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“Amphibious” Movies and Formal Experiments After the critical and commercial failure of Michael Kohlhaas, Schlöndorff entered what one might describe as a period of retrenchment, a period that roughly parallels a transition in the New German Cinema in general. After the burst of activity of the Young German Cinema of the late 1960s, there was something of a lull before the more impressive achievements of the 1970s. Thus, during the first half of the 1970s, Schlöndorff worked exclusively on lowbudget productions financed in association with German television. Although much of this period was a low-profile time for the director, it was also a productive one. The resultant movies, namely Baal (1969), The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1970), The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass, 1971), A Free Woman (Strohfeuer, 1972), Overnight Stay in Tyrol (Übernachtung in Tirol, 1973), Georgina’s Reasons (Georginas Gründe, 1974), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), and Coup de Grâce (1976), include several impressive successes. The beginning of the second period is marked by Schlöndorff’s founding, along with Peter Fleischmann, of his own production company, HallelujahFilm , in 1969. The production company was for a period to be Schlöndorff’s home base in working out production arrangements with West German television , and it operated until 1981. In 1973, Schlöndorff began, along with Reinhard Hauff, Bioskop-Film, for which much of his subsequent work has been produced. Both production companies were in Munich on the lot of the venerable “Arriflex,” Arnold and Richter, camera works. After the collapse of the West German commercial film industry during the late 1960s, such independent production and distribution efforts became a trend, cresting in the 1971 establishment of the “Filmverlag der Autoren,” a combined collective production and distribution setup. 6 63 Three major influences or factors shaped this period in Schlöndorff’s work. As with all the New German Cinema, the institutions of West German television provided the filmmaker with his major production opportunities. Secondly, during this period Schlöndorff built upon the theories of the playwright Bertolt Brecht to create a body of work that strives to merge political commitment with formal innovation. Finally, Schlöndorff met and married Margarethe von Trotta, and developed a creative collaboration with her that combined his more professionalist, rationalist sensibility—albeit one open to protest and pop culture—with her more instinctive and feminist one. The resultant work is ambitious and intellectually substantive, both varied in its subject matter and consistent in its thoughtful rigor. Schlöndorff andTelevision Schlöndorff’s transition to lower-budget films was brought about, in large part, by the 1968 revisions of the West German film-subsidy law, which essentially terminated funding for culturally ambitious filmmakers. At the same time, West German television became increasingly receptive to producing programming with an alternative, oppositional stance. Serious historical discussions of the New German Cinema have had to confront the way in which German television has provided both a significant source of funding and a structure for project development for German filmmakers from the late 1960s to the present (Elsaesser, New; Collins and Porter). With a highly developed public television system, and with state production operations feeding into a federally organized structure, television production work often was and still is commissioned from or subcontracted to independent production firms. Both the virtues and limitations of West German film after the 1960s have arisen from this particular television production system that caters to a German population that has been not as enthusiastic about moviegoing as the French and Italians. Like all the filmmakers of the New German Cinema, including Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, and Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Schlöndorff’s ties to television and its institutions have marked his work. With the exception of Georgina’s Reasons (which was part of a collection of Henry James adaptations produced for both French and German television), all of Schlöndorff’s works from this period were produced in association with Hessischer Rundfunk, the Frankfurt-based television station. Even several of Schlöndorff’s subsequent larger-scale international coproductions, such as The Tin Drum, Circle of Deceit, and A Gathering of Old Men, took advantage of Hessischer Rundfunk’s production help.1 Much of the resultant work falls into 64 Brechtian and Profeminist Schlöndorff the category first described by Günter Rohrbach, that of the “amphibious film,” referring to a kind of cinema that supposedly can be marketable and...

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