What kind of film can you make in a defeated, ruined country? This cunning, self-reflexive movie, written by Helmut Käutner (the writer-director of In Those Days and Sky without Stars), confronts the problem of the postwar German film industry head-on. Its framing characters are three filmmakers in search of a story, and maybe more importantly, a genre. As a director, writer, and actor (the latter played by the perennial Willy Fritsch) consider their options, Film without a Title tells and retells the story of a wartime marriage (starring Hildegard Knef), running a gamut of styles-neorealism, Expressionism, comedy, melodrama. Even the postwar “rubble film” is skillfully parodied, in moments that look like they could have been lifted from The Murderers Are Among Us (January 25), made the previous year. Film without a Title is what its fictive filmmakers set out to create: “a contemporary comedy, with both feet on the ground, set against the desolate background of our times.”

Film without a Title is repeated on Sunday, February 2.