Keine Filme?

Why are German movies so bad?

this movie is like aftersun if the dad was an annoying as hell version of gene parmesan instead of being suicidal and depressed

Two weeks ago I watched Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, which is a pretty good movie that I thoroughly enjoed. Toni Erdmann was nominated for an Oscar in 2016, and was one of the four German nominations this century. However, there´s only been three German or German-adjacent movies to get any traction anywhere whatsoever this last decade, alongside All Quiet on the Western Front (a Netflix movie) and Corsage (the Austrian Lana del Rey version of Marie Antoinette). German movies being mediocre is a common refrain among film buffs, even if Germany is one of the biggest countries in Europe, one of the biggest economies in the world, and had a really big film industry a century ago. What’s going on?

Why Nations Win (Oscars)

Let’s start with an easy measure of film quality per country: the Best International Picture Oscar. The award is fairly straightforward: out of movies that are not primarily in English, each country’s film institute selects one and submits it to the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences, the organization that run the oscars. The Academy chooses a shortlist (in 2022 they were: Austria’s Corsage, Cambodia’s Return to Seoul, Denmark’s Holy Spider, India’s Last Film Show, Mexico’s Bardo, Morocco’s The Blue Caftan, Pakistan’s Joyland, France’s Saint Omer, and Sweden’s Cairo Conspiracy), and five nominees (Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Argentina’s Argentina 1985, Belgium’s Close, Ireland’s The Quiet Girl, and Poland’s EO) out of which the winner (AQotWF) is chosen by the membership at large of the academy.

Looking at the statistics, Germany has won three times (2022, 2006, and 2002) and has received twelve nominations (technically four wins if you count the one for just West Germany, with 20 nominations total plus one for East Germany). This figure is solid, but it’s comparable to Denmark (4 and 14 respectively), Sweden (3 and 16) and the Netherlands (3 and 7) more than, say, France (which has won 12 times out of 41 nominations), Italy (14 out of 31) or Japan (4 out of 17). Economically and politically, Germany is much larger than its Oscar gold neighbors, and so it should play on a similar field to its geographical neighbors - what gives?

Well, the Best Foreign Picture Oscar isn’t precisely perfect. The first issue is that each country chooses its submissions, which can mean notorious blunders - for instance, India’s RRR was a global sensation last year, but it was not selected for Best Foreign Picture by the Indian movie watchdog, so it was not nominated. For more repressive countries (such as China, Russia, or Iran) this is a major issue, since the submissions are politically influenced - Hong Kong’s Wong Kar Wai is simply not elegible for anything because of the weird China/Hong Kong territorial situation. This might mean that Germany’s film association might simply be bad at choosing its submissions: France’s selections are usually shockingly bad, with its last two winners of the Cannes Palme D’Or (Titane in 2022 and Anatomy of a Fall this year) being passed over.

The second issue with the Best Foreign Picture Oscar is that it has to both not be in English and also have most key crew members be from the submitting country, which results in insanely awkward selections such as Finnish movie made almost entirely in France, or a British movie about the Holocaust leading most prediction lists simply because it’s in German and therefore might be elegible. The rule was originally designed to prevent British and Anglosphere movies from dominating the category, but instead has resulted in African movies being consistently disqualified.

Regardless, the main reason why it might not be particularly likely that Germany is disproportionately affected by this is that the countries that tend to get shut out of the Oscars are from Africa, Asia, and South America, meaning that if anything German submissions are advantaged by the current system.

Clusters Rule Everything Around Me

Keen readers of the blog might be able to tell the similarities with a post from late last year: why do some countries do so badly at the World Cup (soccer).

The main reason found comes from the economic concepts of agglomeration and clusters. A cluster is an interconnected set of companies in a single sector, and agglomeration is the force that brings them together - cities dominate all economies because clusters thrive in bigger labor markets, and labor markets tend to grow around clusters. This applies anywhere from cities to drug cartels - clusters rule everything around us. They’re (part of) why there tend to be so many similar businesses in some streets or neighbourhoods.

An important caveat is that clusters tend to form nowhere in particular: certain activities, types of shops, or just immigrant communities are usually where they are for reasons, and those are normally completely arbitrary. Of course, figuring out why clusters form is crucial, since you could then make yourself very rich, thoug hefforts in this direction haven’t been especially fruitful. There are many reasons why clusters might emerge: resources (either natural or human), comparative advantage, the vibes just being right, etc.; but a big uniting one seems to be that especially talented individuals or firms set up shop in one specific location. For instance, Silicon Valley is in Silicon Valley because William Shockley (a major figure in the transistor industry) lived there, and Seattle is a tech hub because Bill Gates preferred it to Albuquerque - which then led Jeff Bezos, an Albuquerque native, to move to Seattle to start his company, Amazon, in order to have access to a better labor force.

Since the major driver of economic growth appears to be ideas, a major theory of economic growth (endogenous growth theory) is centered around how ideas are produced, specifically where there are resources that have to go to producing ideas, and so the more resources directed at “science”, the more ideas that exist in the country, and the the richer it is. This means that countries that are rich stay rich, since ideas generate ideas. In consequence, a major prediction in EGT is the existence of scale effects, i.e. that countries with bigger populations will be richer, since a bigger market produces more ideas. I don’t know if EGT is true or not, but it does predict a few massive centers dominating the global economy.

What’s the relevance for Germany? Well, replace “ideas” with “movies”, and you start getting somewhere. German film history was cut short in the 1930s, where its pioneering filmmakers (the “German expressionists”) were either coopted by the Nazi Regime, driven to exile, or murdered. This resulted in an initial stock of post-war knowledge that was smaller than that of Italy or France, and therefore had a harder time getting started. Much like France, Germany had a New Wave in the 70s and 80s, but its major figures either died (Fassbinder) or emigrated (Herzog, Wim Wenders), resulting in even slower formation of a “film cluster”.

A way that countries tend to try to form clusters of key industries is what’s known as industrial policy, which is largely about manufacturing these days. There isn’t a lot of research about industrial policy, specifically how effective it is, but let’s just agree that “somewhat” is as good an evaluation as any. Does Germany have industrial policy for films? You betcha, but the problem is that it’s very strange: filmmakers get selected based on seemingly incomprehensible reasons, and most of the subsidies go to producing films in Germany, not making German films, which results in a massive amount of the tax incentives going to big international productions. This is a traditional critique of industrial policy programs: they will be designed to benefit certain stakeholders (film crew unions) and generate employment, rather than increase output, and sometimes in detriment of production.

This last point is pretty interesting: for critics of industrial policy, projects tend to be steered towards politically beneficial goals, and not necessarily towards economically optimal ones. This results, among other things, in suboptimal productivity growth and a bad allocation of tax and productive resources. Another common critique of German movies is that they are very conservative: the film association consistently rewards more traditional, more establishment movies, resulting in unimpressive output. Per the New Yorker’s film critic Richard Brody:

What’s missing from the German cinema today is the power to film in the first person, to see the crimes of the past in the present tense, to admit that, in some inescapable way, they’re one’s own—or, for that matter, to declare brazenly that they’re not. But doing so isn’t only a matter of good will, of readiness to take on such moral risks; it’s a matter of artistic audacity that arises from a confrontation with the matter of the medium. For the most part, the German film industry displays a fundamental lack of aesthetic daring, of reconsideration of the physical and practical means of filmmaking. It’s burdened with an assembly-line system of financing and production into which each individual director’s scripts are plugged—with a lack of independence, both economic and artistic.

I miss the old Krugman, no Nobel Prize Krugman

Why is the financial services industry concentrated in New York? Partly because the sheer size of New York makes it an attractive place to do business, and the concentration of the financial industry means that many clients and many ancillary services are located there. But a thick market for those with special skills, such as securities lawyers, and the general importance of being in the midst of the buzz are also important. Why doesn’t all financial business concentrate in New York? Partly because many clients are not there, partly because renting office space in New York is expensive, and partly because dealing with the city’s traffic, crime, and so on is such a nuisance.

Krugman (1998) “The Role of Geography in Development”

A key concept in economic geography is increasing returns to scale. Basically, in most areas of life, a process getting bigger either remains as efficient (constant returns), or starts getting less efficient (decreasing returns). For instance, working 5 hours on a project might be optimal, adding a sixth hour is as effective, but a seventh and eight hour are increasingly less productive.

How can returns be increasing, though? Seems counterproductive. The first is that, obviously, not all locations are equal - some places are more productive (for certain uses) than others. Secondly, some locations are more populated, which is important in terms of labor supply and demand: more firms can operate, which means higher wages and more spending, which means workers migrate, which means even more firms. Lastly, it’s just possible that firms can learn by competing with each other, or that there’s some other external property of having a bigger market. These are centripetal forces, because they bring things together. There are also centrifugal forces, which are mainly physical constraints and costs, which limit the size of an economy’s productive potential. An interesting extensions of this model is that economic activity simply occurs in some location, usually by a mix of optimal qualities and historical accident, and then simply percolates around the same region due to the interplay of forces for expansion and for limitation of economic activity.

What’s the relevance here? Well, if filmmaking has increasing returns to scale, then having a bigger film industry results in simply more films and a faster growth rate, rather than it tapering off at some point. Germany (as mentioned above) started off with a smaller industry, leading to fewer films, leading to much worse outcomes. In addition, the small pool of talent meant that smaller leaps could be made, and there were no major names pushing the industry forward (like Walt Disney).

Of course, a major constraint is how big the market would be, since there is not a lot of demand for non-English movies. However, it is actually possible to overcome this, as is the case of South Korea, which went from being a fairly obscure nation to winning the first ever non-English, non-silent Best Picture Oscar with Parasite. How they accomplished this is complex, but largely has a lot to do with concerted government effort in this direction; the K-Pop industry, for instance, is another case of South Korea successfully catapulting itself to global cultural superpower status.

Conclusion

So, what gives? Well, if German films are actually bad (not really a quantifiable statement - and the film school guy I went on a date with ghosted me, so I don’t have anyone to ask about the subject), then it’s mostly because the German film industry is deceptively young. But for a big, rich nation Germany is definitely punching below its weight. Its government policy is generally ineffective or even counterproductive, and Germany might look east (to South Korea) for successful ideas about industrial policy for the culture sector.