We recently published our Top Films of 2024 lists which has finally given us all the freedom to stop playing catchup and go back to our individual rabbit holes. There are three films on this grid that represent one of my favorites of said rabbit holes and they all belong to a long-running (early 1970s – ongoing) German-language police procedural TV series named Polizeiruf 110 after the emergency phone number for the Volkspolizei.
Each episode is near feature film length at about 90 minutes and is a pretty typical police procedural with a crime of the week investigated by a local precinct police team. In that sense, the closest American comparison would be the beloved Columbo except without the famous detective at the center. What makes it so wonderfully pleasurable to me and important enough to warrant space on the grid for individual episodes is that this series has served as a playground for two of our most beloved and well-regarded filmmakers from Germany to explore their very particular ideas, techniques and preoccupations within this fairly simple frame. It’s a model that happens like capturing lightning in a bottle every once in a while and that one wishes happened more often.
The Graf episode on this list, Er sollte tot from 2006 is less about the crime committed – an old pensioner is murdered almost certainly by a young woman with a history of scamming lonely hapless men out of their fortune with the mere promise of care and companionship – and more about the interrogation process itself. Most of the film takes place in a single room – there’s even a joke about moving to a nicer conference room from the dungeon — with only the detective, the accused and a female police writer who takes notes the entire time. It’s a series of intense interviews focused on driving the accused into a full confession and of course we get the confession we need except when it comes, it’s deeply unsatisfying and just lays bare the far more vicious, toxic and pure evil of which the accused is merely a victim. All it does is reveal how limited we are as a society to stem the kind of evil that is just a reality of the human condition and a crime committed by someone that has only known subservience and that never had a chance to develop any moral compass of their own. There’s a real anger and bitterness to all of the Graf Polizeiruf episodes which is funny because while he may not have much faith in the system, he does love these working class cops that have to live their lives staring this kind of evil in the face day after day.
The 7 episodes of Polizeiruf 110 directed by Graf span two decades from 2005 to 2024. Petzold joins the franchise a decade later in 2015. Matthias Brandt as Detective Hanns von Meuffels is first introduced to the series by Graf and in my favorite episode by him (Smoke on the Water). The one Petzold episode I have remaining is Hanns von Meuffels’s last one in the series. There’s something specifically wonderful when this kind of auteur completism project ends up being a study of two rather different filmmakers approaching in some ways, the same basic brief but also allowing for us to develop a relationship with actors and characters given that we see them over and over – something unique to television. There have been several occasions in the past few years where I have felt no enthusiasm for film watching and somehow these episodes have always brought me back. What better way to start the year but with more of these.
Lucky Star 