can understand why contemporary Germans might prefer their National Socialist flashback cinema to distance personal association via a hard-line stance against absolute evil. Downfall disturbs because it shows Hitler as a sweetie pie toward select children, dogs, and secretaries – as well as an irrational, screaming, paranoid, and unblinkingly murderous nutcase.

Ganz's brilliant performance coheres all these and other behavioral elements to arrive at something not caricatured, not simply monstrous, but rather a startling portrait of combined supreme will and mental illness that might credibly have driven millions toward catastrophe. I wouldn't want to imagine the internal process that went into creating such a "well-rounded" Hitler. But it's quite likely no other actor will ever again make historical evil quite so incriminatingly banal.

The Berlin and Beyond Film Festival runs Jan. 6-13, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. Tickets are $7-$30 (advance tickets may be purchased at www.ticketweb.com). (415) 263-8760. www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco. For shows and times, see Film listings.

Ich bin ein B&B

Let's face it: a decade ago, the prospect of an annual festival exclusively focused on new films from the Deutsch-speaking Big Three – reunited Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – didn't look like the most interesting or forward-looking of propositions. As Berlin and Beyond turns 10, however, we must wake up and smell the strudel. This is one of the most reliably high-quality-fiber, low-program-fat events on the Bay Area's cinematic calendar. Here are a few highlights on the '05 slate not related to Bruno Ganz:

The Edukators (Hans Weingartner, 2004) Hereabouts radical chic went the way of the dodo around 1975, but it never died in Germany. Hence that nation's theoretically laudable subgenre of youth pix in which the pursuit of getting laid is displaced (at least partly) by the goal of shocking the bourgeoisie, sticking it to the Man, etc. Alas, these movies (What to Do in Case of Fire, Gallant Girls) often wind up seeming as glib and calculated in their audience pandering as the most generic Hollywood mall flick. Improving somewhat on that standard is Hans Weingartner's opening-night feature, in which a trio of romantically and ideologically twined hotties (Daniel Bruhl, Julia Jentsch, Stipe Erceg) find their revolutionary pranksterdom gets them in deep düngen. Schematic and simplistic but not a total wank – and pretty entertaining. Thurs/6, 8 p.m.

Asphalt (Joe May, 1928-29) A semiforgotten talent, Joe May was among the best directors working in German cinema's silent "golden age," when its artistic reach frequently trumped Hollywood's. This 1929 feature about a beautiful jewel thief caught by an initially straight-arrow policeman – and vice versa – is at once gritty and elaborately stylized, a testament to the medium's pre-sound visual sophistication. Dennis James accompanies this rare revival on the mighty Wurlitzer. Mon/10, 7 p.m.

Quiet as a Mouse (Marcus Mittermeier, 2003) This creepy, funny, surprising first feature by writer-director-star Marcus Mittermeier is like Man Bites Dog meets Chuck Palahniuk. Our protagonist, Mux, presents the ongoing video evidence of his one-man crusade to correct German society's bad manners – by any means necessary. Trouble is, the eccentric megalomaniac's notion of the Golden Rule is very punitive and more than a tad fascistic. Tues/11, 7 p.m.

Poem (I Set My Foot upon the Air and It Carried Me) (Ralf Schmerberg, 2003) This being B&B's 10th anniversary, it's reprising a few past audience favorites. The most unique is Ralf Schmerberg's freewheeling mosaic of visuals – globe-trotting, mood-swinging, documentary, and staged – to accompany spoken excerpts of German poems from Schiller to Paul Celan. Tues/11, 1 p.m.

Also returning to the Castro are the most recent version of much-filmed children's adventure Emil and the Detectives (Jan. 8, 11 a.m.), and Andreas Dresen's 2001 sharp adultery drama Grill Point (Jan. 13, 3 p.m.).

D.H.