Key Figures In The New German Cinema Movement
The most important players in Postwar German filmmaking.
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Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and even antigay, he completed 44 projects between 1966 and 1982, the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas. His prodigious output was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertinage that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure.) Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. Some find his cinema needlessly controversial and avant-garde; others accuse him of surrendering to the Hollywood ethos. It is best said that he drew forth strong emotional reactions from all he encountered, both in his personal and professional lives, and this provocative nature can be experienced posthumously through reviewing his artistic legacy.
Fassbinder was born into a bourgeois Bavarian family in 1945. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. In order to have time for her work, his mother frequently sent him the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. At the age of 15, Fassbinder defiantly declared his homosexuality, soon after which he left school and took a job. He studied theater in the mid-sixties at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich and joined the Action Theater (aka, Anti-Theater) in 1967. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. [So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.] In his theater years, he also developed a repertory company that included his mother, two of his wives and various male and female lovers. Coupled with his ability to serve in nearly any crew capacity, this gave him the ability to produce his films quickly and on extremely low budgets.
Success was not immediate for Fassbinder. His first feature length film, a gangster movie called Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. His next piece, Katzelmacher (1969), was a minor critical success, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured Jorgos, an emigrant from Greece, who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. In subsequent years, he made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) and Whity (1971) before scoring his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). This moving portrait of a street vendor crushed by the betrayal and his own futility is considered a masterpiece, as is his first international success Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Fear Eats the Soul). With a wider audience for his efforts, however, some critics contend that Fassbinder began to sell out with big budget projects such as Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1981). In retrospect, however, it seems that the added fame simply enabled Fassbinder to explore various kinds of filmmaking, including such "private" works as In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), two films about individual experience and feelings. His greatest success came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) (The Marriage of Maria Braun), chronicling the rise and fall of a German woman in the wake of World War II. Other notable movies include The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Satan's Brew (1976) and Querelle (1982), all focused on gay and lesbian themes and frequently with a strongly pornographic edge.
His death is a perfect picture of the man and his legend. On the night of June 10, 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, the unfinished script for a version of Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. So boundless was his drive and creativity that, throughout his downward spiral and even in the moment of his death, Fassbinder never ceased to be productive.- Director
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Director. Writer. Producer. Actor. Poet. He studied history, literature and theatre for some time, but didn't finish it and founded instead his own film production company in 1963. Later in his life, Herzog also staged several operas in Bayreuth, Germany, and at the Milan Scala in Italy. Herzog has won numerous national and international awards for his poetic feature and documentary films.- Director
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Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker who was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, which then was located in the British Occupation Zone of what became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially as West Germany until reunification). At university, Wenders originally studied to become a physician before switching to philosophy before terminating his studies in 1965. Moving to Paris, he intended to become a painter.
He fell in love with the cinema but failed to gain admission to the French national film school. He supported himself as an engraver while attending movie houses. Upon his return to West Germany in 1967, he was employed by United Artists at its Düsseldorf office before he was accepted by the University of Television and Film Munich school for its autumn 1967 semester, where he remained until 1970. While attending film school, he worked as a newspaper film critic. In addition to shorts, he made a feature film as part of his studies, Summer in the City (1971).
Wenders gained recognition as part of the German New Wave of the 1970s. Other directors that were part of the New German Cinema were Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. His second feature, a film made from Peter Handke's novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), brought him acclaim, as did Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). It was his 1977 feature The American Friend (1977) ("The American Friend"), starring Dennis Hopper as Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero Tom Ripley, that represented his international breakthrough. He was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for "The American Friend", which was cited as Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review in the United States.
Francis Ford Coppola, as producer, gave Wenders the chance to direct in America, but Hammett (1982) (1982) was a critical and commercial failure. However, his American-made Paris, Texas (1984) (1984) received critical hosannas, winning three awards at Cannes, including the Palme d'Or, and Wenders won a BAFTA for best director. "Paris, Texas" was a prelude to his greatest success, 1987's Wings of Desire (1987) ("Wings of Desire"), which he made back in Germany. The film brought him the best director award at Cannes and was a solid hit, even spawning an egregious Hollywood remake.
Wenders followed it up with a critical and commercial flop in 1991, Until the End of the World (1991) ("Until the End of the World"), though Faraway, So Close! (1993) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Still, is reputation as a feature film director never quite recovered in the United States after the bomb that was "Until the End of the World." Since the mid-1990s, Wenders has distinguished himself as a non-fiction filmmaker, directing several highly acclaimed documentaries, most notably Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Pina (2011), both of which brought him Oscar nominations.- Director
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Writer. Director. Producer. Studied law and graduated. Was one of the founders of the Oberhausener Manifest in 1962. Since 1962 Headmaster of the 'Institut fuer Filmgestaltung' at the 'Hochschule fuer Gestaltung' in Ulm, Germany. Since 1988 produces broadcastings dealing with cultural aspects in German private TV channels RTL and SAT.1 in his own responsibility (DCTP program).- Director
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Helma Sanders-Brahms was born on 20 November 1940 in Emden, Province of Hanover, Prussia [now Lower Saxony], Germany. She was a director and writer, known for Germany Pale Mother (1980), No Mercy, No Future (1981) and Laputa (1986). She died on 27 May 2014 in Berlin, Germany.- Actor
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Widely known for his frequent collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a creative partnership which lasted 10 years and produced over 20 films, Ulli Lommel is one of the most consistently creative filmmakers to come from the New German Cinema movement.
The son of German comic performer Ludwig Manfred Lommel, Ulli Lommel began his career in show business as a child. His second feature film as a director Tenderness of the Wolves (1973) brought Lommel to New York, where he began working with Andy Warhol at The Factory. The Warhol / Lommel years spawned several features, including Cocaine Cowboys (1979) and Blank Generation (1980), both of which were directed by Lommel and feature Warhol in an acting role.
In the summer of 2013 Lommel went for nine months to Brazil, where he wrote a book and also made a film about Campo Bahia, the official camp for the German National Soccer Team. His autobiography, entitled Tenderness of the Wolves, is due out in late 2015.- Actress
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Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942. In the 1960s she moved to Paris where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. She also pursued an acclaimed acting career, starring in films by well known German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. In 1971, von Trotta divorced her first husband Juergen Moeller (with whom she had a child) and married Schlöndorff. She co-wrote many of the scripts for his films, and in 1975 the two of them co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). In 1977, von Trotta directed her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). With her third film, Marianne & Juliane (1981), von Trotta's position as New German Cinema's most prominent and successful female filmmaker was fully secured.
Her films feature strong female protagonists, and are usually set against an important political background. Themes in her work include the effect of the political on the personal, and vice versa, as well as the relationships between female characters, often sisters.- Director
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Hans-Jürgen Syberberg was born on 8 December 1935 in Nossendorf, Pomerania, Prussia [now Mecklenburg-Vorpommern], Germany. He is a director and producer, known for Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), Die Nacht (1985) and Scarabea - wieviel Erde braucht der Mensch? (1969).- Director
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The German film director, screenwriter and media artist Harun Farocki was born on the 9th January 1944 in Nový Jicín [Neutitschein], at that time a part of Czechoslovakia annexed by the Third Reich. He was the son of an immigrated Indian doctor and a German woman. Farocki first studied Theatre, Sociology and Journalism at the 'Freie Universität (FU)' in West-Berlin. From 1966 to 1968 he studied at the new 'Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB)' as part of their first generation which included students as diverse as future Hollywood-director Wolfgang Petersen, future feminist filmmaker Helke Sander and future RAF-terrorist Holger Meins. Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and Bertolt Brecht Harun Farocki gradually developed his own unique style of non-narrative-filmmaking concerned with understanding, reflecting and confronting modern society. Since 1966 Farocki produced, wrote and directed more than 100 short and feature-length films for television and cinema, mostly documentaries and essay films, that analyzed social realities with a precise use of moving images that always included the political and sociological context involved in the creation of imagery. Since 1996 Farocki had numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide, for example at the 'MOMA' in New York, the 'MUMOK' in Vienna, the 'Jeu de Paume' in Paris and the 'Museum Ludwig' in Cologne, followed by retrospectives of his films at many institutions like the 'Tate Modern' in London or the 'Centre for Contemporary Art' in Warsaw. Farocki's participation in the prestigious "documenta" in 1997 and 2007 is an indication of the huge impact that his films and video installations had in the art context, but no less was his influence in the film world: Six of his films were presented in the 'Forum' of the 'Berlin International Film Festival' and two more films won awards at the 'Locarno International Film Festival' in 2003 and 2007. In 2009 the influential French magazine "Cahiers du cinéma" named Farocki's and Andrei Ujica's celebrated masterpiece Videograms of a Revolution (1992) one of the 10 most subversive films ever made. Farocki's life included writing about film and teaching media, too: From 1974 to 1984 he was the editor of the journal "Filmkritik", published in Munich. In 1998 he published the book "Speaking about Godard" (together with Kaja Silverman). From 1993 to 1999 Farocki was a visiting professor at the 'University of California Berkeley'. From 2000 to 2004 Farocki taught in Berlin at his former school 'DFFB' and at the 'University of the Arts'. In 2004 Farocki first became a visiting professor and then in 2006 a full professor at the 'Academy of Fine Arts' in Vienna. As a teacher Harun Farocki had a significant cinematic and intellectual influence on the development of the acclaimed "Berlin School" film movement. He himself co-wrote five celebrated feature films of its most prominent member Christian Petzold, who used to be his student and assistant. Harun Farocki was married to Ursula Lefkes from 1966 until her death in 1996. They had two children (twin daughters) together. In 2001 Antje Ehmann became his second wife and like Lefkes a frequent collaborator on his films. On July 30, 2014 Harun Farocki died at the age of 70 in his home near Berlin.- Director
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Jean-Marie Straub was born on 8 January 1933 in Metz, Moselle, Lorraine, France. He was a director and editor, known for The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Sicily! (1999) and Class Relations (1984). He was married to Danièle Huillet. He died on 20 November 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland.