The New German Cinema

During the 1920s, Germany was the center for one of the most artistically ambitious cinemas in the world. Such artists as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Georg Wilhelm Pabst created a body of work unsurpassed for its boldness, originality, and expressiveness. The rise of Nazism, the ensuing war, and the protracted period of reconstruction, however, left the German cinema in shambles. By the early 1960s, the German cinema consisted largely of pseudo-English detective mysteries and mediocre film versions of Karl May's Westerns.

This artistic vacuum made the rise of the New German cinema especially unique. An entire generation grew up without any immediate film heritage except that of Hollywood movies and American rock 'n' roll. The pre-war culture seemed distant, aloof, and essentially meaningless, while the period prior to the American occupation was rarely discussed. Because of this, the New German cinema had to formulate an aesthetic response to the gap in German culture. As Wim Wenders stated in Kings of the Road (W. German 1976), the Americans had colonized the German sub-conscious. The roots of this New German cinema is, in part, a response to this colonization.

Nowhere is this influence more evident than in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An incredibly prolific director, Fassbinder's work is remarkably diverse, yet the influence of Douglas Sirk pervades his style. Sirk used the conventions of melodrama to produce films which were critical of the American society of the 1950s and many of Fassbinder's films operate with a calculated sense of melodramatic excess.

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (W. German 1969) represents an important early statement of one of Fassbinder's major themes. Fassbinder essentially sees society as a dehumanizing set of structures and institutions which are designed to deny an individual's need for love and affection. The alienated, and ultimately psychotic, figure represented by Herr R. is simply the logical result of a society which crushes a person's basic capacity for affection and sense of self-worth, and the film's title is rhetorical. For Fassbinder, the mystery of Herr R.'s behavior is that it should be mysterious to anyone in the first place. What else could one have expected?

While Fassbinder adapted certain American influences, Werner Herzog created his own unique form of film language. Reaching back to the Germanic Romanticism of the 19th century, Herzog's protagonists are either obsessed by a singular, overwhelming vision (as in his recent Fitzcarraldo - 1982) or else driven mad by it. In Signs of Life (W. German 1968), a landscape filled with wildly twirling windmills is, like the landscape in all of his films, elevated to the level of visionary experience. Proclaiming that "I am my films," Herzog does not make films about madness, he champions it instead. Unceasing circular movement, traditionally a symbol of chaos, is Herzog's recurring motif.

Though not as well known as either Fassbinder or Herzog, Volker Schlondorff is nonetheless of equal importance as a director. His best films, such as The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (W. German 1970) and Coup de Grace (W. German 1977), delved into the repressive nature of traditional German society. While these films are unremitting in their critical nature, Schlondorff has been remarkably successful at producing a more commercial form of film making. A Free Woman (W. German 1972), retains its integrity even while operating in a more conventional manner than some of his other works. A Free Woman, like many of his other films made in collaboration with his wife Margarethe Von Trotta, intricately examines the problems faced by an ordinary woman in contemporary German society.

While Schlondorff's subtle commercialization makes him more immediately accessible to American audiences, Reinhard Hauff often works within the conventions of extremely Germanic genres. Primarily a social realist, Hauff's films contrast sharply with that of his fellow artists. The Brutalization of Franz Blum (W. German 1974) rigorously details the everyday, banal cruelties of life in prison. Striving for authenticity rather than dramatics, Hauff's camera work is often flat and matter-of-fact in its presentation. This authenticity is further accentuated by Burkhard Driest who based his screenplay on his own experiences after serving five years for bank robbery.

Of all the filmmakers in the New German cinema, undoubtedly the most difficult and experimental is Jean-Marie Straub. Along with his wife and co-director Daniele Huillet, Straub has created some of the major works of structuralist cinema. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (W. German 1968) was constructed by Straub not to be a biography of Bach and his wife, but a series of sound and images, attempting to preserve the integrity of Bach's music. The musical performances are interspersed with calmly composed visuals and the reciting of letters written by Anna to her husband. By not predetermining the film in advance (as happens in a narrative film), Straub allows the audience to construct the film themselves and to do so by way of Bach's own work.