AUTHENTIC VISION
Ravi Vasudevan
The New German Cinema by John Sandford Eyre Methuen, London, 1983, 0 pp., 180
January 1983, volume 8, No 4

In February 1962 there appeared a document at the Oberhausen Festival known in film history as the ‘Oberhausen Manifesto’. Twenty-six young signatories documented their frustration with German Cinema and their will to change it. The ‘Manifesto’ noted the collapse of the conventional German Cinema and declared that the new cinema needed… new freedoms … from the customary conventions of the trade … from the influence of commercial partners … from the tutelage of vested interests … We are collectively prepaid to take risks. The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new one. The background to this was a post-War German cinema in a state of chronic crisis. Under American occupation German cinema had been reorganised with a view to creating a market for American films. West Germany was not allowed to impose an import quota on American films. As this first-rate introduction to the new German cinema observes, this policy also had an ideological premise:

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