Helmut Käutner's Black Gravel and the lost decade of German cinema

I have written previously here about my love for German director Helmut Käutner’s 1961 noir, Schwarzer Kies, or translated into English, Black Gravel. It is without doubt my favourite German noir and one of my favourite noirs from the period of late film noir more generally.

So, for my obligatory #Noirvember post, a quick heads up about episode #773 of the Projection Booth podcast, in which my Revolution in 35mm co-editor, Samm Deighan and I join the hardest working man in podcasting, Mike White, to discuss the film.

Without rehashing the contents of the episode too much, there are several things about Black Gravel that make it so interesting

It takes as its starting point a key theme in a lot of postwar German crime related drama –films like Peter Lorre’s The Lost One (1951) and Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Amongst Us (1946) – troubled individuals trying to escape traumatic memories from experiences during the war, who are thrown right back into those events through a chance encounter.

But rather than the dark, rubble strewn streets of Berlin, Black Gravel is set in a small German town turned R&R destination for a nearby American airbase. The war seems to be a receding memory as West Germany is on the cusp of its so-called economic miracle. But, of course, it is not. And the terrible memories of that conflict are joined by a host of new problems: the anomie of consumer capitalism; a fraught relationship with the occupying American powers, whom local Germans rely on for a living but also resent for their domination; and the spectre of a new and potentially even more horrific conflict with the Soviet Union and its eastern bloc client states.

Black Gravel is a trucker noir and a bad town noir. It’s a doomed romance. And it’s about ordinary Germans trying to bury the past but being hopelessly unable to. It looks fantastic, with a palpable neorealist influence and some, frankly, jaw dropping mis en scene.

The original cut of the film was buried for years due to (completely unfounded) charges of antisemitism arising from one scene. But honestly, watching it now, one can see many reasons for why this film performed so badly at the box office and pretty much all of them have to do with the fact that – much like the reception to Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright by local Australian audiences – German cinema goers were simply no prepared to sit through the absolutely scathing and bleak depiction of Germany’s postwar trajectory that Käutner conjures.

Black Gravel is also interesting in terms of where it sits in the broader history of German cinema. I have been living in Berlin for the last six months, during which time I’ve made an effort to watch as much local cinema as possible. Of course, I haven’t even scratched the surface, even in the noir/crime genre. But one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of official critical discourse around German film culture is centred around two poles: the pre-war classics and the work of New German cinema, particular works that appeared from the late 1960s onwards.

And that stuff is great. But – and this is not an original analysis – there is a sort of lost decade of local cinema that does not seem to get much love, from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. And it is kind of obvious why, because in the urgency to try and construct a respectable post war German cinematic canon, up and coming directors and critics alike were not particularly keen to shed light on the cinema of the 1950s: Heimatfilme or ‘Homeland’ films, traditional romance and family tales set in idyllic settings, Krimi or crime films, and a whole host of other popular forms of German cinema mainly designed to entertain. Although like nearly all popular culture, they are textually far deeper than that. Anyway, this lost period is very much were Black Gravel and a large chunk of Käutner’s career take place. And, it is interesting to speculate what other gems from this period are waiting to be re-appraised and re-discovered.

Anyway, we discuss this and many other aspects of the film of the Projection Booth episode, which you can check out here.

This is the first of two Projection Booth episodes I am a guest on during #Noirvember this year. Coming up is an episode on another of my many cultural obsessions, Cop, the 1988 neo noir directed by James B. Harris, which I wrote about here.

Until next time.