German department film series lauds New German Cinema among top Euro film art

European art cinema traditionally brings to mind the beautiful black-and-white montages of Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard films, which overshadow the lesser-known works of New German Cinema.

Providing a different perspective on European art film, biweekly screenings organized by a group of graduate students in the German department feature films from this cinematic movement and those closely linked to the tradition, with pieces chosen from the 1970s to the 2000s.

“Sometimes it’s a little harder for us to get a big audience. When people think about European art film, they think the sexy ones to go to are French especially, and maybe Italian. There is probably something true to that there is not such a rich tradition,” said Alexis Radisoglou, a fifth-year graduate student and one of the main organizers of the series.

The selection of films does not follow an over-arching theme, creating a diverse picture of the New German Cinema movement.

“We discussed when we came up with a plan for a film series whether we should have a retrospective of a particular director or focus on one movement, but we decided to have no restrictions,” said Radisoglou. “It is really about showing films that we thought are good films—films people might have difficulty seeing, and are part of a German-speaking cinema.”

As most of the films are rare pieces of art cinema and difficult to come by on the popular market, even on a Netflix catalogue, the series presents a unique viewing opportunity.
Each screening begins with an introduction by the graduate student who selected the film, giving a brief context to add to the audience’s experience.

Second-year graduate student Vincent Hessling presented “Palermo oder Wolfsburg” (“Palermo or Wolfsburg”) on Tuesday, Nov. 29 in its second screening in the series.

One of the more radical selections from the series, “Palermo oder Wolfsburg,” directed by Werner Schroeter, is a surrealist depiction of the assimilation of a Sicilian guest-worker into West German culture.

The protagonist, Nicola Zarbo, leaves his hometown in Sicily in hopes of finding work to support his family. The romanticized and idyllic environment Nicola was raised in starkly clashes with the industrialized society of West Germany.

The film is difficult to absorb in its entirety. The combination of melodramatic Biblical scenes, the excessively poetic and expressive monologues of the Italian characters, especially in the final court scene, and the almost grotesque cinematography only encompass a fraction of the complexities found in the film.

“The director embraces aesthetic phenomena, such as kitsch,” Hessling said, “and he really plays with them and achieves a certain cinematic effect that is sort of unprecedented. He succeeds in showing something that is ugly or cheesy so that we can enjoy it, but by the means of montage, he turns it into a real work of art.”

The final film in the series is 2008’s “Jerichow,” screening on Tuesday, Dec. 6, after an introduction by Radisoglou. Following the story of a war veteran who becomes entangled in a love triangle upon returning to his home village, “Jerichow,” as Radisoglou described, “is much less explicitly about kind of larger social and political questions.”

Radisglou commented on how “Jerichow,” the most current film in the series, bridges the German New Wave movement with modern mainstream cinema. “While at the same time sort of continuing some of the formal traditions of the other films that have been shown, it stands in a kind of relationship to the New German Cinema in the conforms of filmmaking,” said Radisoglou.
Aside from exposing audiences to the unique stylistic nuances of German cinema, both Hessling and Radisoglou agreed, the series aims to present bits of German culture outside of known stereotypes.

“It is a nice thing to get more exposure to German culture for students who are learning the language, since they don’t usually get that in language classes,” said Radisoglou.