Nostalgia for cult TV: repackaging the West German television movie

Abstract

The discourse of ‘cult’ applied to West German made-for-television films from the 1970s as part of their DVD release after 2000 signals not only a shift in the cultural categories of assessment but also a nostalgia for television as a medium capable of assembling a mass audience around a controversial social or political issue. Based on a selective appropriation of genre markers, director's star personae, and textual eccentricities, the shift from mainstream to ‘cult’ also announces a post-modern turn in the production and consumption of contemporary television.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Sogang University for supporting work on this project with a research grant in 2013.

Notes

^1. Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all translations from a source originally in German are the author's own.

^2. In 2003, a compilation of scenes from the seven episodes of the series, titled Rücksturz ins Kino, saw limited theatrical release in Germany, drawing on a niche audience across different demographics for which the editing of the compiled material explicitly framed the series as camp – a reframing not unlike that of the three films under discussion. For an example of this framing, reiterated in commentary on this project and its original material, see ‘Raumpatrouille Orion—Rücksturz ins Kino’ (http://www.filmportal.de/film/raumpatrouille-orion-ruecksturz-inskino_d74f59de53374ce6bc47feb66512e1e1, accessed December 12, 2012). For a detailed discussion of the series in its historical context, see Hantke (2004).

^3. By moving the critical vocabulary, at least temporarily, from ‘cult’ to ‘camp’, I am referring to an early argument about subversive reading practices, this one made by Sontag (1961) in her essay ‘Notes on Camp’. Camp, Sontag suggests, can be as much a quality inherent in cultural products (in regard to categories like ‘kitsch’, for example, that were originally produced with a tongue-in-cheek awareness of their bad taste), as it is a perception superimposed after the fact on cultural products that were never intended to be in bad taste. The qualities Sontag describes are transferable, to some degree, to the category of ‘cult’ as well, though authorial intent is often less predictably a marker of ‘cult’ than dynamic audience response. For a discussion on the failure of a text to achieve its intended ‘cult’ status, see Hantke (2010).

^4. Lenssen (1993, 270) places Fassbinder's work during the 1970s amidst the ‘tension between continuity and experimental openness’, making it representative of ‘the tendencies and contradictions within this decade of transition from a political to a psychological discourse. Repression not within the political context is at the centre of interest’, Lenssen argues, ‘but in the context of privacy, of love relationships, which [Fassbinder] frequently traces back – frequently still in the didactic spirit of the '68 generation – to their social and historical conditions’.

^5. This oddness is far less prominent in Fassbinder's more widely known television adaptation of Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (WDR, 1980), a miniseries more smoothly aligned with Fassbinder's auteurist persona.

^6. Parker and Parker (2011, 7) make the argument that nostalgia is a quality inherent in the very technology of the DVD, an argument that essentially applies, yet would have to be adjusted in its specifics, to the release of television programming. ‘The DVD’, they argue, ‘seems strangely positioned within the world of new media. Its material form, its data structures, looks forward, but its ultimate appearance bends to an earlier form. Its status as a computer-era artifact is hidden by the particular choices made on what Manovich calls the “cultural layer”. The representation of film on the DVD is an exercise in nostalgia, but a nostalgia maintained by the latest technology.’

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Notes on contributors

Steffen Hantke

Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary literature, film, and culture. He is author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary Literature (1994), as well as editor of Horror, a special topics issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Rudolphus Teeuwen, of Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers, and the Global Academic Proletariat: Adjunct Labor in Higher Education (2007). His essays and reviews have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Critique, StoryTelling, Literature/Film Quarterly, and other journals. He teaches in the American Culture Program at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.