2025 | Meet the Sections | Retrospective

“The Appeal is in the Selection of Material”

“Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 70s” is the topic of the 2025 Retrospective. In this interview, section head Rainer Rother and Annika Haupts, member of the selection committee and programme coordinator, discuss the appeal of imperfection, the desire for genre and the fascination for the outlaw in this year's programme.

Evelyne Kraft in Lady Dracula by Franz Josef Gottlieb

As early as 2010, the Deutsche Kinemathek held a symposium on “The Pleasure of Genre”. The corresponding publication says “the imperfection, the lack of slickness in comparison with expensive A-pictures, the quick production of many genre films, contributes to their fascination”. Were you guided by that in choosing the films from the 1970s?

Rainer Rother: “Lack of slickness” and “produced quickly” certainly describes many of the films. Whereby the title, “wild, weird, bloody” makes it clear that we are differentiating between genres. We are trying to highlight different qualities within genre cinema that set it apart from classic and conventional storytelling. That occasionally means crossing the boundaries of good taste. It may be surprising to audiences that that was even possible in the 1970s. We have learned in the last few years, that our film series reach not just older, but also younger audiences. And we believe this Retrospective, which is somewhat at odds with what is normally referred to as the canon, will fascinate those young audiences in particular.

Annika Haupts: “The Pleasure of Genre” would have been a good title for this Retrospective. The films should be fun. They challenge audiences, and provoke thought, but they are also fun in the various iterations of “wild”, “weird”, and “bloody” that we discovered in our foray into the 1970s.

Mascha Elm Raben in Deadlock by Roland Klick

The history of film encompasses a large variety of genres, from adventures to circus films. Which ones is the Retrospective showing?

Annika Haupts: We consciously decided to leave out some genres, because we wanted to present films from both East and West Germany. We did, however, show some of the sometimes fantastic DEFA science fiction films in our 2017 Retrospective “Future Imperfect”. So this time we looked for unusual East German satires, musicals, and romantic comedies with a lot of music that are decidedly charming and enchantingly colourful, and which don’t shy away from extravagance. West German gangster films are well represented with Fremde Stadt (Strange City), Deadlock, and Blutiger Freitag (Bloody Friday). There are heist movies about money and men competing for loot. Then we have some genuine exploitation films – such as Rocker, which I think is the only biker film ever made in Germany. Another one is Blutiger Freitag with its over-the-top violence and extremes. Horror is on show with three vampire films – Hans W. Geißendörfer’s Jonathan, Lady Dracula, which is a genre mix of horror, thriller and comedy, and Ulli Lommel’s Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (Tenderness of the Wolves), a movie about a serial murderer that incorporates the vampire motif.

Armin Mueller-Stahl in Nelken in Aspik by Günter Reisch

The West German films are generally smaller productions, while the DEFA films are far more elaborate by comparison. Was there a different concept of genre in East Germany compared to the West?

Rainer Rother: The reality with the DEFA films is that they were far less driven by the need to produce entertainment. They were meant to be art. That put a certain limitation on what was even possible in genre. If you look closely, you realise that the DEFA films’ subjects often take a hard look at conditions in East Germany. They reference real economic crisis or supply bottlenecks. For instance, Nelken in Aspik (Carnations in Aspic) is a satire about an advertising agency – already pretty amazing for an East German film! It’s evidence of how it’s possible to get around the demands of art without giving up on “we are in some way talking about reality here”.

It is striking that virtually all of the West German films were made by directors or production companies from Munich, even if they are set in Berlin (like Einer von uns beiden (One or the Other of Us)) or Hamburg (Rocker). Was that coincidence or unavoidable?

Annika Haupts: It is definitely not coincidence, rather it is because of Munich’s filmmakers, who turned to making genre movies at the time and found their role models in Hollywood directors like Howard Hawks or John Huston. In essence, these amazing films were a counter-programme to auteur cinema. It was a generation of young filmmakers who wanted to try their hand at genre cinema.

Ortrud Beginnen, Jürgen Prochnow aund Elke Sommer in Einer von uns beiden by Wolfgang Petersen

Rainer Rother: We also looked at older directors and established producers such as Artur Brauner and his company CCC Film in Berlin, who traditionally made a lot of genre cinema. He was particularly active in thrillers and exploitation films. But many of the films were international co-productions with Italian or Spanish directors, such as Jess Franco. And older genre directors such as Alfred Vohrer mostly made big-budget film versions of Johannes Simmel’s books during the 1970s. So under those circumstances, it is perhaps not inevitable that Wolfgang Petersen, who had been very attracted to genre moviemaking even as a student at Berlin’s dffb film school, was unable to find a producer in the city for his cinematic debut, Einer von uns beiden. But it’s also clear that it was easier for him in Munich.

Looking at the West German films, the director usually also wrote the script. That sort of goes against the rules of genre. So aren’t those films of the 1970s also auteur cinema, albeit in disguise?

Rainer Rother: By turning to genre at the time, directors who were already established names, like Geißendörfer or Rudolf Thome, were making a decision that can perhaps to a certain extent be compared with Martin Scorsese. His start with the 1972 Boxcar Bertha and the other movies that he and other New Hollywood directors made for Roger Corman were not primarily meant to be auteur films, but rather aimed a specific audience. And the same is really true of the films that we selected. The filmmakers did not come to it with pretentions to be auteurs. They wanted to represent a different category of films.

Raimund Harmstorf and Ursula Erber in Blutiger Freitag by Rolf Olsen

Are there comparable examples in the present?

Annika Haupts: The appeal is in the selection of material. What the films of today’s genre directors like Thomas Arslan, Jan Bonny, or Christoph Hochhäusler have in common with those of the 1970s is the character of the gangster, the outlaw, who is not integrated into society, who wants to make a quick buck. What is interesting is that, even in Blutiger Freitag, the protagonists reflect on their individual motivations. The character of Heidi, who is involved in the robberies, says that she sees no future as a wife and mother in a “milieu without prospects”; her boyfriend, the father of her child, would be denied any opportunity for social advancement. That reflects the public discourse in 1970s society – delightfully wrapped up in a genre movie. That is true although some scenes have a harshness and excess that would never be green-lit by a commissioning editor these days.

The 2025 Retrospective programme