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Munich Films, 1967–1977: Ten Years That Shook the Film World

Guggenheim Fellowship Application

IN the last ten years, it’s towards the Munich-based film industry that anyone interested in innovatory stylistics and polemical statement has had to turn. This renaissance, all the more interesting in that the German film industry had been almost wiped out as a national entity by the war against the Nazi regime, was triggered in the early Sixties by the Marxist film essays of Jean Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub, the latter a Frenchman who spent his early years in German-occupied Lorraine and made his first austere, minimal films in Munich. The coming of age of a new generation of leftist filmmakers, whose particular concern is the weave of formalist inventions with political dimension, has been amplified from the start by funding from the government and the attention of German TV producers. There is now a Munich school of filmmaking, according to the critics (“More people have read about the young German directors than have seen their spooky films”), but its interest lies more in its diversity than in its unity. Filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, and Schroeter share in common the same kind of financing, and low budget techniques (the biggest budget to date: Wim Wenders’ $800,000 “The American Friend”), but vary greatly in their anti-establishment content and abstract styling. Another interesting fact is that the American critics, for lack of precise information on the Munich situation, have been unaware of an incredible increment of young filmmakers (Hauff, Sanders, Syberberg, Boehm, Sinkel, Kluge, Reitz, Raben, Schlondorff, Ucicky, and Verhoeven).

The book that I propose, “Munich Films, 1967–1977: Ten Years That Shook the Film World,” inspects the visible tip of the iceberg, but also plunges underwater to try and show the bulk of the German phenomenon. The book examines the ongoing renaissance in terms of politics, economics, and art, paying particular attention to its progenitors, such as the haunting exoticism of F. W. Murnau, and those emigrés (Von Sternberg, Wilder, Lang) whose expressionist techniques and cynical outlook strongly influenced the dark, suspenseful Hollywood thrillers known as Film Noir.

From “Katzelmacher” to “The American Friend” is a remarkable passage in film history, an unusual conjunction of Marxist polemics with formidable use of graphic-oral inventions. That the odyssey of Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder has moved away from its first anti-establishment positions in “Not Reconciled” (1965), “Fata Morgana” (1971), and “Katzelmacher” (1969) is symptomatic of the massive entrance and infiltration of media values into Seventies art. A major act of the book is to explain this encirclement and containment without downgrading the vital nature of the films under discussion.

The preparation for this book has been underway since 1970 when I began teaching film and painting at UC San Diego. During this 1970–77 period, a series of three-hour lecture classes paid attention not only to the films of the above filmmakers, but centered each semester on a particular area: politics, issues of the Seventies, the relationship of these works to other movie types made at the same historical moment, elements of form such as lighting, framing, sound, and narrative. A large volume of notes and research material accrued from the twelve classes, which served as reading matter for the students. These notes built the lectures given throughout the state and elsewhere (Southern Methodist, NYU, Illinois Wesleyan) as well as a series of articles that were written in 1975 as I served as regular film critic for CITY of San Francisco magazine and later as a frequent contributor to FILM COMMENT. At this writing, half of the final work on Fassbinder, Herzog, and the introduction has been done. About one third of the research is accomplished on Straub, Wenders, Schroeter, and Kluge.

I’ve worked a great deal in close collaboration with the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, and its director, Tom Luddy. Through him I’ve been in close contact with many of the crucial filmmakers in Europe, such as Rossellini and Godard, the Straubs, Herzog, and Wenders. A lot of the proposed work is going to be done at the very active, pertinent archives. My experience as a critic for Coppola’s CITY magazine gives me a good access to Hollywood screening rooms. My connection to the abstract film scene in America has been a long-standing one: so a segment of the study in New York will be done in cooperation with Jonas Mekas and Annette Michelson. But I’ll also be working with Adrienne Mancia, the film curator at the Museum of Modern Art. In London, I’ll be working with David Wilson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and other critics of the German film, most of them based at the British Film Institute. In Munich, my base of operations is the Filmverlag der Autoren which distributes many of the films in which I’m interested and has also asked me to do some lecturing.

I am singularly placed in relation to most of my colleagues in movie criticism in that I have deep experience as a practicing painter and as an instructor in painting. Added to this is a sort of odd union of popular magazine criticism (a ton of this) and teaching large lecture classes (350 students) and small seminars in film, where the drive is always towards probing and dense analyses. These types of persuasion allow me to move more freely into serious music, performance, and art history to understand the forces that have helped radicalize the Munich films. With this background, I am equipped to work back and forth between the audience film and the traits of other art forms, which form the basis for a Merchant of the Four Seasons or The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

My work has been very publishable. This is the second time that it has involved such wide ranging research. My first book, “Negative Space,” deals largely but not totally with American and European films that are easily seen in the neighborhood theaters. My second book, a collaboration with my wife, Patricia Patterson, is in its final revision stage, a study of the Seventies film which ranged from the highly public genre films into a huge underground of less exposed radical work, from Serene Velocity to Death by Hanging. The texture of my criticism has changed considerably since 1941 in The New Republic, and takes a lot longer to write. A number of publishers have expressed interest in the project, and, as the work is fulfilled, there will be little trouble finding a publisher. As of now, no contract has been negotiated.

The publications that have the greatest relevance to my proposed study are the following: