From the golden age of television: The case of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

From the golden age of television: The case of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

Volker Pantenburg

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Prologue

On 26 January 1976, Joachim von Mengershausen sends a letter to Harun Farocki. The film-maker had contacted the commissioning editor at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and other friends and colleagues to find support for his initiative to create an independent, self-organised archive; a repository for the production of documentary work. Farocki’s mission statement, entitled programmatically ‘What Ought to Be Done’, stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the way that cinema and television dealt with documentary footage.

The millions of kilometers that are produced each year in film and TV are ill suited to documenting the real world in a way that enables you to work with the sources. […] A newsreel from 1947 tends to document how a newsreel was cut and spoken at the time, rather than how things looked then and what a speaker said. (Farocki, 2017a: 3–4.)

Von Mengershausen had got to know Farocki as a student around 1968, while teaching at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb). He was now employed at the WDR department ‘Fernsehspiel’ and an important figure as the TV-co-producer of such directors as Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As his reaction shows, he was sceptical about Farocki’s vision. It would be very hard, he suspects, to secure regular funding for such an independent institution. His answer, significantly written on paper bearing the WDR letterhead (and included in this dossier), confronts the film-maker with a simple but far-reaching idea: ‘One should put a substantial effort into making the TV archives as public as public libraries, with all that this requires’, he postulates, specifying: ‘adequate preservation, recording of origins and dates, etc. Hence, at least partially an expropriation of television, which should not be difficult to find political arguments for’ (von Mengershausen, 1976). Today, more than 40 years later, von Mengershausen’s proposition strikes the reader as prescient and still relevant. He puts the finger on a crucial tension (or contradiction) of public radio and television. On the one hand, public media finance their programmes with the tax payers’ money; in Germany, this is allocated and administered by the Gebühreneinzugszentrale, which demands a mandatory monthly fee. On the other hand, the productions financed with this public money immediately turn into the property of the broadcasting channels. Once they have been aired they are withdrawn from the reach of the citizens who financed them. Apart from the channels’ selective online media libraries granting access for a limited time, TV and radio archives are notoriously difficult to access; the use of their material is in most cases charged by the minute and thus prohibitively expensive (for further discussion, see Knapskog, 2010).

The tension between public funding and restricted access is only one of the issues that Farocki’s paper and von Mengershausen’s reaction raise. The contrast of opinions, in this case concerning the productivity and shortcomings of the archive, also points to a larger constellation that marked the 1970s in West Germany. On the one hand, politically aware film-makers found themselves in pronounced opposition to the institution of public television, which they suspected to be conservative or, at best, social democratic: TV surely did not present itself as the prototypical site for experimental modes of production. This scepticism was backed up by a critical attitude concerning the conventionality of the programme and thus the compromises that film-makers had to make. On the other hand, however, the ramified structure of the broadcasting channels and a new adventurous generation of commissioning editors and staff had arranged for niches and spaces of experimentation, permitting alliances between political film-makers and personnel or editorial departments. For film-makers like Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, Fassbinder, Helma Sanders-Brahms and many others, television became an important source of funding.

In the following pages, I want to briefly outline the historical context of WDR and then zoom in on three specific editorial units and their activities in the mid-1970s – a particularly fertile moment in the history of the encounter between cinematic thinking and TV practice. This article contextualises the other elements of this dossier on WDR and the TV Essay: Werner Dütsch’s personal recollections as one of the influential commissioning editors in his essay, ‘The Three Musketeers’; Angelika Wittlich’s ‘Draft for a concept Telekritik 1975’ (1975); von Mengershausen’s aforementioned letter to Harun Farocki; and finally, one page of the first treatment for Erzählen (About Narration) (Farocki/Ingemo Engström), produced for the WDR Department, ‘Literatur und Sprache’ (Literature and Language) (Farocki, 1975).

WDR and WDF

Even if Westdeutsches Fernsehen (the TV division of WDR) had predecessors, its official foundation took place on January 1956 (for background on WDR, see Katz et al., 2006). At this time, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, whose transmission area was congruent with the British occupation zone in West Germany, was split into several broadcasting stations corresponding to the West German federal states. ¹ Public media was thus structured according to the federal political structure and organised regionally, with a nationwide umbrella institution called ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) forming the first TV channel. It was only in 1963, after a long debate, that the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) was established to add a second public channel to the existing one.

In West Germany television and film culture traditionally had a conflicted relation. ‘Not one foot of film stock for television’ – this motto expressed by a film producer at a meeting of the ‘Spitzenorganisation des deutschen Films’ (SPIO) defined the antagonistic agenda self-confidently propagated by the film industry in 1955 (Leder, 2006; Prinzler, 1997). In the mid-1960s, however, this began to change. ARD, ZDF and the third channels started to implement film/cinema units into their structure. Their primary mission was to select and schedule movies from both the past and present and to accompany them with educational programmes. First Reinold E. Thiel and Wilhelm Roth, then Georg Alexander and Wilfried Reichart were the pioneers in this field at WDR. In 1970 Alexander and Reichart were joined by Werner Dütsch, forming the ‘Three Musketeers’ that Dütsch, quoting Danièle Huillet, evokes in his recollections. (The fourth musketeer mentioned by Dütsch in passing, most likely refers to Helmut Merker [1942–2018], who joined the film unit in 1975 and retired in 2007. In fact, the film unit also had a fifth member, Roland Johannes.)

A number of factors coincided and helped turn the period between 1970 and the mid-1980s into a ‘golden age of television’ (see Girke, 2006a). Most importantly, the young commissioning editors running the film unit all had cinephile backgrounds. Before joining the WDR they had been immersed in film societies, film clubs and cinemáthèques (Dütsch), worked as film critics (Reichart) or engaged as members of editorial teams at film journals like Film (Georg Alexander) or Filmkritik (Roth and Thiel). Secondly, licensing German and international films for television was comparatively easy and cheap. Once an interesting auteur was detected or rediscovered, the budget allowed for the scheduling of an extensive series of films. This led to retrospectives of John Ford, Max Ophüls, Yasujiro Ozu and many others, but also of directors with less prestige like Jack Arnold or less established positions such as the Brazilian Cinema Novo or exponents from Third Cinema.

Thirdly, TV audiences grew while cinema was in decline. In 1976 only 115.1 million admissions were sold – a modest fraction of the 817.5 million 20 years earlier, an all-time high and never matched since. Television had become an important competitor, as audiences stayed at home and the supply of cultural goods diversified. For films that would not have had a theatrical release television became an option.

Finally, a fourth factor is important to note: the first West German film schools – dffb and Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen München (HFF) – had been established in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Hence, in the early 1970s, the first generation of graduates (or, in the case of dffb: expelled students) were in the job market and looking for opportunities to work. Many students at dffb had experienced radicalisation in 1967 and 1968, involving the occupation of the School and its renaming, ‘Dziga Vertov-Akademie’, and the production of agitational films like Herstellung eines Molotov Cocktails (How to build a Molotov Cocktail) (attributed to Holger Meins, later joining the Red Army Faction) or Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators) (Helke Sanders, 1967–1968), opposing the Springer press and its defence of the Vietnam War. The confrontation between students and the School’s directors, which had been palpable since the beginning, eventually led to the the expulsion of 18 students from dffb in November 1968 (see Prinzler, 1976; Tietke, 2016).

Commissioning editors like Angelika Wittlich, Dütsch or Thiel had known aspiring directors like Sander, Bitomsky or Farocki, either from their time at film school, common publication platforms – particularly Filmkritik – or other cinephile and political contexts.

In the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, WDR had the reputation of leaning much more to the left than other public channels – a tendency that provoked the deprecatory designation ‘Rotfunk’ (see Schmid, 2001). Significantly, Harun Farocki’s first film after his reprehension, Inextinguishable Fire (1969), about Dow Chemical’s involvement in Napalm Production, was produced hastily at the end of 1968, since WDR had a budget to spare (Farocki, 2017b: 138–140). Finally, the situation also benefitted from the fact that, among the so-called Dritte Programme, WDR, located in Cologne, covered the biggest terrain and hence had a larger budget at its command than the other three channels.

To get a sense of the productivity, scope and openness for essayistic and experimental formats, a look at Autumn 1975 is illuminating. Let’s zoom in on a nondescript small town somewhere between Aachen, Siegen, Detmold, Rheine and Kleve. A TV viewer based anywhere within this geographical rectangle – the transmission area of WDR – was able to tune into the following schedule: On 7 October, she/he could watch Farocki’s 30-minute-programme, Über ‘Song of Ceylon’ von Basil Wright, a commentary and analysis of the film preceded by Wright’s 1934 documentary, Song of Ceylon. One week later, on 14 October, Bitomsky devoted 30 minutes to Humphrey Jennings, Unter einem Himmel, schwarz von Häusern, von erloschenen Bränden schwarz, complementing Jennings’ 1943 film Fires Were Started. Another 2 weeks later, on 28 October, Rainer Gansera presented Peter Nestler’s short films Von Griechenland (1965) and Aufsätze (1963) (see dossier on the audiovisual essay, Pantenburg, 2017). All three programmes were episodes in the series, Telekritik, commissioned by Angelika Wittlich, which I will discuss later in more detail. In November and December of the same year, Günter Peter Straschek’s extraordinary five-part series, Filmemigration aus Nazideutschland (Film emigration from Nazi Germany), commissioned by Dütsch and the WDR film unit, was shown. Each week between 11 November and 9 December at 9.15 pm, 1 hour of WDR’s programming consisted of long and extended interviews that Straschek had conducted with emigrants, directors, cutters, writers, secretaries, and so on (see Pantenburg, 2018). Finally, Erzählen (On Narration), an essayistic exploration of narratology and current literary theory, directed by Ingemo Engström and Farocki, was broadcast on 16 December, again at 9.15 pm. This incomplete sample, based on personal interest rather than a systematic investigation of the schedule, gives insight into the seriousness and devotion with which authors and editors engaged with cinema and film history.

Filmredaktion: The WDR film unit

Headed from 1969 to 1980 by Georg Alexander, the WDR film unit of the 1970s pursued three different interlocking agendas. First and foremost, they licensed old and new films, many of which had not been shown – neither on TV nor in German cinemas. First two, then later three slots in the weekly schedule were reserved for either existing films or self-produced programmes. Reichart recalls:

We had a budget for the whole year and knew how much we could buy. And then we went to many festivals and bought new films there: one or two of us went to Cannes, another one to Venice and yet another one to Montreal or San Sebastian and so on. This way, we informed ourselves about the latest productions. And, of course, we read most of the international film magazines, compiled lists and then organized screenings. We often went to other countries and watched the films we had on the lists. All over Europe and then also in Asia and America. (Baute and Pethke, 2008a)

Early on Enno Patalas had produced a seminal 45-minute programme entitled Ernst Lubitsch. Eine Lektion in Kino (A Lesson in Cinema, 1971) (for a transcription, see Prinzler and Patalas, 1984: 60–80). Rearranging motifs and recurring patterns in Lubitsch’s films and adding a sharp voice-over, Patalas provides a sophisticated structuralist reading without resorting to any academic jargon. In Lubitsch’s movies, he recognises ‘not works, singular, self-contained, distinctive, but series, processes, progressing in changing mutations’ (Prinzler and Patalas, 1984: 62). Patalas’ engagement with Lubitsch is remarkably close to the material and analytically precise, but at the same time theoretically informed and poetic in the way he reveals the consistency of Lubitsch’s forms and constellations.

In retrospect, Patalas’ TV essay looks like a model for later forays by Bitomsky, Farocki and Helmut Färber. Even if the budget of the ‘Filmredaktion’ was considerably smaller than that of ‘Fernsehspiel’ (television play), where von Mengershausen, Peter Märthesheimer and Günther Rohrbach co-produced feature films by Fassbinder, Wenders and other exponents of New German Cinema, the editors nonetheless managed to act as co-producers for national and international productions. In his contribution for this dossier, Dütsch mentions young film-makers like Richard Linklater or Jim Jarmusch who received substantial support. Another example is Wilfried Reichart’s engagement for Jacques Rivette’s legendary Out 1 (1970/1990). Since its production in 1970, the film had only existed as an unfinished work print for almost 20 years. WDR’s decision to broadcast it enabled Rivette to produce a definitive version and create the 13-hour Noli me tangere-work (Oplustil, 2013). Beyond Rivette, Reichart has contributed enormously to the exposure of French cinema on German television. He accompanied Godard’s work for over four decades by showing his films, commissioning programmes about the director or realising them himself (see Helbig, 2018), and he also followed Agnès Varda’s career closely. Reichart was also responsible for the series Experimente, which focused on avant-garde productions in film and video and showed films by Gabór Bódy, Jürgen Böttcher, Peter Greenaway, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Heiner Mühlenbrock, Harry Rag, Jan Švankmajer and others, often framed by introductions by fellow film-makers. Co-producing Claude Lanzmann’s first film Pourquoi Israël in 1972, Reichart and the WDR Filmredaktion later co-financed Shoah (1985) and accompanied the film through its complicated production history.

Helmut Merker, for his part, was the first to introduce Asian Cinema to a German TV audience (in subtitled versions). He also invented the Filmtip in 1978, short film critical essays – almost 350 episodes until 2007 – authored by well-known film critics that can be regarded as legitimate precursors to the prospering genre of the online ‘Video Essay’ since the mid-2000s (see Merker, 2008). Merker, taking turns with his colleagues, was also responsible for different film magazine programmes like Kino 73, Kino 74 and so on (1973–1987), Schaukasten. Bilder und Berichte vom Kino (1975–1985), Film aktuell (1984–1994), magazines which usually combined short journalistic contributions about cinema. However, within this conventional scheme, extraordinary instances of TV history became possible.

An episode of the magazine Kino 78, devoted to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s short film Toute révolution est un coup de dés (1977), serves as an example. In a WDR studio, literary scholar Leo Kreutzer, Huillet, Straub and Farocki are sitting around a wooden table, on which some notes and photographs, packs of cigarettes and a beer glasses are placed. Farocki, who, as moderator Klaus Haak speculates, ‘probably works in this building at the moment’, has spontaneously joined the discussion but reveals that he prefers not to talk but only listen. The programme is 50-minute-long and structured like a triptych. After a brief introduction by the moderator, the 11-minute film by Straub/Huillet is shown – to the television viewers but also the participants in the studio. This first screening is followed by 30 minutes of discussion and interpretation, before the programme closes with a second complete screening of the film. Not only is the repetition of the short film highly unusual but also the studio setup is remarkable. Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés – the source and linguistic material of Straub/Huillet’s film – is attached to the studio wall in a panoramic sequence of enlarged book pages. In a spatial arrangement corresponding to the juxtaposition of the speakers in the film – in a diagrammatical pattern, if you will –, the pages hover above the participants in the conversation. Now and then, Straub gets up from his chair to point at Mallarmé’s lines, for instance to explain the principles according to which the verses and words are attributed to different speakers in the film. Mimicking the structure of a simple talk show, the setup, the participants and the content turn this episode of Kino 78 into something utterly unexpected.

Dütsch stresses the variety of different authors who worked for the film unit. The editorial team was, as he says, ‘opportunistic enough to court many authors, even though they couldn’t always stand each other and their positions were often incompatible’ (see his contribution in this dossier). H.C. Blumenberg, chief film critic of the weekly Die Zeit, was a regular contributor, other journalists, scholars and cinephiles like Norbert Grob, Claudia Lenssen, Norbert Jochum or Martina Müller joined them. However, a substantial part of the programme was prepared by writers of the monthly journal Filmkritik. Patalas, previously mentioned as the director of the quintessential programme on Lubitsch, founded the journal in 1957 and acted as its chief editor until 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany, Filmkritik, with writers like Patalas or Winfried Berghahn and Ulrich Gregor, Frieda Grafe or Herbert Linder, Wilhelm Roth or Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, was indispensable in (re)establishing film and cinema as an intellectual subject worth the rigorous thought that Siegfried Kracauer and others had given it before 1933. In the 1970s, after a period of dissent between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political left’ and the replacement of Patalas as a chief editor, the journal veered away from reviewing current movies and concentrated instead on issues covering specific fields of film history and film theory. Issues became ‘little books’, or as Farocki once remarked ‘would-be books’, and were little mongraphs, as examples taken from 1975 illustrate, on Delmer Daves and D. W. Griffith, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang, Godard’s work with video, and Jean Renoir and Jennings. It is also significant that around 1974, film-makers – primarily alumni of the film schools in Berlin and Munich, were among the most active members of the editorial board: Rainer Gansera, Bitomsky, Manfred Blank, Farocki. A statement from 1982 gives a good impression about the self-perception of Filmkritik in this period:

Each month, we write a Filmkritik to produce an idea, the idea of what a film could be and what film work should be. With our journal, we seek to spread this idea. […] What is presented in Filmkritik is a choice of its authors/editors. Accordingly, Filmkritik does not present what the distributors would like to see presented (neither its opposite), hence Filmkritik is not encyclopedic in character or a museum. Still, there is work typical of cinematheques, documentary labor, building blocks for an imaginary cathedral of film history…It is Filmkritik’s task to deal with things, but since film culture is a weak culture, oftentimes the things that one wants to deal with need to be saved from vanishing. ( Filmkritik, 2018: 4)

In its efforts to promote cinephilia, film culture and media literacy in various ways, the film unit – and WDR in general – were the product of very specific cultural, political and historical circumstances. However, the combination of a public media infrastructure and experimental productions certainly had equivalents in other countries. A more comprehensive picture including other European countries would therefore have to contextualise the WDR’s activities with similar functions fulfilled by the Institut nationale de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in France, the BBC or Channel Four in Great Britain or Rai 3 in Italy, to name only a few. In all of these cases, a public institution financed and run by the state either explicitly encouraged and induced, or at least tolerated, a climate of experimentation.

Telekritik

The series Telekritik, established in 1972, was a part of larger attempt ‘to act self-critically’, as Angelika Wittlich, the commissioning editor of the programmes, recalls. Part of the unit ‘Glashaus’, it encouraged a self-reflexive turn to the shortcomings and deficits of TV programming itself. Run by Martin Wiebel, then Angelika Wittlich, and later continued by documentary film-maker and journalist Gert Monheim, its mission was to invent forms and formats that subjected TV work and its productions to a critical examination. Wittlich had just graduated from university when she began her work:

I had just come to the WDR. I had done German and Romance Studies and was quite clueless. […] There was no concept behind this series. All of a sudden, I was commissioning editor, there was a broadcasting slot that varied in length; a filler, really, and this is how Telekritik was born. Little money, but a lot of freedom. I wanted to work with people like Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, and Helke Sander, whose student work at dffb I knew. (Wittlich, 2017)

Among the early programmes of Telekritik was Farocki’s fierce critique of the ‘feature’ format entitled, Der Ärger mit den Bildern (The Trouble with Images) (1973). In an accompanying text, Farocki explains his objections:

Feature has become the term for the process of squeezing out the meaning of documents that one most conveniently needs; for the procedure of either recording or organising picture and sound material in such a way that one can only experience what one already knew. If you see features in the ongoing programme, this becomes evident, and writers have already noticed it all. But in the case of the feature, the archive and the editing table are a particularly sharp instrument against the rhetorical envelope. Because in this sad genre feature, almost all means of representation are means of cover-up. How the material is edited, how one information follows the other, how the images relate to the sounds: all this is only there to cover up. Like the discourse of someone who has nothing to say and who dresses this nothingness in complete sentences. ((2018) [1973]: 132) (Author translation).

The consequence to be drawn from this diagnosis is a turn to positive examples and thus an orientation towards film history. Significantly, this resulted in a strong focus on the British school of documentary from the 1930s, on film-makers like Jennings and Wright. Joined by Wittlich as a co-director, Bitomsky devoted two programmes to Jennings. Farocki chose Wright’s Song of Ceylon as his subject. In his Telekritik on Wright’s film, Über Song of Ceylon (1975), Farocki leaves no doubt about the educational impetus of his exercise:

We’re going to examine films here, to learn something for today’s television. For watching television and for creating television. We will make you aware of a few cinematic methods and we’ll look at what consequences a few cinematic methods have.

Today’s viewers might wonder why Farocki chose to use handwritten intertitles reminiscent of children’s drawings. After a screening of the film in 2008, the film-maker recalled:

TV was a highly official affair at the time, and using these hand-written, scribbled intertitles was a wonderful gesture of rebellion. Also, the people in the final sound mix were appalled that an amateur like me did the voice-over, and not an alert professional speaker. The transgression against a certain sound and tone – that was important. (Farocki, 2008)

Farocki’s analysis of Wright’s film is a good example for the shift that Wittlich aimed at in her ‘Draft for a concept Telekritik 1975 ‘. Just like in the previous programmes, contemporary television remained the target of critical inquiry, but instead of addressing the deficits of journalism directly, a more positive choice was made by pointing to documentary examples from the past, and in particular the British documentary movement of the 1930s. Apart from the diligence of Jennings, Wright and others and the quality of their films, a more structural argument might also have played a role for focusing on the documentary school in Great Britain. Similar to WDR as a public institution, the British film-makers realised their films in a public, state-run institutional framework – first in John Grierson’s famous GPO Film unit, a subdivision of the General Post Office; later, during World War II, it became the Crown Film Unit headed by the Ministry of Information (see Anthony and Mansell, 2011). Without wanting to blur the differences, the idea of fostering experimental and politically advanced documentary work within a public infrastructure must have had a strong appeal.

It seems that the Telekritik format lost its sharp focus after 1976. Wittlich transferred to the film unit and Telekritik became a moniker for a more varied programme. Some of the previous contributions were adapted for schools as educational TV. Around 1976, with a number of internal restructurings and the fierce critique of the self-critical Glashaus, the general impetus towards self-criticism diminished. Telekritik terminated in 1978, Glashaus, the larger media-critical framework within WDR, ended in 1979.

‘Literatur und Sprache’ (literature and language)

The productivity of the film unit at WDR and a format like Telekritik should not eclipse the audacity and experimental spirit of other divisions at the channel. Another example for this is the department, ‘Literatur und Sprache’ (formerly: ‘Sprache’) led by commissioning editor Christhart Burgmann (at WDR since 1966) who was joined later by Annelen Kranefuss. As early as 1969 Burgmann had won the prestigious Grimme award for his series Das Porträt. In 1972, he had first worked with Farocki (and Hans Christoph Buch) on Die Sprache der Revolution (The Language of Revolution), one part of a more extensive exploration of different modes of language. While their field of work was circumscribed by the domain of literature and language, their practice went far beyond questions of literary adaptations. In many of their projects, often developed in tandem, a strong self-reflexive element, a thorough investigation of the interactions between language and image can be sensed. Some of those productions were Fluchtweg nach Marseilles (Escape Route to Marseille, 1977); ‘Amerika’ vor Augen – oder Kafka in 43 min 30 sec (‘Amerika’ before your eyes – or, Kafka in 43 min 30 sec, 1978), an account of the possibilities or impossibilities of adapting Kafka’s novel for television or cinema; Else Lasker-Schüler: Ich räume auf (1979); and On Display: Peter Weiss (1979), an extensive conversation between Weiss and Farocki about the writer’s monumental novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (for details tracing the production via letters and documents from the WDR films, see Farocki, 2016).

Evidence of the ambition and openness of Kranefuss and Burgmann is Erzählen (On Narration), co-directed by Farocki and Ingemo Engström. The first nine-page-draft to this film, written in February 1975, was authored by Farocki. In it, he betrays little of what is to be seen. He mainly reflects about how he and Engström want to proceed and what theoretical aspects are important to them. Many sentences are programmatic and sketch, as one would say today, a poetics and politics of artistic (in this case: cinematic) research. Some examples: ‘not a program about the act of narration, but a program in which the labour of authorship takes place’ (p. 1); ‘to talk to people, presenting particles of subject matter to them, processing the material for narration’ (p. 2); ‘performing research with the microphone and the camera, like the brothers grimm or harun al raschid, who gave a coin to anyone who told a story’ (p. 2); ‘getting the idea for the representation of something from the observation of a process. write it down, try it out with film, maybe improve it’ (p. 4).

Different trajectories can be discerned. One of them concerns the ‘film essay’ already indicated by the title. The attempt to weave the particular, the fragmentary and the provisional into a loose structure is what Farocki associates with the genre of the essay. ‘Essai’, he writes, ‘a term from written literature, unity of science and art, unity of social and individual knowledge’. Along with this definition, the process of narration is emphasised. The simple presentation of results is replaced by the performance of a research movement. Another focus of Farocki’s considerations is the question of authorship. I have already quoted the utopian aspiration to create ‘a programme in which the work of authorship takes place’. If we consider Erzählen in the larger context of Farocki’s productions of the 1970s, it becomes clear that – apart from being a crucial work on its own – it also is an important step towards his first film for cinema, Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars) (1978).

As soon as 1971 the film-maker had written a concept called ‘Das Verbindungsrohr’ (tr. The Connecting Pipe) and started various attempts to find money for it in different TV stations. Based on a short essay by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the film was supposed to explain the continuity between the Weimar Republic and the Hitler regime. Sohn-Rethel had argued that the economic coalition between the steel industry and the coal producers made it inevitable for the industrial producers to side with Hitler and the Nazi regime. Over the years Farocki, himself reacting to the economic need to combine different areas of work, had managed to write and direct a radio play (Das große Verbindungsrohr, 1976) and write book reviews to investigate Sohn-Rethel’s argument further.

Erzählen allows him to continue his research by integrating it into the structure of the film. A preliminary remark in a later treatment (July 1975) makes this clear:

The film is an investigation of the question of what a (fictional) narrative is. This investigation is carried out from two different epistemic interests and with two methods. First: the narrative in contrast and in connection with journalism and academia. Second, the narrative in contrast and in connection with experience and biography.

These two positions and interests are assigned to two author film-makers, here H. F., who has some features of Harun Farocki, and there I. E. who shares some traits with Ingemo Engström. Both investigate the secret of the narrative, their investigations sometimes run parallel and sometimes hand in hand. (Farocki and Engström, 1975)

Epilogue

It is difficult to say when the ‘golden age’ at Apellhofplatz 1 in Cologne (the address of the WDR broadcasting headquarters) ended. There was no definitive final moment, but a steady increase of obstacles. Since the 1980s, a number of factors made it increasingly difficult to maintain the sense of experimentation that had characterised many of the programmes. Some reasons can be specified: well into the 1970s, TV slots had been uneven. When a feature film was 78-minute long, the remaining 12 minutes to fill the 90-minute slot provided the opportunity for the production of a short programme. This way, the Filmtip, conceived by Helmut Merker and produced in over 300 episodes over three decades, came into being. Also, short introductions focusing on new film or theory publications (books by Vilém Flusser or Paul Virilio, Bazin and others) could find a niche in the programming grid. Once programme lengths were streamlined, with hardly anything outside the 45- or 90-minute pattern permissible, these opportunities disappeared.

With the implementation and success of private television – in 1984, RTL and the channel which later became Sat1 started, followed by Pro7, Vox, MTV Germany and other music channels – audience figures became more important. In a long interview after his retirement, Dütsch recalls the early years:

Audience figures were measured from time to time, but the discussions were about the quality of the program, not about these figures. The results had a rather modest influence. Television addresses a huge audience, but at the same time you know nothing of its opinions. You may have satisfactory or unsatisfactory audience figures, but you still do not know how the audience reacted. These surveys did not clarify if someone really liked the program. […] Ratings started to get important with the increasing success of private broadcasters and then they became more and more relevant. For certain departments, and budgets, it could mean either promotion or death. (Girke, 2006b)

In the overall self-perception of WDR, the initiatives outlined in this essay remain marginal. Am Puls der Zeit (2006), the three-volume historiography of the channel, devotes only a few of the roughly 1300 pages to the channel’s engagement with literature, theatre and cinema. Compared to political journalism, news programmes, entertainment or talk shows, Filmredaktion and similar departments might be nothing but a footnote.

While the academic investigation of this field has started, the visibility of the programmes themselves remains limited. We might come across arbitrary bits and pieces on YouTube or Vimeo, digitised from old VHS tapes for reasons of nostalgia; every now and then, singular programmes surface and attract public attention. Recent examples include Günter Peter Straschek’s Filmemigration-series that has been granted a second life thanks to a 2018 exhibition curated by Julia Friedrich in Cologne (Friedrich, 2018), or Wolf Eckart Bühler’s films on Sterling Hayden, celebrated at the 2018 Locarno festival and finally available on DVD (Bühler and Hayden, 2018). ³

More than 40 years after von Mengershausen’s call for expropriation and complete accessibility to the archives of public TV, the starting point of this article, his proposition to open the archives to the general public remains as relevant today as it did in 1976. However, there can be little doubt that it would need a concerted effort and a strategic alliance between academia, cinephilia and politics to promote such an expropriation, or at least, with the help of WDR, to uncover more of this legacy.