| Abstrakt: |
The following article offers the first detailed comparison of Tom Tykwer's omnibus film project Deutschland 09 (2009), with Deutschland im Herbst (1978), a film made by a number of artists connected to the New German Cinema. I explore the reasons why this group of contemporary filmmakers should choose to look back to a film made 31 years earlier, examining the ways in which the New German Cinema continues to cast a shadow over contemporary cultural production. I suggest that this influence must be understood within the broader context of recent manifestations of nostalgia for some of the certainties of pre-unification society. Although, on the face of it, Deutschland 09 appears to be far removed from the types of nostalgia films one finds throughout German film production in the 2000s, it nonetheless offers a nostalgic reevaluation of West German culture in which the New German Cinema is retrospectively reframed as a coherent cinematic ‘project’, very different from the ostensibly far more disparate landscape of contemporary film. A comparison with Deutschland im Herbst, however, troubles Deutschland 09's retrospective construction of the past. At the same time it reveals continuities in the national preoccupations of German filmmakers, even as contemporary critics identify a move towards cultural and political ‘normalization’ within Germany which, along with a growing trend towards transnational cultural production, might seem to signal the demise of a specifically German national film culture in the age of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
