German Filmmakers and Movies

The road to Hollywood is – or so it would seem – somewhat shorter for cameramen than for others in the German film industry. Jost Vacano, who filmed The Boat, went on to shoot Total Recall and Starship Troopers in the United States. Dietrich Lohmann, a winner of the German Film Prize who died in 1997, made his last movies over there, Deep Impact and The Peacemaker. Fred Schuler served as assistant cameraman on Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and later worked with John Cassavetes on Gloria and other films.

But the most successful German cameraman of all is Michael Ballhaus. He was the main man behind the camera for the New German Cinema directors of the 1970s, especially Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he made Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971), Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit, 1975), The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979) and Lilli Marleen (1981).

Working in America

The more famous Fassbinder became abroad – he was the chief exponent of German cinema at the time – the more renowned his cameraman became too. In the ’80s Ballhaus set up shop in the US for good to work with Francis Ford Coppola (Dracula), Robert Redford (Quiz Show, The Legend of Bagger Vance) and repeatedly as Martin Scorsese’s cameraman of choice (Age of Innocence, Goodfellas). In 2003 Blockbuster Gangs of New York earned Ballhaus his third Oscar nomination.

It was one speciality in particular that catapulted Ballhaus to fame and became his trademark: the 360-degree tracking shot around the actors. The scene in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) in which the camera encircles Michelle Pfeiffer lolling on the piano – that may well have been his crowning achievement, and in fact the film bears his mark more than that of its director, Steve Kloves.

The 360

He first described this circle in Fassbinder’s marital drama Martha. The title character, played by Margit Carstensen, and Karl-Heinz Böhm first meet at the square in front of the German embassy in Rome. They walk past each other and, as Ballhaus tracks them round, their gazes meet: Martha’s fate – to become more the man’s captive than his lover – is sealed, and she’ll never forget this moment. The second semi-circle, owns Ballhaus, was Fassbinder’s idea: Ballhaus wanted to stop after 180 degrees.

Roots

Born on 5 August 1935, Ballhaus grew up in Coburg, where his parents ran a theatre. Art was in his blood: that he was destined for the silver screen manifested itself in the making of Max Ophüls’ Lola Montez. He was infected with the madness that reigned on the set of this mega-production run amok. And this experience was ultimately to point him the way to Hollywood, where at least occasionally movies can be as big and as zany as you please – which is generally less a question of inspiration than a matter of money.

The Flying Eye

A number of Ballhaus’s interviews with German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) have been compiled in a book that came out recently in Germany. Modelled on François Truffaut’s legendary Hitchcock, the book, though not quite a match for its model, is remarkable nonetheless: books about cameramen are generally few and far between, and Ballhaus is not the only one to be hitherto passed over, or relegated to a footnote, in film literature. The title of this collaborative effort is Das Fliegende Auge – Michael Ballhaus, Director of Photography (i.e. The flying eye). Ballhaus has earned this professional title (for which there is, by the way, no corresponding term in German): for it is his own ideas, dreams, experiences that he makes visible. He has always been – and always sought to be – more than a mere operative following his director’s instructions and capturing pictures on film.