Newspapers and Magazines

When deciding on a name for their quarterly film magazine, the people in charge at “Cargo” took their inspiration from a business indicator that was the forerunner to container handling – cargo cult. The magazine, produced in Berlin, goes much more deeply into the background of what is going on in the world of cinema and has managed to win over quite a few big names to contribute to the magazine.

This year, for a change, Bert Rebhandl did not go to the Cannes Film Festival. Instead he took a trip to Rumania – a filmmaking country that he is particularly interested in at the moment. So instead of rubbing shoulders on the Croisette with Tarentino, Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz, he went to Bucharest to try and track down the ideas and the protagonists behind the “New Wave” that has been energising the Rumanian film scene for the past few years and thrilling critics all over the world. You can read the results of his investigations in the latest edition of the film magazine “Cargo” – the magazine that Bert Rebhandl set up in cooperation with Ekkehard Knörer and Simon Rothöhler.

“What we were interested in at the beginning was to bring certain things together that are normally not brought together,” says Bert Rebhandl on a sunny afternoon at a café in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. The object for him and his comrades-in-arms was to make film in all its manifestations a subject of discussion. He would like Cargo to be seen as a mirror of world cinema, opening up more vistas than the well-known festivals do, and discovering films in the most remote corners of the world and presenting them. Similarly, film theory and critique are also to have their own platform in the magazine. These are things that the usual arts pages of a newspaper do not necessarily offer. Bert Rebhandl himself used to be a critic for many years on the arts pages of the German newspaper, FAZ. Even ten years after moving from Frankfurt to Berlin he still has not lost his charming Viennese accent.

Film director, Christian Petzold, is in charge of the comics

The first thing the reader notices when browsing through the pages of the first two editions of Cargo is just how good relations with German filmmakers must be. Whereas in the first edition there was a comprehensive report on the shooting of Domink Graf’s new TV series Im Angesicht des Verbrechens, for the current edition the auteur himself put pen to paper and, in an essay entitled Simmel. Sex, Nazis und Tränen, wrote about his nostalgia for Germany’s good, old “Bahnhofskino” – those long-gone, seedy, little cinemas in German railway stations that showed films non-stop for people who needed to kill time waiting for their train. This nostalgia is also focused on one of his long-cherished dreams – to film a novel by Simmel.

His fellow director, Christian Petzold, also writes a column in Cargo in which he presents a comic in great detail. “Christian Petzold lives here just round the corner,” says Rebhandl. “I always knew he was interested in comics and that is how his column came about. That was just a happy coincidence – actually we are both interested in football, but there is no room in the magazine for that.” Petzold’s thoughts on the American illustrated story Lucky to have her are one of the best contributions this edition of Cargo has to offer. His reflections on a “pure comic” that does not just illustrate a story, but uses every trick in the book that the medium has to offer is a clear illustration of Petzold’s own ideal of a form of cinema that uncompromisingly adheres to its own rules.

Blockbusters alongside Filipino independent productions

“We are of the opinion that cinema is going through quite a good phase at the moment,” emphasises Rebhandl. “It is just that we are not able to create the same mood we had 50 years ago. Back then it was the Cinémathèque française that more or less set the tone and influenced the interests of the filmmakers. This kind of standardisation is not going to happen anymore. The cinema of today is fragmented.” This is why everything is so jumbled up in Cargo – there is a portrait of blockbuster director, Kathryn Bigelow (K-19, Near Dark), whose star has somewhat tarnished over the last few years, next to an article about current trends in the Israeli documentary film or one about the aforementioned report on the Bucharest film scene.

The type of reader Rebhandl envisages is one who perceives the diverse tendencies within the film world in a totally unbiased way. Somebody who can enjoy a blockbuster equally as much as an independent Filipino production. For Rebhandl, the film critic, it is not so much the idea of having a certain view of what is going on in the film world, but more the “big picture” on a media level. Cargo does however focus more on filmmakers rather than on actors. In the current edition it is the French director, Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep), who in an interview talks in detail about the work on his comprehensive film trilogy about “Super Terrorist” Carlos – and about how good German actors are – maybe because he cast the German actress, Nora von Waldstätten, in the role of the “Jackal’s” long-term lover.

The editorial office in the privacy of one’s own four walls

Amongst themselves, the three movers and shakers at Cargo like to call themselves a garage band, “because we do everything ourselves and have not even managed to get a recording contract yet,” as Rebhandl says. All the work is done in Simon Rothöhler’s apartment. The magazine is put together there electronically. They do however allow themselves the luxury of using an established print shop that uses top-quality paper.

For the moment the three of them do not really expect to get rich quickly with Cargo. For every edition they have to tediously scrape the money together, from which they also have to pay the fees of the authors from outside. That is why it is all the more surprising the threesome still managed to find the time for a particularly diversified web presentation. This can above all be put down to the skills of Ekkehard Knörer, who back in 1996 succeeded in establishing a film magazine web presence with his Jumpcut project.

Knörer, who in the meantime is an editor at the German online magazine, Perlentaucher, has his very own blog on the Cargo site called Container, which every day is updated with films and selected links from the film world. It is features like this that have brought the threesome a nomination for a Grimme Online Award. In these economically challenging times it is to be hoped that an ambitious undertaking like Cargo will still enjoy the attention it deserves. Surely there are enough readers interested in film, for whom the arts pages of a daily newspaper are simply not enough.