German Cinema and the Neoliberal Turn : The End of the National-Cultural Film Project

This chapter examines two films about the transitional status of cinema around 1980, Wenders’s The State of Things (1982), and Gusner’s All My Girls (1980). Situating these films in relation to Deleuze’s influential Cinema books, written in response to the crisis of cinema that both films narrate, I analyse these films as exemplifications of Deleuze’s crystal-image, a figure that helps explicate the way they make visible the cinematic confrontation between time and money. Both films discursively anticipate events of the neoliberal turn, demonstrating the impending triumph of market principles over the national-cultural film project represented by the New German Cinema and DEFA. This chapter offers a feminist-queer reading of how both films disrupt normative timelines to open up alternative imaginaries.

On the Wannseeheim Youth Center

Presented here for the first time in English translation is one of Harun Farocki’s earliest publications in the journal Filmkritik, of which he later became editor. Composed largely of quotations, Farocki’s text reports on film courses at the Wannseeheim Youth Center, a form of adult and alternative education in Berlin West. The introduction to Farocki’s text connects with the New German Cinema and themes that remained central throughout his own work: collaboration and quotation, Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “learning plays,” using nonfiction to explore both social relations and the cinematic apparatus, and seeing film as a form of “productive thinking.” It represents a kernel of Farocki’s wish to put the tools of filmmaking into the hands of ordinary people, thus revealing both theoretical aspects of the cinematic apparatus itself and the interweaving of visual images with social relations. With a deadpan, whimsical tone, Farocki argues that all this is, or should be, film criticism—in German, Filmkritik.

The Serpent’s Egg: Ingmar Bergman’s Exilic Elsewheres in 1970s New German and New Hollywood Cinema

This chapter focuses on Ingmar Bergman’s historical drama The Serpent’s Egg (1977), made in West Germany during the director’s 5-year self-imposed exile over a tax scandal in Sweden. Set during the hyper-inflationary Weimar Berlin of the early 1920s, the film retells in an expressionist mode the rise of German Nazism. Produced by Italian-born film mogul Dino DeLaurentiis and filmed on set in Munich with an international cast, The Serpent’s Egg was meant to provide an English-language European art film for American audiences, situating Bergman for Hollywood exposure. It simultaneously engaged with a silenced, repressed part of German history that New German Cinema directors had not yet begun to address by the mid-1970s. The massive exterior sets were re-used for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and served a central role in that episodic TV-miniseries. Thus The Serpent’s Egg becomes not only an ‘elsewhere’ of Bergman’s production and New German Cinema, but also of New Hollywood.

Difference and Orientation

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written books and articles, and continues to make films. However, his reputation outside of the German-speaking world still largely rests on his films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This book assembles thirty of the author's essays, speeches, glossaries, and interviews, revolving around the capacity for differentiation and the need for orientation toward ways out of catastrophic modernity. The volume brings together some of the author's most fundamental statements on literature, film, pre- and post-cinematic media, and social theory, nearly all for the first time in English translation. Together, these works highlight a career-spanning commitment to unorthodox, essayistic thinking.

Kluge, Alexander (1932--)

Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of the New German Cinema, he has continued to publish numerous works of fiction and social criticism, and to make experimental films and "film essays" for television. Kluge was born in Halberstadt in 1932. After studying at the University of Marburg, he earned a doctorate in law at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1956. During this time, Kluge began writing short stories. He also befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was then teaching at the Institute for Social Research. The encounter with critical theory would profoundly shape Kluge’s work. Adorno also introduced the young writer to director Fritz Lang. In 1960, Kluge made his first film, Brutalitätim Stein (Brutality in Stone), a twelve-minute, black-and-white montage of Nazi architecture, intended to open discussion of Germany’s recent past that public discourse had suppressed. It premiered at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1961. The following year, Kluge signed the Oberhausen Manifesto with twenty-five other filmmakers. This document, usually identified as the beginning of the New German Cinema, declared that "Daddy’s cinema is dead." Celebrating the innovative potential of experimental shorts, it called for greater political and creative freedom for, and a better system for financing and distributing, independent films. Lutze argues that Kluge belongs to a distinctly modernist tradition of figures who have opposed what they see to be the dominant culture of capitalist society, taking adversarial stances on mainstream aesthetics and politics alike.