No Farewell to Yesterday

This chapter studies Alexander Kluge's reflections on the organizational politics that gave rise to New German Cinema as seen through the uncertainty of cinema's future in the new millennium. It has been nearly fifty years since a group of young filmmakers, who up until that point had distinguished themselves only with shorts, spoke up at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen. In their now-famous Oberhausen Manifesto they demanded a renewal of the intellectual attitude in filmmaking in a direction toward authenticity and away from commerce; an intellectual center for German film, meaning film education; and opportunities for young filmmakers to make their first films. The Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board for Young German Film) emerged out of the final demand with an endowment of five million marks. North Rhine-Westphalia's funding agency for short film, which formed the foundation of the Oberhausen group, added up to 800,000 marks distributed over six years. A shift in German film occurred right from the start. At that point, the history of film was seventy years old. What later grew out of the Oberhausen movement up until Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death filled a quarter of this history. This included lots of mistakes, a lot of claims to fame, variety, enthusiasm, and many works that have enriched the history of film.