National Cinemas Post 1968: Germany, Australia, Canada, Third Cinema
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
Identify the characteristics and major figures of the postwar cinemas of Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Define the term "third cinema" and its connection to film history.
Germany – Between the years 1932 and 1967, Germany produced very few films of international significance. In 1962, 26 German filmmakers at the Oberhausen Film Festival formulated the Oberhausen Manifesto, calling for “a new German cinema” free of the conventions of the German film industry. The group's leaders included Alexander Kluge, who helped persuade the West German legislature to allocate subsidies for film production in 1967. From these subsidies, the New German Cinema or the German New Wave) was born.
Das Neue Kino (New Cinema) - In the late 1960s and early 1970s, three young German filmmakers emerged: Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders. All three directors were born in the early to mid 1940s, and were about 24 years old when their first films appeared. Americans took longer to notice these films of the New German Cinema. The films of the German New Wave were colder, harder edged, more ironic, and less charming then the films of the French New Wave or Italian Modernists.
The success of Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) allowed for these filmmakers to secure international financing for English language productions: Wenders (The American Friend [1977] & Paris, Texas, [1984]), Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, [1982]). All three of these directors paid tribute to American genre films and directors like Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Nicolas Ray, and to the style of German Expressionism. For example, Werner Herzog made a version of Nosferatu in 1979.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
New German Directors - Wenders, Herzog, and Fassbinder are not the only directors of the New German Cinema. Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlondorff, and Margarethe von Trotta are all important figures in German film history. The modern German filmmakers that are probably best known are Tom Tykwer and Michael Haneke. Even though Haneke is largely considered an Austrian filmmaker, many of his films are international co-productions. Haneke’s films tend to be cruel and violent; he frequently uses long takes and leaves out crucial information concerning story and plot. For example, Funny Games leaves out the motive behind why two seemingly upper class men torture and kill a family. The function of the film is to ask the audience to question how they feel about what they see. Many of his films involve the question of how we negotiate blame or guilt.
Australia – The film industries of England’s former colonies (including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) faced great difficulty finding the economic means to flourish as alternatives to the film industries of Hollywood and England. The British founded Australia as a penal colony in 1788 (until 1840). The dominant culture of the country came from its colonizers following its federation as a commonwealth (political community founded for the common good) in 1901. The Australian New Wave began in the early 1970s and lasted until the mid 1980s. Notable films include Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (British - 1971), Wake in Fright (Canadian - Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstorng, 1979), and Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980).
New Zealand – New Zealand was settled by the Maori in the 10th century, and by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries. It became a British colony in 1840 and became self-governing in 1907, joining the commonwealth in 1947. Later in 1978, The New Zealand Film Commission was founded. Mast and Kawin explain that for awhile that the most important filmmakers from New Zealand worked in England and the United States: most notably experimental filmmaker Len Lye. However, beginning in the late 1970s, several filmmakers working in New Zealand began to have success: Roger Donaldson with Sleeping Dogs (1977) & Smash Palace (1981), Lee Tamahori with Once Were Warriors (1994), and Peter Jackson with Bad Taste (1987) & Heavenly Creatures (1994).
Canada – Canada is not only a former British colony, but also a former French colony. For decades, the Canadian film industry was the National Film Board of Canada, which was founded by John Grierson in 1939. Many important pre-1978 Canadian films were animated films, documentaries, and experimental films, most notably those by Michael Snow such as Wavelength (1967). In 1978, the Canadian government began funding work through the Canadian Film Development Corporation. Directors like Ted Kotcheff [The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)], Claude Jutra [Mon Oncle Antoine (1971)], and Denys Arcand [The Decline of the American Empire (1986)] emerged on the international film scene. Kotcheff also directed First Blood (1982) and the Austrian New Wave classic Wake in Fright (1971).
This week's module covers a wide array of cinema, but there is a through line of "new" cinema in every instance. After modernism, the French New Wave, neorealism and others we start to see innovations and evolutions of various national cinemas that mostly spring from independent means and sources to tell stories of social and cultural relevance very much tied to the current moment of their making.
This week's film is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali Fear Eats the Soul, an example of New German Cinema that takes on so many issues ranging from racism, ageism and immigration to the aftermath of WW II for the German people and life in several active war zones that aren't immediately obvious.
This BBC documentary takes a look at several New German filmmakers as their stars are rising and the influence that the German Golden Age of the 20s-30s had on their work.
NOTE: auto-generated English captions, however subtitles are provided when German is spoken
Signs of vigorous life - The New German Cinema -BBC Humphrey Burton. 1981 (39 yrs ago)
The new German cinema, Herzog, Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Wenders, Syberberg
This developed out of cinematic wasteland of over the last 30 years. 8 ff, 3 tv films, 5 prizes of international festivals.
This has the BBC documentary Click Here with Humphrey Burton of the BBC. 1981.
Volker Schlondorff - we are all great movie fans 6-7 a week. we saw wonder films in other countries and we need to show that there are places here too and people living here too and want to show them. Why aren't we ever happening on a screen. theater and opera director. age 37.
Wim Wenders - Writer/critic, 7 feature films, 7 shorts. Winner of International critics prize at Cannes. Age 31 during this filming.
Werner Herzog - writer, 9 feature films, 7 shorts and documentaries, 6 prizes at age 34.
Hunts Yorgen Syberberg - Writer, Historian, 5 feature films, 6 shorts and documenatries, age 39.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Playwrite, novelist, actor. 23 ff, 3 shorts, 4 tv plays, 6 prizes. Age 30.
Back to German Film History: 40 years after the National Socialism had put an end to the Golden years of cinema, a small group of actors, writers and directors is putting Germany back on the cinematic map. The rise of a new original German cinema - the first since 1930 has taken everyone by surprise. Not least the German's who staple diet for the last 25 years was based on the most abysmal films.
The rise of Nazism in the 1930's killed the bold advance of the directors most of them emigrated to Holland. Those who stayed behind were absorbed into one of the most powerful propaganda campaigns ever which would dominate the German cinema for the next 12 years.
History was distorted and was full of Blonde Aryan actors. The villains' were foreigners and Jews.
Stukas (1941). Happy flying in the sky we attack again and again. till England is defeated. They sing.
During the 12 years of the Hitler regime, 1100 pictures. 5pct propaganda, the others pure escapism with the more political information left to the news reels. In 1945 those dreams came to an end like most of the country lay in ruin. Regardless of the devastation Germans began to make films again. Lack of money though.
First post war years films tried to deal with the immediate past. They were of social comment, self examination and self pity. With the rubble disappearing most people wanted to be spared the memory.
by 1960 cinema sunk to its lowest level. Pictures of tuba players...The economic miracle. Beautiful landscapes and saccharine happy endings. The drive for prosperity no question it was the Germany of the adonai era (?) and the economic miracle. porno or happy endings.
By end of 60's some filmmakers wanted an end to the stereotype films and wanted a separation of just purely commercial films. New language and new considerations. It was the starting signal for the New German Cinema.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder says the basic idea of the new German cinema is to make films again which are important and have something to say. Films from our own life and experiences
Volker Schlondorff - The German society has a need for looking at itself. It also has enough distance to the Fascist trauma to do so and that's why we are making films.
Wim Wenders - We want a more active spectator. Not someone who is sitting there as a victim of a film but somebody who has his own attitude to what he's seeing.
These directors belong to a generation who fought to a new political awareness in the 60's. Their sad and reflective films have a lot to do with Germany past and present.
Werner Herzog: Some young people have started from zero with out any continuity in their culture but I would say, we do not have any continuity back to the great cinema of the 20's and early 30's but still we have one common thing with them and that time we had legitimate German cinema and this is legitimate again.
However different the individual directors are, they all share many things. All of them see film as a commentary on present day Germany and the world we live in. The film as a critical analysis not merely an emotional one. but the knowledge that society cannot be changed has led to a feeling of melancholia and often despair.
It is not surprising that German audiences conditioned by 30 years of manufactured dreams have shied away from these somber and difficult films.
The work of the new directors is eagerly sought out in NY and European capitals Latin America and behind the iron curtain yet in their own country their films are often self-conscious and too intellectual. Public taste still longs for escapist entertainment.
Rejected by main stream cinema companies 15 film directors set up their own office. Filmverlag Der Autoren. No union restrictions and money is available. in 1967 the German govt passed a law to help the more promising directors and with a generous subsidy and help from tv many then came into their own.
They had a grant of 6 million pounds the average cost of the low budget film was 200,000 lbs. In the same year German TV contributed 2 million pounds. Herzog says that it was a hard struggle to get that law passed.
One of the most remarkable is Werner Herzog an outsider among outsiders. Herzog is continuously looking for a country that does not exist.
Herzog: Filmmaking for me is also a physical work and I do a lot of things myself like when i shoot in a room like this i move around the table or heavy things or work in the room until I get a perfect feeling for the space itself and this is a physical experience which hardly be described and this is an aspect of the vitality of filmmaking here in Germany. I think if you do not have this vital feeling for people space for objects in your film, you won't be able to make good films. Cinema itself resists somehow people who just approach it with their brains.
In 1969, WH made Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) a Buñuel type black account of the revolution. This disturbing film already shows all the disturbing signs of his later work. a stark poetic view of extreme human situations to contrast with our cliché-ridden existence. All the players are dwarfs (some on motorcycles) acting out an obscene parody of life, one is struck not so much by the differences from normal human beings as by their similarities in these creatures our reactions our joy suffering and pettiness seem to be seen in an extreme and concentrated way which is shattering. it is not the dwarf which is deformed but the motorcycle he rides.
Herzog: It is a film like a nightmare it shows a world where only midgets are left it is like a consumers world that has become monstrous or the regulations of table manners or religious things or education. Everything becomes like a monstrosity all of sudden and it's a very desperate kind of anarchic rebellion. It's my most desperate and strongest film.
BBC: Landscape unused and un-abused by modern civilization is for Herzog as important as people. his films are shot in lonely locations in Africa, Alaska and in Peru and the Amazon. Aguirre, wrath of God which won the 1975 Cannes festival Special Jury Prize is powerful tale of a made obsessed Spanish conquistador in search of El Dorado. The film was shot under great difficulties, the team building their own villages and rafts to carry the mad Aguirre on a chilling journey to his final death.
Herzog: There are personal films in somehow you are stark naked when you show a film and it shows what you are. If you're a scientist and want to find out about some sort of inner structure of a matter you will put it under extreme pressure and extreme circumstances like radiation, heat, pressure and you will find out the very nature of this matter much better and people under extreme pressure and extreme circumstances give you much more insight about what we are people who are deaf and blind at the same time who only can only communicate by a tactile language give us much more insight about our very innermost being and about communication better than any thesis theoretical essay on communication.
BBC: Sales to TV and a cash prize enabled him to make his next film: The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) This somber film is based on the true story of a young man who suddenly surfaced in a small German town. It is an allegory on the betrayal of innocence by a complacent society.
Herzog: I do see things that their horizon and I can articulate it if I put it in the films and I'm sick of the kind of images that surround us just go through a magazine and look at the posters in travel agencies I look at our postcards and you will see that it's a waste it's worn out images I look at TV serials like Bonanza or Daktari and you can see that it's worn out images I just filmed that's a rye field in the wind or some trees and these trees as you have never seen them before does not make the difference where you go it is a way to see it a new perspective. Certainly I'm looking for new images and at the same time for a new way to discover what we are a human aspect I mean the way how I show people and what kind of people I'm showing in my films.
Volker Schlondorff is of a very different temperament unlike his colleagues he had a considerable international training having worked as a Louis Malle and Alan Resnais his first film Young Törless (1966) based on a short story by ? won him prizes at Cannes and Berlin in 1966. With his film the lost honor of Katharina Bloom (1975) Randolph has come right to the foreground of the German cinema scene while most of his other seven films dealt with the struggle of the underprivileged against an oppressive society in the past Katharina Bloom takes on the Germany of today. The Lost Honor of Katherina Bloom made in collaboration with his wife Margarethe von Trotta is a strong semi-documentary based on novel by Heinrich bloom. The original music score is by Huntsville Henson. Katharina Bloom is played by Angela Winker a girl who unwittingly picks up a man who ends up being a terrorist as a result she is hounded and destroyed by the police and the unscrupulous German Daily Press this is a Germany troubled by the baader-meinhof trial. A polite democratic system taking off it's mask.
Schlondorff : It looks like an opera scene yet it's reality. This enormous amount of police forces who in almost civil like action are mobilized to catch one deserter who may or may not have anything to do with energist (?). Is quite typical of what's happening in Germany today where within the last six years the police forces have been multiplied by ten and they use not only to catch this young fellow but also last year there were two wolves who got lost from a zoo in the south and Bavaria and they mobilized the whole army to get these two rather innocent beasts this un-proportional reaction to reality is what we are most worried that's why we try to show it for instance in this film how come our society is not able anymore to react humanely to human beings.
Schlondorff :This film was for the first time an enormous success. It's the most political film. It's the film where all the cinema owners and distributors said our public doesn't want to see that and it's a film who had already over a million viewers in Germany. People coming to see it not merely as a film but as a statement long overdue.
BBC: Best known of all the filmmakers is Reiner warner Fassbender. The awful terrible of the New German Cinema in the last seven years he has made no less than 23 films written and directed as many theater and tv plays as well as acting in many of them. Fassbender's films are usually shot within 10 to 15 days and made on very low budgets many were produced for tv he uses the same group of actors and does not disguise the fact that his films are shot at one or two locations or in a few rooms. The self imposed banality is delivered - the power of his work comes from Fassbender's conviction that tragedy is inevitable his themes are alienation and oppression. There are scenes of domestic despair seemingly banal but raised through his art to the level of tragedy.
In 1971 Fassbender made The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1971) a social drama it is the story of a family black sheep who tries to make a living hawking vegetables and lives through a series of humiliations. It is a strong parable of the weak faced with a tough heartless middle-class ritual. As in many Fassbender films cliché attitudes are pushed to the limits of melodrama.
In 1973, Fassbender took up the theme of the immigrant worker a sore subject in today's Germany Fear Eats the Soul a double prize winner at Cannes. Tells the heroic love story of a colored worker and an older widow. Landscape rarely exists in Fassbender's films his world is a room the scenes are shot through a doorway, a window or a mirror. The characters sit and talk around tables in motionless tableau living as though in a prison. Love is a utopia.
Dr Hunts Yorgen Syberberg is a cult figure in France where the Cinematheque devoted a whole season to his films but he is as yet, little known here. Syberberg's films are very personal reconstructions of German historical figures of the last hundred years. Ludwig of Bavaria, Richard Wagner, the best selling author Karl May and finally Hitler all men whose ideas dreams and myths for the very essence of German middle-class thinking. The films are highly theatrical, consciously Kitsch and full of references to European culture. Ludwig II: Requiem for a Virgin King is entirely filmed against stylized backgrounds. In front of which the actors parade as in a charade. The charade for Syberberg is history, German History, the birth of the dream king is announced by the Nornes(?) The music mixing is Wagner with Marlena Dietrich. In dissecting German history, Syberberg is trying to understand how Hitler could come to power in one of the most civilized and culturally conscious European nations.
After Ludwig, Syberberg looked at another legend, Carl May, popular author of over 100 adventure books with form part of every German's cultural luggage. This film is concerned with the German Soul its mythology and its dangers to the world.
Syberberg: We have our history and our history is very bloody so we have something the others don't have. if our people wouldn't solve these problems it would be horrible. Guilt I think is something not only to overcome it is something of value too what we can a new generation make out it.
BBC: Syberberg is at present preparing a film on Adolph Hitler. Before committing himself to this he made a preliminary study an extraordinary tour de force. A documentary Winifred Wagner. Sigried Wagner's widow former head of the buyright clan (sp?) a closefriendship with Hitler who regularly visited xroid and the role Wagner's music played in the Nazi period has been one of the controversies of post-war Germany. The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (1975) This position of being the middle generation is very interesting because on one side there are people still living who saw Hitler, who were in the war and on the other sides with the victims and later generations I think are much more free to ban the ghosts of the past and now I think 30 years after Hitler we have the strength of morality and heart and democracy in Germany to speak about these things.
BBC: Wim Wenders studied at the Munich Film School and has worked as a film critic. Like Herzog's his beautifully made films are marked by landscape mostly a German landscape.
Wenders: By making one thing after the other I realized that I was a European filmmaker or even a German filmmaker maybe and that it has a lot to do with national things and the international cinema is something nobody can be really interested in just international wishy-washy cinema. And that cinema is really for me something I do now from my cultural background which is German our European.
BBC: Wenders big themes are of anti-heroes always on the road. Incapable of forming binding relationships for the journalists in Alice in the Cities (1974), life goes on in an emotional limbo. All Wendors films are marked by travel, movement. In Alice in the Cities, a man and a child travel through Germany in search of her family. In, Wrong Movement, based on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister a writer travels in search of himself.
Wender: There's a literal tradition in the term literature of 19th century the so called (and victim's home on) A young man leaving his home and experiencing the world and himself and that is what I was obsessed with in filmmaking too especially because I liked shooting on the road and making a journey and a film at the same time. My fantasy just worked better when I was not at home.
BBC: Wenders latest film, Kings of the Road, won this year's international critics prize at Cannes and had rave notices in Germany and France. It is certainly Wenders most beautiful and accomplished film so far, a melancholy three-hour journey through the wide empty of northern Germany two men. Two lost existences. kings of the road is also a film about the cinema. One of the men is a projectionist travelling from one village to another. It is a film about a new German cinema that refuses naively to perpetuate a dream of a better world but on the contrary has accepted the condition in which it lives.
Herzog: It is a National Film Movement and it has the strength of it is that it's daring enough to be national cinema again but I mean not in the chauvinistic sense or not in the sense of the Nazis it is what I always say it is legitimate national culture again like let's say Bushnow or Kleist or Kafka were legitimate German culture in literature and it is violently turned against barbarian culture that we had in the Nazi time
Schlondorff - we were about to make the same mistake as the British did the British thought since we have the same language as the Americans. America is our market and they sold out to the Americans. They made British films looking over the ocean and to sell them there to the states and doing this they lost their individuality. They lost their identity and we were about to do this when everybody said the hope of European films are co-production and you must take an actor from Italy and a writer from France and put all this together and make a European film you could sell in all these countries.
Fortunately it didn't work out and we fell back into a rather provincial German cinema not by mere choice but we didn't succeed in the international scene and as we were thrown back into our own identity and represent what German life is like and what German people are like and what their concern is all of a sudden the entire world got interested and they said now let's have a look what kind of people are these Germans they are so rich and it's everything seems to be going so well and economically they area such an important factor in the third world and everywhere so lets have a look what they are like and they got interested in us because we represented ourselves in our own provincial attitude the same thing happened years ago with the Czech cinema and I think this is very encouraging effect because it still proves that all over the world people are interested in other people and the less un-personal allure this is the more you feel a human being that's why film is art because it deals with human beings, individuals.
An article on the 15 essential films of New German Cinema Click Here
- Reading: Mast & Kawin, Chapter 16 “National Cinemas 2: 1968-” (pp. 528-559) in A Short History of the Movies
- Read/Watch Module 13 Pages/Clips
- Watch Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- Complete Discussion: National Cinemas Post 1968: Germany, Australia, Canada, Third Cinema
