New German Cinema

In the years after the Oberhausen Manifesto (Chapter 4), a group of young West German directors made films that no one had seen from Germany before: personal, political, often strange, and made on small budgets. Within about fifteen years they had won major prizes in Cannes and Venice and an Oscar, and German cinema was again a name to conjure with. This chapter looks at how the movement was funded, at six of its best-known figures and at what was distinctive about their films. The dates and titles are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

How It Was Paid For

The movement was only possible because of new money and new rules.

• Public funding. From the mid-1960s a new body gave grants to young directors, and a federal film law in the later 1960s set up a film subsidy system (check the dates).
• Television. In the mid-1970s the public broadcasters agreed to help pay for films, in return for the right to show them on television (check the date). That arrangement meant many of the films were as much television co-productions as cinema releases.
• Schools and small crews. The new directors often worked in small groups, used the same actors and technicians from film to film and kept their costs low.

A Movement or a Moment?

The label "New German Cinema" covers directors who were quite different from one another, with no common manifesto beyond the Oberhausen statement. The label is a convenience, applied by critics and by the directors' supporters abroad. What they shared were a rejection of the earlier commercial cinema, an interest in the German past and present, and a personal, author-driven approach to film-making sometimes called Autorenfilm. They were also influenced by the French New Wave, Italian film and, in Fassbinder's case, American melodrama.

Six Names

Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the figure most often placed at the centre of the movement. He directed around forty features, plus television work, between 1969 and 1982, often working with the same group of actors, and he also wrote, acted and edited. He died in 1982, aged 37 (check). His films are mainly stories of unequal relationships, from small-scale love stories to portraits of the economic recovery, and he was greatly influenced by the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk. His television epic Berlin Alexanderplatz is discussed in Chapter 8.

Herzog and Wenders

Werner Herzog made films about people driven by obsession, often in remote places, and filmed in difficult conditions. Wim Wenders, by contrast, made quiet, wandering films about people in motion, in West Germany and the United States, and was strongly influenced by American music and cinema. Both found international audiences more easily than at home, and both became better known abroad than most of the earlier directors.

Politics and the "German Autumn"

Many of the films dealt with the pressures of West German society in the 1970s, a time of political violence by left-wing militants and a sharp reaction by the state. The autumn of 1977 is remembered as a peak of that crisis, and in 1978 a group of directors, including Kluge, Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and others, contributed to an omnibus film about it, Germany in Autumn (check). It is an example of film-makers responding directly to events.

Women in the Movement

Women directors were more visible in this period than in earlier German film. Von Trotta was the best known, and others such as Helma Sanders-Brahms and Helke Sander are also usually named (check). Their films often looked at women's lives, the family and the consequences of the war, and were part of wider changes in German society.

How It Ended

The movement is usually said to have faded around the early 1980s. Fassbinder's death in 1982 is often treated as a symbolic end, but the causes were wider: funding priorities changed, some directors moved abroad or to other work, and the audience for such films never grew large at home. Even so, the directors' reputation abroad was lasting, and several of them remained active for decades.

Exercises

Next chapter: Television: ARD, ZDF & Tatort, which turns from the cinema to the small screen.