Series Site
March 16–May 17, 2026
With the emergence in the 1960s of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) and his fellow West German filmmakers—including Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Ulrike Ottinger, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders—came a great awakening of form, style, and expression of the postwar experience. The directors and films associated with the New German Cinema movement received critical acclaim, won international awards, and became art house hits. Indeed, one of the places that helped champion this cinema was the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) Theater, where a dozen retrospectives were mounted in the 1970s. Several New German Cinema filmmakers also spent extended periods of time in Berkeley thanks to their close connection to former PFA Director Tom Luddy.
This series offers a chance to share examples of the important body of work and ideas behind New German Cinema with a new generation of filmgoers. We have positioned Fassbinder, who was a driving force behind the movement, in the spotlight. As a director, actor, author, and playwright, he worked at a feverous pace with a team of collaborators, including gifted actors such as Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Gottfried John, Ulli Lommel, Hanna Schygulla, and Volker Spengler, and talented cinematographers like Michael Ballhaus, Jürgen Jürges, and Dietrich Lohmann. Fassbinder directed more than forty films before his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven.
We welcome UC Berkeley faculty members Deniz Göktürk and Nicholas Baer from the Department of German to introduce several films in this series.
—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator