Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities)

Abstract

‘The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new’ (in Elsaesser, 1989, 20–1). These words resonate at the close of the precociously self-confident manifesto signed by twenty-six up-and-coming West German film-makers at the 1962 Oberhausen Film Festival. The interlopers, who were inspired by the French New Wave, styled themselves as the ‘Young German Cinemâ and were exasperated by the way domestic theatres were dominated by Hollywood re-runs and the peculiarly German genre Heimatfilme, insipid depictions of sentimentalised rustic idylls. A decade later — once youth had mellowed into middle age — they would prefer to be known as the ‘New German Cinema’. Original signatories such as Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz had been joined by film-makers such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders. These film-makers gained international acclaim for their formal and thematic innovation and became leading intellectual figures in their own country.