New German Cinema

Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.

1978 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A real estate agent leaves behind his beautiful wife to go to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar.

1979 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Bourbon Street Blues is made after Tennessee Williams' play The Lady Larkspur Lotion.
"In a rundown French Quarter boarding house, Mrs Hardwick-Moore, a faded beauty in an alcoholic tailspin, chooses to remain blanketed in her delusional dream world, despite its conflict with the reality presented to her by a brusque landlady. This brief, yet intensely evocative, character study is widely considered to be a preparatory sketch for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.”

1979 film directed by Volker Schlöndorff

1979 film

Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One of them is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.

Sisters Maria and Anna live together. Maria is a most proficient executive secretary, encouraging Anna to finish her studies and start a career. Anna broods, threatens to quit university, takes pills, and keeps a diary. When Maria's relationship with Maurice, the son of her boss, starts to lead to love, Anna takes a selfish and drastic step that plummets Maria into solitude. No longer able to connect with Maurice, Maria does establish a relationship with Miriam, a typist at her office who becomes a surrogate younger sister. But Maria is intrusive as well as helpful. Can this or any relationship work out for this talented woman whose past seems to choke her soul?

1980 film by Helma Sanders-Brahms

该电视剧改编自德国作家阿尔弗雷德•德布林的同名小说，故事发生在1920年代末的德国柏林。
因杀死与自己同居的妓女艾达，强壮、暴力、酗酒的弗朗兹•毕伯科夫（Günter Lamprecht ）被判入狱四年，刑满释放后，他立誓要做一个正直的好人，可是因为不知从何做起，他终日在亚历山大广场附近游荡。不久，他拥有了出狱后的第一个女人，并为了她开始尝试各种体力活，但很快便被生活愚弄，这令性格里有一面相当单纯的他非常受打击，离开了原来的生活圈子。
和形形色色的人打过交道后，弗朗兹重回原来的生活环境，并在常去的小酒馆结识伦霍尔德（Peter Kollek）。伦霍尔德虽然说话结结巴巴，弗朗兹仍觉得他魅力非凡，开始对他盲目信任和依赖，甚至与他制定秘密的游戏协议，答应接手他玩腻的女人。游戏进行当中，弗朗兹展现出多情的一面，为了一个女人单方将协议撕毁，令伦霍尔德对他记恨在心，不久，伦霍尔德利用他对自己的信任，将他拉入小偷集团，害他失去一条胳膊。但截肢后，弗朗兹并没有报复的欲望。
弗朗兹的保护人兼旧女友爱娃（Hanna Schygulla）介绍单纯、美丽的女孩米兹（Karin Baal）与他认识，弗朗兹与之相爱并走出绝望，不过因为失去劳动能力，他只能靠米兹卖身养活。伦霍尔德无法忍受弗朗兹的幸福生活，生出无动机的邪念，再次利用弗朗兹对他“无动机的纯粹的爱（法斯宾德语）”，将弗朗兹又一次拉入小偷集团，并开始想方设法勾引米兹，试图将弗朗兹的生活彻底推上绝路。

1980 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Ein deutsches TV-Drama

1981 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1981 film by Margarethe von Trotta

A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.

In 1914, with men gone to war, Marcel Proust hired Céleste Albaret as his attendant. More than eight years later, she was at his side when he died. During this entire time, she only entered his room when he rang for her, sleeping from 9 AM to 3 PM to wait during the night while he wrote. Marcel uses her as more than a servant: she is his muse, telling stories of her childhood to stir his remembrance of things past; she's in cahoots with him as he manipulates those he wants to draw on for his writing; she listens appalled to his descriptions of the underside of Paris. Hers is a life of love and sweet devotion as he races time to finish his work before death.

With Tag der Idioten (1982), Schroeter perhaps draws upon his brief studies of psychology. The film centres around a passionate woman, Carole (played by the well-known French actor Carole Bouquet) who feels alienated and repressed by the highly institutionalised public and private spheres of Western society. Unable to extract any kind of emotional response from her reserved boyfriend, Carole seeks attention by falsely denouncing her neighbours as terrorists. With this detail Schroeter briefly touches upon the panic and paranoia that was brought about by the German government crackdown on terrorism at its height during 1977 and Carole's subsequent institutionalisation in a mental asylum can be seen as an allegory for a society wishing to suppress radical activity of any sort. In Tag der Idioten Schroeter returns to a less linear narrative structure, more reminiscent of the episodic films of his second phase. He employs numerous hallucinatory sequences in order to convey the protagonist's state of mind. Furthermore, much of the film's meaning is delivered through Carole's body, facial expressions and gestures rather than through dialogue, and the film's montage serves to create spatial and temporal disorientation. Schroeter again won the German Film Prize for best direction for this film.

Doctors say that Veronika, a woman in her 20s, is schizophrenic. She is compliant, which makes her an easy target for men. She's religious, believing she is God's favorite child; she searches for Jesus. She has sent a letter to a filmmaker suggesting her life as the subject for a movie. We see her raped than take up with a series of men she believes are Jesus, each willing or insistent on sex. A young man with his own crisis of faith invites her to join a cult. We see her involuntarily committed to an asylum from time to time where medication and constraints await. Her wealthy parents are helpless. Will a medical professional ever talk to her? If one did, would it help?

1982 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder