New German Cinema and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema

Editors Abel (English and film studies, Univ. of Nebraska) and Fisher (German and media, UC-Davis) present essays on German cinematic auteurs of the period from 1962 to 1982, practitioners of what New York critics identify as the New German Cinema. The introduction claims this as the last of the new waves, many of which (in France, Italy, and the States) influenced West German films mainly produced in Munich. This art-house genre features young directors who critique conventional middle-class society. Feminist filmmakers were adjacent to this movement, but none signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, which initiated it. East German films made in Babelsberg, and those that bore the imprint of Eastern European immigrants, such as animation, are included. American borrowings include plot twists, countercultural protagonists, and nonlinear, experimental narration. Notes at the end of each essay assist readers; explanations of film stills are in the text rather than analytical captions. Summaries of plots might interest cultural historians of late 20th-century Central Europe, for the movement waxed beyond the Federal Republic.