One of the most popular genres within nonfiction cinema today is the so-called “essay film.” These audiovisual productions are literary or philosophical meditations on a variety of topics, including self-reflective explorations on the nature of image- and sound-making, social critiques and histories, and introspective investigations plumbing the depths of human nature. As varied as the form and topics of these films are, there is common agreement on their definition. The essay film has generally been characterized as an in-between genre that moves freely from fiction to nonfiction, part documentary, part fantasy, made for television viewing and for gallery or museum exhibition. One of the characteristics of the essay film is that it is not predictable, since it does not follow the conventional rules. Moreover, essay films are both informed by and produce theory. To that extent, they constitute part of a body of experimental films, which Edward S. Small identifies as a genre and refers to as “direct theory.”

The contemporary essay film is international, and many of its producers have a transnational or diasporic identity. At the same time, however, there are national variations of the essay film. When one traces a history of the genre, it is evident that several national cinemas have a clearly developed brand of this hybrid form that identifies them as being part of a larger national cinematic tradition. Thus there are the French, British, Italian, North American, Latin American, and German essay films.

When taking stock of German film culture since the demise of its famous Autorenkino, which attracted international attention in the 1970s and reestablished West German cinema as “legitimate,” one could do worse than consider the singular case of Dominik Graf. For over the last thirty years Graf—who is almost completely unknown outside Germany and whose status at home does not nearly approach the level of recognition enjoyed by post-Autorenkino filmmakers such as Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich, and Doris Dörrie, nor that of the better-known post- Wende directors such as Sönke Wortmann, Tom Tykwer, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck—has been one of German film's most productive filmmakers.

Point of view shot: an aerial camera flying through the clouds toward what looks like a large mountaintop observatory, accompanied by a blues-rock soundtrack. Cut to the inside of the building, where the camera pans across a series of iconic images of dead pop stars, from Elvis and Otis Redding to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. Cut to a clothing rack filled with rock-inspired costumes, behind which we glimpse a man swapping an “Uncle Sam” topper for a black cowboy hat. Cut to an extreme close-up of the same man lighting a cigarette, fading down the music on a mixing desk and opening his mouth to speak. So begins Marcus H. Rosenmüller's surprise hit of 2006, Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot (released in English as Grave Decisions), an opening sequence awash with intertextual references that encapsulate many of the tensions present in the genre films discussed throughout this volume. The first shot from a camera descending onto the mountain recalls the famous opening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and its depiction of Hitler's approach to the 1934 Nuremburg Rally. This echo of Germany's problematic cinematic legacy is then juxtaposed with the presentation of the inside of the building that, it transpires, is a radio station with far more in common with George Lucas's classic nostalgia film American Graffiti (1973) than with Riefenstahl: the man we see on the screen before us seems to recall that archetypal American DJ Wolfman Jack, who acts as mythical seer to the teenagers of Lucas's film.

With the death of “Promi-Produzent” Bernd Eichinger in January 2011, many obituary writers, media commentators, and film-industry luminaries, such as Wolfgang Petersen and actor Til Schweiger, took the occasion to revisit the last forty years of German cinema. Eichinger's oeuvre ranges from works now canonized as part of New German Cinema, such as Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement, 1975) and Hitler—Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: A Film From Germany, 1977), to some of the biggest blockbusters of 1990s genre cinema such as Der bewegte Mann (The Moved Man, released in English as Maybe … maybe not, 1994) and Ballermann 6 (1997), to the post-2000, globally marketed historical dramas Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) and Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008). Although Eichinger's star rose more in the later phases of New German Cinema, he worked with New German Cinema luminaries as varied as Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, and Doris Dörrie, as well as, more recently, a director who has positioned himself as a second-generation inheritor of that cinema's often provocatively political project, Oskar Roehler. On the other, more mainstream hand, he was the producer of films such as the Berlin-shot Resident Evil series: made in English, based on a video game, and starring a former Ukranian super-model, it is one of the highest-earning film cycles made outside the United States and United Kingdom. Beyond his involvement at the level of the film or film series, Eichinger was also a force at the studio level: he took over Constantin-Film in 1979 and built it into the biggest studio player in German cinema.

From 1959 to 1972, Germany sustained a wave of some thirty-eight filmic adaptations of Edgar Wallace's crime novels, most of which were produced by Rialto Film, a Danish-German film company. The Wallace wave paralleled, in many ways, the success of the Karl may adaptations (also produced by Rialto) and remains one of Germany's most popular cultural artifacts of the postwar era. Preben Philipsen, head of the Rialto production company, filmed the first installment, entitled Der Frosch mit der Maske (The Frog with the Mask) in 1959, followed by Der rote Kreis (The Red Circle) in the same year. Although both films were made in Denmark, they targeted the German film market and were enormous box-office successes. The production was subsequently relocated to Germany, and the German Rialto was founded as a subdivision of Constantin-Film, which then exclusively distributed the Edgar Wallace films. What followed in the next fifteen years was Germany's longest feature-film series, with thirty-two films produced by Rialto.

At first sight, the relatively low production costs of each of the series' films—Der Frosch mit der Maske cost only around 600,000 DM—contrasts with the cycle's audience appeal, yet they also help to explain some of the series' generic aspects. Very few scenes and sequences were actually filmed on location in Great Britain and inserted into the films later. A great number of location shots were overdubbed and reused several times throughout the cycle.

In 2002 Kino Video released a collection of “German Horror Classics.” This four-DVD set, boxed in a slick black case with Gothic lettering, includes Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Paul Wegener's Der Golem und wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem and How He Came Into the World, 1920), Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 1922), and Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924). None of these films would have been considered “horror films” at the time of their release; nor, some would argue, should some of them rightly be considered horror films today. Nonetheless, these films are invariably cited as key entries in the horror-film lexicon. From Lotte Eisner's famous identification of German Expressionist cinema's “haunted screen” to contemporary transnational thrillers that export German history as horror film, German identity has consistently been represented through the lens of the Faustian soul, the haunted Teuton, the mad genius. It is therefore not surprising that film scholars typically cite Germany—“the land of dark forests and darker myths”—as the birthplace of horror. Carlos Clarens, in his definitive history of horror and science-fiction films prior to 1967, includes the first three films in his chapter on German film between 1913 and 1932, arguing that the sharp contrasts and dramatic acting of Expressionism offered precisely the right style “to render in black and white the reawakened fantasies of the darkly romantic German soul” (14).

Until his sudden death in 2011 at the age of sixty-one, Bernd Eichinger was not only the most significant German film producer, but also a singular figure in German filmmaking, a man who more than anyone else shaped the course of German cinema over the last forty years. An active player since the early 1970s, Eichinger devoted himself to the commercial renewal of German film. as a self-styled mogul who consciously adopted the ideas and habits of classical Hollywood producers, Eichinger was an auteur producer who played a central role in all aspects of the films he made. First acquiring the story, he then also oversaw script development, casting, selection of the crew including the director, location scouting, the shoot, editing, visual effects, and postproduction, as well as advertising, publicity, and distribution. When he was unhappy with these, he regularly intervened. As such, his vision left an indelible imprint on the dominant narrative and stylistic trends in contemporary German and international film.

Eichinger began his career by founding the independent production company Solaris in 1974. In 1979 he took over the moribund German production and distribution company Constantin-Film. At the reinvented neue Constantin, Eichinger introduced an emphasis on narrative filmmaking and epic stories, at a moment when art cinema held sway in postwar Germany. Eichinger's formula for success involved tailoring his films to the demands of international audiences, while simultaneously creating new expectations at home for a highly commercialized cinema that could compete with the best that global film industries have to offer.

A major contention of Rick Altman's sweeping study Film/Genre (1999) is that traditional genre criticism all too routinely assumes generic fixity at the expense of generic historicity. “Genre films” are often considered to have fixed narrative patterns and to repeat a relatively unchanging set of codes. Moreover, genre films are thought to be derivative, commercial in both aim and scope, and as a consequence not art. Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952), to take one example, may be read as a “classic” Western in this regard, exhibiting clear-cut and enduring conventions: the mythical settings on the nineteenth-century American frontier, the encounter between law and lawlessness, and the use of stock characters such as cowboys, outlaws, and “noble” Native Americans. While traditional genre criticism has deemed such elements to be timeless and transhistorical, Altman notes that this use of genres overlooks the historical ebb and flow that consolidates not only specific genres but also the concept of genre itself. “Stressing the apparently representative straight stretches of the mighty genre river rather than its tortuous tributaries, its riverbed-defying floods, or its tidewater-dominated estuary, recent genre theory has devoted too little attention to the logic and mechanisms whereby genres become recognizable as such.” Traditional genre criticism has not drawn sufficient attention to the varied contestations and negotiations that consolidate genre categorization. Challenging the notion that genre categories exist outside the flow of time, Altman argues that the categories themselves, in close conjunction with the generic cues through which they are constituted, are always already embedded in a historical trajectory, a “mighty genre river,” and are thus always in flux.

One hesitates to start with any sort of polled survey, but such surveys both illuminate and constitute the wider film culture that the present volume's generic approach foregrounds. In a 1995 survey celebrating the centennial of cinema, Bernhard Wicki's Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1959) was named by industry personnel, critics, and scholars the thirteenth most significant work of German cinema's first century, placing it between Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) and Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday's Farewell, released in English as Yesterday Girl, 1966); even more impressively, this remarkably high ranking rendered it the list's third highest postwar film (the top of the list is dominated by films of the celebrated Weimar era). Critics placed it ahead not only of all the works of the so-called New German Cinema but even of Weimar classics such as Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922); Murnau's Der letzte Mann (The Last Man, released in English as The Last Laugh 1925); and Pabst's famously controversial Die 3-Groschen-Oper (Three-Penny Opera, 1931). Although this survey hardly proves quality, it underscores a contradiction within the broader film culture of which Die Brücke and this kind of survey are both part: despite this dignified company on the survey's list, Die Brücke has received very little scholarly attention, which is all the more surprising given that Die Brücke is also the most highly placed war film in the survey.

Edgar G. Ulmer and German Horror Legacies

In an extensive interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in 1970, Edgar G. Ulmer made references to two German sources that gave shape to his famous horror film The Black Cat, which he directed for Universal in 1934: “Junior [Laemmle] gave me free rein to write a horror picture in the style we had started in Europe with Caligari,” only to add a few moments later that the film “was very much out of my Bauhaus period.” This puzzling double reference to two very different and aesthetically even incompatible sources holds an important clue to what Ulmer wanted to achieve with his first film produced by a major studio. Most obviously, this can be read as a typical Ulmerian gesture to establish cultural capital.

Beyond the Haunted Screen

“The weimar cinema has never been a particularly popular cinema,” writes Thomas Elsaesser. “It has always been something of a filmmaker's or a film scholar's cinema.” In this assessment, the films made in the Weimar Republic stand out above all by dint of the formal accomplishment and intellectual appeal of “individually authored art films.” Commentators who share this persuasion applaud the masterpieces of Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst and focus on the mean streets, dread spaces, and eccentric narratives of what Lotte Eisner called “the haunted screen,” from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922) to Metropolis (1927) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1928) along with other films of the fantastic, street films, chamber room melodramas, and big-city symphonies. The hallmarks of the silent era have without a doubt played a much more estimable role in the history of German cinema than the productions made after the coming of sound and the Nazi takeover. Despite its unquestionable veracity, this argument has also unwittingly helped to foster a partial and occluded view. A more inclusive approach would want to consider, along with the period's canonized productions, its less well-known genre films.

Til schweiger's 2007 hit romantic comedy Keinohrhasen (Rabbit Without Ears) opens with a spoof on Hollywood stardom. In its first scene, German art-cinema actor Jürgen Vogel, playing himself, pretends to have undergone a ridiculous transformation, or rather, Americanization. Bragging about his supposedly improved appearance, which includes exaggerated dental work, a deep tan, substantial hair replacements, and silicone butt implants, Vogel announces that his previous work doing “arthouse shit” like Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life is a Construction Site, released in English as Life is All You Get, 1997) appealed only to an audience of “pseudo-intellectual pop culture idiots from Berlin,” but left him dissatisfied and depressed. While these statements are later revealed as a parody staged to make fun of gullible paparazzi journalists, this opening also reflexively contrasts films such as the humorous Keinohrhasen with arguably more “alternative” arthouse productions, which are favored by critics but frustrate general audiences. Schweiger's petulant response to not being considered for the German Film Prize in 2008 (he left the German Film Academy and announced that he would establish his own award), despite the film's overwhelming popularity (by 2008 6.3 million Germans had seen the film, which put it ahead at the box office, surpassing all other cinematic releases, including big Hollywood blockbusters, that year), while Fatih Akin's much less successful Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side, released in English as The Edge of Heaven, 2007), which barely drew 500,000 viewers, went home with the coveted Lola award, recalls familiar tensions between high and low art biases towards the cinema.

Count Down

Fritz lang's 1929 Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon) is rightly known for its invention of the so-called “countdown” practice and hence for how science-fiction cinema has the ability to envision and shape our use of various technologies long before their actual arrival. Lang's film abounds with images and procedures later generations came to associate primarily with the sober ingenuity of the NASA space program, whether we think of the slow passage of the rocket to its launch pad, the travelers’ intricate preparation for take-off, or the capturing of the experience of weightlessness. A product of Lang's well-known preoccupation with space travel, Die Frau im Mond thus seems to do what science-fiction cinema does at its best, namely mobilize elaborate special effects for engineering a credible preview of coming technological attractions. And yet today's audiences may find it quite difficult to sit through an entire screening of Die Frau im Mond for reasons other than mere curiosity. The film's historical achievement, its ability to prefigure a future that has become a future generation's past, has also contributed to the film's relative oblivion. Precisely because history has proven Lang's imagination right, Die Frau im Mond no longer holds our attention. The film's posthumous fate is representative of the unique dilemma of both science-fiction filmmaking and the critical writing about this genre. Dedicated to visions of futurity that are both stunning and believable, science-fiction features have to risk rapid aging and forgetting in order to keep believably ahead of reality.