Book Presentation and Short Film Evening: With Nonchalance at the Abyss (The New Munich Group)

The German-American film scholar Marco Abel presents his recently published book "With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the New Munich Group (1964—1972)." To accompany this, we will show stylistically influential short films from the 1960s. The New Munich Group represented one of the most interesting movements in West German cinema between 1964 and 1972, not least because it swam against the mainstream, against the films that film historiography commonly refers to as the "young German cinema." This designation of the so-called "Oberhausen" – and in the 1970s also of the "New German Cinema" – was made at the expense of the New Munich Group. After some commercially successful films (Zur Sache Schätzchen; Nicht fummeln, Liebling) and after critical acclaim, especially from critics who positioned themselves as "aesthetic leftists" against a "political left" that, in their opinion, reduced films to their sociological content and meanings, the charming, "light" films of Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, Max Zihlmann, Roger Fritz, the duo May Spils & Werner Enke, as well as the youngest member of the group, Martin Müller, have fallen out of film historiography and the broader public consciousness despite one or two retrospectives. What distinguishes these "light" films and their heroines and heroes from other films of the so-called Young German Cinema is described by the German-American film scholar Marco Abel in his recently published book "With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the New Munich Group (1964—1972)." For the book presentation, we will show the short films: Galaxis (1967, Rudolf Thome), Duell (1966, Klaus Lemke), Frühstück in Rom (1965, Max Zihlmann), Das Portrait (1966, May Spils), Die eschäftsfreunde (1969, Martin Müller), and Sabine 18 (1967, Marran Gosov).