Talk:New German Cinema

"Commercial failure"

I challenge the way in which the "commercial failure" of NGC that it had always been largely dependent upon subsidies is used to signify a kind of overall failure or downturn. Ever since the 1960s, the entire NGC movement had demanded and publically clamored for public subsidies as ostensibly the only viable way to run their business. In fact, it were NGC directors such as Alexander Kluge and the Oberhausen group that had been lobbying for public funding for years until they finally got it by 1967 in the form of the de:Filmförderungsgesetz (Deutschland) ("Film Subsidizing Act") that was mainly intended to fund the New German Cinema movement (though it took about three years to amend the Act from funding mainly commercial productions to a more "cultured" orientation by means of introducing Projektfilmförderung for speculative/experimental, arthouse, and intellectual auteur cinema). It was only through the Film Subsidizing Act of 1967 and its amended Projektfilmförderung that the Filmverlag der Autoren, the pivotal association of NGC, could be founded and the golden era of NGC during the 1970s began.

The only thing that changed between 1971 and 1977 was that the subsidized NGC funding increasingly changed from financing though the Film Subsidizing Act of 1967 to TV funding through the Film and Television Accord of 1974. The end of NGC occured in 1977 not due to subsidizing, since NGC had *ALWAYS* largely dependent on subsidies, but because Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein bought himself into the Filmverlag der Autoren and enforced a more conservative and more commercial agenda, part of which consisted of throwing out Faßbinder. The increasingly conservative social climate (which would soon lead to the conservative Helmut Kohl administration) compared to the earlier 70s then lead to an overall political move to heavily decrease and a general stop of public funding for arthouse and especially Filmverlag films. Ever since the 1980s, the financial means of the Film Subsidizing Act of 1967 and the Film and Television Accord of 1974 are mainly used for conservative and mainstream commercial productions, not for intellectual arthouse anymore. --2003:EF:13C1:CE27:5CAC:9743:1A0D:56AB (talk) 09:45, 9 October 2018 (UTC)