17 - An Interview with Birgit Hein: “Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system”

Summary

Typically, considerations of 1968 and West German cinema focus on New German Cinema (NGC) as the radical aesthetic project of the period. NGC is even described as avant-garde film. This analysis, however, overlooks the significance of non-narrative experimental cinema. The following interview with Birgit Hein, one of (West) Germany’s most important experimental filmmakers, offers a vision of cinema culture focused on the experimental work of the 1960s. Hein, born in 1942 in Berlin, belonged to the first generation of postwar filmmakers who revitalized the experimental tradition destroyed by the catastrophe of 1933 or German fascism. Unlike commercial narrative cinema, this form of filmmaking did not return to West Germany easily. It took almost two decades and then largely through the exposition at venues like the film festival EXPRMNTL in Knokke, Belgium. In the interview, Hein notes importantly that experimental filmmakers came to the project not from the questions of narration but from the considerations of the fine arts. Birgit Hein, along with her then husband Wilhelm Hein, was part of a growing set of moving image artists who in their work turned, as she states here, “from the depiction of reality to the reality of depiction.” Hein provides here a compelling reflection on the often difficult to assess work of the avant-garde film of the period. In its aesthetic and political aspirations, art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system and that cannot even exist outside its own immanent language. She also helps us understand how, like NGC, a New German Avant-garde Film also had to build its community, train itself, establish an audience, find screening spaces, and, in effect, create its own institutions. The interview also helps us to understand how Hein’s work as a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art created the preconditions for the accomplishments of the most successful current generation of experimental filmmakers in Germany. The publication of Film als Idee (Film as Idea), which collects her writings and contains translations into English, allows interested English speakers further access to Birgit Hein’s important body of work.

RH: Typically, European film historians think of this as the period of the birth of New German Cinema. Could we say it was also the rebirth of German Avant-garde cinema, a New German Avant-garde Film (NGAF)?