Germany

views updated

Germany

EARLY YEARS: 1895–1918
THE GOLDEN AGE: 1919–1933
FASCISM: 1933–1945
SINCE 1945
THE NEW WAVE
DEFA
SINCE 1990
FURTHER READING

German cinema, in its widest sense what the Germans call Filmkultur (film culture), illustrates many aspects of Germany's history, culture, commerce, and politics over more than a hundred years. Any account of world film-making must acknowledge the range of the German cinema's technical and aesthetic innovation, its difficult yet fascinating evolution, and the influence of its leading figures and works. Today it operates in a mediascape extending to European and global perspectives, and integrates into a converging network of production and consumption.

One index of German cinema's identity is public funding. At the national level, support is channeled by Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA, Federal Film Subsidy Institute) in Berlin; from Munich, the capital of the state of Bavaria, the Export Union promotes its image and sales abroad. Cinema as a cultural export is one of the functions of the Goethe-Institut München, combined with the Inter Nationes Bonn, in the state of Northrhine-Westphalia. All sixteen federal states, and many regional authorities, support film and media exhibition, education, training, and production by maintaining museums, archives, and municipal theaters, like the Stiftung Deutscher Kinemathek in Berlin or the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt/Main, or by offering prizes, grants, and loans to filmmakers. Such complex networks of support and subsidy are also key elements in economic planning aimed at replacing failing industries, like steelmaking and mining, with expertise in media technology and production. For German Filmkultur, Berlin and Munich still dominate, but centers in the Rhineland cities of Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Karlruhe and in the North German port of Hamburg have arisen to challenge them.

EARLY YEARS: 1895–1918

In early 1895 Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907) had paying audiences for his Tachyscope, an optical device capable of producing movement in single pictures, and on 1 November that year the Skladanowsky brothers projected what was arguably the first film show as public entertainment. The Skladanowskys' "Bioskop" projector was not, however, technically equal to that of the French Lumière brothers (Auguste [1862–1954] and Louis [1864–1948]), who are generally credited with the first authentic film show on 28 December 1895. Cinema originated as part of variety performances, and the first generation of exhibitors traveled around existing entertainment venues showing, between live acts, a mixture of short items featuring acrobatics, nature scenes, local events, and so on. Many of these items were realist documentation, but filmmakers were already developing film's capacity for the fantastical.

The most significant pioneers of German cinema were Oskar Messter (1866–1943) and Guido Seeber (1879–1940) in Berlin. Messter refined the technology, inventing the Maltese cross to synchronize film frames behind the projector's lens, and also a sound system using gramophones. He shot his own material, including regular newsreels, and initially used it to sell his equipment. Messter moved into exhibition and distribution and by 1913 was producing full-length features. As a director and cinematographer, Seeber developed German cinema's potential in lighting and effects photography, but perhaps his major contribution was to supervise the building in 1912 of the first major German studio at Babelsberg, a suburb of the city of Potsdam, just southwest of Berlin.

Up to 1906 German exhibitors made or bought their material, but by 1910 a second stage of development was under way with longer, multi-reel narratives, together with a change in ownership rights toward distributors, who now began renting prints. Cinema was moving out of its initial novelty phase and into premises built specifically to show films, some of which, like the Marmorhaus (Marble House) in Berlin, copied the opulence of established theater in an attempt to share its cultural recognition. Filmmakers strove to increase cinema's cultural capital by attracting bourgeois audiences, which would in turn serve to moderate censorship restrictions and entertainment taxes and to counter the efforts at controlling them by reform movements like those established in 1907 and again in 1917. Such movements promoted preventive censorship, requiring that films justify their right to be shown, and sought to co-opt the new medium for their own educational, reformist, or nationalist purposes. Filmmakers responded by producing what have come to be known as "authors' films." These might be adaptations from literature, with screenplays written by recognized authors—such as Hanns Heinz Ewers's scenario for Stellan Rye's (1880–1914) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913), a fantasy on the motif of the alter ego, and Paul Lindau's (1839–1919) version of his play Der Andere (The Other, 1913)—or films with rights to plays by renowned dramatists like Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) or Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931). Recognized names from the theater also came to act and direct, like the actor Albert Bassermann and the stage-director Max Reinhardt.

Most films functioned as popular entertainment, which demanded the recognizable patterns of genres with known stars and directors. Established popular traditions, such as fairy tales, operettas, and serial novels, made film dramas, melodramas, and comedies easily accessible, and fantastic narratives appeared alongside historical epic and costume extravaganzas. Der Steckbrief (The wanted poster, Franz Hofer, 1913) combined the fashion for detective stories with stylized settings. Hollywood provided models for slapstick comedy and even for a group of imitation westerns, some adapting the Wild West tales of the German nineteenth-century writer Karl May (1842–1912). Stars of the period included Paul Wegener (1874–1948), Bassermann, Henny Porten (1890–1960), and, above all, Asta Nielsen (1881–1972).

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German industry moved into its final founding stage, consolidation. Nationalism had always marked German filmmaking, with groups like the Deutsche Flottenverein (Society for a German Fleet) and colonial societies producing films to promote their policies. And the German emperor, Wilhelm II, figured so frequently in newsreels that he was nicknamed the nation's first film star. As foreign competition declined, domestic production and exhibition expanded and came under increasing state influence aimed at harnessing the established entertainment function as both a distraction from the war's realities and as a vehicle for nationalist propaganda. Newsreel and documentary film adopted narratives supporting the war effort rather than depicting the realities of the Front. The military formed its own Bild-und Filmamt (Office for Photography and Film) in 1917, seeking to control all German filmmaking. Defeat nullified such ambition, but not before it generated the most famous studio in German cinema history. The Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) brought together private and state investment to buy up large parts of the industry, like Messter's studios and the German division of the Scandinavian Nordisk company, and dominated German Filmkultur, even through the Third Reich.

THE GOLDEN AGE: 1919–1933

Defeat brought two to three years of social and political turmoil until the Weimar Republic (named after the provincial town to which the postwar government fled to escape the upheavals in Berlin) stabilized Germany. Then the Great Depression of 1929 undermined the fragile economy and democracy, paving the way for Nazism. Yet this short period is known as the Golden Age of German cinema.

Initially, the German economy spiraled into inflation, which was not controlled until the US Dawes Plan guaranteed the currency in 1923. Yet the film industry remained active, with hundreds of production companies and distributors, and it expanded with the Emelka studios in Munich, later the Bavaria AG, the second traditional site of German filmmaking. The other major studio, Ufa, prospered initially, establishing prestige cinemas in Berlin and Hamburg and later building the leading soundstage at Babelsberg. The new republic rapidly established direct control over production with film assessment offices in Berlin and Munich, freeing individual films from the preventive censorship applied by law. However, the same body could also promote its educational criteria via tax breaks for "particularly valuable" films.

Yet German filmmakers' greatest advantage was international, as exported German films gained acclaim abroad. With foreign films also coming in, international opportunity meant negotiating with what was already the dominant global film industry, Hollywood. In 1921 a European Film Alliance came about between the Hollywood company Famous Players and a group of ex-Ufa filmmakers, such as the entrepreneur Paul Davidson (1867–1927) and the directors Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) and Joe May (1880–1954). However, its management could not cope with the pressures of inflation and quickly declared bankruptcy. A few years later, Ufa, led by the most successful producer of the day, Erich Pommer (1889–1966), made the Parufamet agreement with the Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn studios. Ufa contracted for twenty US films each season and guaranteed the American studios 75 percent of its cinema's programs, and the Americans agreed to take ten Ufa films each. The German side needed the deal, as it also came with a loan of $4 million to pay off Ufa's debts. Unfortunately, it was not enough.

Already in 1919 Ufa had launched the first German international success for over five years with Lubitsch's costume drama, Madame Du Barry. Under the title Passion, this became a huge hit in the United States the next year, so that the director left for Hollywood in 1923 and never worked in Germany again. In early 1920 Robert Wiene's (1881–1938) Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), the film that came to characterize German expressionism, the dominant avant-garde art movement of the times, premiered in Berlin. It abandoned any attempt at realism, depicting the machinations of an evil doctor and showman with his exhibit, a sleepwalker, through bizarre, painted sets and exaggerated costume and acting styles, not least from the young Conrad Veidt (1893–1943), who also later left for Hollywood and is perhaps best known for his role as the Nazi commander in Casablanca (1941). Caligari's theme of the corruption lurking behind respectability was so potentially controversial that the producers forced the addition of a conciliatory ending before release. Unlike Lubitsch's film, Wiene's made an international impression as innovative filmmaking, even if it did not enjoy the same popular success. Other examples are Fritz Lang's (1890–1976) Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, 1922), centered on a mad criminal mastermind, and above all his Der Müde Tod (The Weary Death, also known as Destiny and Between Two Worlds, 1921), a film exploring the mysteries of life and death and displaying Lang's ability to visualize transcendent scenes architecturally. F. W. Murnau (1888–1931) made twenty-two films from 1919 to 1931, when he died in the United States. Nosferatu, ein Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire, also known as Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors, 1922) is one of the most well-known expressionist films, while Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) displayed a masterful use of the moving camera that did away entirely with the need for subtitles to tell its tale of a once-proud hotel doorman who finds himself unemployed. Murnau came to the United States on the strength of these films, but with the exception of the exquisite Sunrise (1927), he was unable to find success within the Hollywood studio system. Expressionism was nearing its end in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, Paul Leni, 1924), which told three fantastical tales with magnificent sets and featured three of the era's great stars: Veidt, Emil Jannings (1884–1950), and Werner Krauss (1884–1959).

In 1924 Fritz Lang adapted the expressionist style for the historical epic Die Nibelungen, which depicts the greatest German folk-myth. With his penchant for monumental effect combined with expressionistic devices, Lang made another of the milestone films of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis, in 1927. With two of German cinema's leading stars, Heinrich George (1893–1946) and Brigitte Helm (1906–1996), supported by an army of extras, the story shows an apocalypse averted in a supercity of the future and an idealistic conclusion uniting management and workers. Although it confirmed Ufa's technical prowess, the film also came close to bankrupting the company, precipitating eventual takeover by conservative, nationalist interests. However, Metropolis had impressed Dr. Josef Goebbels (1897–1945), who, as the Nazi propaganda minister after 1933, offered Lang a leading position in the industry. Lang left for Hollywood, where he managed a reasonably successful transition, producing films like Fury (1936), the anti-Nazi story Hangmen Also Die (1943), Rancho Notorious (1952), and The Big Heat (1953). He never reintegrated into the German industry after the war, although he accepted invitations to return to Germany to direct Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Bengal, 1959), Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1959), and Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960), reprising a motif from his early career.

In the late 1920s expressionism gave way to the technically and ideologically more sober style of the New Objectivity, which found cinematic expression in such films as Kurt (1902–2000) and Robert (1900–1973) Siodmak's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930) and G. W. Pabst's (1885–1967) Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925). The latter, a social drama set in a proletarian district of Vienna, combined social commentary with moralistic melodrama to show the corruption of speculators and the rescue of the heroine by an American Red Cross officer. It was also the film debut of Greta Garbo (1905–1990), who shortly afterward left for Hollywood and became a screen goddess. In the same genre, but ideologically uncompromising, is Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness, 1929), made by director Piel Jutzi (1896–1946) with the Marxist film collective, Prometheus. The film depicts a mother's suicide after her family is destroyed by unemployment and poverty and advocates working-class solidarity.

Lang also depicted the same milieu for his first sound film, M—Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (M, 1931), but used it for a crime thriller based on an actual case of a serial killer of children. M launched another significant star, Peter Lorre (1904–1964), who soon went on to prosper in Hollywood. In M, and in much of the earlier expressionist filmmaking from Caligari onward, the critic Siegfried Kracauer identified in the German culture and nation a significant reflection of individual and social psychoses, which would find an overt form in Nazism.

F. W. MURNAU
b. Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, Bielefeld, Germany, 29 December 1888, d. 11 March 1931

Murnau took his professional name from a town in southern Bavaria favored by noted artists in the early part of the twentieth century. He earned a reputation as a creative genius who contributed to the German film industry's international ascendancy, but also as a director unable to manage the shift to Hollywood and all that such a move entailed.

After World War I, he became an apprentice to the theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. He directed his first film, Der Knabe in Blau (The Boy in Blue), in 1919 and had his first success with the romantic melodrama Der Gang in die Nacht (The Dark Road) in 1921. With the screenwriter Henrik Galeen, he made one of the signal films of German expressionism, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire, 1922), the forerunner of the vampire genre and a cult film today. Murnau worked in a variety of styles but is best known for his expressionist films: Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1926), from the seventeenth-century French comedy by Molière, and Faust (1926), from the celebrated play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Murnau's Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), one of the most significant films of the period, combined elements of expressionism and the subsequent New Objectivity. Murnau had Karl Freund, a leading cameraman of the day, shift his camera around and through the scenes, even going so far as to have Freund strap the unwieldy equipment onto his body. The film's groundbreaking visual effects support a story told from the perspective of the protagonist, a hotel doorman powerfully portrayed by Emil Jannings. The Last Laugh displays technical prowess, eschewing any title cards to support its narrative.

Murnau received official recognition at the premiere of Faust in 1926, but he left for the United States and a contract with Fox studios. There he made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), an expressionist story of infidelity and murder with a visionary, dreamlike style, often ranked as one of the greatest silent films. It was a critical but not a commercial success. After Four Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930), Murnau quit the mainstream industry and took a loyal team to the South Pacific to produce Tabu (1931), a tale of love and death in paradise. He was killed in a car accident a week before its Hollywood premiere.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire, 1922), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), Faust (1926), Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe, 1926), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Tabu (1931)

FASCISM: 1933–1945

On taking power in 1933, the Nazis brought all aspects of production together under the Reichsministerium fu Volksaufklär?rung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda), led by propaganda minister Goebbels. Filmmakers, together with all writers, artists, musicians, and so on, had to belong to the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber for Cultural Affairs). Consolidation of production companies meant that the studios Ufa, Tobis, Bavaria, and Terra soon came to produce more than 80 percent of all features. Prominent names, like so many anonymous individuals, had to leave or were threatened with literal destruction. Billy Wilder (1906–2002), Max Ophüls (1902–1957), Robert Siodmak, Erich Pommer, Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk; 1897–1987), Alexander Korda (1893–1956), and Arnold Pressburger (1885–1951) joined those who had earlier emigrated to other European countries or to Hollywood; but now they were in exile, with no guarantee of ever returning home. Those who stayed, like the actors Emil Jannings, Hans Albers (1925–1999), Kristina Söderbaum (1912–2001), Brigitte Horney (1911–1988), and Heinz Rühmann (1902–1994), or the directors Veit Harlan (1899–1964), Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1905–1987), and Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), could have successful careers if they obeyed the rules.

The onset of Nazi rule, like its downfall in 1945, marks a crucial shift in German history. But it did not happen overnight; rather, it was a transition to circumstances long foreseeable and thus meant a degree of continuity, at least initially. Possibly the world's most sophisticated industry lost much of that indeterminate factor vital in all filmmaking—talent—but it could still produce impressive films for its popular market, propagandistic tracts as features or as pseudo-newsreels, and some of the most vicious imagery ever screened. The Reich also carried on the Weimar Republic's assessment policy, granting films conducive to its ideology tax breaks, although these could not compensate for the loss of export markets, especially in the United States, which immediately declined. There were, however, some advantages, as foreign film imports declined, although never disappeared completely, with the major competitor, Hollywood, banned only in 1939. And, of course, from the later 1930s the expanding Reich brought captive audiences. By 1937 major parts of the industry were nationalized, and any independent filmmaking was banned in 1941, when the final consolidation created

an Ufa monopoly and meant direct rule by Goebbels from his ministry.

Popular entertainment continued with dependable genre films, comedies, musicals, and exotic adventures, all keeping to the classic conventions and styles of Hollywood while incorporating specifically German folklore, popular literature, and music. A satirical comedy such as Amphitryon (Reinhold Schünzel, 1935) could even imply social criticism, but was protected by its origin in a play by Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), a literary icon. Heimat (Homeland, Carl Froelich, 1938) starred Heinrich George in a melodrama of family relations. The film musical found an extreme form in Wir tanzen um die Welt (We Are Dancing Around the World, Karl Anton, 1939), combining revue, "back-stage" musical, and love story with mass choreography reminiscent of Busby Berkeley spectaculars. The most successful popular entertainment was Veit Harlan's Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942), set in occupied Prague, a melodrama of betrayal and suicide with a strong message of local patriotism. Yet perhaps the high point came with Josef von Báky's (1902–1966) Münchhausen (The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, 1943), an opulent fantasy adventure based on the "Baron of Lies" from popular German literature and intended to celebrate Ufa's twenty-fifth anniversary while displaying to the embattled Germans, and the world at large, the German industry's prowess, not least in color photography.

Epic filmmaking had already come in for nationalist exploitation in the "Prussia Films." It continued into the Third Reich, as Harlan produced Der grosse König (The Great King, 1942), in which a Germany at war in the seventeenth century parallels contemporary circumstances. The epic genre expanded to encompass various sorts of "great men" and "leaders" like the playwright

Friedrich Schiller (1940), the inventor Rudolf Diesel (1942), and the physician Robert Koch (1939). However, the climax of this propagandistic adaptation of history came with Harlan's Kolberg (1945), a retelling of the defense of a Baltic port city against the French in the early nineteenth century. As the advancing Red Army took the actual town in 1944, Goebbels diverted resources of money, men, and materials—even interfering in the scriptwriting—to a spectacular war film designed to bolster the Germans' will to resist. The film itself, with its message of endless sacrifice and its production history, provides many insights into the self-destructive megalomania at the heart of Nazism.

MARLENE DIETRICH
b. Maria Magdalene von Losch, Berlin, Germany, 27 December 1901, d. 6 May 1992

Appearing in over a dozen films by such renowned directors of the day as Maurice Tourneur, Curtis Bernhardt, and Alexander Korda, Marlene Dietrich achieved international stardom when, as the dance-hall girl Lola Lola, she stole Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930) from star Emil Jannings. In the film's final scene she scans the cabaret audience with a knowing smile and a provocative stance that established the outline of the iconic star she was to play all her life.

In 1930 she followed Josef von Sternberg, the director of The Blue Angel, to Hollywood. For five years at Paramount, von Sternberg and Dietrich collaborated on six films, from Morocco (1930) to The Devil Is a Woman (1935), establishing her as a screen goddess. The films experiment with expressionist lighting and texture even as they explore the nature of femininity. Dietrich learned a great deal from von Sternberg about constructing her own image, and although she could devise her own lighting arrangements for the most suitable effects, she could mock it too, as in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) and, memorably, in Orson Welles's noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil (1958).

Dietrich was approached by the Nazis but did not return to German filmmaking, becoming instead an American citizen and taking a public stance against fascism as a celebrated entertainer of Allied troops. She returned to Germany in 1945 for her mother's funeral but was unpopular because of her wartime allegiances. She appeared in a key role in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), for which she worked again briefly in Germany. However, she did not attend the Berlin premiere, which was a disaster, with the film opening and closing that same night. It was her last major film role, although she maintained a career in cabaret until an accident in 1973. Her last appearance on film was as a madame managing gigolos in post-1918 Berlin in Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo (Just a Gigolo, 1979). Not long before the end of her life, France awarded her its most prestigious decoration, the Légion d'Honneur, and the city paid for the Paris apartment where she lived for over twenty years. In Joseph Vilsmaier's Marlene (2000), a biopic with elements of pure invention, Katja Flint vainly tries to capture something of Dietrich's aura. Dietrich and her legend are remembered not only in her films but in Dietrich Square, off Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and an archive devoted to her in the nearby Stiftung deutscher Kinemathek.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), Morocco (1930), Blonde Venus (1932), Shanghai Express (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), Desire (1936), Destry Rides Again (1939), Rancho Notorious (1952), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

SINCE 1945

The year 1945, unlike 1918, brought total defeat and occupation zones, permanent loss of territory and resources, floods of refugees, and a burden of historical guilt that still shapes German society today. The French, British, and Russian allies governed the country in increasingly uneasy cooperation until 1949, when two German states emerged, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the Western zones and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the Eastern, Soviet zone. With the building of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961 and the sealing of the internal border, two Germanies were locked in stasis and integrated into their respective power blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In November 1989 the East German state finally collapsed and was rapidly absorbed into the Federal Republic.

Filmmaking carried on amid the ruins, not least because the occupying powers wanted it to, although they were themselves distracted by dismantling and profiting from the remains of Ufa. As early as May 1946, the Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA, the German Film Company Limited) received a license from the Soviets for the Babelsberg studios. DEFA became the East German state's film company and thus the monopoly producer. Its first film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers Among Us, 1946) by Wolfgang Staudte (1906–1984) premiered as the first postwar German film. Dealing with the heritage of Nazism, it came to be known as a Trümmerfilm (rubble film), after its setting in ruined Berlin. Shot in film noir style with Hildegard Knef (1925–2002), one of the postwar cinema's major stars, it established antifascist filmmaking at DEFA. At the same time, private companies were appearing in the Western zones, such as Central Cinema Company-Film (CCC) and Berolina-Film in West Berlin, Filmaufbau in the provincial university town of Göttingen, and Real-Film in Hamburg. In Munich the Bavaria studios remained in public ownership until 1956.

Distribution companies in West Germany also acquired licenses from the Western allies and could import large quantities of foreign material that was new to Germany. This meant, above all, B pictures from Hollywood, thus reestablishing the abiding presence of the American industry. Audiences' preference for dubbing into German dates from this time. Some film-makers, like Staudte, were able to work in both Germanies for a while, and until the Wall went up, West Berliners could work in Babelsberg. However, there was little cooperation between the two industries. The deterioration of relations between the former allies soon turned into the Cold War and meant that the Federal Republic at first banned all DEFA films, shifting to a more selective approach in the 1960s. Filmmaking came to reflect the Wirtschaftswunder, the rapid economic recovery of West German manufacturing and trade. Scarcely any films dealt with the division of Germany, and most tackled the problem of Nazism under the broad attitude of a liberal humanism, presenting ordinary Germans as victims of anonymous historical forces. This stance also enabled condemnation of Communism as a nonpolitical evil rather than acknowledging East Germany as any sort of comparator. Ufa style merged with that of Hollywood genres to offer "great men" films, Heimatfilme, popular depictions of idyllic local cultures, nostalgic historical costume dramas depicting "the good old days," and melodramas focusing on questions of personal identity and relations within families. These latter might ostensibly deal with social, even political, problems of the day but tended to deflect them into questions of emotional attachments and moralizing. Something of an exception were films dealing with young people, as they referred to the significant impact of US culture on the Wirtschaftswunder society, such as Georg Tressler's Die Halbstarken (The Hooligans, 1956), a depiction of young criminals notable for its realist style and for introducing new actors like Horst Buchholz (1933–2003), who went on to achieve stardom. Popular music featured in Schlagerfilme (pop films) catered to a youth audience alongside the remakes of musicals, revues, and operettas for more conservative tastes.

West German films from the 1950s did not export well, had few successes at international festivals, and always had to cope with competition from Hollywood. Filmmakers concentrated on what suited the domestic market. The state supported them by introducing the first of the permanent subsidy programs, levying tickets sold and offering production guarantees with the money, thus propping up a declining industry for reasons of cultural politics. As German consumers became increasingly affluent, chief among the new offers was television, with the first channel being established in 1954. By the early 1960s German film attracted less than a third of its home market, and its inadequacy was confirmed when the 1961 Berlinale (the Berlin Film Festival) refused to award the annual German film prize at all.

THE NEW WAVE

In the 1960s a young generation of West Germans began to reject the filmmaking of their parents (and even grandparents), as they were beginning to reject many of the premises on which their parents had reestablished their version of Germany. In 1962 a group of young film-makers published the Oberhausen Manifesto at the festival in the town of that name. They wanted a radical shift in Filmkultur to recognize cinema as an art equivalent to other arts and thus equally deserving of public support. The Young German Film sought new forms of expression while looking back to prewar cinematic traditions. It embraced American popular culture while criticizing much of American politics, particularly internationally. It turned to German literature for inspiration while rejecting notions of high and low culture and consciously stressing an auteur cinema.

The German state responded by expanding support agencies, subsidies, and training institutions. The Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (Board for Young German Film) offered, from 1964 on, interest-free loans to screenplays found worthy of support, yet first-time filmmakers still found it difficult to find distribution and exhibition. Established industry circles countered by securing loans from the Filmförderungsanstalt for companies demonstrating box-office success, which led to a flurry of cheap, often sensationalist productions. The new generation's films began to appear in 1966 with Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl) by Alexander Kluge (b. 1932), a film-essay challenging genre cinema with a fragmented narrative and a critique of social norms. Volker Schlöndorff (b. 1939) began his literary adaptations with his Der junge Törless (Young Torless, 1966) based on the famous novella by Robert Musil (1880–1942). Social realist, even documentary style went together with experimental and avant-garde developments and a wide-ranging critical stance toward modern mass culture and media. Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933) and Danièle Huillet (b. 1936) influenced their contemporaries, although they never found a large audience, with films like Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968), which refused narrative authority and examined the relationship of time and space in film.

Parallel to these developments, mainline popular cinema carried on by producing pop music films, low-level porn under the guise of social comment on sexuality, detective stories, and even remakes of the Karl May westerns. However, by the early 1970s, with new film-makers gaining recognition overseas, cinema rapidly became one of Germany's cultural export flagships under the title New German Cinema, and was then validated by foreign opinion. German public identification with the new wave—some even proudly hailed it as a new "Golden Age"—was mixed with unease at the film-makers' potential excesses. The generation of the early 1960s stressed the Autorenfilm (author's film) as pro-grammatic, as it privileged individual creativity against commercial and industrial expertise. This meant that filmmakers were not only their own directors but scriptwriters, producers, and editors as well. In 1971 these filmmakers launched a short-lived attempt to secure their own distribution by founding the Filmverlag der Autoren, but it was never able to compete with mainline companies.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946–1982) was by far the most prolific and controversial filmmaker of this generation, with a formidable productivity from the late 1960s to his early death in 1982. He was also an important figure in radical German theater. His Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) is still provocative in its depiction of love between a middle-aged German woman and an immigrant worker from North Africa. His Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette, 1976) offers remarkable shot compositions to support its melodrama, and his Lili Marleen (1981) takes up the theme of Nazism through an examination of the way Nazi media promoted a star cult. Probably his best-known film is Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979), where his own "star" actress, Hanna Schygulla (b. 1943), portrays the career of a woman during the German "economic miracle," displaying the sexual politics that paralleled socioeconomic developments. With Lola (1981) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982), The Marriage of Maria Braun forms the "Trilogy of the Federal Republic," a tableau of the history, politics, culture, and style of Fassbinder's homeland.

Wim Wenders (b. 1945) is internationally celebrated and engages in the politics of Filmkultur. His Im Laufe der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976) set many of his thematic and stylistic trademarks, like his fascination with American culture and the figure of the lone male wanderer as hero, which resurfaced in his Paris, Texas (1984), made in the United States with French financing. After several years in the United States (including a notable but flawed cooperation with Francis Ford Coppola on Hammett, 1982), Wenders returned home and shot his masterpiece, Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) in 1987, combining remarkable images from Berlin just before the Wall collapsed with a mythical love story of an angel and the woman for whom he forsakes immortality. Wenders returned to the United States to shoot The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), a bizarre detective story set in a rundown residential hotel in Los Angeles. Applying his trademarks to an American cast in an American setting, Wenders continues German cinema's tradition of interaction with the United States and its filmmaking. In a Land of Plenty (2004) has its title borrowed from poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen, and results from cooperation with US writers, producers, and cast on a US theme: the continuing legacy of Vietnam. Technologically, Wenders also broke new ground by shooting mainly digitally. Don't Come Knocking (2005) meant working with Sam Shepard again and with a US cast, including Shepard himself, Tim Roth, and Jessica Lange. Its narrative resembles Paris, Texas in tracing the wanderings of a loner-male and his attempt to salvage his disastrous family relations. Wenders has also cooperated with Ry Cooder, on the documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999), and with Martin Scorsese to contribute The Soul of a Man (2003) to Scorsese's TV series on the blues.

Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is regarded as one of the most eccentric figures of das neue kino. His films feature inspiring landscapes and controversial actors (the flamboyant Klaus Kinski [1926–1991], the strange Bruno S. [b. 1932]) at odds with their world. Herzog is also well known for the making of his films, whether hypnotizing the entire cast in Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass, 1976), dragging a boat through the Amazon jungle for Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), or feuding with actor Kinski. Other significant figures from this generation are Volker Schlöndorff, whose Oscar^® winning adaptation of Günter Grass's novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979) is a remarkable treatment of a powerful exploration of German identity, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (b. 1935), whose Ludwig, Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (Ludwig, Requiem for a Virgin King, 1972) and Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: A Film from Germany, 1978) present richly textured visions exploring the legacies of German Romanticism and nationalism, controversially depicting a particular German identity through irrational and nihilistic imagery.

Paralleling the New German Cinema, in the 1970s Frauenfilm (women's filmmaking) arose. Directors like Helke Sander (b. 1937), Helma Sanders-Brahms (b. 1940), Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942), Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942), and Jutta Brückner (b. 1941) have sought to redefine the practice and politics of filmmaking while criticizing the oppression and discrimination directed against women in the Federal Republic. The combination of national and family history in Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany Pale Mother, 1980), by Sanders-Brahms, sparked controversy. Von Trotta's DiebleierneZeit (Marianne and Juliane, also known as The German Sisters, 1981) took up the story of the Ensslin sisters for a subtle examination of the effect of terrorism on daily life by combining radical politics with personal history.

The German New Wave petered out in the early 1980s, around the time of Fassbinder's death. The political climate had changed from the idealism of the 1960s to the violence of the "extraparliamentary opposition" of the 1970s, with countermeasures by the state, together with public opposition to projects like nuclear power and the presence of US nuclear weaponry on West German soil. Many of these issues are reflected in Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), a collaborative project between several directors to depict the impact on German society of terrorism and the state's response to it.

WERNER HERZOG
b. Werner Stipetic, Munich, Germany, 5 September 1942

Werner Herzog, one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema, has remained a radical individualist and a cinematic visionary for over forty years. His films disturb by their questioning of the bases of human civilization and its values. He first attracted notice with Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968), a war story set on a Greek island, which depicts an individual soldier's futile revolt against his situation. Herzog won the Berlin International Film Festival prize that year for a first work, as well as a German Film Award for outstanding feature film.

In Jeder für sich und Gott gegen Alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974) he commented on fundamental social values via the historical account of a strange foundling child in nineteenth-century Germany. Herzog also tackled a difficult play by Georg Büchner, from the mainstream of German theater, in Woyzeck (1979). Herzog's favorite actor, Klaus Kinski, draws on his characteristic intensity to portray the destruction of a simple little man caught in an absurd, authoritarian society. In Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu, 1978), an homage to the director F. W. Murnau, Kinski gives a remarkably nuanced portrayal of the Dracula figure as a lonely and driven predator envious of his victims for their human relations. With Kinski, Herzog also explored megalomania in Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God, 1972)andagainin Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987). Fitzcarraldo is an allegory of colonialism in its treatment of the actual historical events surrounding the hero's obsession with building an opera house a thousand miles up the Amazon River in the Peruvian jungle. During the shooting of this film, Herzog became involved with dangerous local politics, and one of his crew was killed while filming a wild ride down river rapids. Cobra Verde deals with the eighteenth-century slave trade between South America and Africa, with Kinski reprising his role of the obsessive adventurer who perishes through his overreaching ambition. After this film, Herzog and Kinski parted ways, as it was becoming increasingly difficult for the director to work with the erratic star.

Herzog also has produced several highly personal documentaries in Germany and elsewhere, and has done mainstream work for German TV. Among his impressive documentaries are Mein Liebster Feind—Klaus Kinski (My Best Fiend, 1999), about the director's tumultuous working relationship with Kinski; Wheel of Time (2003), about the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist rituals; The White Diamond (2004), about exploring the rainforest in a unique airship; and Grizzly Man (2005), about an actor who filmed himself living among grizzly bears and who, along with his girlfriend, was killed by one.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 1972), Jeder für sich und Gott gegen Alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974), Stroszek (1977), Woyzeck (1979), Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu, 1978), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987), Mein Liebster Feind—Klaus Kinski (My Best Fiend, 1999), Wheel of Time (2003), The White Diamond (2004), Grizzly Man (2005)

DEFA

From 1945 to 1990, when the company, along with the state that owned it, disappeared, DEFA produced over seven hundred films. When DEFA acquired the Ufa premises in Babelsberg it took on a large number of staff from the Third Reich. In 1953 the Soviets relinquished any ownership, and under the Ministry of Culture DEFA came to control all East German filmmaking. Alongside those allowed to continue working, exiles like Slatan Dudow (1903–1963) and Wilhelm Dieterle (1893–1972) were encouraged to return. Thus the GDR's film establishment was at odds with the official doctrine of representing that German tradition and identity, which had always abjured fascism. Whereas the West German industry avoided political references in its films, the East German industry had to include them in all films, but only in forms dictated by the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

Already in 1951, with the continuity afforded by folding Ufa into DEFA, Staudte was able to put out an accomplished account of German imperial history, Der Untertan (The Kaiser's Lackey), adapted from the novel by Heinrich Mann. Slatan Dudow was one of the few film-makers to examine the brutality of the Third Reich, as he depicted the price paid by resistance circles in his Stärker als die Nacht (Stronger Than the Night, 1954). Paralleling the antifascist tradition, filmmakers were also required to depict the reconstruction of the state on socialist lines in a "socialist realist" style. When the cultural climate thawed after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, genre filmmaking became easier (even allowing the development of a subgenre of westerns told from the viewpoint of the American Indians). In 1958 the climate changed again as the Socialist Unity Party attacked many DEFA filmmakers for undermining socialism with critical viewpoints. Even well-established directors like Kurt Maetzig (b. 1911), Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), Jürgen Böttcher (b. 1931), and Heiner Carow (1929–1997) had to negotiate with the ideological

demands of their political masters; like many technicians, writers, and musicians, they were functionaries of the state on permanent contracts, and so faced changing demands for films that could educate, inform, and persuade, yet also entertain. However, filmmakers were not isolated from developments in other countries. Thus Frank Beyer (b. 1932) made his debut with Fünf?lsen (Five Cartridges, 1960), which showed influences from Russian filmmaking in its story of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. The film featured Manfred Krug (b. 1937), the biggest star in the East German industry until his departure for the West in 1977 after a conflict with the party.

In 1965 the party intervened drastically by banning twelve completed films and dismissing some management at DEFA. Maetzig's Das Kaninchen bin ich (IAm the Rabbit, 1965) had passed all the censors, but, together with Frank Vogel's Denk bloss nicht ich heule (Just Don't Think I'm Crying, 1965), it was publicly criticized for being too skeptical and failing to contribute to a positive Patronenhu identity for the state and banned anyway. Required conformity with established ideology and systems pushed formal and thematic innovation further toward what the authorities considered an elitism. At the same time mass audiences sought genre products, even those coming from Hollywood, as entertainment, or turned to TV (which itself could be risky if one's aerial pointed west). In this climate a group of films came to be known as Regalfilme (shelved films), of which Spur der Steine (The Trace of Stones, 1966), by rising star Frank Beyer, is the most celebrated. The film, which depicts an anarchic but effective band of carpenters at work on a major construction site, and their involvement with the site management and the party, implies that there might be a range of personal contributions possible under socialism. Although allowed a limited release, the film raised too much popular interest for the party to tolerate and thus was shelved. On its reappearance, in perfect condition twenty-five years later, it immediately became a German cinema classic.

The party became somewhat more confident of itself in the 1970s, particularly under Erich Honecker, who presided over increased international recognition and responded to Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic, by allowing more contact with the West. Another thaw followed, on the basis of the GDR's having become a fully developed socialist society. In 1975 Frank Beyer's Jakob, der Lügner (Jacob the Liar) appeared and in 1977 became the only DEFA film ever nominated for an Oscar^®. Adapted from a novel by Jurek Becker, it tells of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto that was based on invented radio reports of imminent liberation by the Red Army.

By the end of the 1970s it was growing ever clearer that the state and the party had little support among the populace. Citizens were withdrawing into private spheres, or becoming outright dissidents, or simply leaving the country. In filmmaking the discontent was reflected in an alternative film culture centered in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. DEFA had to accept increasing marginalization in public life, with very few films, like Solo Sunny (1980), co-directed by Konrad Wolf (1925–1982) and Wolfgang Kohlhaase (b. 1931), attracting any significant box office, particularly against mainstream Hollywood films. Films like Das Fahrrad (The Bicycle, 1982), directed by Evelyn Schmidt (b. 1949), one of the few women filmmakers in the East, or Grüne Hochzeit (Green Wedding, Herrmann Zschoche, 1989) were marked by disillusionment about any improvement in individual lives. DEFA's one success was in films for children, such as Das Schulgespenst (The School Ghost, Rolf Losansky, 1986), which deals with a young girl's identity problems through the motif of changing places with a ghost.

DEFA celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1986, which artificially stimulated productivity, some of it already in anticipation of the GDR's own fortieth anniversary in 1989. In 1988 a group of young filmmakers put out a manifesto demanding an independent studio. It was suppressed, but the dissidents were allowed to form their own working group; their discontent thus was focused, but they had no time to make anything of it. Among the last products of DEFA's filmmaking were Heiner Carow's Coming Out (1989), the only East German film ever to deal with the official discrimination against homosexuals; Letztes aus der DaDaeR (The Last of the Gee-Dee-Arr, Jörg Foth, 1990); and Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen (The Country Beyond the Rainbow, Herwig Kipping, 1992), committing the studio's last resources to reckonings with the GDR. The direction for any remaining Filmkultur became apparent in Der Bruch (The Break, 1989), written by Kohlhaase and directed by Beyer, a straight crime-comedy genre product with no ideological trappings, based on a case from 1951 and featuring a range of noted West German actors.

SINCE 1990

In July 1990 the West's currency replaced the East's, and by early October performances in downtown Berlin of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and a massive fireworks display signaled the end to two Germanies. The shift back to Berlin as the sole capital heralded a shift in the political landscape, as the conservative government in power since 1982 gave way in 1998 to a center-left coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, the most durable product of the dissenting generation of the 1960s. The Federal Republic subsequently joined the European common currency zone, and thus has continued its role as the pivotal state in an expanded European Union.

Established filmmakers—Beyer; Herzog; Wenders, going back and forth between Berlin and the United States; Schlöndorff; Kluge, with his social commentaries through private TV; and von Trotta—continue to make films. They have been joined by another generation: Tom Tykwer (b. 1965), Doris Dörrie, Christoph Schlingensief, Carolina Link, Romuald Karmakar, Andreas Dresen, Fatih Akin, Angela Schanelec, Jürgen Vogel, and Oskar Roehler. Some, like Tykwer, have had remarkable success in the mainstream, even internationally, whereas others operate domestically, not translating out of the natural German territories.

All depend in various ways on German cultural politics and government subsidy and financing measures. In 1997 several German films did well, managing over three million viewers, through sheer box office appeal: Rossini (1997), Helmut Dietl's satire on the vanity of Munich's film establishment; Knockin' on Heaven's Door (1997), by Thomas Jahn; and Kleines Arschloch (The Little Bastard, 1997), by Michael Schaack and Veit Vollmer. The industry remained dependent on TV productions, with the attendant influence of producers on content and on exhibition rights. To address this issue, Michael Naumann, on becoming Minister for Culture and the Media, called a meeting of interested parties in an attempt to reform the subsidy system away from its commercial emphasis, a move not favored by TV interests. At the same time, large amounts of investment were actually leaving Germany to buy rights in foreign productions. As many deals would simply never see a return, this phenomenon became known in the United States as "stupid German money," and the bubble subsequently burst.

Four categories of subject matter have most closely reflected Germany's circumstances at the turn of the century: reworkings of late-twentieth-century history, especially that of East Germany; comedies of social manners and gender relationships among young West German urban professionals; depictions of immigrant and foreigner populations; and depictions of Berlin after the Wall. The wider historical past continues to circulate, more or less in the mainstream, and detective thrillers and road movies retain their appeal. Among the "reworkers," Andreas Kleinert (b. 1962) finished his training at DEFA just as it ceased to exist; yet he managed, in Neben der Zeit (Outside Time, 1995), to present an image of East Germany left behind by events and clinging to outdated habits. In 1999 he intensified that motif in a bleak picture of psychosis, Wege in die Nacht (Paths in the Night), which shows a former manager for the GDR leading an increasingly violent vigilante campaign against what he sees as the moral decay of the new Germany, until he himself becomes criminal and commits suicide. Stilles Land (Silent Country, 1992) by Andreas Dresen (b. 1963) takes a very "art house" form to show a provincial theater-group in the East overtaken in the midst of their rehearsals by the opening of the border, which confronts them with the existential question about their function in an indeterminate future. Tackling East Germany from a Western viewpoint, Detlev Buck's (b. 1962) Wir können auch anders (No More Mr. Niceguy, 1993) is a road movie about two country brothers who set off from the West to find their inheritance in the East; after hilarious adventures avoiding the law, they simply keep on heading east until they find an idyllic life in a Russian peasant community. Goodbye Lenin! (2003) by Wolfgang Becker (b. 1954) is an ironic tale of a young man who must pretend that East Germany still exists so as not to shock his fragile mother, who has just awakened from a coma that began before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The mainstream of German production in the first half of the 1990s was characterized by lightweight comedies such as Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, Sönke Wortmann, 1994), dealing with male gender identities and launching Til Schweiger (b. 1963) as the star of the time. Rainer Kaufmann's (b. 1959) Stadtgespräch (Talk of the Town, 1995) starred his partner, Katja Riemann (b. 1963), in a comedy of marital complications. Detlev Buck's Männerpension (Jailbirds, 1996), Sherry Horman's (b. 1960) Frauen sind was Wunderbares (Women Are Something Wonderful, 1994,) and Wortmann's Das Superweib (The Superwife, 1996) are all examples of a highly successful subgenre that presented German society as a sort of well-heeled sitcom driven by neurotic wise-cracking. In the same general category of social comedy, Doris Dörrie has maintained her position, but her films, such as the episodic Bin ich Schön? (Am I Beautiful?, 1998), have a harder satirical and critical edge, depicting a society—as well as personal relations—given to meaningless consumerism.

Helmut Dietl's (b. 1944) satire Schtonk! (1992) is a darker film that returns to one of postwar filmmaking's regular motifs, Nazism. The film mocked the gullibility of editors of the popular magazine Stern, who were duped by forgers purporting to have Hitler's wartime diaries for sale. In it Götz George (b. 1938), a TV and film tough-guy star since the late 1960s, makes an outrageous appearance in a monstrous corset and dressing gown purported to be that of Hitler's henchman Hermann Goering. In 2004 Der Untergang (The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich) by Oliver Hirschbiegel (b. 1957), which presents the last days of Hitler and his inner circle in the bunker under central Berlin, became an international success. The film was also the subject of much public debate for what some see as its relatively sympathetic treatment of Hitler as a human rather than as a monster. The director Joseph Vilsmaier (b. 1939)—whose films include Stalingrad (1993), Comedian Harmonists (1997), and Marlene (2000), the last two ostensibly biopics on a famous singing group and on Marlene Dietrich—produces for the mainstream, with significant production values; his work filters historical perspectives through personalities.

With the onset of the "Berlin Republic"—a concept arising from the post–Cold War relocation of the German government to that city—Berlin itself has become the focus of many films. Andreas Dresen's Nachtgestalten (Night Shapes, 1999) reveals the city's ugliness, its patient narrative the counterpart of the frenetic comedies of the early 1990s. By far the most widely acknowledged Berlin film has been Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998). Using parallel narratives and other devices from computer games, Tykwer's story of lovers threatened with extinction by their existence on the fringes of the underworld cemented his reputation internationally as one of German cinema's representative directors and propelled the film's female lead, Franka Potente (b. 1974), toward Hollywood.

In the mainstream genres, the thriller continues to appear and is especially prevalent on German TV. Examples include Solo für Klarinette (Solo for Clarinet, 1998), Schattenboxer (Shadow Boxer, 1992), Kurz und schmerzlos (Short Sharp Shock, 1998), and Die Mutter des Killers (The Mother of the Killer, 1996), and parodies like Die Musterknaben (The Favorite Sons, 1997) and Zugvögel—…einmal nach Inari (Train Birds, also known as Trains'n'Roses, 1998). Psychological thrillers include Der Totmacher (Deathmaker, 1995) and Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go, 2000), both German film prizewinners. Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), also a prizewinner, investigates the 1960s generation, whose revolutionary visions are reduced to the shiftless existence of a couple still sought for alleged terrorism, together with their daughter, who knows no other existence than the one "underground." In 2004 Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei (over the Edukators), the first

German film for eleven years in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, took up the topic of activism and opposition in present-day Germany. In a satisfyingly ambiguous conclusion, the possibility of partnership across the generations is left open.

The industry maintains its own Spitzenorganisation (SPIO) in Wiesbaden as an umbrella for the major professional organizations. SPIO also supervises patents and copyrights and the TV rights to films, and decides on the German industry's entries for local and international festivals. It can also enforce the rulings of the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, the industry's voluntary self-censorship organization, established in 1949 after the model of the American Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America. In 1951 a film evaluation office, the Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden, was established, the assessments of which can promote a film's chances of subsidy or block any hope of distribution. Germany's constitution guarantees freedom of expression, forbids censorship, and declares the federal states' rights to administer local exhibition; given the system of self-censorship, coupled with the subsidy system, government at various levels has great, if indirect, influence on what can be made and shown.

The Spitzenorganisation also produces a yearly compilation of statistics on the industry. In 2004 figures for premiered films for 1993 to 2003 show a gradual increase to around eighty per year, with a relatively constant proportion of foreign co-productions. The fragmented nature of the industry is evident in the fact that scarcely any production company managed more than one premiere; and the crucial importance of support from the film industry's rival, TV, is evident in the almost 50 percent of co-productions with companies in this sector. Showings of film on TV have burgeoned since the mid-1980s and, together with video production, sales, and rentals, show the biggest returns. This contrasts with the film industry's employment structure, where the overwhelming numbers, about 25,000 out of 37,000 members, are in film and video production. Regarding average production budgets, the German film industry is a global second-rank industry. Internationally, the chief market for German films is, not surprisingly, Europe, with over three times the turnover of exports compared with the next biggest market, the United States. The cinema audience is overwhelmingly young: ages fourteen to twenty-nine, with a sharp decline from about thirty up. For cinema visits, Germany ranks under the EU average, with scarcely two per head in 2003, and far behind the United States, at 5.4. However, the bottom line for the German industry is the dominance of the US product over the German home market: over 40 percent of films exhibited in 2003, and almost 80 percent of the total turnover, were from the United States.

For the foreseeable future Filmkultur is likely to remain a secondary, "foreign-language" cinema, dominated at home and abroad by the English-speaking industry led by Hollywood. In 2003 the introduction of film study in the German school system added to the ongoing debate on what constitutes the German artistic canon. Thus questions about the role of German cinema—in terms of national identity, high versus low culture, social relevance, commercial status, and international significance—have achieved an unprecedented public prominence.