THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL: GERMAN FILM AND ITS POLITICS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Jaimey Fisher Brad Prager Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010, 431 pp. Reviewed by Brigitte B. Wagner At turn of millennium, German historian Eric Rentschler published a seminal piece that traced institutional changes responsible for shift from politically engaged New German Cinema (along lines of Fassbinder, Kluge, Wenders, Herzog) to a post- 1989 of consensus. An early proponent both of study of cinema in North American German departments study of 1970s leftist West German in departments, Rentschler was understandably perturbed by postwall German industry's new emphasis on box office success, generic formulas, film-television co-production structures, commercially biased subsidy boards, Americanised distribution, individual, not nationally rooted, self-understandings dramatic conflicts.1 Although acknowledging an ardent nostalgia for formally experimental oeuvre of postwar auteurs (contemporaries of participants in revolutionary concerns of 1968 generation) calling for a more measured critical exploration of latest incarnation of German film, Rentschler's essay in effect betrays a disdain for this unabashedly 1990s cinema.2 Far from Utopian political impulses of its forebears, this cinema seemed suddenly too free of national identity, too unencumbered by German past, too dangerously inclusive of a heterogeneous population, too imitative of Hollywood; it did not address international markets. Even as 1990s European cinema more generally maintained national local idiosyncrasies in face of transnational Europeanisation globally hegemonic American entertainment industry thus secured brands English, German, or French in a legal sense, (West) Germany's purported loss of cinematic legitimacy in immediate postwall postwall era has been a hard pill for scholars of German cinema to swallow. In intervening years, Rentschler's observations have challenged a new generation of German experts to re-examine politics within beyond consensus to scan horizons for other modes of cinematic politicization. It is this task that Jaimey Fisher Brad Prager's edited volume, The Collapse of Conventional: German Farn Its Politics at Turn of Twenty-First Century, assumes. The timing of this anthology could not be better. Just as its title refers to of conventional German film declared by young filmmakers who signed Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, Fisher Prager hail what they term the collapse of consensual filmmaking. The conceit of both collapses is of course that a period of cinematic normalization, whether postwar or postwall postwall, precedes a renewal of aesthetic energies that artistic output of present therefore deserves heightened critical attention. In other words, there is once again work to be done. While Oberhauseners' arrogant dismissal of 'Papas Kino' (well-made genre for masses) short-changed critical interventions of numerous 1950s directors (one thinks, for example, of of Wolfgang Staudte Bernhard Wicki), it is not Fisher Prager's project to discredit productions of 1990s. Rather, they introduce a millennial periodisation that demarcates a new era in All-German filmmaking- one in which unified Germany is no longer a concept-in-the-making but a place structured by new borders, migrants, transnational alliances as well as East West German past selective memories of National Socialism, World War II, Holocaust. The editors avoid separation of contemporary German cinema into what they call bad ideological films good cultural critical films, and turn their attention, instead, to variety of produced in past fifteen years or so. …