German National Cinema from 1970 to the Present

In this class, we will intensively study German cinema of the 20th century, with a special emphasis on films from 1970 to the present. Each day, we will watch a film in class and discuss its social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts. The goal is for you to immerse yourself in this national cinema and learn how its film productions respond to the various socio-cultural forces that gave rise to its various permutations. In the end, we are going to be less interested in interpreting any given film for its “meaning”; rather, we are going to engage the films as presenting us with images of and for various moments in German history that attempt to provoke their most immediate audience (Germans) to encounter their world with new eyes. In other words, we are not particularly interested in thinking about how these films are more or less accurate “representations” of a pre-existing German reality; rather, we will examine how these films’ images render something visible that is as such not immediately seeable or even available in their audience’s lived reality. To accomplish this, it will be necessary for us to engage the films as films rather than dealing with them merely on the level of story, plot, and character. Though these aspects of film are not entirely unimportant, it is imperative that we account for the medium’s specificity, that is, the films’ cinematicness, if we want to avoid treating films just like a novel or a theatre play, which, in my view, is the cardinal sin of all too many discussions of cinema.

Films screened:

• Rudolf Thome, Red Sun (1969)
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
• Werner Herzog, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
• Wim Wenders, The American Friend (1977)
• Sönke Wortmann, Maybe, Maybe Not (1996)
• Tom Tykwer, Run Lola Run (1999)
• Wolfgang Becker, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
• Hans Weingartner, The Edukators (2004)
• Fatih Akin, Head-On (2004)
• Andreas Dresen, Willenbrock (2004)
• Christian Petzold, Cuba Libre (1996)
• Angela Schanelec, Places in the Cities (1998) or Passing Summer (2001)
• Ulrich Köhler, Bungalow (2002, 82 min.) or Christoph Hochhäusler, Milchwald

Books assigned:

• Elsaesser, Thomas, ed. The BFI Companion to German Cinema. London: BFI, 2000.
• Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Various essays