Ode to Cologne: A Rock 'N' Roll Film

Wim Wenders has succeeded once again in making a film about a relatively obscure subject (this time the rock band BAP from Cologne in Wenders' native Germany) which is artistic, interesting and enlightening. The film is inspired by the group's album 'Tonfilm' (talking movie) which in turn was inspired by Edward Hopper's painting 'New York Movie'. Since band leader Wolfgang Niedecken is also a painter this is a fitting starting point for a fascinating and beautifully filmed journey through the band's history, taking in German postwar history and Niedecken's heroes including The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Bob Dylan. The DVD has English subtitles throughout and German ones for the songs (sung in Cologne dialect). The music is fabulous and the film is much much more than your average 'Rockumentary'

Using lots of staged episodes with a certain pathos certainly not fitting what the band BAP is about or the fans (who don't get into the picute at all) love in it, the comparedly few concert clips are not very well shot nor give a good sound. What Wenders was trying to achieve with this film remains unclear. The only interesting, but far too short, interesting episode is a TV-clipping from a discussion Niedecken (the bandleader) had with Heinrich Boell. But having seen this film with a Russian colleague at the Berlin film festival, I noticed, that by far not everyone knows Boell's face...

Wolfgang Niedecken is the German Bruce Springsteen, with the same range of material and the same celebrity, even though he sings in a dialect that is largely incomprehensible to anyone not from Cologne. The film is a homage to BAP (named for Niedecken's father - Bapp meaning father).

The film inadvertently maintains a tension between BAP's serious, lonely lyrics, the absurdity of singing a song in a language no one else understands, and a Cologne that it tries to portray as a serious, tragic, rebellious city, but the narrative never gets away from the mythic, folkloric Cologne that most Carneval-goers know. It is a very strange Carnevalesque.

The film seems to have been part of Niedecken's current attempts to establish his legacy, both by helping to launch younger musicians' careers and his personal and stage-personal love-affair with Cologne. Interestingly, it also skirts over the reasons behind BAP's failed tour of East Germany, which would have provided some negative balance to the story.

In 2003, the German Ministry of Culture showed this film in Washington, and Wolfgang Niedecken was there to provide commentary. The film was not heavily funded (the sweets' girl and the projectionist, for example, were supposed to mirror the Cologne fable of Jan and Griet, but they ran out of money and left the story undeveloped).