Dr. Marco Abel - Guest Talk

With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the New Munich Group (1964-1972)

This talk will offer an introduction to the New Munich Group (NMG), a group of filmmakers who constituted one of the most interesting phenomena in West-German cinema during the second half of the 1960s. Yet, although they both received modest critical support from film critics writing in Filmkritik and Film and made several features that have assumed cult status, the group has been written out of German film historiography. This happened, I argue, because their films are characterized by an aesthetic and political sensibility of nonchalance—a Gleichgültigkeit in terms of both gleiche Gültigkeit (equally valid) and gleichgültig (being indifferent)—that affectively expressed the attitude of an “aesthetic left.” This sociopolitical disposition, encapsulated in a specific film aesthetic, did not sit well with the so-called “political left” of West-German film criticism—a film-critical tendency that not only dominated the period of the “long 1968” but also shaped (West-)German film historiography in subsequent decades. I argue that today it is worth recovering the NMG around filmmakers as their style of filmmaking is expressive of what I call a “left without leftism,” which embodies an as-of-yet unrealized virtual potential for the possibility of making a different kind of left-political German cinema—one that significantly differs from both the “Brechtian” tradition and the typical social-realist Problemfilm-tradition [socially conscious problem film tradition] that have largely defined the notion of what (left) political cinema in German can be, should be, and is.

For more information, please contact Dr. Berna Gueneli (bg79766@uga.edu)

This is a joint event by Germanic & Slavic Studies and the English Department.