BOOKS IN PAIRS 1

Big Pictures, LIttle Pictures.

Charlie Chaplin - Das Fotoalbum, Michel Comte (Ed),Steidl, ISBN3-88243-855-X

Otto Sander - Ein Hauch von Anarchie darf schon dabei sein.... Klaus Dermutz & Karin Lesslinger, Henschel, ISBN3-89487-381-7

(in passing: Theatre Raum, Silke Koneffke, Reimer, 3-496-01193-9)

Among the regular stream of glossily printed books on art and artists, actors and particularly film actors have a hard time. Too many of the images derive from the dead hand of marketing and publicity departments, or the sterile casting portraits that pass from actor to agent and all too rarely beyond. So picture editors have a difficulty finding anything new in the agency archives and the images we get are rarely linked with any conviction to the captioning and essays that pass for a text.

Both these books are exceptions. Michel Comte has trawled the Chaplin family archive to assemble a remarkable biographic protrait of the cinema's first great character. Plenty of the images are press photos, but they are contextualised by stills from 8mm home movies and travel snaps, particularly of Chaplin and Paulette Goddard during the nineteen thirties (some 60 odd pages) and images from the private life of the old man Chaplin became in the sixties and seventies. Achieving a balance between images of film-making and photos from his private life, there are scarcely half a dozen shots in the whole book where he has been caught unawares, or chosen to let the photographer capture his image without posing. In most of these less formal pictures he appears to be drinking a cup of tea, pages 49, 294, 352, enjoying the company of children, or both page 339. The most memorable of these private photos (page 196) shows an already grey haired Chaplin sitting in a whicker chair on the promenade deck of an ocean liner. Wearing little more than a pair of pumps and a strategically placed towel, Chaplin is leaning forward as he talks to some-one off camera, but the tension in his hands and the expression of puzzled exhaustion as he makes himself clear, creates an eloquent contrast between the slightly built figure of this vivacious tiny man and the demands his career. This photo was taken in 1936, at the age of 47. Twenty years earlier in a passport type photo from October 1918, we can see the same look on theface of an eager yet weary young man; twenty years later, in 1956, a glance of tired concentration, reappears as he's working on the edit for a 'A King in New York'. Comte's caption to that picture, (page 284), is a quote from Chaplin himself, "For more than forty years I have always done everything myself, it seems foolish, but I am the only person I can trust."

Subdivided decade by decade, Comte's selection is a stark reminder of the distance between ourselves and the era of early cinema and in particular the phenomenon of stardom that Chaplin experienced during and after the first world war. This well produced book even gives us a journey through the technical history of photography as photos using different formats and film stock have been carefully reproduced in a style that is faithful to the original balance of contrast and tonality. There are enough images of Chaplin at work as a director and actor for us to recognise the performer, but to remind us that his greatest talent was to have understood cinema and create movies during the earliest phase of film history, when the defining genres were still being developed.

Charlie Chaplin spent most of his life making movies. Though this book is worthwhile, it would be far more rewarding to find a collection of restored prints bringing Chaplin's films back to the cinema.

Otto Sander is a familiar name in Germany, an even more familiar face and an inimitable voice that people recognise instantly. Klaus Dermutz and Karin Messinger have created a portrait of his career, (Otto Sander: A whiff of anarchy should certainly be there), which shifts between theatre and film, tv and the spoken word. Reminding us of an illustrated 'festschrift', the book is a series of appreciative essays, however Sander has opened his personal archive to the editors, so here too, we have a honest mix of biographic photos.

Sander belongs to a privileged generation of German artists and writers, who benefitted from the curious psychology and open coffers of West Berlin, strange freedoms combined with the constant threat of nuclear oblivion, which meant they more or less had the city to themselves, apart from a Kellogs Corn Flake factory, a dwindling population of some two million local people and a few thousand allied troops. They were of course surrounded by the 'East' and massive contingents of the Soviet Red Army, but the period from 1970 to 1990 spawned a series of impressive developments, the theatre of Peter Stein, first at the Schaubuehn am Hallesches Ufer, then at Lehniner Platz, the cinema of Wim Wenders and the opera of Goetz Friedrich.

Sander's theatre work was dominated by his relationship with the Schaubuehn for more than twenty years, from Peter Handke's, "Der Ritt ueber den Bodensee", directed by Claus Peymann, playing Emil Jannings, with Bruno Ganz (Heinrich George), Jutte Lampe (Elizabeth Bergner), Guenter Lampe (Erich von Stroheim) and Edith Clever (Henny Porton). The essays on theatre from Klaus Dermutz provide a description both of the productions themselves and the background in rehearsal, from magazine interviews and reviews. Occasionally there is too much reliance on archive sources and a fresher approach based on interviews with the protagonists might have been more revealing. A whiff of anarchy, or a touch of blood sweat, toil and tears might have helped this timid though no doubt faithful description of Berlin theatre. The section on Sander's film work is similarly unadventurous, providing a careful description of various productions, 'the charm of this comedy lies in the fine, very precise drawn individual characters...'(Der Bruch) without finding it in any sense unusual that Sander, a West Berliner, should have been working in the DDR, at the DEFA Studios in Babelsburg, nor examining the strange political culture that empowered director Frank Beyer, whose earlier work, notably 'Spur der Stein' had been banned. The references to other films and Sander's television and radio work are similar.

So, this is a survey of Sander's career with a predictable series of milestones that well illustrated and well produced, manages to achieve clear and not uninformative account that simultaneously leaves the reader knowing far little about Sander's experience and the challenges he has faced, or the turbulent era that drew to a close when the reins of power at the Schaubuhn were passed to a younger generation and everyone was surprised to discover that the talents of the sixties and seventies were becoming the pensioners of the new millenium. I had expected this book to be three times more interesting than it actually is. Sander is a remarkable man and actor. Maybe the next book about him will be more focussed on its subject? Maybe Sander should write it himself?

It is extremely difficult to write about theatre, because the very nature of performance is ephemeral, however, the buildings themselves and the space that is a theatre could not be more physical and enduring. That sense of a gritty practical world of work and creativity is lost in Germutz and Messlinger's essays on Sander, but Silke Koneffke's thesis published by Reimer, as "Theatre Raum" covers a range of Berlin theatres and theatre projects. Her architectural survey of 'visions and projects from theatre people and architects, 1900-1980" covering the period from Max Rheinhardt's "Grosse Schauspeilhaus", via Walter Gropius' designs for Piscator's 'Total Theatre' among projects from Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union. Koneffke gives us diagrams of the Schaubuehn and some informatoin on the scale of the commitment the city of Berlin provided the Schaubuehn collective, $3millions for the site of Erich Mendelsohn's modernist Universum Cinema, which had been destroyed during World War II, then $20million for the building work, a price tag that unsurprisingly rose to $40million before completion in 1981.

Somewhere between the buildings and the actors, the stage and the audience, there is an activity we think of as performance and a totality that gets called theatre. Chaplin had an instinct for cinema, Sander knows theatre. They deserve authors who can share that sensibility.