Black Gravel (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Robert Kohen

Directed by Helmut Käutner; produced by Walter Ulbrich; screenplay by Helmut Käutner and Walter Ulbrich; photographed by Heinz Pehlke; edited by Klaus Dudenhöfer; music by Bernard Eichhorn; staring Helmut Wildt, Ingmar Zeisberg, Hans Cossy, Wolfgang Büttner, Anita Höfer. Blu-ray or DVD, B&W, German dialogue with English subtitles, 114 min. (premiere version) and 113 min. (distribution version), 1961. A Kino Classics release.

Kino Classics’ North American DVD and Blu-ray release of Black Gravel (Schwarzer Kies, 1961), a film directed by the German master Helmut Käutner, marks a moment to be celebrated for cinephiles on this side of the Atlantic. It is the first time the film has been released on home video in North America, where woefully few of Käutner’s films are available as VHS editions from the 1990s. The release, a new restoration and digitization by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation that was shown during the 2017 Berlinale, comes on the heels of a renewed interest in Käutner’s films and German cinema from the 1940s through the advent of the New German Cinema in 1962. While Käutner retrospectives have screened in both Europe and the United States over the past few years, this is the first in what will hopefully be many North American home video releases of Käutner’s large body of work.

The until-recent neglect of Käutner originated in the revolutionary zeal of the founding members of the New German Cinema, whose famous 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto harshly derided the largely formulaic and conservative “Papa’s Kino” of the preceding Adenauer years and called for a radical break with that past. Black Gravel was itself targeted by the young Oberhausen critics, who sardonically granted the film an award for being “the worst achievement by an established director” in 1961. In a similar slight, the Berlin Film Festival refused to hand out any awards to a German film that year. While Oberhausen filmmakers’ investment in avant-garde and experimental cinema understandably put them at odds with the more narratively conventional Käutner, their rush to jettison the past in an attempt to build something wholly new had the unfortunate effect of obscuring Käutner’s legacy for nearly half a century. It also elided some of the shared thematic affinities between Käutner and many of the Oberhausen filmmakers. These included an interest in confronting Germany’s recent National Socialist legacy and its culture of amnesia, as well as more generally documenting social conditions in the Federal Republic—both of which are, to varying degrees, features of Black Gravel. And while the Oberhausen manifesto called for freeing filmmaking from the commercial constraints of a studio system Käutner largely worked in, he himself had formed an independent production company intended to allow for the regular creation of artistically ambitious, albeit not necessarily formally radical, films (it would fail financially within a few short years).

Foretastes of the 1970s German art films that followed Oberhausen’s more radically avant-garde legacy in the prior decade are also on display in Black Gravel: the use of relatively unheard-of actors in place of traditional stars; the playful subversion of traditional genres; and the depiction of characters from society’s margins. Like the auteurist cinema of that decade, Käutner’s body of work is also marked by a number of idiosyncratic, if less consistently pronounced, stylistic signatures. Indeed, watching his films today it is hard not be struck by some of the similarities to, if not influences on, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work, from both directors’ predilection for a heavily stylized use of color, mirrors, and stairways to their provocatively direct exposure of lingering racism and anti-Semitism in postwar German society. Viewed from the sober perspective of the present, Black Gravel, with its radical overturning of 1950s genre conventions, uncharacteristically frank sociopolitical criticism and overwhelming stylistic artistry, is anything but cinema worth jettisoning.

Far from the cheerful “Papa’s Kino” of Käutner’s generation, Black Gravel tells the bleak tale (necessary spoilers ahead) of Robert Neidhardt, a gravel truck driver in the small German town of Sohnen in 1960, where the economy revolves around an American Air Force base currently under expansion. In addition to his legitimate work for the base’s construction, he is also involved in the local black market (hence the title), siphoning off gravel from his employer in coordination with his friend Otto. Robert’s squalid existence—he lives in a tiny room atop the brothel “Atlantic”—is interrupted when he runs into his former lover Inge (played by Ingmar Zeisberg, whose occasionally unconvincing acting is one of the few weak spots in the film), whom he undertakes a quest to win back. Unhappily married to the American base officer Major Gaines (Hans Cossy), Inge is eventually won over by the persistent but emotionally distant Robert. Tragedy, however, soon strikes when Robert, in the process of illegally dumping stolen gravel on a restricted military road, accidentally runs over two young lovers, the American soldier Bill Rodgers (Peter Nestler) and his East German girlfriend Anni Peel (Edeltraut Eisner). In order to protect himself and Inge, who was in the truck with him, Robert covers up the accident by burying the deceased couple under gravel. Things begin to look up until a false alarm leads Inge and Robert to mistakenly believe that Bill and Anni’s bodies will soon be discovered. Robert flees but refuses to take Inge along with him. There are two slightly differing versions of the film, both of which are included in this release. In the original version, Inge dies at the end when she accidentally falls off the side of Robert’s truck, and Robert proceeds to bury both her and himself under the gravel. In the edited version (a concession to misguided anti-Semitic charges and commercial pressures), Inge is not killed but simply deserted by Robert, who drives off into the mist before the credits roll.

While Black Gravel decidedly recalls American noir, both in its sophisticated style (low-key lighting, disorienting camera angles, fog, nighttime action, overcoat- and fedora-wearing characters) and themes (desperate, unlucky, pessimistic petty criminals who unwittingly get women killed, cf. Detour and The Big Heat, only to ultimately be undone themselves), it is also constructed as a response to the most popular German genre of its day, the Heimatfilm (or “homeland film”). These films, socially conservative works that were also exceptionally popular during the Nazi era, championed an exclusionary vision of German national identity and values that they located in the preindustrial, rural countryside. Their escapist narratives, unfolding in picturesque Alpine or otherwise characteristically German landscapes, turned away from any sort of sociopolitical postwar reckoning. By contrast, Black Gravel establishes itself as a sort of anti-Heimat film, repeatedly undercutting the beloved genre’s most cherished assumptions.  

Sohnen, the fictional town of some five hundred residents where the film takes place, is located in Germany’s scenic and rural Hunsrück region. The perfect setting for a Heimatfilm, however, is turned into something radically other in Käutner’s hands. The opening shots of the film present the viewer with large blocks of text that nearly eclipse the landscape behind them, as if to suggest its relative insignificance. Stripped of its traditional visual coordinates, the Heimat is reduced to a sort of postapocalyptic, modernist wasteland that recalls the “non-places” discussed by Marc Augé. The construction site where Robert transports gravel is nothing but a massive pit in the earth amidst a monotonous expanse of gravel. His “country house,” a mere shack located along the side of a desolate highway, is seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There is also a curious miniature reconstruction of a folksy German church that Robert has built on his property, as if longing for a connection to a more traditional sense of homeland that is not otherwise accessible. As much an indicator of this traditional culture’s apparent absence as its longed-for status, the church, we unsurprisingly learn, was copied not from an actual church but from an image Robert saw in a calendar. The comforting Germany of the Heimatfilm, it would seem, is rendered further than ever from modern German experience.

When we do see an actual church in Black Gravel, the contrast with Robert’s reconstruction could not be starker. Located on the military base, the church features a sleek, nondescript façade and a comically rotatable chancel that swivels around every time the Catholics and Protestants alternate services (despite the film’s overall bleakness, Käutner often manages to subtly weave in comedy, as in many of his films). Similarly, the apartments on the base are repeating rows of nondescript modernist buildings whose interiors, according to Robert, are also all identical. “Even from the window,” he tells Inge while looking out onto the street, “you can’t tell where you are.” The few indicators of place that do exist in the film are nearly all non-German. The “Atlantic,” the town brothel where Robert resides, is filled with American soldiers and bears few traces of Germanness (and even less of traditional Heimatfilm values). Inge’s apartment is adorned with Asian and African statuettes, and Robert’s “country house” is full of Americana. Despite Germany’s famed automotive and technical prowess, Robert drives a French truck and Anni listens to a Japanese radio.

During a key scene late in the film, the characters sing a ballad about a forlorn traveler longing for the comforts of home. It is a telling moment, as none of the characters feel properly “at home” anymore in Käutner’s Germany. Nearly everyone seems to be trying to escape: we overhear a woman who helps run the brothel ask “how do we finally get out of here?”; Otto and Robert’s former girlfriend Elli are planning to move to Canada; and Inge, who formerly lived abroad with her husband, is now desperate for him to take her away to America. Even Inge’s beloved dog has run away from home. The longing to escape is captured perfectly by the film’s restlessly moving camera, as well as by low angle shots of characters claustrophobically framed against the ships that decorate the low ceiling of the Atlantic. Off-center shots of characters who linger tentatively at the edge of the frame, rather than fully inhabit the space, convey their feelings of dislocation. Even in death the film’s characters are not properly at home: they lie not in German soil, but in the artificial gravel Robert buries them in at the American base.

Black Gravel also situates itself in opposition to the Heimatfilm in its frank portrayal of persistent anti-Semitism and racism in German society, subjects conveniently elided in most cinema of the Adenauer era. “The events and characters are fictional,” the film tells us as the beginning, “but not the time and place,” signaling its commitment to a topical, sociopolitically engaged cinema. Käutner said he wanted to depict the “remnants of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism" in modern Germany, but he ran into trouble when the leader of a Jewish group in Germany misguidedly brought legal action against the film for its depiction of anti-Semitism against the Jewish brothel owner (the fact that a concentration camp survivor might run a brothel was also cited as unacceptable). Despite strong disagreement from the group’s members and another Jewish association in Germany, as well as a court’s decision to summarily dismiss the case, the production company agreed to remove the relevant scenes against Käutner’s objections (hence the revised version of the film, also available on the disc).  

Kino Classics’ decision to make the original, uncensored version available is a fortunate one. Had the original been released in 1961, one wonders if it might not have had a less acrid reception among the Oberhausen critics. For the film’s portrayal of persistent anti-Semitism is an essential frame for the noir story: immediately preceding Robert’s revelation to Inge that he has buried Bill and Anni’s bodies beneath the gravel, in the very same scene the Jewish brothel owner (in the uncensored version) speaks to his assistant of Mauthausen, the notorious German concentration camp. Käutner thus links Robert’s piling of bodies under the gravel, an image with which the film both begins and ends, to West Germany’s efforts to bury its own past crimes, from a notoriously lax process of de-Nazification and the reinstatement of Nazi members throughout all levels of society to the silent passing over of the Holocaust in both textbooks and popular (including filmic) culture. That the United States helped facilitate this amnesia, particularly in an effort to build a strong and united front against communism, is also suggested when Major Gaines tells Inge to keep Robert’s actions secret and later when the American CIA agent investigating Anni and Bill’s disappearance turns his attention away from the truly guilty characters toward communist agents in the East instead. Such connections are visually underscored by the massive pit where Robert buries the bodies, calling to mind familiar images of mass graves from the Holocaust. When we learn from Gaines that any objects trapped under the gravel can compromise its function as a structural foundation, Käutner drives the point home: you can’t properly build a nation anew upon the buried crimes of the past.

The Murnau Foundation’s restoration of Black Gravel is of high quality, apart from a few scenes that feature some minor flickering damage. The digital transfer has strikingly crisp images and good audio balancing. The censored version of the film will be especially useful to those interested in exploring the film’s reception history, although its inclusion is less interesting for its own sake. An insightful audio commentary by film critic and programmer Olaf Möller provides rich cinematic and historical context, if at times wandering a bit from the film itself. The Murnau Foundation and Kino Classics have brought the care and attention to Käutner’s work that it has long deserved, and this release will undoubtedly open the doors to an exciting sphere of cinema that has too long been neglected outside of Germany.

Robert Kohen has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, where he studied German, French and Italian cinema. He lives in the New York City area.

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