Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 ed. by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (review)

One of the most fascinating chapters in German-language film history can be found in “the long 1968,” a remarkably productive era that includes cinematic impulses and new institutions that came into being before and after the iconic year itself. Previous explorations of the cinemas of this era have often followed movements such as the Young German Cinema and the New German Cinema, starting with the Oberhausen Manifesto and ending either in the “Hot Summer” of 1977 or at the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982. The editors and authors of Celluloid Revolt call for a deeper, broader, and more inclusive study of the cinematic landscape of German-speaking Europe surrounding the watershed year of 1968. They argue that West German filmmakers of the era, rising out of newly formed film institutes in Berlin, Munich, and Ulm, form a much less coherent yet much richer constellation that exists apart from the canonical auteurs. Moreover, this broad spectrum of new voices, as the editors and contributors convincingly demonstrate, resonates with often-overlooked cinematic impulses that were happening at the same time in East Germany and in Austria.

More than just a survey of the films from the long 1968, Celluloid Revolt presents a compelling theoretical position. While historical and aesthetic narratives surrounding the phenomena of 1968 tend either to fall into nostalgia for a lost moment or to explain the era’s failure, the volume’s editors approach 1968 as an event that should be considered— the editors quote Deleuze— as an “unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible” (9). The long 1968 may be more of a dormant virus or social mutation, a way to see, sense, and perceive new possibilities. This concept of history opens up entirely new perspectives in the fifteen essays and three interviews contained in Celluloid Revolt. The films and the ideas explored by the contributors are not only historical artifacts but also relevant, dynamic forces that maintain their disruptive and inspirational potential. This potential is especially interesting because of the broad range of films treated in the anthology: not only the usual suspects from the New German Cinema, but also exploitation films, genre films, Arbeiterfilme (worker films), student films, and short films.

For film scholars and instructors of film seminars, many of the contributions in the anthology provide us with the rarest of resources: they offer not only general discussions about film but careful close readings of individual sequences and images. Michael Dobstadt’s discussion of Ich bin ein Elephant, Madame (1969; I’m an elephant, Madame), for example, provides insight into the explosive quasi-documentary crowd scenes in which Bremen’s citizens cast themselves as the victims of fascist aggression. Priscilla Layne’s well-crafted analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni (1967; Berlin, June 2nd) investigates the way that film and other media shape the iconic images surrounding the death of Benno Ohnesorg. Lisa Haegele, Ian Fleischman, and Sean Eedy bring the reader into the surreal world of St. Pauli sexploitation films, the DEFA travel musical Heißer Sommer (1968; Hot summer), and DEFA fairy-tale cartoons, respectively, giving course instructors a fascinating context for these films. (German film syllabi will doubtlessly be seeing some colorful additions in the near future.) And, in a year when the male-dominated Academy Awards have drawn attention to the egregious historical and present treatment of women in filmmaking, Celluloid Revolt’s articles by Madeleine Bernstorff, Christina Gerhardt, and Ervin Malakaj— as well as Randall Halle’s paradigm-shift ing interview with Birgit Hein— model for us different ways of navigating the power dynamics that have made us believe that women filmmakers somehow existed on the margins of cinema’s aesthetic and political development. The three interviews at the end of the book— by Tilman Baumgärtel, Randall Halle, and Marco Abel— provide readers with more than just secondary literature...