Genres and Film Topics in Germany

The development of documentary films in Germany is characterised by several changes of style, which are closely linked to the major upheavals in German history and the development of audio-visual technology.

During the Weimar Republic, films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin. The Symphony of the City (1927) were among the models of the international film avant-garde. By contrast, in the Third Reich documentary films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) served the purposes of fascist propaganda. Although documentary films were denazified after 1945, they were still used for propaganda purposes in the FRG and the GDR of the 1950s, marked by the East-West confrontation and the Cold War. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that there was a change in direction under the influence of television journalism as well as American Direct Cinema and French Cinéma Vérite: an observational and socially committed documentary film gained in importance with films by Klaus Wildenhahn, Peter Nestler, Eberhard Fechner and many others, first of all in West Germany, but also in East Germany with Jürgen Böttcher, Winfried Junge and Volker Koepp.

Documentary Films in the 1960s and 1970s in East and West

The documentary films shows life as it really is, and it should contribute to improving critical social conditions. This, at least, was the aim of many film makers at this time. In the West, film makers such as Rolf Schübel, Peter Heller, Peter Krieg, Hans-Dieter Grabe or Helga Reidemeister stood up for the socially disadvantaged and for majorities as well as resistance and freedom movements, under the influence of the student and alternative movement.

Many films dispensed with the previously usual apparently omniscient author’s commentary and let those affected speak for themselves in conversations, interviews and statements. With observations with the camera they examined the working and everyday lives of the population and largely dispensed with set scenes and filmed reconstructions as had been usual in the past. Their heroes were not the celebrities and those with influence, but the little people.

Not only in the West, but also in the GDR, the documentary film developed into a medium for a critical public and, under the impression of growing resistance and the collapse of the SED regime, it once again experienced a heyday with films by Helke Misselwitz, Gitta Nickel, Thomas Heise and others before Reunification and the closure of the DEFA Studios put an end to this important documentary film tradition.

The Crisis of the 1980s

But with the fall of the protest and alternative movements, the self-confident educational claim of the committed documentary film went into crisis in the 1980s in the West, too. On the television screens of the Federal Republic, upon which the film makers were largely dependent, the initially provocative, observational film style increasingly mutated to a professional cult of the affected who not only bemoaned the misery of the world, but also spectacularly marketed it. As the ever closer merger of film, television and new media and the development of video and digitisation took place with the new forms of media, younger film makers have been trying out a variety of hybrid film techniques and forms since the 1980s and 1990s that deliberately ignore the traditional rules and genre boundaries. What is often noticeable here is that there is a movement away from the major socially critical issues of the 1960s and 1970s in favour of a greater interest in subjective, individual and biographical forms and a tendency towards various experiments with hybrid mixed forms.

New Formats and Approaches

Since then the most popular forms alongside the observational documentary films and reportages, have been video diaries and autobiographical portrait films that use the new, handy video cameras to penetrate into the previously closed zones of private and intimate life (e.g. Birgit Hein, Jan Peters). Other films transfer narrative and dramatic procedures from feature film and TV film direction to the documentary film. Often they obtain their greatest effect with the help of concealed scenarios and re-enactments in which the protagonists re-enact individual scenes from their own lives. Or they combine documentary sequences with scenes from feature films to make the films more compact, livelier and more exciting and to combine the political with the personal (Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Ulrich Seidl, Gordian Maugg). Docu-dramas combine documentary material with theatrical re-enactments or reconstructed historical events using TV direction methods in order to uncover political scandals: a technique that Heinrich Breloer and Horst Königstein have developed to perfection. Politically committed films use modern observation and montage techniques to present their political “state of the nation” reports or their criticism of environmental destruction, war or the business practices of international corporations in a highly effective visual way, such as Werner Herzog, Thomas Schadt, Andres Veiel, Romuald Karmakar or Bertram Verhaag have done. Poetic “found footage” films and experimental films by Matthias Müller and others use handed down film material less as a historical document, but rather as the starting material for the artistic treatment and interpretation of the handed-down images.

Reflections On Own Aims and Reality

In view of the scepticism about the traditional “truth” claims of the genre of individual experimental film makers, also occasionally with self-reflective, satirical and paradoxical hybrid forms. Essay films and media-critical documentaries by Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, Jan Sebening and others make the aesthetics and history of documentary film and TV genre to a subject for self-reflection. Other film makers combine the satire on social events with a parody of their own documentary and journalistic genre conventions (Volker Anding, Thomas Frickel). “Fake documentaries”, which only simulate the idea of the documentary, but are really largely staged play a game of confusion with the audience, combining deception and truth, fiction and the authentic, in order to question the right of the genre to portray the truth.

Documentaries and fiction are merged together in the outlined forms in the most varied way: a tendency that can be seen internationally. With the development of digital production and distribution techniques and the internet, this trend towards hybrid forms, where the aesthetics of film, TV and the new media increasingly merge together, are forced further: modern signatures of a worldwide “Media Revolution”.