1990-2010 Modern Era
Today's biggest producers include Bavaria Film, Constantin Film, Studio Hamburg, and UFA. Recent film releases such as Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer, Good Bye Lenin! by Wolfgang Becker, Head-On by Fatih Akin, and Downfall by Oliver Hirschbiegel have arguably managed to recapture the provocative and innovative nature of 1970s New German cinema. A number of modern German films such as Downfall, Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, The Lives of Others and The Counterfeiters address the nature of totalitarianism in 20th-century Germany.
Apart from the international releases, a number of intimate German films have enjoyed critical success in France, where the term Nouvelle Vague Allemande (German New Wave) has been applied to smaller productions mostly coming out of Berlin. A circle of directors of penetrating, realistic studies of relationships and characters informally constitute the "Berlin School" of filmmaking. Among those directors are Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Valeska Grisebach, Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Henner Winckler and Angela Schanelec. The films of the Berlin School have sometimes been criticized on the grounds that they are "brittle", "slow", or "lacking narrative impetus", criticisms echoed by German director Oskar Roehler, who has said of Berlin School films, "they are always slow, always depressing, nothing is ever really said in them they are always well thought of and have an audience of between five and ten thousand". An implicit criticism is the lack of mainstream accessibility and commercial viability of the films, concerns which German director Dominik Graf has also shared about New German Cinema.
Other notable directors working in German currently include Sönke Wortmann, Caroline Link (winner of an Academy Award), Romuald Karmakar, Harun Farocki, Hans-Christian Schmid, Andreas Dresen, Dennis Gansel, Ulrich Köhler, Ulrich Seidl, and Sebastian Schipper, as well as comedy directors Michael Herbig and Sven Unterwaldt.
Germany has recently experienced an influx of independent and underground films (mostly pertaining to the horror genre). Directors in this popular circle include Andreas Schnaas, Olaf Ittenbach, Jorg Buttgereit, Timo Rose, and Daryush Shokof with some highly original works beginning with his Seven Servants.
The new decade has also seen a resurgence of the German film industry, with bigger-budget films and good returns at the German box office.
German production companies have been quite commonly involved in expensive French and Italian productions from Spaghetti Westerns to French comic book adaptations. In recent years, German production interests have also become very involved with American television and film production to help offset the costs of such productions, as evidenced by the company credits in certain films and TV shows.
Germany have a long cooperation with the Swedish film industry, which started as early as during the 1960s. German film industry has primarily been economically involved in Swedish films, but does not put itself in the artistic product. However, some German actors have had small parts in Swedish films and some Swedish actors have had small parts in German films. The co-operation became stronger during the end of the 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Cinema Of Germany
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