1968 in Art and Culture

Filmmaking in Germanyin the 1960’s struck out on new paths. But what was “new” about the "New German Film“? A look at film production during those years shows that creative potential arises above all through the acceptance of heterogeneity and difference

German films would never have had such titles ten years before: Alexander Kluge’s Artists under the Big Top: Disorientated (Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos), Hellmuth Costard’s Of Special Merit (Besonders wertvoll), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp (Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter), Helke Sander’s Break the Power of the Manipulators (Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure), Rudolf Thome’s Jane Shoots John Because He is Unfaithful with Ann (Jane erschießt John weil er sie mit Ann betrügt) Klaus Lemke’s Negresco, or May Spils’ Go For It, Baby (Zur Sache, Schätzchen).

Each of these films could be seen in 1968, if not necessarily in movie theaters. Helke Sander’s agitational film against the Springer Group arose in the still young Berlin Film Academy (DFFB); Hellmuth Costard’s short film, in which two sentences on the changes in the legislation on film promotion of 1967 are read aloud by the glans of a penis in ultra-closeup format, triggered a medium-sized scandal at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, where it was not shown.

Contexts and Interconnections

Behind every title stands another approach to filmmaking: a space extends itself between documentarism, material studies and narrative cinema, convention and experiment that simply did not exist in the cinema of the 1950’s. Various aspects of closeness or distance to politics are included here. And there are connections and alliances among the films, as well. For instance, Straub/Huillet’s film is the result of a close cooperation with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s „antiteater“

Thome’s Jane Shoots John... was shot on the one hand on left-over negative material from Klaus Lemke’s 48 Hours to Acapulco (48 Stunden nach Acapulco) and on the other on Straub/Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach) And Costard’s Of Special Merit (Besonders wertvoll) begins with a dedication to Anna Magdalena Bach – a reference to Straub/Huillet’s film on Bach: Context-sharing between these works, exchange, interconnections.

Locales: Hamburg and Munich

These connections reveal that a process of change was underway in the second half of the ‚60’s in terms of the politics of film, and of society as a whole. A good five years after the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which 26 young film directors proclaimed the death of traditional film, directors were working together whose paths would soon part again. Common interests resulted in utterly different films. Geographically speaking, this often meant Munich, because this was the place to be for film aficionados in the mid -‚60’s. But for adherents of another kind of cinema, Hamburg was the more important city. Helmut Herbst, one of the protagonists of the Hamburg scene, once described the difference in these words: "Hamburg wanted film, Munich wanted movies.“ What is meant here is that in Munich film circles narrative had priority, while the Hamburg scene (Hellmuth Costard, Thomas Struck, Helmut Herbst, Klaus Wyborny) – not least through the founding of a film cooperative along the lines of the coops of London and New York – was aiming at a departure from cinema and the creation of alternative venues for presentation and distribution. Influences here derived more strongly from the visual arts and the American avant-garde than from "normal“ film history. A unique politics of film arose that recognized the political potential inherent in its investigative approach to material and its break with traditional forms.

Berlin

The Berlin film students studying at the DFFB sought a more direct and also content-related connection with the politicized present. Here, in the films of Carlos Bustamante, Thomas Giefer, Harun Farocki and Gerd Conradt, both experiments in form and concrete political agitation came together due to their immediate proximity to current political events in the divided city (the Vietnam War Congress, demonstrations against the Springer Group, the shooting of Rudi Dutschke). The epitome of this development is to be found in the short film Herstellung eines Molotovcocktails (i.e. How to Make a Molotov Cocktail), that delivers exactly what its title promises. It is generally ascribed to Holger Meins, who had been a student at the DFFB since 1966 and later became a member of the RAF.

Film as Utopia

There is no comprehensive formula that can adequately summarize the many productive ways of dealing with film material being developed around 1968 in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The usual label for the most prominent among them (Volker Schlöndorff, Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Kluge and Wenders) – "Young German Cinema,“ or "New German Film“ - is merely annoying, because what in fact united many of these filmmakers was a common impulse to connect with other, expressly non-German and therefore uncorrupted forms. Wenders’ romantic view of American cinema (Same player shoots again, 1968) exemplifies this pattern, as does the DFFB students’ international bridge-building in Berlin, the exchange between the Hamburg COOP and the experimental film circles in New York, as can be noted in Klaus Wyborny’s and Heinz Emigholz’ early structural works. But also Alexander Kluge’s idea of combining the narrative potential of early cinema with the documentary impulses of the "New Waves“ (neorealism and nouvelle vague) in a film such as Artists under the Big Top: Disorientated (Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos), and of exemplifying the debates on “revolution or reform” through the metaphor of a circus company, bears witness to an opening up of cinema to investigation and to a productive ambiguity as to what “cinema” is as such, or what it should be.

However, a film such as Costard’s Of Special Merit (Besonders wertvoll) clearly reveals that this utopian moment was short indeed. Of Special Merit is already a document of rupture in the very moment of potential opening; the legislation for film promotion of 1967 had laid the groundwork for supporting acclaimed popular films. In 1968, Uwe Nettelbeck wrote in Die Zeit, with reference to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962: "Hellmuth Costard’s film draws the balance of the experiences in film politics that we have had to go through since then. He declares that the negotiations between filmmakers and the establishment that were started at that time have failed irretrieveably.“