Narratives of transformation and resistance: A cultural studies approach towards a critical understanding of the New German Cinema

Capital & Class, Winter 2004 by Scharf, Inga

Holger Meins and Deutschland im Herbst can be described as belonging to the post-war generation, which had been born during or shortly after the war, and whose members were in search of adequate forms of articulating their frustration with their parents' failure to confront the problematic past, while at the same time working towards a changed community. In the course of their work they thus produced filmic essays on issues that, according to them, had to be confronted and talked about.

Deutschland im Herbst and Ich liebe dich, ich töte dich serve as examples of the NGC'S critical representation of community. The NGC broke the silence, and invited dialogue into a society that, although formally a democracy, was still suffering from authoritarian and even Nazi residues. In this respect, the NGC had a democratising influence on post-war West German society, since it helped to create an alternative public sphere and thus prepared the ground for change.

In order to achieve this, its films often employed an 'ami-' or non-identification strategy (similar to Brecht's 'Verfremdungseffekt') in order to engage in a dialogue with the audience, and make them aware that they had a responsibility to get involved in the meaning-making process. Eike Wenzel (2000) speaks, in this respect, of films as 'memory spaces' -a concept that he develops by analysing films made by JeanMarie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky and Alexander Kluge.

The latter said 'goodbye to yesterday' in the form of a challenge to the dominant narrative conventions of realism. He avoided composing his narratives, such as Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966) and Die Patriotin (The Patriot, !979)5 in a linear fashion, since this would have alluded to the ultimate intelligibility of the world.

Instead, he confronted the audience with a disorienting composition of broken and incomplete story-pieces drawn from a range of documentary and fictional sources, which presented itself as a work-in-progress rather than as a finished narrative.

Through his editing techniques, Kluge created multilayered and knowingly inter-textual collages, which turned his films, in the words of Wenzel, into 'accessible memory spaces'. By this, Wenzel means that the audience is invited to come forth with its own memories and understanding of images, sounds and signs, which can then be negotiated with those of the film. Kluge's narratives were transformational in two ways.

First, they questioned seemingly fixed hegemonic knowledge and its corresponding truth-claim, and secondly, they provoked the audience to engage with film as a 'building site for meaning making': to use it as a space for the development of new and creative imaginings. This ethic saw the cinema as a democratic forum actively working towards communal change, rather than as a dream factory luring the audience into pleasant but ultimately pacifying viewing experiences.

To conclude, although we have little way of concretely assessing the direct social impact of NGC on Germany's sociocultural condition between 1962 and 1989, it can be said that its particular political stance, and its transformation of the narratives and generic forms, conceptualised and provided a cultural space for political dialogue in a largely silent community.