Abstract
In 1967 at the fourth exprmntl film festival in Knokke Belgium, a group of German activist film students led by Harun Farocki sought to disrupt screenings with politically engaged happenings. Rejecting these protests, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein returned to Cologne and with other inspired filmmakers co-founded Xscreen, an institution of underground, experimental, material, and independent films. Beginning with 1967/1968, the essay exams the post-World War II divergence of what Peter Wollen famously identified as “the two avant-gardes”: the split of New German Cinema from New German Avant-garde Film and of political narrative cinema from material experimental film. An emphasis on New German Cinema in (German) film studies has exiled experimental cinema from film histories into the realm of art history and visual culture studies. Inversely, this foreclosure has erased the political potential of West German experimental or avant-garde cinema from narratives about its 1968.
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