7 - West Germany’s “Workers’ Films”: A Cinema in the Service of Television?

Summary

After some fifty years of diverse and prolific production, post-1968 West German filmmaking is still mostly associated with the star directors of the New German Cinema, especially Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, and several women directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Doris Dörrie. Even in the communitarian 1960s and 70s, when the “death of the author” was the politically correct motto, the precarious ness of film exhibition in West Germany and the system of municipally funded art house venues (the “Communal Cinemas”) required independent distributors to market virtually all their productions under a director/author label, with filmmakers often travelling with their films, like musicians.

These programming exigencies obscure the fact that most Western European filmmaking has, for the better part of four decades, been dependent on the large national television networks: for finance, production facilities, and even exhibition, in the form of scheduled broadcasts.This was particularly true of West Germany, where the various state subsidy systems for filmmaking were tied to, and synchronized with, the television networks to such an extent that one had to ask: was television putting its resources into supporting a national cinema, or had the nation’s filmmakers put themselves in the service of television?

A particularly illuminating case not only of the West German filmmaking community’s interpenetration with television but also proof of its vulnerability when it came to targeting domestic television viewers (while still envisaging a national or even international cinema audience) was a relatively short-lived but historically important experiment conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films).It was the first time since the birth of the New German Cinema (or “Young German Cinema,” as it was known between 1962 and 1970) that a group of films made by independent directors was launched specifically as a genre, rather than under the then so powerful and almost magic banner of the Autorenfilm (authors’ films). In what follows, I will sketch some of the thinking behind the decision to revitalize and at the same time radicalize the concept of genre, by making it productive not in its traditional context of the cinema but for television, where it represented a useful halfway house between the information-and-issue orientation of the docudrama and the entertainment-and-spectacle orientation of classical genre-cinema.