Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures And The Long 1968

340 Pages·2019·8.295 MB·English

by  Marco Abel, Christina Gerhardt

Celluloid Revolt
Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual
Series Editors
Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College)
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)
Also in this series
Women in Weimar Fashion, by Mila Ganeva (2008)
After the Digital Divide?, edited by
Lutz Koepnick and Erin McGlothlin (2009)
The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, edited by
Christian Rogowski (2010)
Screening War, edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (2010)
A New History of German Cinema, edited by
Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (2012)
The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco Abel (2013)
Generic Histories of German Cinema,
edited by Jaimey Fisher (2013)
The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone
Documentary and Experimental Film, edited by
Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (2014)
DEFA after East Germany, edited by
Brigitta B. Wagner (2014)
Last Features, by Reinhild Steingröver (2014)
The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film,
by Axel Bangert (2014)
Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by
Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein (2016)
Forgotten Dreams, by Laurie Ruth Johnson (2016)
Montage as Perceptual Experience, by Mario Slugan (2017)
Gender and Sexuality in East German Film, edited by
Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (2018)
Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin,
by Mila Ganeva (2018)
Austria Made in Hollywood, by Jacqueline Vansant (2019)
Celluloid Revolt
German Screen Cultures
and the Long 1968
Edited by
Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel
Copyright © 2019 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2019
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-995-5
ISBN-10: 1-57113-995-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 1
Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel
Part I
1: Peter Zadek’s Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing
“1968” by Means of “1968 Thinking” 27
Michael Dobstadt
2: “Break the Power of the Manipulators”: Film and the
West German 1968 42
Timothy Scott Brown
3: Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger
Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni 53
Priscilla Layne
4: Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist
Movement 69
Christina Gerhardt
5: Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere
for Feminist Politics 87
Madeleine Bernstorff
6: A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the
German Film and Television Academy and Participatory
Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism 105
Fabian Tietke
7: West Germany’s “Workers’ Films”: A Cinema in the Service
of Television? 122
Thomas Elsaesser
8: Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation
Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s 134
Lisa Haegele
(cid:2)
vi CONTENTS
9: Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian
Filmmakers Cooperative 152
Andrew Stefan Weiner
10: Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German
Blockbuster Heißer Sommer 168
Ian Fleishman
11: Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale
Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968 183
Sean Eedy
12: A llegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in
GDR Visual Cultures 201
Patricia Anne Simpson
13: “You Say You Want a Revolution”: East German
Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas 218
Evelyn Preuss
14: Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of
Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem
Pflaster ist der Strand 237
Ervin Malakaj
15: Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard:
An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film 253
Kalani Michell
Part II
In Conversation: Interviews with Filmmakers
16: An Interview with Harun Farocki: “Holger Thought about
Aesthetics and Politics Together” 271
Tilman Baumgärtel
17: An Interview with Birgit Hein: “Art communicates knowledge
that cannot be expressed in any other information system” 281
Randall Halle
18: An Interview with Klaus Lemke: “Being Smart Does Not
Make Good Films” 292
Marco Abel
Notes on the Contributors 313
Index 319
Acknowledgments
THE GENESIS OF Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long
1968 lies in the 2008 German Film Institute, which was co-organized
by Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, and which focused on the German cinemas around 1968. We thank
Tony and Rick for that summer’s iteration, in particular, and for the
invaluable service they provide to the field of German film studies by offer-
ing the German Film Institute.
We thank Jim Walker, our editor at Camden House, and Gerd
Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, series editors of German Screen
Cultures, who understood the relevance of the book from the very outset.
Their enthusiasm and support of the project as well as helpful suggestions
along the way were much appreciated. We thank the two anonymous read-
ers for their generous feedback, which helped to shape the volume.
We are grateful to the following persons at the press for their excellent
work: Julia Cook, managing editor; Jacqueline Heinzelmann, editorial
assistant; Mark Baker, copyeditor; Jane Best, production editor; and
Rosemary Shojaie, marketing executive.
The book benefited from several conference panels devoted to the
topic of 1968 and German cinemas at the 2014 Modern Languages
Association convention and at the 2015 German Studies Association
(GSA) conference, which Tina organized, as well as a 2013 GSA seminar,
which Marco co-organized. The papers and audiences at these conferences
confirmed our suspicion that there is much, much more to say about the
long 1968 and German cinemas.
We are grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Nebraska–Lincoln for supporting our project with an ENHANCE
grant.
Our deepest gratitude goes to our contributors, whose work has
shaped the book into something far beyond what we initially imagined. As
Celluloid Revolt developed, we were fortunate to have the involvement and
encouragement of colleagues, friends, and partners, and to witness the
formation of new intellectual com munities, some of which have already
produced new collaborations. We look forward to the future conversations
and projects generated by this volume.

Introduction: German Screen Cultures and
the Long 1968
Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel
1968 as a German Political and Cinematic Event
THE YEAR 1968, or rather the era of what Fredric Jameson influentially
periodized as the long sixties,1 changed the world in countless ways,
politically and socially. Anti-colonial and anti-imperial wars were being
waged around the globe, in particular in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. The protracted US-Vietnam War was emblematic of these self-
liberation and self-determination struggles, and social movements sprung
up internationally to protest it. In the United States, the civil rights move-
ment challenged racism and demanded equal rights. The Black Panthers
inspired countless other groups, including the American Indian Movement,
a Native American advocacy group; the Brown Berets, a Chicano rights
group; I Wor Kuen, an Asian-American rights group; the Young Lords, a
Puerto Rican nationalist group; and the Young Patriots, a poor and work-
ing-class white group. Many of these organizations came together to form
the Rainbow Coalition, through the organizing efforts of Fred Hampton
of the Black Panther Party, of José Cha-Cha Jiménez of the Young Lords,
and of members of the Young Patriots Organization. The 1969 Stonewall
Riots led to the first Christopher Street Day and gay pride protests in
1970. In European social movements, solidarity with third world politics
played a key role.2 Additionally, feminists challenged patriarchal structures
and sexism, also among the left, demanding changes in the workplace and
at home, which led to the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s.
Solidarity alliances across classes were crucial domestically as well, as stu-
dent protests and labor struggles joined forces, most notably but not solely
in France.3
In addition to these political changes, what we will call ’68 here but
will construe throughout this introduction and volume as the “long 1968”
was also decidedly a media event. Graphic, gruesome images from the
Vietnam War were broadcast on television on the nightly news and printed
as photographs in the daily newspapers.4 Most famous among them, Eddie