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A CINEMA IN THE SERVICE OF TELEVISION? THE CASE OF GERMANY’S “WORKERS' FILMS” © Thomas Elsaesser, 1983 The so-called New German Cinema has primarily been associated with the star- and superstar directors: RW Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders; Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff, and possibly with women directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helam Sanders-Brahms and Doris Dörrie. The power structure and precariousness of international film-exhibition was such that independent distributors had to market virtually all non-Hollywood productions under a director/author label. These programming exigencies, together with American television's reluctance to show European material, necessarily obscured the fact that most European film-making has, for good or ill, been dependent on the public service national television networks: for finance, for production facilities and for exhibition. This is particularly true of Germany, where the various State-subsidy systems for filmmaking have been tied to, and are synchronized with the television networks to such an extent that a similar state of affairs in the US would be called “socialism” and be rejected not only by television producers and network executives, but by the technicians' unions as well. A particularly illuminating case of the interpenetration of independent film-making and television, but also their interdependence when it comes to trying to target domestic television viewers, while still envisaging a national or even international cinema audience, was a relatively short-lived but historically important experiment conducted in the early 1970s, the so-called Arbeiterfilm. It was the first time since the birth of the New German Cinema that a group of films made by independent directors was launched specifically as a genre, rather than under the then so powerful and almost magic banner of the Autorenfilm. This article will try to indicate the thinking behind the decision to revitalize and at the same time radicalize the concept of genre, by making it productive, not in its traditional context of the cinema but for television, where it represented a useful half-way house between the information-and-issue orientation of the docu-drama, and the entertain-ment-orientation of genre-cinema. I am supporting these necessarily brief observations by a look at a monograph by Richard Collins and Vincent Porter devoted to WDR and the Arbeiterfilm (British Film Institute, London 1981), which stands out from the literature on the subject, not only because it

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puts a great deal of the historical background to German television in perspective. It also analyses this specific instance of co-production through the institutional framework, and the ideological questions which such a collaboration throws up, rather than focussing on the filmmakers as authors or the films as texts even though their subtitle reads Fassbinder, Ziewer and others. Collins and Porter for instance, have chapters on the political context, and on the growth of state-owned television, before they discuss the genesis of the Arbeiterfilm; fifty pages of appendices contain translations of material whose usefulness goes beyond merely documenting the case in hand. For even though the history of the "workers' films" may have been brief, and the broadcasting company involved now seems anxious to forget its part in this success story, the films have almost exemplary status: they contain, embryonically, a theory of the media under the political conditions of state-ownership and representational democracy. The case is exemplary in that on the one hand, the political stance --arguing at least implicitly for a radical change of the economic system and the mode of production-- was such that no commercial company or private source of financing would have taken on these films. On the other hand, only politically independent filmmakers not under contract to or employed by television could have taken the risks, or brought so much commitment to the task, while television program directors could justify the series internally by pointing to the freelance or 'author' status of the filmmakers. What is to be understood by the genre of the Arbeiterfilm is a series of films on working class subjects commissioned by one of West German television's most prestigious networks, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR), in which working life and the work place are the primary setting for dramatic conflicts. These conflicts are only marginally concerned with psychological or emotional tensions between characters or the struggle of the forces of order against disruptions or threats to the community, as is the case in the vast majority of genre films made under commercial conditions. Instead, the central conflicts and struggles are those arising out of the fundamental contradictions between different sets of interests, mainly those of organized and non-unionized labour (e.g. Germany's foreign workers), and between labour and management or employer, especially in the manufacturing industries of the German Ruhrgebiet. Since the making of the films coincided with West Germany's first major recession for more than thirty years, the films' target audiences were an increasingly politicised working class, and secondly, a general public only ill-informed about the implications or consequences of world-

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political events (like the Middle-East oil crisis) on conditions of the working class, and the fatal logic of job insecurity and stress at the place of work leading to domestic traumas or illness. Precisely because direct (whether fictional or documentary) depictions of industrial relations, of strikes, lay-offs and lock-outs, shop-floor militancy and trade union organizations, of working conditions and their effects on family life are as rare and politically controversial in West Germany as they would be elsewhere in the industrialized world, the Arbeiterfilm demonstrated in much more concrete terms than the analysis of a quiz show or even of a thriller series could, the decision-making process and the command-structure of a large, publicly-funded corporation. Comprising the genre are eleven films, either commissioned or co-produced by WDR between 1968 and 1976, and they are clearly limit-cases of a certain programming policy. By dealing explicitly with places of work 'from the point of view of the victims', as the key film, Rote Fahnen sieht man besser (Red Flags are More Visible, dir: Theo Gallehr, Rolf Schübel, 1971) puts it not without deliberate provocation, the films are well suited to bringing into the open the assumptions and pressures that shape work in television at all times, but which would normally remain internalized, unvoiced and implicit. Those involved in making the decisions - from the Director-general, the Heads of Department, down to the producers and (freelance) directors - realized the public stir the concept would create. In an article in Die Zeit from 1966, WDR's Intendant (DirectorGeneral), Klaus von Bismarck had announced his intention of breaking with the cautious and conservative approach of West German television: Experience has shown that programmes tend to ossify when the demands of society have reached a state of perfect balance; programme patterns become inflexible, planning is carried out on a sweeping, long-term basis and productions are safely mediocre, without risks, gambles or experiments. In this situation it is again and again the initiative of a few individuals which is needed (...). The Intendant of a broadcasting company which is free of both government and commercial influences must take on the difficult task of protecting many different interests both from within and without. But when in doubt he should opt for taking the risk (...). (p. 126)

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And Martin Weibel, producer at WDR, was even more specific: Rote Fahnen sieht man besser constitutes teaching and learning material in so far as it exposes large economic and small private situations of conflict. (...) Concepts like exploitation, alienation and social injustice seem to have become slogans (...). It was necessary to make abstract concepts concrete by means of an example from real-life experience in order to ensure that other potential victims would have no difficulty in understanding. So the film attempts to take the dramatization of social reality seriously. (p.130) Those involved in developing this form of dramatized social issue knew they were exploring not only the working reality of millions of people, but also, as it were, the 'outer envelope' of television's role as an agency of mediation and socialization. In effect, the Arbeiterfilm brought to crisis point two sets of working hypotheses that have hardened into dogma in television practice: the notion of a clear demarcation line between news, current affairs, documentary on the one hand, and 'drama' i.e. fiction, on the other. Peter Märtesheimer, for instance, the WDR Head of Department responsible for Fassbinder's Acht Stunden sind kein Tag [Eight Hours do not Make a Day], reflecting on the difference between the issue-oriented television feature and the kind of spectator involvement he wanted for the film series, defended the idea of a positive hero: Many television plays, good and bad, have come about because a drama producer or scriptwriter has said at some time or other 'someone ought to make a film about...'. Then a so-called 'theme' usually follows, a 'problem' which the person (who thinks it a serious issue) considers relevant. This approach, which surely has something to do with the proximity of the television editorial staff in the drama department to those of current affairs, features and the political journal ('I've got a programme going out Monday - do you know about any more grievances?') has in recent years made a definite impact on the television play, and has set it apart from the cinema film. (...) Now, there would be nothing wrong with this approach, if this fixation with bringing the facts to light were also extended to consider of how these facts should be presented (...). The use of drama, which attempts to deal with reality by means of utopia, is not unproblematic, as is evident when one thinks maybe of Fassbinder's Acht Stunden sind kein Tag, a working class series whose hero certainly does not act as workers generally do. Nevertheless, reality was intended, but this reality was not to appear as natural

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and unchangeable but as part of a process which might be influenced by human beings. (p.143-4) If the idea of the 'positive hero' inserted into the realistic and even documentary depiction of a situation harks back to the films from the late 1920s and early 1930s, like Piehl Jutzi's Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (a fiction film about a working-class family in Berlin) or Hunger in Waldenburg (a documentary about unemployment in a Silesian village), in order to challenge the strict separation between drama, documentary, the other television dogma which the Arbeiterfilm trespassed on was the assumption that 'balance' and 'objectivity' were not only inherent attributes of television broadcasting, but that in any programme purporting to be about real life, justice must be seen to be done, by always having somebody on the programme act as a 'moderator', who can raise real or hypothetical counter-arguments. Rote Fahnen sieht man besser in particular, ran foul of even liberal commentators because its evident partisanship for the victims of a factory closure which was not 'balanced' by an official statement from the management: Television writers do not take on an easy task when they tackle economic matters. Economics is particularly difficult to translate into the visual medium. For this reason one should be tolerant towards less successful attempts. However, there is a particular form of economic and socio-political film production which is not made by experts, which does not actually clarify relations and does not criticise the basis of expertise. Its aim is pure defamation. Rote Fahnen sieht man besser is an obvious example of this. (p.130-1) In Germany, the division between 'information' (property held, as it were, in the public domain) and 'personal opinion' (the prerogative, above all, of the film-auteur and artist) is reinforced by analogous administrative-departmental divisions (drama/current affairs), and it is this division of labour that the Arbeiterfilm upset by giving a positive definition to the ambiguous term 'representation', both in its political as well as its aesthetic sense: what can be shown, for whom, and from whose point of view. The reasons why such a test-case as the Arbeiterfilm could be mounted - almost in the spirit of Brecht's 'model-books', or his earlier Dreigroschenprozess (which he called 'a sociological experiment') - are to be sought in the conjuncture of a particular historical moment and a particular institutional structure. By the early 1970s the student movement in West Germany had reached its peak and, at least temporarily, managed to politicize

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many of those active in education and on the (independent, freelance) margins of the media or official culture. Thus, for instance, more than two-thirds of the film-makers involved in the Arbeiterfilm belonged to a single class [of 68/69] of the Berlin Film Academy (whose students were expelled after a bitter and passionate struggle over the future direction of the Academy). Equally important was the fact that the Social Democrats - in power for the first time since 1932 - still enjoyed the goodwill and support of the broad Left, while the Right took a wait-and-see low profile. Finally, the West German economy was experiencing its first recession, and with it came industrial conflict, again something that Germany had not known on a large scale since the 1930s. There was thus considerable pressure on the media to reflect these events and to portray, if not the causes, then at least the effects of what were indeed radical changes in Germany's post-war history. In this constellation WDR proved to be the 'weakest link' so to speak, in the chain of institutional conservatism among the nine regional television networks which together supply the two national channels. At WDR, a combination of personal and political factors made for unique conditions: the non-conformist outlook of Klaus von Bismarck, and the specific demographic factors of the 'Land' North-Rhine Westphalia which the WDR serviced. Bismarck was willing and able to exploit to the full the television charter's definition of balanced reporting - a charter which WDR ironically owed to the legacy of the British Allied Authorities, who in response to the Nazi abuse of broadcasting, gave the service in their zone a particular definition of public responsibility and representativeness, modelled on the BBC. Basing his argument on the demographic reality, namely that North-Rhine Westphalia had a very high number of working class audiences, von Bismarck could legitimately claim that proportionally, the views of the working class were under-represented in the overall spread of programmes, if one considered that WDR material was received by the industrial population of the Ruhrgebiet as well as the Catholic bourgeoisie around Bonn, Cologne and the Rhine valley. But given the explicitly party-political constitution of the various administrative and consultative councils to whom the Director-General reports, it required a very delicate balance of regional political forces to allow von Bismarck to implement a programming policy whereby his broadcasting service could make an impact on the national networks, for which WDR supplies 25% of all programmes.

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It is one of the central theses of Collins and Porter that the rise and demise of the Arbeiterfilm directly parallels the prevailing political tendencies of the North-Rhine Westphalia Landtag (regional government), as represented on, and filtered through the administrative and decision-making bodies of WDR itself: Thus the constitution of the WDR has ensured an almost direct line of political accountability between the Intendant and the Landtag, but, because of the particular politics of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it has given the Intendant substantial independence provided that he operated within the liberal public service traditions envisaged by the British authorities when they set up NWDR at the end of the war. When, however, programming policy upsets two of the three interests on the administrative council, then the Intendant becomes politically accountable in a very real sense. This limitation on broadcasting independence was to play a key role in the history of the Arbeiterfilme. (p.19) The end of the experiment had little to do with lack of audience response, or with the fact that the film-makers became tired of the format and did not want to be typecast (contributing factors, to be sure), but much more with the change in political climate, the formation of right-wing pressure groups, press campaigns against individual programmes and personnel changes at the head of WDR. The story of WDR and the Arbeiterfilm risks at this point becoming a 'genre' in itself: that of the Left learning precious lessons from its defeats. For a brief historical moment the low clouds seemed to be parting, a ray of revolutionary hope becomes visible before it is again extinguished by the grey mass of calumny, prejudice and vested interests. If this was all there was to it, the history of the Arbeiterfilm could hardly serve as a model. The coming together of WDR and the 'worker's films' was not fortuitous; but neither was it inevitable: herein lies the subject's theoretical and exemplary interest. For what was ultimately at stake was a particular self-definition of public service broadcasting and its notion of public accountability. The episode of the Arbeiterfilm points quite naturally to a more enlightened and democratic possibility for broadcasting than that currently practised, where the claim towards Olympian impartiality above politics and factions seems socially unsatisfactory and politically dangerous. For it is quite clear that beyond the historical interest in an aspect of German film and television co-operation which the Arbeiterfilm holds for the specialist, the issues raised contribute to a debate about the role of independent filmmaking generally, and the function of a filmic

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genre or a body of work, in a situation where the main consumer/distributor of the product is television. The Arbeiterfilm, catering, if seen nationally, for a minority audience and often presenting minority views even within this viewer group, make a strong case against the over-valuation of audience-maximization, the ratings game as an end in itself and a valid rationale for particular programming policies. In a country and at a time when the different public service networks were not in an economically competitive situation with commercial television, but nonetheless pretend to be, there was the danger that politicians took for granted the availability of television for delivering audiences to the government of the day (which through the national evening news in any case already addresses 'the people'). The priority given by WDR during the early 1970s (and thus indicating a potential inherent in the German system generally) to questions of public access and public accountability ('open government', proportional representation) contrasts favourably with other countries' media lobbies, obsession with balance and objectivity, in which so often the dominant ideas turn out no doubt by coincidence, to be the ideas of the dominant. The final paragraph of Collins and Porter makes this point with forceful clarity: It remains our view that although disappointing for those who perceive considerable aesthetic interest and artistic success in the Arbeiterfilm and greet it as a small step towards unskewing the representation of the public sphere offered by mass-communication and therefore towards ushering the spectators in their own real world with attentive faculties, this ending (of the "worker's film" as a genre) is paradoxically a testimony to one of the most positive features of the post-war West German broadcasting order. Its representation of politics and political control is much more explicit (...). In Germany, by and large, you know who is talking to you, why and what they are saying (pp. 115, 116). Most observers, having watched German television news coverage over a certain period would probably say that, in this generalized form, the statement is overoptimistic. The case in this respect rests on a structural potential, which the Arbeiterfilm began to explore, not on an actual, widely followed practice, even in West Germany. Both success and demise of the Arbeiterfilm indicate that this structural potential has to be defined in a wider social context. What the German experience shows is that independent film-making can have a crucial role to play in the general landscape

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of media-culture of which public service broadcasting is perhaps the strongest but not the only constituent. What has happened in Germany over the last decades is that noncommercial film-making has won for itself the status of something very close to a 'public service', and the extent of state subsidy as well as other funding schemes reflect a position which exempts film-makers from simply defining themselves in terms of a radical aesthetic opposition or to become wholly dependent on audience- and profitmaximization. Almost all of the Arbeiterfilme were based on the development of ideas and storylines brought to WDR (and subsequently one or two other networks) by writers and directors from outside the television establishment. Likewise, many films were in fact coproductions between television and independent producers. It points to a different role for television, as co-financier and distributor, by making it represent views, interests, ideas not originating from within its own organization, but formulated elsewhere in society and in the public sphere. Such a practice would establish quite different circuits of representation and access. Therefore, the picture of the Arbeiterfilm would be incomplete if one did not know that these films were also shown outside of and in different viewing contexts from television programming. They were exhibited by the film-makers' own distribution companies (e.g. Basis Verlag in Berlin) who often acted as production companies as well. The films also reached smaller, more specialized audiences including trade union organizations and even personnel departments of industrial corporations who have been known to hire 'worker's films' for management training courses! The potential of the German system is therefore not merely in the constitution of its public broadcasting service. It lies in the diversification and interpenetration which public funding and public accountability has created for the various sectors and organizations of film-production, to the point where the independent circuits could in some small measure - with the help of television itself - displace the monolithic structure of both television and the exclusive sphere of theatrical distribution, by initiating a more flexible play of political and cultural forces. In this light the Arbeiterfilm may not have been such a unique or isolated historical moment after all. They point to the fact that the politics of broadcasting in general are the real aesthetics of both television and independent filmmaking in West Germany today.

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The achievement of the Arbeiterfilm consists not so much in the aesthetic strategies they employed, when measured against the various theories of 'realism' or 'political avantgarde', but in the fact that they indicated how a sizeable section of the independent filmmaking community in Germany (which is now also quite strongly organized in professional bodies) gained - legally guaranteed - access to the television networks as, in some sense, equivalent partners, thanks to the Film Subsidy Laws and the various Framework Agreements passed during the 1970s. The question today is whether filmmakers are still entertaining the notion of their work as a public service or whether, ironically, the very success of gaining access has not fostered a new star director mentality: except that this time, there is no longer an international (alongside the national) audience awaiting their films.