Dear Jonathan, dear Adrian, dear Kent, dear Nicole! I am writing to you in German. You will read this letter in a translation only.* Will you draw from this letter exactly what I have put in? Believe me, I know why I'm worried. In German-speaking film culture, foreign movies are not often seen in their original language, and before I was 18, 19 years old, 95 percent of all films I saw were synchronizedthat's word for dubbing here: Synchronisation. This word has a lot to do with how people perceive film culture, which is based on some concurrences and many displacements. The very idea of of the children of 1960, is a kind of synchronization. We want to find out shared aspects of how we were cinematically formed, and with good reason; but in this process differences will necessarily be brought out as well. The split between dubbed lines of an actor and movement of his or her lips. Jonathan asks about specific needs of our generation's particular brand of cinephilia. I think that there was certainly one specific need: to become flexible enough, to be able to (re)act quickly and knowledgeably in order to undermine firmly established positions. To become Eno's small, highly mobile unit which Kent talks about. In framework of film-cultural globalization two fake alternatives to Hollywood have evolved: Miramax idea of U.S. indies and reduction of European and Asian cinemas to a few masters who can transcend all national borders and dance in all markets (Kieslowski and Zhang Yimou might be two good examples). I am much more interested in filmmakers who speak in concrete words and voices, from a concrete place, about concrete places and characters. I like image of brothers Dardenne (the directors of La Promesse), standing somewhere in middle of industrial Belgian suburbia, looking around and saying, All these landscapes make up our language. Next to filmmakers we've often discussed (like Ferrara, Assayas, Egoyan, Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, et al.) there are many more if lesser-known examples of such a kind of cinema. Their dialects are much too specific to fit into global commerce of goods-in Austria: Wolfgang Murnberger (today), John Cook (in 1970s); in Germany: Michael Klier, Helge Schneider. Or in Kazakhstan: Darezhan Omirbaev. And even in Hollywood: Albert Brooks. Each of us could think of twenty others. I am too young to have witnessed innovative movements in European cinema as a contemporary. But at same time, I am too old to belong to a later generation, which very naturally grew up with home video, rock video, video games, and computers. This might be an important element of how I was (how we were) formed: aura of movies in first person singular (as a dominant idea of cinema) was still in air, like an afterimage; and commodification of film in context of exploding entertainment industries (as a dominant idea of cinema) was not yet fully tangible. Born into this gap, without a guiding cinematic principle, my perspective was unstable: turning both backward and forward. (And I share Kent's experience: only real guiding principle at that time, to define yourself as a young person, was pop music.) For me in Austria, this gap or in-between space lasted from about 1980 to 1986; as a real space in film history, it might have lasted from 1975 to 1983, from Salo to Flashdance. I can imagine that it was also formative era for many of filmmakers we cherish today. I am, however, drawn toward space of 1970s, space of that new simplicity, kind of minimalism you've associated with Eustache, Garrel, and Cassavetes, among others. For German film culture, this moment is certainly linked with Wenders, Schroeter, and-in a decisive way-with Fassbinder. In Germany, endlessly (self-)referential cinema a la New Wave didn't have to be broken, as it didn't exist. Wenders and Fassbinder were first to introduce it, but at same time they already acknowledged need for emptying out-their intertextuality never seems playful but like a desperate echo of Ford, Sirk, or Melville, employed to relate a depressive post-'68 situation. I saw most of films by Fassbinder, and by Pialat, Eustache, Cassavetes, and Garrel, five or ten years after they first appeared, but deep pain they expressed became a moving and beautiful sensation; this pain always seemed to have been experienced firsthand, and it preserved a sense of life even in death or madness. It helped me to finally give up any belief in historically predetermined improvement of world. And pain's authenticity (on screen) was guaranteed by fact that many filmmakers of this