'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

1.1 The Oberhausen Manifesto and New German Cinema during the 1960s
The decisive break of West German film of the 1960s with “Papas Kino,” 8 or the
cinema of the post-war period, came in 1962 at the Eighth West-German Short Film
Festival in Oberhausen. A group of twenty-six young directors and journalists led by
Alexander Kluge issued a manifesto demanding a state system of funding for films to
move West German cinema artistically beyond the popular/populist productions of the
1950s. The Oberhausen Manifesto was self-assertive and revolutionary in tone. Starting
from the premise that the old order of German cinema had finally collapsed, the authors
of the manifesto announced their own “zero hour,” and made clear their determination to
create a new feature film (Pflaum and Prinzler 9). Moreover, the directors rejected the
exploitation of film for commercial and ideological purposes and sought to establish a
new kind of film both politically and artistically. Above all, the filmmakers wanted to
serve as a critical voice in the Federal Republic of Germany by creating an art cinema
with social relevance, and they demanded government funding and subsidies that would
afford them this freedom (Hake 144). Hence, their Manifesto was a declaration of artistic
and ideological independence:
Der Zusammenbruch des konventionellen deutschen Films entzieht einer von uns
abgelehnten Geisteshaltung endlich den wirtschaftlichen Boden. Dadurch hat der
neue Film die Chance, lebendig zu werden.
Deutsche Kurzfilme von jungen Autoren, Regisseuren und Produzenten erhielten
in den letzten Jahren eine große Zahl von Preisen auf internationalen Festivals
und fanden Anerkennung der internationalen Kritik. Diese Arbeiten und ihre
Erfolge zeigen, daß die Zukunft des deutschen Films bei denen liegt, die bewiesen
8 The West German motion picture journal Filmkritik borrowed the phrase “Papas Kino” from a review in
the French journal Arts of Alain Resnais‟ film L’année dernière à Marienbad (The Last Year at Marienbad,
1961), entitled “Le cinéma de papa est mort.” This phrase soon became a catchword for French New Wave
Cinema. Filmkritik then adopted the German phrase as a motto for its appeal for a New German Cinema,
calling for a break with “Papas Kino” (quoted in Halle and McCarthy 193).
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