new german cinema

A group of young directors signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962 and announced that their fathers' cinema was dead. Over the twenty years that followed, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlondorff built a national cinema more or less from scratch, financed by the state because the old studio system barely still existed, and kept the camera outside the studio walls entirely. Herzog's answer was to leave the country: he took Aguirre, the Wrath of God down the Amazon behind a conquistador who wants gold more than he wants any of them to live. Wenders looked for the same distance from home: Paris, Texas opens on a man walking out of the American desert with no idea who he is. Fassbinder stayed and looked straight at the years everyone else wanted to skip: he married the heroine of The Marriage of Maria Braun to a soldier in the last days of the war and followed her through the boom that came after. Each film argues with the fathers' cinema in its own direction, and none of them is in a hurry.

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.