ABSTRACT

Germany has enjoyed a privileged status in discussions about national cinema. No other cinema, in fact, has lent itself so consistently and productively to investigations into the relations between film and nationhood. New German Cinema, most critics would agree, constitutes the most recent chapter in this national cinema’s compelling and controversial saga. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles in many languages celebrate New German Cinema’s achievements. In the early 1990s, lavish exhibitions in Frankfurt and Berlin commemorated its hallmarks and, in so doing, certified its status as a thing of the past. I would like to consider the continuation of this story, to account for what has come in the wake of New German Cinema. German films, between sixty and seventy features a year in fact, are still being made, watched and talked about. How does one speak of national cinema in Germany today and how does this discourse relate to the ways in which people once spoke of a previous epoch’s national cinema?