As far as the European cinema goes, the 1970s belonged to Germany, or more exactly, to the “New German Cinema.” Breaking through the commercial and critical twilight of the post-war period, a handful of internationally well-exposed star directors – mainly Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Syberberg – briefly illuminated a notoriously bleak filmmaking landscape. Looking back, however, one realizes that this blaze of light left much territory underexposed, not least by obscuring the ground on which some of these talents grew. For besides the New German Cinema of auteurs and festivals, to which we owe THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, AGUIRRE, HITLER – A FILM FROM GERMANY or KINGS OF THE ROAD, there existed another New German Cinema that functioned almost exclusively within West Germany itself, and which, in its own terms, was as successful as its better-known half.

Both New German Cinemas have in common one very material fact: a radical change in the way films were made and financed in West Germany. From the late 1960s onwards, the Bonn government had stepped in with grants and subsidies, distributed by the “Gremien” of the Filmförderungsanstalt in Berlin, which opened up a chance to projects and personalities that no commercial producer would have risked. But this federal funding system, which Herzog once called his life-support machine, was a mere drip-feed compared to the blood transfusion and oxygen boost given to the patient after the so-called “Television Framework Agreement” of 1974. It obliged the various West German broadcasters to co-produce feature films and to set aside additional funds for transmitting independently made films first shown in the cinemas. With one stroke, independent filmmakers had gained access via television not only to a breed of producers and co-producers who wouldn't go bankrupt in mid-production or run off to the South of France; they had also acquired the next-best thing to a distribution and exhibition guarantee: audiences. This was especially important in a country whose cinemas were either controlled by the American majors, or owned by people convinced that a German-made feature film emptied seats more quickly than a colony of mice released at a children's matinee.