the 1980s. Its founders, a group of young writers
and filmmakers, recognized that any attempt to
revive the German cinema must deal with two large
issues: the Nazi period and the brutal break that
it made in the German cultural tradition; and
the reemergence of postwar Germany as a divided
country, the western part of which was known, like
Japan at the same time, as an “economic miracle.”
In addition, they knew the Italian, French, and
British New Cinemas that preceded them and had
a genuine affection for established genres in Holly-
wood, particularly melodrama. Like all serious rad-
ical groups, it issued a manifesto:
The collapse of the conventional German film finally
removes the economic basis for a mode of filmmaking
whose attitude and practice we reject. With it the new
film has a chance to come to life....
We declare our intention to create the new Ger-
man feature film.
This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom
from the conventions of the established industry.
Freedom from the outside influence of commercial
partners. Freedom from the control of special inter-
est groups.
We have concrete intellectual, formal, and eco-
nomic conceptions about the production of the new
German film. We are as a collective prepared to take
economic risks.
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.^14This 1962 document (known as the Oberhausen
Manifesto)—fusing economic, aesthetic, and politi-
cal goals—sought to create a new cinema free from
historical antecedents, one that could criticize
bourgeois German society and expose viewers to
new modes of looking at movies. A short list of the
early work of the most significant directors
includes Volker Schlöndorff ’s Young Torless(1966);
Alexander Kluge’s Artists under the Big Top: Per-
plexed(1968); and Margarethe von Trotta’s The
German Sisters/Marianne and Juliane (1981; von
Trotta is perhaps the most important of a large
group of female directors) Rainer Werner Fass-
binder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun(1979), Fear of
Fear(1975), and Berlin Alexanderplatz(1980; a tele-
vision series, released theatrically in a 15^1 ⁄ 2 -hour
version, the longest narrative movie ever made);
Wim Wenders’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty
Kick(1972), The American Friend(1977), and Paris,
Texas(1984); and Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs
Started Small(1970), Aguirre: The Wrath of God
(1972), Heart of Glass(1976), and Nosferatu the Vam-
pire(1979). Ultimately, the movement sparked a
renaissance in German filmmaking by encouraging
the production of quality films that created consid-
erable excitement in the international cinema com-
munity. Its bold treatments of such contemporary
issues as sexuality, immigration, and national iden-
tity have had a significant influence on filmmakers
worldwide.Japan and Postwar Filmmaking
The movies were popular in Japan as early as 1896,
a year after they were invented in the West, and the
Japanese film industry flourished—albeit with a
highly stylized form of filmmaking that owed a
great deal to Japanese literary and theatrical tradi-
tions as well as something to Western cinematic
traditions—until World War II.
When the war ended in 1945, much of the coun-
try lay in ruins and was under occupation by the
Allied powers. As the film industry began to revive,
it was strongly influenced by such Hollywood mas-
ters as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson
Welles. However, filmmakers were limited, both by
the occupying powers and by a film industry scarce
of money, to making films that extolled the free-
doms made possible by democracy, particularly the
emancipation of women. The three Japanese direc-
tors most familiar in the West are Akira Kurosawa,
Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Mizoguchi and
Ozu began their directing careers in the 1920s, but
it was not until 1950 that Kurosawa launched the
golden age of Japanese filmmaking with Rashomon.
To Western viewers, Akira Kurosawa is the most
recognizable Japanese director, both for the quality
of his work and the fact that he, among his contem-
poraries, was most familiar with the conventions of464 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
(^14) For the full text and list of signatories, see http://web.uvic
.ca/geru/439/oberhausen.html.