The students accepted alongside Skip Norman as part of the inaugural DFFB cohort in 1966 include some of West Germany’s most notable postwar political filmmakers—Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Helke Sander, and later Red Army Faction radical Holger Meins. Deeply collaborative in nature, with a political alignment that extended from the classroom to the streets, the work the cohort produced rallied against the injustices they saw around them, as well as a German citizenry seemingly unconcerned with their status quo. Just as his peers and classmates supported Norman on his own productions—Meins served as cinematographer and Gerd Conradt as assistant cinematographer on Riffi—in these films, Norman contributed his own talent and vision as a cameraman to the work of his colleagues. 

The films in this program evidence a shared commitment to both political radicalism and formal experimentation coursing through the work of the cohort. The selections range from the feminist cri de coeur of Sander’s Subjectitude to the anti–Vietnam War censure of Farocki’s White Christmas, to the urgent but little-seen Berlin – 2. Juni 67 by Thomas Giefer and Hans-Rüdiger Minow, capturing that day’s mass protests against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s visit to West Berlin, which culminated in an epoch-defining shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg. 

—Jesse Cumming