The revolt of 1968 in the Federal Republic of Germany was very much a media revolt. As a vibrant and relatively new medium, film occupied an important position within it. Film could inspire rebellion or provoke protest, but it could also function as a powerful tool of propaganda in its own right. Film reflected the interpenetration of culture and politics around 1968 and the tendency of artists to become political. More importantly, filmmaking practices exemplified key tendencies of the sixties revolt, not least self-organization and a DIY (“Do it Yourself”) approach to cultural-production. As a site of political engagement, furthermore, film became connected with a collectivist ethos (as opposed to an individualist one), with a corresponding re-inscription of artistic production into a collective enterprise and a rejection of capitalist methods of production and distribution. Most fundamentally, filmmaking contributed to one of the anti-authoritarian revolt’s most fundamental projects: the forging of an alternative public sphere to act as a counterweight to prevailing regimes of un-truth.

Truth, indeed, was a key site of contention in the West German 1968—not truth as in the hands of postmodernists who later tried to redraw 68’s battle lines on the terrain of epistemology, but truth in the hands of sixties militants who insisted on its absolute nature as a weapon against the false claims of authority. Against official untruth—lies about the nature of state violence at home or abroad, or mis-characterization of the spiritual and political content of the various rebellions being enacted by the young—rebels sought to construct a Gegenöffentlichkeit (an alternative public sphere), rooted in alternative media and local small-scale ownership of the cultural means of production. Heavily indebted to the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass media and mass culture as potential sites of authoritarianism, this attempt to build an alternative repository of truth became a central feature of underground filmmaking at the height of the anti-authoritarian revolt.

Long before 1968, film played a key role in radicalizing youth by transmitting nonconformist lifeways, fashions, and anti-authoritarian attitudes. Even the early theoreticians of the student revolt were not immune to film’s emotive, fantasy-invoking power. As early as 1965, leaders of the anti-authoritarian contingent in West Berlin were so taken with Louis Malle’s revolutionary sex romp Viva Maria! (1965) that they took its title as the name of their subversive group.