New German Cinema

In 1962, twenty-six young Germans signed a manifesto at a short-film festival declaring their fathers’ cinema dead.

What replaced it was scraped together from television money and stubbornness: Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff, each making films about a country that did not want to look at itself. Fassbinder worked so fast he finished more than forty features before dying at thirty-seven, sometimes shooting one picture while editing another. Herzog hauled a real steamship over a real hill for Fitzcarraldo, on the grounds that a special effect is a lie the audience can feel. The Tin Drum took the Palme d’Or in 1979 and Paris, Texas took it in 1984, and the cinema the manifesto had buried stayed buried.