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

THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL: GERMAN FILM AND ITS POLITICS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010, 431 pp. Reviewed by Brigitte B. Wagner At the turn of the millennium, German film historian Eric Rentschler published a seminal piece that traced the institutional changes responsible for the shift from the politically engaged New German Cinema (along the lines of Fassbinder, Kluge, Wenders, and Herzog) to a post- 1989 "cinema of consensus." An early proponent both of the study of cinema in North American German departments and the study of 1970s leftist West German film in film departments, Rentschler was understandably perturbed by the postwall German film industry's new emphasis on box office success, generic formulas, film-television co-production structures, commercially biased subsidy boards, Americanised distribution, and individual, not nationally rooted, self-understandings and dramatic conflicts.1 Although acknowledging an "ardent nostalgia" for the formally experimental oeuvre of postwar auteurs (contemporaries of and participants in the revolutionary concerns of the 1968 generation) and calling for a more measured critical exploration of the latest incarnation of German film, Rentschler's essay in effect betrays a disdain for this "unabashedly conventional" 1990s cinema.2 Far from the Utopian political impulses of its forebears, this cinema seemed suddenly too free of national identity, too unencumbered by the German past, too dangerously inclusive of a heterogeneous population, and too imitative of Hollywood; and it did not address international markets. Even as 1990s European cinema more generally maintained national and local idiosyncrasies in the face of transnational Europeanisation and the globally hegemonic American entertainment industry and thus secured the brands "English," "German," or "French" in a legal sense, (West) Germany's purported loss of cinematic legitimacy in the immediate postwall postwall era has been a hard pill for scholars of German cinema to swallow. In the intervening years, Rentschler's observations have challenged a new generation of German film experts to re-examine the politics within and beyond consensus films and to scan the horizons for other modes of cinematic politicization. It is this task that Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager's edited volume, The Collapse of the Conventional: German Farn and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, assumes. The timing of this anthology could not be better. Just as its title refers to the "collapse of the conventional German film" declared by the young filmmakers who signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, Fisher and 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 and that the artistic output of the present therefore deserves heightened critical attention. In other words, there is once again work to be done. While the Oberhauseners' arrogant dismissal of 'Papas Kino' (well-made genre films for the masses) short-changed the critical interventions of numerous 1950s directors (one thinks, for example, of the films of Wolfgang Staudte and Bernhard Wicki), it is not Fisher and Prager's project to discredit the productions of the 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, and transnational alliances as well as the East and West German past and selective memories of National Socialism, World War II, and the Holocaust. The editors avoid the separation of contemporary German cinema into what they call "bad ideological films" and "good cultural critical films, "and turn their attention, instead, to the variety of films produced in the past fifteen years or so. …