Contentism v. Sensibilism: Želimir Žilnik’s Paradise: An Imperialist Tragicomedy as a challenge to the New German Cinema

Želimir Žilnik’s time in West Germany (1973-6) ended with the short feature Paradise: An Imperialist Tragicomedy (Paradies: Eine imperialistische Tragikomödie, Alligator Film, 1976). An extraordinarily rich, at times uncomfortably visceral and chaotic parody of far-left terrorism (the RAF or Baader-Meinhof group), Paradise doesn’t feature in any of the myriad publications on the New German Cinema, despite being much more audacious than the work of contemporary German directors. If there is a German film Žilnik’s compelling mix of riotous anarchy, actionist body art, political satire can be compared with, then it is Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (Die dritte Generation, 1979) made after the events and, as we shall see, possibly inspired by Paradise. Žilnik’s ‘German films’ are not straightforwardly German either: they are shot there, they are (for the most part) in German, and they feature German actors, but they bring something from elsewhere; they are, to borrow the title of a contemporary Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville film that itself addresses cultural and political dislocation, Ici et ailleurs (1976). Thomas Elsaesser is responsible for propagating the terms in my title; they are deeply engrained in the psyche of scholars and students of West German cinema and continue to resonate as a reassuringly simple binary categorisation: ‘contentism’, broadly synonymous with Brechtian political modernism, and romantic ‘sensibilism’ à-la Caspar David Friedrich or the Hollywood road-movie. In the late 1960s the former is associated with the dffb film school in Berlin (Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Helke Sander), the latter with the HFF in Munich (Wim Wenders et al). Elsaesser acknowledges in his landmark 1989 study New German Cinema: A History – which popularized the contentism-sensibilism binary – that the terminology is not actually his: it had appeared first in Michael Rutschky’s book-length study of the psychology of the 1970s, Erfahrungshunger (‘The Hunger for Experience’, 1979). Rutschky’s thesis is that post-’68 the hunger in West Germany was for experience – qua sensibility and consumption – rather than emancipation. The resulting shift from contentism to sensibilism after 1968 is generally known as the Tendenzwende (‘change of direction’) or simply ‘New Subjectivity’. It is associated with a rejection, in the wake of the perceived ‘failure’ of the student movement, of political action and its associated discourse(s) of progressive politics, coupled with a renewed concern with personal experience and the less reified kinds of language needed to give expression to it. The shift is often dated to around the time Žilnik moved to Germany. For Richard McCormick, New German Cinema