After a short-lived Weimar golden age many filmmakers had fled into exile as cinema was harnessed for Nazi wartime propaganda; then, with Allied occupation, came a flood of Hollywood entertainment. The Oberhausen Manifesto, signed in by 26 filmmakers including Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz, called for a post-war cinema that would take risks to confront the trauma of fascism and its legacy of violence β a subject their humiliated parents, in a state divided in two, preferred to avoid.
Bold mavericks including Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder rallied their energies to the cause. The new generation, working with low budgets, were influenced by the French New Wave and Italian neorealism, and repurposed elements of American genre cinema with subversive twists as they critiqued society and examined the plight of the marginalised.
They portrayed characters with lifestyles defiantly outside the law, their only recourse in a bourgeois West German democracy characterised by hypocrisy. Real-world political crisis offered strong inspiration, as kidnappings and assassinations by the far-left Red Army Faction gripped the public imagination. French filmmaking duo and committed leftists Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet made their first films in Germany, where they went into exile when Straub refused to fight in Algeria.
There is little to signpost movements through time, as history persists into the present. The past was a burden and a taboo of discussion in post-war Germany, due to the shame of Holocaust atrocities and defeat. Anita G. She has run-ins with employers and the justice system, as accusations of theft and institutional hostility upend her dreams of education and a stable future.
For her, love is frustrating and conditional, as the politician she is seeing clandestinely is married. The title of his unapologetically confrontational sociological essay film and manifesto, which called for men to proudly leave the closet and was made just after homosexuality was decriminalised in Germany, says it all. With arch humour, we follow Daniel, a young man from the provinces, as he arrives in Berlin and navigates the challenges of gay life.
