new german cinema

A generation of West German filmmakers — Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, Schlöndorff — who declared "Papa's cinema is dead" in the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto and built an internationally recognized national cinema from scratch. Each pursued a radically different vision: Herzog's ecstatic truth in extreme landscapes, Wenders' road movies exploring American cultural colonization, Fassbinder's melodramas dissecting postwar German society. United less by style than by their shared rejection of the commercial entertainment cinema that had dominated postwar Germany and their determination to make films that engaged with German history, identity, and guilt.

Distinguish from

German Expressionism is the earlier German cinematic revolution (1920s) — visual, studio-bound, and Gothic where New German Cinema is location-shot, politically engaged, and formally diverse. French New Wave is the direct inspiration and parallel movement, but French in its cinephilia and Parisian setting.

Films here also carry Cultural Dislocation, Identity Crisis, Forbidden Love, Moral Ambiguity, War Trauma · Most represented: Wim Wenders.