New German Cinema and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema

Rediscovering a momentous cinema movement, its canonization, and its recasting through global discourse.

The last of the so-called new waves in film, New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s represents much more than a national phenomenon; it impacted and was influenced by films from around the world. Filmmakers such as the famous troika of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, as well as directors, such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Helke Sander, and Volker Schl?ndorff received much critical acclaim both in Germany and abroad. These directors, their films, and their often-infamous reputations constitute one of the most intriguing and consequential legacies of European cinema and world culture. In this groundbreaking view of New German Cinema through a global lens, editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher approach these celebrated years of German art film from diverse and innovative perspectives. Contributors explore these films' transnational circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as how the films were made and received, thereby inviting us to reexamine the roots of what New German Cinema was and imagine what it might yet become.

Marco Abel is Willa Cather Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He specializes in critical, poststructuralist, and (neo-)Marxist theory in addition to film theory and German film history. He is the recipient of an American Academy in Berlin Prize and, in 2019, served as the Dirk Ippen Fellow there. Jaimey Fisher is professor of German and of cinema and digital media at the University of California, Davis. He has held two fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and was awarded a German Chancellor (Bundeskanzler) Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.