New German Cinema. Images of a Generation (review)

Wallflower Press of Great Britain has come out with a series of texts, Short Cuts, that introduce various topics of interest in film studies, ranging from the craft of filmmaking to interpretive studies to histories of specific national cinemas. Julia Knight, Prinicipal Lecturer in the Media Arts at the University of Luton, has contributed a volume on the German film industry and film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s. Her monograph, like the others in the series, is illustrated and complete with a substantial bibliography.

After the introduction Knight divides her book into three chapters. The first chapter examines how New German Cinema came into existence; the second analyzes why the films of this generation of German filmmakers made an impression, at home and abroad, that was not matched by the foregoing films of the 1950s; and the third chapter ponders the question as to why the New German Cinema, which began with such promise in 1966 with Alexander Kluge's Abschied von gestern, declined in the early 1980s.

Knight writes crisply and with dispatch; reading this book is not a laborious task. At the same time she conveys a broad familiarity with the subject matter and has produced a dependable introduction to the topic at hand. Her description of the economics of German filmmaking and film distribution in the post–World War II era is comprehensive and accessible, and she quickly draws the lines that will outline much of the book, namely that commercial film production in Germany, quickly dominated by American studios and distributors, was simply unable to make room for a national cinema that was more adventurous and critical. Government involvement, in the form of subsidy-granting agencies, made New German Cinema possible, but restrictions on those subsidies, imposed after lobbying by the commercial film industry, nearly snuffed out what had begun to flourish in the late 1960s. German television involvement was both salvation and damnation for more avant-garde filmmakers. Knight's summary of these economic and political factors is brief without being superficial, based as it is on the work of Anton Kaes, Eric Rentschler, and Thomas Elsaesser, among others.

Interspersed with this account of German cinematic production culture are short two-to-three page interpretations of about a dozen films, classics, if you will, of the period. The plot of each film is introduced, and an analysis follows that investigates cinematic, narrative, and socio-cultural aspects of the work in question. Most of these examinations occur in the second chapter, which is subdivided thematically according to Knight's understanding of the main themes of New German Cinema's films: Gastarbeiter, political violence in the 1970s, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, "American imperialism," and feminism.

These interpretations are somewhat cursory in their findings; the films of this period are much more complex and problematic than these investigations indicate. Knight raises few new questions, but that is not a disservice in an introductory overview. Occasionally, though, one wishes that the analyses would be a little more comprehensive; conclusions – such as the statement about Anita G. from Abschied von Gestern that "as a Jew who leaves the GDR, she acts as a reminder both of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and of the communist rejection of capitalism" (17) – may be well founded, but there is not enough information at hand for the reader to accept this conclusion other than by trusting that the author has it right. Other remarks are merely more simplistic than they really should be; is Der Spiegel best described as a "left-wing" magazine?

A more serious debate could be held about Knight's discussion of European art cinema, its rejection of "Hollywood" values, and the place of New German Cinema in the transatlantic cinema tension. Here Knight relies too heavily on clichés about Hollywood and American cinema in general and is unable to resolve the paradox as to why, if New German Cinema was rejecting Hollywood filmmaking, did many...