The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Writing film history has become difficult in an age mistrustful of grands récits. To define a new period requires giving it a name, and marking it off as both unitary and distinct from what preceded it.1 There is an increasing sense that the end of the 1990s marked the beginning of a new type of German film, different from Eric Rentschler's ‘cinema of consensus’2 that had followed New German Cinema. Yet this change is hard to categorize with any single term, and its relations to the German past are not as clear-cut as those of the Oberhauseners, or of NGC. Unlike its predecessors, the current generation of filmmakers has produced no manifesto. The Collapse of the Conventional can thus only define its new epoch with a combination of paradox and negation. Although the period since 2000 ‘has seen the collapse of consensual filmmaking’, ‘today's debates are the same ones that attended West German film in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s’ (pp. 3–4). Post-conventional German film is thus still somewhat dependent on New German Cinema, and may feel – especially in some of the characterizations offered by this volume – like the latter's return. This is not so much a question of aesthetics, for the contributors to the book are largely in agreement that German film after 2000 is not a simple restoration of arthouse film or an auteurist programme. Rather, the authors believe that thanks to recent German film, ‘the door has been opened for a … political mode of inquiry to return to criticism’ (p. 5).