The Basis Film Verleih

A recent event at the ICA, featuring the work of a Berlin distribution and production company, the Basis Film Verleih, has again highlighted the current dilemmas of independent cinema on the Left, battling against an unfavorable cultural climate, increasing difficulties with funding, and the competition from denationalized and deregulated television markets. The history of Basis, however, also demonstrates, amidst an atmosphere of near-despondency, the position of (relative) strength from which women filmmakers in West Germany can take stock and address the changing situation. The audience at the ICA was on the whole skeptical about the lessons to be learnt, given the different (and considerably worse) starting point in Britain, but in the way Basis proposes to respond to the crisis, it is adding a new chapter to the history of the cinema d’auteur.

Basis Film Verleih was founded in 1973, initially in order to promote and distribute a number of television films (DEAR MOTHER, I’M FINE, SNOWDROPS BLOOM IN SEPTEMBER) which Christian Ziewer had produced and directed about shop-floor conflicts, strikes, and their repercussions in the home, the socalled Arbeiterfilme. Basis’ intention was to bypass the commercial (and moribund) system, by taking the films directly to a working-class audience, into factories, trade-union meetings and social clubs. When Ziewer hired Clara Burckner as his production manager and director of Basis, the company expanded its operations, using subsidy money, production grants, and distribution aid to build up revolving capital with which to co-produce and distribute films from mainly Berlin filmmakers, the Berlin School. With the decline of the Arbeiterfilme, in the wake of party-political pressures and more cautious television editors, Basis was able to move more strongly into an emergent area of independent work: it attracted funds for projects by women filmmakers, and over the years has added to its distribution list films by directors as diverse as Helke Sander and Ulrike Ottinger, Helma Sanders-Brahms and Ula Stöckl, Helga Reidemeister and Ingemo Engstrom, Jutta Brückner and Alexandra von Grothe, Cristina Perincioli and Marianne Rosenbaum. Where do all these filmmakers come from?