This movement was launched at the Oberhausen Film Festival in the spring of 1962. At that time, 26 "young German film workers" jointly issued the "Oberhausen Declaration", declaring that "old movies are dead."
We place our hope in new cinema." They put forward a basic principle - "The future of German cinema lies in the use of international film language.
"They also declared: "We are now making a new kind of German feature film, and this new kind of film needs freedom.
We have to break the mold and overcome the commercial nature of film.
We want to go against the preferences of some audiences and create a film that is new in form and ideology." This declaration is considered the official programmatic document of the New German Film Movement, which opened the prelude to the New German Film Movement.
The New German Film Movement, like other literary and artistic movements, has its social roots. The West German film industry in the 1950s can be said to have been a period of economic prosperity and artistic stagnation; but in the 1960s, it fell into a national crisis, and the number of viewers dropped from the previous period.
The peak of more than 800 million in the late 1950s dropped by 10% every year, and the number of film production and theaters also dropped. By 1966, the Federal Republic of Germany produced only 60 films, less than half of those in 1965.
In addition to the impact of television, the main reason is the poor artistic quality of the film. In 1961, it was impossible to select a film worthy of being awarded "Best Picture" or "Best Director" among the films produced that year.
What is embarrassing is that some international film festivals returned the films submitted by the Federal Republic of Germany on the grounds that they were not of sufficient quality for the festival. Many film critics and theorists wrote articles criticizing the Federal Republic of Germany as a country without films. Faced with this grim situation, in 1962.
In 2000, a group of young film workers in West Germany, headed by Alexander and Kruger, issued the "Haubhausen Manifesto" at the above-mentioned film festival, openly waging war against old films, and striving for West German films to make breakthroughs in content and form as soon as possible.
Innovation, thereby revitalizing national cinema. Like other film art movements in the West, the first task of the organizers of the New German Film Movement was to ask for money from the government. Through various activities, they established the "German Youth Film Board" in 1965.
, raised 5 million marks to finance film production. They used this "Youth Film Fund" to support young film directors to produce 20 new films from 1965 to 1968, which set off the first wave of the New German Film Movement.
A creative climax. Representative works include Kruger's "Goodbye to Yesterday", Chamonix's "Forbidden Foxes", and Schl?ndorff's "Teleis", which were screened at the Venice, Berlin and Cannes International Film Festivals respectively.
Won the award and played a pioneering role in the international film industry. In the early 1970s, the new German film was in crisis. The direct reason was that the Federal German Parliament revised the "Film Funding Law".
Applicants must first produce a "certificate of qualifications" film before they can be eligible to apply for funding for new film projects. These new regulations severely restrict the ability of new talents to implement new short film projects.
, the films that had already been made could not find buyers, forcing the number of films to be significantly reduced. However, there were also some directors who struggled hard during the crisis and gradually helped the movement escape from the crisis.
, set off a new climax. Among them, the four directors Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Schl?ndorf received the most attention from the Western film industry from 1975 to 1979. Herzog filmed ".
"Every man for himself, God for all", Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun" and Schl?ndorff's "Gongs and Drums" won awards at international film festivals such as Cannes and the American Oscar respectively.
The New German Film Movement reached its climax in 1975 and 1979, and the climax that started in 1979 has continued to this day and has become the most noticed art movement in the Western film industry.