Fans of the various European film festivals that come through Australia each year will remember the slump in quality that immediately followed the COVID pandemic. The good news is that slump is well and truly passed and there are two outstanding German films to prove it, I Want It All and Cranko. They deal with aspects of the reconstruction of German culture after World War II.

I Want It All (Ich will alles. Hildegard Knef) is a documentary about the tumultuous life and times of Hildegard Knef who reigned over West German popular culture in the post-war decades. She was a film actress, a singer-song writer, concert performer and author of best-selling books. Her Hollywood movies were few and left little sustainable trace but in her homeland she was a star supreme. As shown in this film, that fame was not won easily.

Born in 1925, Knef was barely a teenager at the start of World War II. However, she was ambitious to make it as a film star and became the lover of a senior Nazi film producer. Extraordinarily, she fought by his side as the Red Army entered Berlin.

That dramatic episode and its consequences are dealt with in the documentary, but certain questions are not delved into. Knef and her lover were captured by the Russians and her lover was executed. She somehow survived and while in captivity she was shown a Russian documentary film about the Nazi death camps. She says that she had previously not known about them and seeing the film transformed her.

She subsequently starred in the 1946 film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), made under the auspices of the Soviet occupation administration as part of de-Nazification. Its writer/director, Wolfgang Staudte, used it to expunge his involvement with Nazi propaganda but I Want It All discreetly doesn’t inquire into whether Knef used it similarly.

In the decades following, Knef had innumerable career triumphs and spectacular failures. Ultimately, she was stricken with cancer and had years of painful treatment during which she kept performing. Her experiences fed into her 130 songs. In all, she recorded over 300 songs in 23 LPs, toured extensively and had a glittering stage and TV career.

What is striking about Knef is her intelligence and personal honesty. The film contains TV interviews with German and US interviewers asking piercingly personal questions. Knef’s command of language and the clarity of her thinking is astounding. By the end of this film she will win you with her depth, creativity and sincerity.

Cranko is a dramatised biopic about the choreographer and artistic director famous for taking the regional Stuttgart Ballet company to international acclaim between 1961 and 1973. If you think that ballet is not for you then this film will change your mind.

Public scandal drove John Cranko out of the UK where he was working at the highest level. His misdemeanour was to be openly homosexual. In the film it is said that he was entrapped by the police because he was too close to the Royal family. However, he was accepted at the rather obscure ballet company in Stuttgart.

Cranko could have been produced as a conventional account of a highly-strung individual rising and falling on the road to triumph. However, John Cranko had a unique personal attribute. Just as there are individuals who experience music as colour, he experienced his emotional life and his reaction to music as images of human movement.

So, woven through this film are images of his inner visions, which fed his prolific creativity. It makes for a near-magical experience and certainly introduces the viewer to the beauty of ballet.

Time spent with John Cranko and Hildegard Knef at the cinema are both highly recommended.