A confident stylistic Signature
David Wnendt’s professional career as a director has taken off with astounding speed. His feature film debut "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls")" and the subsequent film "Feuchtgebiete" ("Wetlands") appeared in German cinemas after only a brief interval, in 2011 and 2013. Both enjoyed a tremendous echo in the media, and both touched on provocative subjects, so mirroring controversial contemporary phenomena. In addition, the director’s work stands out distinctly due to a confident stylistic signature and a feeling for sharp-edged, unlikeable, torn women characters. In both films David Wnendt demonstrates a developed sense of the interesting ambivalence in our new images of women.
As early as 1999 he did intense research into the closed scene of radical right-wing youths in East Germany. In the context of a photo project, he succeeded in gaining access to the otherwise hermetically sealed scene, recording conversations with girls and young women there. More than ten years later this authentic material would form the basis to his screenplay for "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls").
The film penetrates into the long underestimated inner world of extreme right-wing women. It focuses on Marisa (Alina Levshin), a woman filled with hatred, who is the young frontliner in a neo-Nazi clique, a woman who attacks her peace-loving compatriates and those seeking asylum. David Wnendt was the first German author filmmaker to show the wild rage and actionism of a neo-Nazi girl and so contradict the cliché of the harmless, passive neo-Nazi broad. His "combat girl" follows a blind fascist view of the world she has copied from her grandfather, at least until she gets to know a bright Afghan refugee boy. In the end she begins, taking the smallest of steps and at risk to her own life, to separate herself from her previous demonic environment.
In 2011, while the German public was busy discussing this narrative vision of reversal, almost simultaneously the crimes of the right-wing radical NSU group came to light. Beate Zschäpe, only survivor and co-perpetrator with two accomplices, was presumed co-responsible for ten xenophobically motivated murders, and many other offences. The trial addressing her involvement opened in June 2013 and is not yet over. In face of these shocking facts, David Wnendt’s "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls") appears like the writing on the wall.
The director sees confirmation of his research in the East German neo-Nazi scene: "The youths there only have the choice between Punk and right-wing extremism". "Deeds not words" – this hate slogan of the British "Blood and Honour Nazis" is under stood in parts of the scene as a call for militancy, as investigations of the NSU have confirmed for David Wnendt. He has a continuing interest in the topic of right-wing extremism and the scandalous obfuscation of possible links between neo-Nazi perpetrators and elements of the police force or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that came to light during the investigations into the NSU.
David Wnendt feels that he owes a debt to the tradition of Eastern European cinema, which he studied in Prague and Potsdam-Babelsberg. He cites the "deep humanity" of films by Milos Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel and many other directors as a yardstick for his own work. He rejects violence for the sake of violence, and cynical exploitation.
Wnendt experienced childhood and youth as the oldest of five children in a German family of diplomats, attending eleven international schools on several continents. In Brussels, shortly before his school graduation, he developed an enthusiasm for drama while taking part in a production of Frank Wedekind’s "Frühlings Erwachen. Eine Kindertragödie" ("Spring Awakening"). Acting and directing work fascinated him, so he developed the plan to become a director at that time. As his concerned parents preferred him to do "something steady", how ever, first of all he studied Journalism and Economics at the Free University Berlin. It was only after graduating that he transferred to a course in Direction. "The directing profession demands a lot from me," he says of his passion for the work’s complexity. In the meantime he has learned "to pass some tasks on to the rest of the team," so that he is better able to concentrate on work with the actors. Of course Wnendt admires a filmmaker like Vincent Gallo, who fills almost all the functions of filmmaking single-handed, but he would prefer not to have to consider such minimalism born of necessity for his own future.
During his studies he also busied himself intensively with the working methods of documentary filmmakers and drew his own conclusions: they need to become involved intuitively in the immediate events in front of the camera; it is vital that they open up their narrative strategy to the full impact of the moment – in his films he would like to reconcile this realistic approach with classical storytelling. David Wnendt has determined to make films of the kind "that I would like to see myself."
"Feuchtgebiete" ("Wetlands") also draws its energy from the carefully composed street credibility of its protagonist. Play with commenting musical quotations and film music that furthers the action is similar to his debut film "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls"), as is the erratic rhythm of the editing, his pleasure in images of movement, and – despite all this speed – ultimately also the concentrated dramaturgy of a coming-of-age story. David Wnendt creates characters that appear to have integrity in moments of disclosure as well. In "Feuchtgebiete" ("Wetlands") Swiss actress Carla Juri, who was selected by the director – like Alina Levshin before her – in a complex, emotionally challenging casting process, embodies the spoilt-neglected kid of a prosperous West German family. Another outsider – in "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls") it was an uprooted descendant of the deprived workers milieu in the former GDR, but in the case of 18-year-old Helen from Charlotte Roche’s grotesque novel we see an anarchic, excessively sexualized girl. Like an artful clown, Helen sums up perfectly and in a relentlessly provocative way the folly of the pornographic age, all the contradictions between disgust and desire so much bandied by the media and yet still inexpressibly embarrassing, the hygiene mania and body fluids, promiscuity and fears of loneliness.
"I enjoyed the humor of the book," Wnendt says about his motives for taking on the project, which producer Peter Rommel offered him after the positive response to "Kriegerin" ("Combat Girls"). The script that screenplay writer Claus Falkenberg had written initially with Charlotte Roche was revised in cooperation with the director. Whereas the novel offers a kind of review of sexual escapades, the film adopts a narrative perspective that permits us to recognize David Wnendt’s signature. Helen experiences the pain at parting, the sense of being torn between her divorced parents at least as powerfully as she does her lust for sexual adventure, and in all this she mirrors the adults’ equally grotesque neuroses.
Wnendt’s stylistically assured cinematic farce opposes the hype surrounding Charlotte Roche’s breaks with taboo. More than 930,000 viewers saw the film in German cinemas to date. Wnendt believes that other directors in Germany besides Til Schweiger, Matthias Schweighöfer and Simon Verhoeven ought to make it into the big cinemas – not only with comedies. There is so much potential for possible crossover projects between arthouse and Cineplex lying waste – and that is what spurs him on.
Author: Claudia Lenssen