The New German Cinema, which was born of a disgust with Germany’s commercial film industry and the desire for films that would reflect German realities in a “new cinematic language” (to quote the so-called Oberhausen Manifesto, which announced the movement, a few years prematurely, in 1962), never coalesced into a single school with a coherent set of principles, practices, themes, and aims. It was a label that grouped together several directors who had little in common and who perhaps didn’t even like one another very much. Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders made the biggest impact internationally. But any temptation to see the rest of New German Cinema as a collection of minor variants on the work of these three dissipates once you’ve seen the radically different films made by several others — like Herbert Achternbusch, one of the movement’s more obscure figures.

Achternbusch makes films that reject conventional narrative and genre. He uses texts and images in ways that suggest that if the cinema ceased to exist, he could switch comfortably to theater, the novel, or the visual arts (in fact his artistic activity encompasses all these media). His pursuit of forms is obstinate, obsessional. A typical Achternbusch shot is a slablike enactment of a single idea that runs on until he feels the idea has been expressed, whereupon he cuts to the next one. Werner Herzog put the actors in his 1976 film Heart of Glass, which is based on an Achternbusch script, under hypnosis. In making his own films, Achternbusch seemingly goes farther and puts himself under hypnosis, and that results in an automatic mise-en-scène.

The Harvard Film Archive’s brief Achternbusch series is a good opportunity to get acquainted with the works of a director who resists acquaintance. The Comanche (1979; Friday at 9 p.m.) opens with one of the best hospital scenes in cinema: in a tuberculosis sanitorium, a doctor and a patient share the same cigarette and a bottle of liquor (they drink from the bottle). After the patient dies, the doctor turns her attention to the last surviving patient, the Comanche (Achternbusch), a man with long platinum hair who sits comatose in an oxygen tent. The hospital staff videotape his dreams and sell them to German TV. In these dreams, the Comanche wanders through Sri Lanka, talking to elephants (“Are you my wife? Are you my child?”). The Comanche’s wife and his nurse, who is in love with him, take him to a house and try to wake him but succeed only in bringing him to a state where he is awake “but doesn’t perceive it.”

This state could be a metaphor for the entire film and the experience of watching it. Audience meets movie in this half-zone where dream and reality enact each other. The oneiric aspect of the film becomes more definite, though not less enigmatic, when the Comanche journeys forth (with two eyepatches, a yellow feather, a blanket, and a rifle) into contemporary reality. He first encounters a policeman who consults a book of rules to determine whether the Comanche is “normal” or “abnormal” (the police are allowed to arrest only normal people). Next the Comanche goes to a restaurant called the Wienerwald, where he tries to talk a group of beer drinkers into becoming Comanches so that they won’t suffer from their wives’ infidelity. The men all die in fulfillment of oaths they make while drinking but soon come back to life (rising from coffins carrying flight bags, as if just deplaning).

The Comanche can be read as a very personal expression of a core theme in Romantic art, the impossibility of art’s remaking the world in its image. In the autobiographical She’s an Olympic Winner (1983; Friday at 7 p.m.), Achternbusch explores another Romantic theme: the elaboration of a personal mythology. A long opening sequence in a park, printed through a telescope mask, introduces the man and the woman whom little Herbert has chosen as his parents: the woman wants to be an Olympic champion; the man is a uniformed flyer who is also, in civilian life, a dentist. The film follows these two through a succession of absurdist scenes that sometimes seem to take place during the Nazi era (Achternbusch was born in 1938). One of the best is a long dining-room-table dialogue between the dentist and his wife in which she proposes going to Herbert’s school to ask him what he wants for lunch, and the dentist warns of the dire consequences that might ensue. It’s all rather theoretical, though, since Herbert has not yet been born (though a cup bearing his name is on the table).

Among the other films in the series, two may be worth special notice: The Andechs Feeling (1974; Friday at 7 p.m.), Achternbusch’s first film, and The Last Hole (1981; Sunday at 7 p.m.), a despairing look at the legacy of Nazism.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001