The new German cinema is the liveliest in Europe
In the '40s it was the Italians and neorealism. British comedies made the world laugh in the '50s, and the '60s saw the crest of the French New Wave. But as far as foreign films are concerned, the '70s belong to the Germans. With little encouragement, less money and no older hands to guide them, a few extraordinary young directors have given birth to a phoenix—the brilliant German cinema of Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch that Hitler consigned to ashes 45 years ago. "We had nothing, and we started with nothing," says Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who at 31, with 33 films to his credit, is probably the most prolific film maker alive. "For a generation nobody made important films in Germany. Until us."
The achievement is remarkable: the Germans are now producing the most original films outside America. Their very lack of experience, otherwise a handicap, is a spur to creativity. They are ignorant of what they are not supposed to do, and they look at movies with the same fresh and vigorous eyes that the pioneers did 50 and 60 years ago.
Their boldness sometimes causes them to stumble and make mistakes that more sophisticated directors would laugh at. But more often it produces exciting new visions, unexpected perspectives, a world in which the sun rises in the west and spring follows summer. "We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones," says Werner Herzog, 35, who, with Fassbinder, is a leader of the group. "I see something on the horizon that most people have not yet seen. I seek planets that do not exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed."
In pursuit of those images, Herzog has made one film in which the actors were hypnotized, another in which all the actors were dwarfs, and a third in which the leading character, an old woman, was both deaf and blind. His best work, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), might serve as a metaphor for the whole German school. Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador played by Klaus Kinski, revolts against the crown and attempts to build a new empire in the jungles of Peru. The film, a kaleidoscope of the fabulous and the bizarre, would be noteworthy even if it stopped after the first riveting scene: 50 or so Spaniards, in armor and heavy battle gear, slowly descending a steep jungle hillside, a rivulet of quicksilver melting into nature's green vastness.
Fassbinder dares in different but equally bold ways. Instead of seeking stories in the strange and the exotic, he finds the strange and exotic in stories he knows. In one of his finest films, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), he evokes intense drama out of what would seem to be a supremely undramatic situation: three lesbians enclosed in a small, claustrophobic apartment who do nothing but talk, talk, talk.