Film Explainer Book

In the beginning was the light. The light was turned off. I stood in front of the screen. all alone. I looked into the audience. There weren't many of them there.In the beginning was the light. The light was turned off. I stood in front of the screen. all alone. I looked into the audience. There weren't many of them there.

Book 22/24 in my reading of the past winners of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize / Man Booker International.

The Film Explainer, translated from Gert Hoffman's original Der Kinoerzähler, won the 1995 prize, the last awarded before the prize went into abeyance for several years,. It was also awarded posthumously to the author, something no longer permitted under the Man Booker version of the rules.

The novel was translated by Gert Hoffman's son, Michael, himself a poet and an award-winning translator (e.g. winner of the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his translation of Herta Müller's novel The Land of Green Plums and the 2004 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel), as well as a judge in the 2018 Man Booker International.

See for an interview with Michael Hoffman after the prize was awarded.

The Film Explainer, set in Germany of the 1930s-mid 40s is gently comic but with a dark edge from the political developments in the background. The novel opens:

My grandfather Karl Hofmann (1873-1944) worked for many years in the Apollo cinema on the Helenenstrasse in Limbach/Saxony. I knew him towards the end of his life, with his artist's hat, his walking stick, his broad gold wedding ring that from time to time would go into pawn in Chemnitz but always came back safely. It was he who gave me the idea - long after he was dead - of walking with a stick. He had trouble with his teeth and used to say: These gnashers will be the death of me one day, if I ever die. In the end, though, it was something quite different, not that at all.

My grandfather was the film explainer and piano player in Limbach. They still had those, back then. A lot of them came from the fairgrounds, from the "apish origins of art" (Grandfather). You could see that from the way they dressed. In the cinema they wore red or blue tailcoats with gold or silver buttons, a white bow tie, white trousers, sometimes top-boots. Others would wear smoking jackets.

Watch out, don't nod off, here comes a wonderful sequence, maybe the most wonderful in the whole film, cried Grandfather, reaching for his pointer. He liked to wave that around a lot.

(as I understand it Gert Hofmann's grandfather was indeed a film explainer, although the novel is not wholly autobiographical e.g. the grandson in the novel was born before Gert himself)

Yes Grandfather is a film explainer, one who, in the early days of silent movies, stood by the screen and explained what people were seeing. A role perfected in Japan by Benshi () but which even by the time of the novel was largely redundant in Europe and later killed entirely by 'talkies' (with the coming of Hitler and the sound-film they slipped quietly back to the circus. grandfather remained.)

Grandfather is a pompous and self-important character, convinced that the citizens of the town need him to appreciate the medium - An audience needs someone to explain a film to them, at least its finer points - despite firm evidence, from indifferent and diminishing audiences, to the contrary. And like the Benshi he views his role as an artform in itself as well as a job, albeit one that, due to the low audiences, doesn't pay well. In one of a number of sarcastic retorts from the narrator's Grandmother, the film explainer's long suffering wife, that punctuate the text she proclaims 'He's not just an artist without any bread, he's an artist without any art'

Grandfather lives for films - for pretty much any situation that arises he has a film based analogy, and the text is filled with his brief explanations of the plots that illustrate this point, usually to the bemusement of his interlocutor. This lovely review contains still from various of the scenes discussed in the movie

His favourite of all the actresses he watches is Asta Nielsen, for reasons he didn't want to divulge. Those reasons, Grandmother said, are her small but shapely breasts. Interestingly (not mentioned in the novel but presumably at the back of the author's mind), Nielsen found herself in the mid 30s summoned to see Hitler who suggested her films could play a valuable cultural role - her response was to leave the country.



(her recollection of the conversation from 1966, reported in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-1925).

And her rival for Grandfather's (mental) affections is Pola Negri, whose 1935 film Mazurka (1935) was designated "artistically valuable" (künstlerisch wertvoll) by the Reichsfilmkammer and was so beloved of Hitler that their were rumours the two had an affair, albeit Negri successfully sued the French magazine that carried the story for libel.

And it is this knowledge, more hinted at than explicit, in the novel that provides the novel it's dark edge.

Grandfather has a constant battle with the owner of the cinema, rightly unconvinced that silent movies and film explainers are the future, and with the coming of the first talkie shown in the town, The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jonson, Grandfather's days are numbered, although his heckling throughout the first showing is a comic highlight.

In the middle of the novel he falls into physical and emotional despair, joining the ranks of the unemployed. An attempt to transfer his skills to the theater as a prompter fails when he cannot resist leaping on stage to show how it should be done.

But with the rise of the Party, he is revitalised. His nemesis, who is Jewish, disappears and the cinema is sold for a knock down price into other, more sympathetic hands, enabling Grandfather to resume employment, albeit now as an usher.

But his real love remains film. Sent to Berlin as a 'deputy flag waver' in a major Nazi party rally in May 1939, he decides to watch a movie before the rally starts, managing to mislay his flag and therefore his opportunity to share a platform with Hitler. The movie he watches, which he talks about for the remaining 5 years of his life was 'Gone With the Wind' (of course a favourite also of the Fuhrer's).

To me a novel that couldn't quite make up its mind what it wanted to be - a tribute to the silent film, a family memoir or social history, a straightforward tale or an analogy, an affectionate portrait of vainglorious rogue or a portrayal of a Nazi sympathiser. To its credit it contains all these element but perhaps then becomes a jack of all trades novel. 3.5 stars