100 Films and a Funeral

This self-laudatory story of the rise and fall of the PolyGram film studio is based on a book by the former head of the company, Michael Kuhn. It is thus no wonder that right from the start we hear from all sides how creative the atmosphere was in the company and how nice it was to collaborate with PolyGram’s management. The testimonies of talking heads, including producers and Jodie Foster (who sued PolyGram for breach of contract in 1996, which is unsurprisingly not mentioned in the film), are interspersed with clips from films such as Wild at Heart, Fargo and Trainspotting, whose creation is supposed to serve as proof of the courage to support unusual projects. The measure of success, however, is revenues, the number of Oscars won and screenings at Cannes (preferably during the opening of the festival). Dozens of other titles that would not fit the image of PolyGram as a progressive company (such as Barb Wire, Kazaam and Spice World) were thus preferably omitted. The story of PolyGram indisputably contains a number of interesting sub-themes (the age-old endeavour of European film producers to compete with Hollywood, the concept of “Cool Britannia”, the importance of film production for large media conglomerates), but these are lost in the repetitive enumeration of successes, motivated particularly by the attempt to convince us that the company’s downfall was an enormous loss for the European film industry and bold independent filmmakers. Formalistic embellishments in the form of animated backgrounds and playful transitions between settings don’t help much. Stories like the one about the necessity of coming up with a different title for the German release of a Michael Winterbottom film so that posters with the word “Jude” on them wouldn’t be plastered up everywhere (again) do actually help, but not many of them are told here, unfortunately. (08/20/2016)