Restauration und Ambivalenz: Maskulinitaet im Deutschsprachigen Film nach 1990 im Lichte des Neuen Deutschen Films

Restoration and Ambiguity: The Male in Post-Wall German Film As the programmatic, if diverse tenets of the Neuer Deutscher Film began to lose their hold on German film-making in the eighties, filmic narratives and cinematography emerged which on the one hand draw on this tradition, especially in seemingly postmodern narratives of subversion, minority and subjectivity, but on the other combine these with conventional, even restorative film language and narrative construction. Reunification has set a development in motion which to a remarkable extent echoes the cultural metanarrative of the post-war period. The role and representation of male characters in a significant number of post-reunification films illustrates this problematic, post-postmodern transformation, in which cultural dislocation and alienation is met with private reassertion, the experience of exclusion is answered with the construction of multiple conventionalities and issues of role and purpose are debated with deliberate ambiguity.