immediate postwar film to the New German Cinema

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immediate postwar film to the New German Cinema
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Cinema in postwar Germany

• May 7, 1945 a clean break from the past?
• Immediate postwar film rupture and continuity
• Film as a re-educational tool
• Summer 1945, Allied Control Commission (ACC)
• guidelines to regulate the control of all
  information production and transfer. The aim was
  to disassemble the centralised organisational
  structure of Goebbelss propaganda ministry as
  well as to counteract the effect of twelve years
  of information and manipulation.

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Cinema in postwar Germany

• Western occupation zones Hollywood
  entertainment models
• Entertainment and escapism
• Soviet occupation zone film used to
  reconstitute the public sphere
• Realism
• Propagation of an anti-fascist myth

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Cinema in postwar Germany

• The Rubble Films (1946-48)
• Black-market trading, hording cigarette currency,
  rationing, fraternisation and sex among the
  ruins.
• Irgendwo in Berlin (1946) Dir. Gerhard Lamprecht

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Cinema in postwar Germany

• 1948 currency reform stability and normalcy.
• Flood of imports from Hollywood
• Entertainment and escapism
• Anathema to the perceived dreariness of the
  Rubble Films

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Cinema in postwar Germany

• The Heimat Film
• Main characteristics
• Landscapes (pastures, mountain regions) NOT
  destroyed by the war.
• Cultural tensions town and country, tradition
  and progress, old and young.
• Social milieu pastoral and holiday.
• Themes
• Horse breeding!
• Frustrated marriage plans
• Business competition
• Rescuing the ancestral domain of family
• Protagonists
• Refugees, occupiers, gypsies (those on the
  periphery of society)
• Holiday makers
• Priests, foresters, teachers
• Nature!

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Cinema in postwar Germany

• 1962 - The Der Spiegel Affair
• 10 October 1962 Der Spiegel published an article
  by its deputy editor Conrad Ahlers on the Nato
  military exercise Fallex 62.
• A hint of the social unrest and the shake up
  that would dominate the 60s and 70s.

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The Oberhausen Manifesto

• 28 February 1962
• Papas Kino ist tot!

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The New German Cinema

• Influenced by the French nouvelle vague.
• Importance of auteur filmmaking.
• Alexander kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz,
  Margarethe von Trotta, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  to name but a few of the most important figures.

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The New German Cinema

• Desire to be financially independent
• Images of Germany
• Films that would challenge the spectator
• The return of the repressed trying to master
  the Nazi past
• Political cinema contemporary issues student
  movement, left-wing radicalism terrorism, the
  press.

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Fassbinder (1969-1982)

• Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 44 films, some of
  which were to become canonical.
• When he died in 1982 he was praised the world
  over as a unique filmmaker and, moreover, as the
  chief representative not only of the New German
  Cinema but of the new Germany.
• Interests German postwar history and those on
  the edge of society.

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Fassbinder (1969-1982)

• The BRD Trilogy
• Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979)
• Lola (1981)
• Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1981/82)