New German Cinema

New German Cinema (German: Neuer Deutscher Film) is a period in German cinema which lasted from 1962 to 1982,^[2] in which a new generation of directors emerged who, working with low budgets, and influenced by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, gained notice by producing a number of "small" motion pictures that caught the attention of art house audiences. These filmmakers included Percy Adlon, Harun Farocki, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Fleischmann, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Ulli Lommel, Wolfgang Petersen, Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Werner Schroeter, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Margarethe von Trotta and Wim Wenders. As a result of the attention they garnered, they were able (particularly in the case of Wenders, Petersen, and Schlöndorff) to create better-financed productions which were backed by the big US studios. However, most of these larger films were commercial failures and the movement was heavily dependent on subsidies.^[3] By 1977, 80% of a budget for a typical German film was ensured by a subsidy.^[4]

Most of the directors of the New German Cinema movement were members of their self-owned Filmverlag der Autoren association founded in 1971, which funded and distributed most of their films, and the history of New German Cinema from the 1970s onwards was largely synonymous with it.