Zur Sache, Schätzchen: Visual Pleasure and New German Cinema

Though largely ignored by the scholarship on 1960s German film, Zur Sache, Schätzchen (May Spils, 1967/68) offers remarkable insights into the early years of the Young German Cinema. By bringing Spils’s film into dialogue with several key film-theoretical texts of the 1960s and 70s, this essay suggests that Zur Sache, Schätzchen engages in revealing ways with the central questions of modernist film. At the same time, Zur Sache, Schätzchen avoids challenging the affective machinery of cinematic pleasure, especially that of scopic desire. It thus registers, as one contemporary critic wrote, “resolute indecision” about the future of modernist German film.