ABSTRACT
Cinema has its roots in lower-class entertainment, circus, vaudeville, variety. From its very beginnings, film has been an art form as well as popular culture and sometimes both at once. The situation of the German cinema in the 1990s is miserable when compared with more productive decades of the history of German film. This chapter discusses the present state of German cinema. It presents a brief survey of German film history in the twentieth century. The artsy and innovative part of the hermaphrodite film laid buried until the arrival of the so-called New German Cinema in the 1960s. The New German Cinema was a cinema of small budgets, with films often shot on 16mm film, frequently in black and white, and more often than not aimed at intellectual pleasure rather than at immediate gratification. Cinema tries to conquer the world by forcing a certain filmic stereotype on the world which destroys consciously every other form of cinema.
