New German Cinema

Fictional film with documentary elements about a jazz musician in Berlin.

In his experimental short film "Brutalität in Stein" (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over.

A young electrical engineer, engaged to his boss's daughter and on the way to a secure existence, breaks out of his usual life when he meets a childhood friend.

Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s biting satire Bonn Diary presents the reflections of a reactivated officer who is summon ed to the West German capital by the Ministry of Defense to establish an Academy for Military Memories. Straub considered his film to be an intervention against German rearmament in the Adenauer era: "Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one."
In "Machorka-Muff," Mr. Straub, employing the cold, somewhat expressionistic but always loquacious approach of his other films, comes closest to underlining the almost subliminal irony of his themes. He briefly outlines, through the performance of Colonel Machorka-Muff, a former Nazi who is reinstated in the Adenauer regime, the unchanging thinking of the Nazi and/or the military mind. As the colonel of the title, Dr. Johannes Eckhardt is properly cold and convincing as the believer in the rights of the soldier. Although it is the shortest and earliest of Mr. Straub's films, it is both the most lucid of his works and the most clearly indicative of his potential as an imaginative filmmaker.

1966 film by Volker Schlöndorff

A young German woman searches for happiness, liberation, and independence in the illusive wake of a transformative national recovery.

Theo, Marite, and Franz cannot make any money selling magazines door to door, so they try a little robbery.

In 1966, a former gymnast returns to his hometown Danzig, which is now a part of Poland. He begins to reflect on one of his classmates, Joachim Mahlke, who disappeared during World War II. Mahlke was initially marked as an outsider due to his oversized Adam’s apple, but when he turned out to be a great diver, the in-crowd embraced him. Then he steals a Knight’s Cross from a soldier and is expelled from school. Volunteering for war service, he earns a medal himself and hopes his reputation will be rehabilitated. But the school principal refuses and Mahlke deserts from the army…

1968 film by Franz-Josef Spieker

During World War II, three German soldiers are withdrawn from combat when one of them, Stroszek, is wounded. They are assigned to a small coastal community on the Greek island of Kos while Stroszek recuperates. The men become increasingly stir crazy in their uneventful new assignment. Stroszek eventually goes mad.

A young circus director ends up going into television after her father, a trapeze performer, dies in a circus accident.

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith's subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

In the summer of 1967, journalist Katharina is visited in Munich by her French friend Anne. They take day trips and visit cafés, acquaintances, and parties. In a series of conversations between them and other women, they talk about the chances for female emancipation in a male-dominated society.

German Film Awards
Year Result Award Category/Recipient(s)
1969 Won Film Award in Gold Outstanding Individual Achievement: Actor
Walter Buschhoff
Outstanding Individual Achievement: Cinematography
Petrus R. Schlömp

ynopsis from Time Out Film Guide: Between the seemingly idyllic opening and closing scenes depicting a rural community, first at church, then at the village festival, Fleischmann attacks that community's prejudices and ignorance without remorse. His very precisely observed portrait of Bavarian life begins with little more than a display of the villagers' constant ribbing, bawdy humour, continuous gossip, and more than a hint of their slow-wittedness. With the return of a young man, their idle malice and childish clowning, always on the edge of unpleasantness, receive some focus: quite without foundation, the lad is victimised as a homosexual. The crippling conformity of their ingrained conservatism leads the villagers to reject anything 'different': a young widow is ostracised, more for her crippled lover and idiot son than her morals; a teacher is frozen out because she's educated; the casual destruction of the young 'homosexual' is given no more thought than the cutting up of a pig. Not Germany in the '30s but the '70s; nevertheless the political parallels are clear. An impressive film.

1969 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

deutscher Spielfilm

1969 film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969 television film directed by Franz Peter Wirth

Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
The film takes youthful impetuousness and hatred of oppression as its subject and also ponders the cult of genius and sexual morals. Rainer Werner Fassbinder simultaneously plays both Baal and himself and is surrounded by many actors who were later to perform in his own films. After the film was broadcast on West German television, Brecht’s widow Helene Weigel prohibited any further screenings, arguing that the social circumstances engendering Baal’s rebelliousness had not been adequately explained.