THE NEW GERMAN CINEMA
French Impressionist or Italian Neorealist cinema can be discussed as a group of filmmakers sharing broad assumptions about film form, style, and subject. After the early 1960s, however, most new cinemas in both West and East were not clear-cut stylistic movements. During this era, a new cinema often consisted of younger filmmakers who happened to make films that won international recognition.
The New German Cinema offers an example. Most historians consider it to be a development out of Young German Film (pp. 456-457). It includes several diverse trends: the political wing we discussed in Chapter 23 (pp. 572-576), the sensibilist trend (pp. 618-620), and diverse works of female, gay, and lesbian directors (pp. 597-599). By the late 1980s, New German Cinema had become a broad term for all independent filmmaking in West Germany since the 1960s, and many historians believed it continued into the 1990s.
The term itself played a concrete historical role. In the 1970s, international film culture took young filmmakers as representatives of a “new German cinema” as yet unacknowledged in their homeland. The New York Film Festival, the Cannes festival, the Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions helped build up the sense of a new trend in international art cinema. After directors such as Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders won recognition outside Germany, their reputations became elevated at home. State support of production was accompanied by initiatives from cultural agencies such as the Goethe Institute, which helped promote the director-based Autorenfilm in other countries by circulating films and subsidizing filmmakers to tour with their works.
For some historians, the radical edge of the 1960s and 1970s films was blunted as the films became absorbed into the European art cinema. By 1979, when Schlondorff’s Tin Drum, Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun, Herzog’s Nosferatu, and von Trotta’s Sisters won international acclaim, the process of assimilation had become evident. During the 1980s, new directors—particularly women— received government and television funding, and several of them gained international recognition. Once in place, the idea of a “new” national cinema could be developed and exploited by the nation as a sign of cultural prestige.
For extensive discussions of how the New German Cinema came to be treated as a distinctive trend in film history, see Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave, 1984), and Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
REFERENCES
1. Rene Cleitman, director of Hachette Premiere Films, quoted in Peter Bart, “Too Little or Too Much?” Variety (24 May 1993): 5.
2. Margarethe von Trotta, “Female Film Aesthetics,” in Eric Rentschler, ed., West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), p. 89.
3. Quoted in Marc Silberman, “Women Filmmakers in West Germany: A Catalog,” Camera Obscura 6 (fall
1980): 128.
4. Quoted in “losseliani on losseliani,” in The 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival Catalogue (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 2000), p. 138.
5. Quoted in Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 146.
6. Quoted in Alan Greenberg, Heart of Glass (Munich: Skellig, 1976), p. 174.
7. Wim Wenders, “Three LPs by Van Morrison,” in Jan Dawson, ed., Wim Wenders (New York: Zoetrope,
1976), p. 30.
8. Wim Wenders, “Impossible Stories,” in The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber, 1991), p. 59.
9. Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Common European Home,” in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 266.
10. Quoted in Vladimir Tismaneau, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 134.
11. Quoted in Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence ofa New Cinema (New York: Praeger,
1988) , p. 193.
12. Quoted in “Damnation: Jonathan Romney Talks to Bela Tarr,” Enthusiasm 4 (summer 2001): 3.
13. Andrzej Wajda, “The Artist’s Responsibility,” in David W. Paul, ed., Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), p. 299.
14. Quoted in Danusia Stok, Kieslowski on Kieslowski (London: Faber, 1993), p. 144.
15. Waldemar Dziki, quoted in Andrew Nagorski, “Sleeping without the Enemy,” Newsweek (19 August
1991): 56.
16. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London: Faber,
1989) , p. 117.
17. Ibid., p. 27.
18. Quoted in George Faraday, Revolt ofthe Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film Industry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 165.
FURTHER READING
Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Corrigan, Timothy. New German Film: The Displaced Image. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
-. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and
History. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Dale, Martin. The Movie Game: The Film Business in Britain, Europe and America. London: Cassell, 1997.
Dibie, Jean Noel. Les mecanismes de financement du cinema et de l’audiovisual en Europe. Paris: Dixit, 1992.
Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996.
Finney, Angus. The State of European Cinema: A New Dose ofReality. London: Cassell, 1996.
Forbes, Gill. The Cinema in France after the New Wave. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Goulding, Daniel J. PostNew Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Hjort, Mette, and Ib Bondebjerg. The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema. Bristol, England: Intellect, 2001.
Horton, Andrew, ed. The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
Horton, Andrew, and Michael Brashinsky. The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Kolker, Robert Phillip, and Peter Beicker. The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Magny, Joel. Maurice Pialat. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1992.
Menashe, Louis. “Moscow Believes in Tears: The Problems (and Promise?) of Russian Cinema in the Transition Period.” Cineaste 26, no. 3 (summer 2001): 10-17.
Portuges, Catherine. Screen Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Predal, Rene. Le Cinema franr;ais contemporain. Paris: Cerf, 1984.
Silberman, Marc. “Women Filmmakers in West Germany: A Catalogue.” Camera Obscura no. 6 (fall 1980): 123-51; no. 11 (fall 1983): 133-45.
Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema ofPedro Almodovar. London: British Film Institute, 2000.
World History
