Christina Gerhardt & Marco Abel 
Celluloid Revolt 
German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968

Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period’s epoch-making cultural and political happenings.






The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as ’68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Now, five decades later,
Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond. Contributors engage a range of cinemas, spanning experimental and avant-garde cinema, installations and exhibits; short films, animated films, and crime films; collectively produced cinemas, feminist films, and
Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films); as well as their relationship to cinemas of other countries, such as French
cinéma vérité and US direct cinema.


Contributors: Marco Abel, Tilman Baumgärtel, Madeleine Bernstorff, Timothy Scott Brown, Michael Dobstadt, Sean Eedy, Thomas Elsaesser, Ian Fleishman, Christina Gerhardt, Lisa Haegele, Randall Halle, Priscilla Layne, Ervin Malakaj, Kalani Michell, Evelyn Preuss, Patricia Anne Simpson, Fabian Tietke, Andrew Stefan Weiner.


Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Spis treści

Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 – Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel

PART I. ESSAYS

Peter Zadek’s Film
Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame (1969): Discussing '1968′ by Means of '1968 Thinking’ – Michael Dobstadt

’Break the Power of the Manipulators’: Film and the West German 1968 – Timothy Scott Brown

Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s
Berlin, 2. Juni – Priscilla Layne

Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement – Christina Gerhardt

Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics – Madeleine Bernstorff

A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism – Fabian Tietke

West Germany’s 'Workers’ Films’: A Cinema in the Service of Television? – Thomas Elsaesser

Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s – Lisa Haegele

Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative – Andrew Stefan Weiner

Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German Blockbuster
Heißer Sommer – Ian Fleishman

Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale
Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968 – Sean Eedy

Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures – Patricia Anne Simpson

’You Say You Want a Revolution’: East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas – Evelyn Preuss

Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s
Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand (1975) – Ervin Malakaj

Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s
Der kleine Godard An das Kuratorium: Junger Deutscher Film – Kalani Michell

PART II. IN CONVERSATION: INTERVIEWS WITH FILMMAKERS

An Interview with Harun Farocki: 'Holger Thought Aesthetics and Politics Together’ – Tilman Baumgärtel

An Interview with Birgit Hein: 'Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system’ – Randall Halle

An Interview with Klaus Lemke: 'Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films’ – Marco Abel

Notes on Contributors

O autorze

PRISCILLA LAYNE is Professor of German, with an adjunct appointment in African, African American and Diaspora Studies, at the University of North Carolina.