Introduction

On Maundy Thursday, April 11, 1968, Rudi Dutschke was shot and severely injured in the center of West Berlin. Dutschke was one of the most charismatic members of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union, SDS), an organization central to West Germany’s student movements. The attack triggered a wave of protests over the subsequent Easter holidays, with tens of thousands of people across the country taking part.

That same evening, Harun Farocki, a student of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), led a demonstration against the tabloid Springer press. Many people deemed the rabble-rousing against the student movements, fomented for months in Springer Press newspapers, to be the reason for the attack on Dutschke. Farocki, like many other dffb students, was also in the SDS. And like many other students in West Berlin at the time, they were politicized after Benno Ohnesorg, a student and protestor, was fatally shot by plainclothes police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras on June 2, 1967, at a demonstration against the state visit of the Shah of Persia and his wife.

In the following years, many dffb students were involved in the West Berlin student movements. The films produced by these dffb students supported the campaigns of the movements and served as their mass media arm. Other filmmakers in West Germany did the same, but no production context was as large and important as the dffb, which was founded in 1966 as the first West German stand-alone film academy.The timing proved crucial as the film school’s formative years coincided with the period of its students’ politicization. The students took the liberty of making political films as part of their studies.

The films of the dffb not only covered core issues of the West German New Left but also, through films by emigrés such as Carlos Bustamante and Skip Norman, raised awareness for international struggles like that of the Black Panther movement or against the war in Vietnam. Over the years, dffb students tried different approaches to political filmmaking. One question that stood at the core of this constant renegotiation was how the films relate to the people portrayed in it. Another question was whether these films should address a general public or a specific political group of spectators.