Following the birth of film in 1895, German city dwellers embraced the new medium as a popular artform, and from Berlin, which became the center of German film production, the excitement the cinema promised to modern spectators swept across the nation. On November 1st, a few days before the Lumière brothers's famous first screening in Paris, Max Skladanovsky presented a Berlin audience with his new Bioscop, a machine which alternately projected images from two separate strips of film. This inaugural cinematic event was followed by the production of the first German short films, which commenced the following year. Film as entertainment quickly proved to be both popular and profitable with the German public. By 1905, Berlin audiences could visit 16 permanent cinemas within the city; in 1907, Berliners could choose between 137 movie houses; and by 1914, there were 206 film theaters altogether, three of them movie palaces with seating for over 1,000 spectators. Among the most important films of this early period were Stellan Rye's haunting Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913), which deals with a student who sells his soul to the devil, Paul Wegener's mysterious Der Golem (1914) which recounts the Jewish myth of a manmade creature, and Max Mack's Der Andere (1913), a tale reminiscent of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde.

While the early German period also saw the production of comedies and historical dramas, the dark subject matter of these films, along with their stark visual imagery, foreshadowed a development in German film style, German Expressionism, which would soon characterize the Weimar period following World War I. In 1917, the Ufa film company was founded and immediately became the most powerful player in the German film industry. Producer Erich Pommer's creative vision and business savvy led to an unprecedented boom in German film production, resulting in both commercial success and international acclaim. In 1919, a year after the abdication of the Kaiser and the founding of the Weimar Republic, over 500 films were produced in Germany. There were 3,000 cinemas and over a million people went to the movies every day, many perhaps to temporarily escape the misery of post-war poverty. Weimar Germany, as a young democracy with a depressed economy, was both politically and ideologically unstable, a tension that found its way into its cultural productions: Weimar films were artistically adventurous and innovative, but they were also nostalgic and anxiety ridden. Modern life seemed both fascinating and frightening to the German public and the cinema echoed these tendencies. For example, one of the first successes of Weimar cinema was Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), a haunting tale of murder and insanity, starring Conrad Veidt and produced by Erich Pommer for Ufa. The film continued the already popular fascination with uncanny stories and introduced a unique visual style that departed from a realist approach to cinematography. Instead, it favored expressionist sets and lighting, which aimed to symbolize the interior emotional states of the characters rather than provide naturalistic representation. The visual imagery of German Expressionism was one of stark contrasts, painted sets, exaggerated costumes and make-up, all complemented by highly stylized theatrical performances by the actors designed to heighten emotional impact. Rather than treating the silent screen as a window of the world, what was important to Weimar directors was to use it artistically, like a canvas, employing light and shadow as a means of visual expression.

A number of major directors associated with German expressionism emerged during this period, among them Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, and F.W. Murnau. Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry (Passion, 1919), starring Pola Negri and Emil Jannings, was one of the big success stories of early Weimar cinema. Not only was the film a hit with the German public, it was successfully exported and played in New York for several months. Abroad, German cinema gained a reputation for being artistic and theatrical in contrast to the more light-hearted and popular Hollywood productions, which were increasingly gaining international markets and now competed heavily for German audiences at home. Hollywood cleverly recruited upcoming European talent thereby undercutting international competition. Along with Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst and F.W. Murnau all eventually ended up in California, a blow to the German film industry. Murnau's classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922) continued German cinema's interest in mysterious and dark stories, as did Lang's Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921), which centered on the figure of death. Lang, in collaboration with his wife, screenwriter Thea v. Harbou, proceeded with works like Die Nibelungen (1924), which explored Germany's national heritage and mythology. Similarly nostalgic, the mountain films by Arnold Fanck - including Der Heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, 1926) and Die weisse Hölle von Piz Palü (The White Hell of Piz Palü, co-directed by G. W. Pabst, 1929), starring Louis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl - looked back to German Romanticism and expressed a desire to return to nature.

While Weimar cinema often dreamed of a pre-modern existence full of mythical heroes and natural beauty, many of its films told stories about modern urban life and its dangers. Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) is a critical portrait of social differences sharply contrasting the lifestyle of the wealthy with that of the working class. Numerous other "street films" dealt with the human struggle with destitution, hunger, and perceived moral corruption, which characterized life in Weimar Germany just as much as creative freedom and artistic innovation. G.W. Pabst's Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) and Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of a Street, 1927) both thematized poverty and prostitution, crime and forbidden sexuality. The same concern with urbanity and modern life emerged in Lang's Metropolis (1926), a fantastic exploration of the modern technological city, as well as in his first sound film, M (1931), about the hunt for a serial child murderer played by Peter Lorre, simultaneously conducted by the Berlin police and the city's criminal underground. Art films like Walter Ruttman's Berlin - Symphonie einer Großstadt (Berlin - Symphony of a Great City, 1929) similarly depicted urban life in a documentary collage, a motif that is once again taken up in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), which follows a day in the life of five young Berliners. Menschen am Sonntag's creative team incidentally included no less than three future Hollywood directors: Billy Wilder was the writer, Fred Zinnemann was the cinematographer and Robert Siodmak the director.

The same year the silent period began to come to an end, and by 1932 all pictures produced in Germany included sound: Marlene Dietrich's star-making role in Erich von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1931) was a sound film produced by Pommer, which featured Dietrich as a singing femme fatale; Berthold Brecht's 3-Groschen-Oper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931) was put on screen by G. W. Pabst. Leni Riefenstahl's directorial debut, Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932) showed the actress/director as a mysterious mountain girl persecuted for her seductive appeal. Similarly concerned with female sexuality was Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931), a boarding school drama about a young pupil's lesbian feelings for her teacher. But especially musical comedies, such as Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Trio from the Gas Station, 1930) and Der Kongress Tanzt (Congress Dances, 1931) both starring singing dream couple Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch, became enormously popular with the European public. These films departed from German Expressionism's thematic concern with psychological conflict and, echoing Hollywood's depression comedies, depicted a charming, happy universe inhabited by people who shrugged off problems like unemployment or economic hardship with a smile and song.

By 1933, a large percentage of the talent that had made Weimar cinema unique and successful was in America. The promise of international success and Hollywood stardom had lured actors like Harvey, Dietrich, von Sternberg, and Lubitsch in the 20s and early 30s. The Nazis' victory in the 1933 elections and Adolf Hitler's repressive and anti-Semitic politics, led Lang, Siodmak, Wilder, Lorre, and countless other directors, cinematographers, writers, and actors to leave Germany shortly after. Nazi policies banned all Jews from participation in the media immediately after they took over, and political opposition by anyone was not tolerated. In Hollywood, where the most creative minds of the German film industry sought refuge, their influence and artistic vision was felt. In particular "film noir" relied heavily on Weimar traditions in its dramatic use of light and shadow as well as in its concentration on subject matters like urban crime. Lang's American thrillers, like Ministry of Fear (1944) and The Big Heat (1953), continued the grim subject matter and stark visual imagery of his German work. Also in the tradition of Weimar themes, Siodmak's The Dark Mirror and The Spiral Staircase, both made in 1946, centered on psychological drama and mental illness.

Back in Germany, following the Nazis' seizure of power, film production was taken over by Nazi ideologues like Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who shared Hitler's passion for the movies and hoped to use the ideological power of the mass media, including radio and film, for the Nazis' own political ends. One of the most obvious uses of film for propaganda purposes were documentaries and newsreels. Leni Riefenstahl's infamous documentary on the Nuremberg Party Congress of 1934, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1934), is still one of the most impressive examples of the fusion of innovative technique and political manipulation. Her second documentary, Olympia, on the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, is also often seen as representative of fascist aesthetics. Riefenstahl's aesthetized visions of the human body in motion, as well as her visual orchestration of group movements into an ornament of the masses, suggest the kind of transformation of politics into art that many consider characteristic of fascist imagery. Cinema as an entertainment product, however, had to take a somewhat modulated approach. Fiction films in Nazi Germany had to sell at the box-office where German spectators were accustomed to Weimar traditions and Hollywood models. Foreign films were still playing in German theaters as late as 1939, and with the beginning of World War II, the Ministry of Propaganda saw popular films not only as an overt means for indoctrination, but also as an escape which provided respite for a nation at war. Perhaps this explains why of the over 1,000 films made under Nazi rule, over 48 percent were comedies like Glückskinder (The Lucky Kids, 1936), a remake of Frank Capra's 1934 It Happened One Night, or the still popular Die Feuerzangenbowle(The Punch Bowl, 1944). Less numerous, but even more popular. were melodramas like Zu Neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1936) and La Habanera (1937). Both films were directed by Detlef Sierck and introduced Nazi Germany's most popular screen heroine,Zarah Leander, a Swedish import intended to replace Marlene Dietrich in exile. Sierck, in turn - like so many of his Weimar colleagues - continued his career in Hollywood in 1938, where under the name of Douglas Sirk he eventually gained much critical acclaim as a director of 1950s melodramas, among them Imitation of Life (1959) and Written on the Wind (1956). While the majority of Nazi cinema was not overtly political, a number of heavily ideological films do stand out. Next to Riefenstahl's documentaries, the work of Veit Harlan deserves particular attention in this respect. Harlan's notoriously anti-Semitic drama Jud Süß (Jew Suess, 1941) is one of the most striking examples of Nazi defamation. And Harlan's monumental 1945 war epic Kolberg, for which thousands of soldiers were withdrawn from the battlefields to serve as extras, was one of Goebbels's last attempts to boost war morale through the illusionary fictions of the cinema. Altogether, the films made during the Third Reich lacked the originality and freedom that Weimar films had promised. Both the creative limitations imposed by the Nazi government and the emigration of top creative talent contributed to a cinema that often reminded spectators of Weimar or Hollywood, but could never truly compete with their artistic and technical accomplishments.

Following Hitler's defeat in 1945, the "year zero", it seemed German film was at its end as foreign distributors arrived and audiences fell in love with Hollywood all over again; yet, at the same time, a different kind of cinema was possible in Germany once more. Films like Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers Amoung Us, 1946) critically addressed the Nazi past and depicted post-war characters that were confused and uncertain about how to pick up the pieces. {Helmut Käuntner's In jenen Tagen (In Those Days, 1947) dealt with the experience of Nazi Germany itself. {Rudolph Jugert's Film ohne Titel (Film without a Title, 1947), a film about filmmaking, had three directors wondering what kind of stories could be told about the war and what kind of films they should make in the face of so much destruction and national disgrace. In contrast to the studio-based Ufa production of the Hitler-era, these early post-war films departed from the glossy look of Nazi cinema. Location shooting dominated as actors wandered through the rubbled landscape of ruined cities, whose physical destruction echoed the inner torment of the characters. Not only did his film style speak to the neo-realist aesthetic of contemporary Italian cinema - indeed, Italian director Roberto Rossellini's Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947) was also set in Berlin - it also recalled German Expressionism of the 1920s. Filmmakers also turned to literary models such as Thomas Mann's Die Buddenbrooks) (1959), or {$Carl Zuckmeyer's Des Teufels General (The Devil's General, 1955) starring Curt Jürgens. Actors who had become famous during the Third Reich often continued their success in post-war cinema. Comedy star ($Heinz Rühmann">Carl Zuckmeyer\">Die Buddenbrooks) (1959), or {$Carl Zuckmeyer's Des Teufels General (The Devil's General, 1955) starring Curt Jürgens. Actors who had become famous during the Third Reich often continued their success in post-war cinema. Comedy star ($Heinz Rühmann, for instance, starred in Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Bright Daylight, 1958) written by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, where he played a detective on the trail of a child murderer, brilliantly acted by Gerd Fröbe, who became known to international audiences as James Bond's wicked opponent in Goldfinger (1964). In addition to these darker narratives, however, a more conservative, escapist kind of cinema quickly gained popularity with a German audience eager to forget and move on. The so-called homeland pictures, "Heimatfilme" of the 1950s, looked away from the cities and contemporary politics and dreamed of pastoral rural communities where both man and nature were still blissfully intact. Films like Grün ist die Heide (Green is the Meadow, 1951) or Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl, 1950) attempted to restore a sense of place and belonging to many Germans who had lost their homes or had been driven from their land at the end of the war. On a somewhat larger scale was one of the biggest successes of the 1950s, the Sissy-trilogy, which introduced Romy Schneider as its young star. A bona fide fairy tale, the films described the 19th-century romance between Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, complete with lavish costumes, exotic locations, elaborate weddings, and pompous state ceremonies.

By the end of the 1950s, however, a new generation of filmmakers announced their frustration with post-war cinema, which they dismissed as "Papa's Kino" (Daddy's cinema) and advocated a more experimental kind of filmmaking. At the Oberhausen film festival in 1962 they followed the French "nouveau vague" critics, who had declared that "cinema was dead," in pronouncing that conventional German film was tired and needed radical innovation. Indeed, the late 1950s saw a dramatic decline in movie attendance at the box office. Just like in the US, the increasing prosperity in West Germany had introduced television into the average household. As a result, cinema visits between 1957 and 1968 dropped by 75 percent, a crisis from which German cinema never really recovered. With the assistance of public funding and television support, young German filmmakers now began to develop a new cinematic language, producing films which never reached mass popularity, let alone profitability, but gained much international critical acclaim and soon became known as "New German Cinema." One of the first feature-length films of this new art cinema, Herbert Vesely's Das Brot der frühen Jahre, made in 1961, was envisioned to be a German variation on Alain Resnais' {Last Year at Marienbad, complete with disorienting visual imagery and an open story structure that refused narrative closure and left many questions unanswered. In contrast to films produced in a studio system, like the classic Hollywood or Ufa films that were made under the control of studio executives, New German Cinema was entirely director-driven. New German directors saw themselves as "authors" who should have complete creative control over their projects.

The "Autorenkino" (the cinema of authors) - once again inspired by a similar movement in France which included directors like Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut - soon produced its own star filmmakers, most notably Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Alexander Kluge's Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966) was a fragmented account of a young Jewish woman's travels through modern Germany, her struggle with the terror of daily life, the alienation of work and the repression of Germany's tainted history. The film included a mixture of styles: improvisation, documentary, photographs, drawings, the citation of poetry and political commentary were all combined in cinematic experimentation. Wim Wenders's Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement, 1974) similarly chronicled a young man's journey through Germany, his quest for a sense of self equally frustrated as he encounters a diverse group of characters alienated by modern life or haunted by their Nazi past. Wenders's Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1973), {Im Laufe der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1975), and {Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1975) again included travel; they were German "road movies" which took their characters through a disillusioning and strange modern world. Werner Herzog's Aguirre - Der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre - The Wrath of God, 1972), starring Klaus Kinski, is another example. A mad conquistador travels up the Amazon in search of the mystical El Dorado, a nightmarish vision that alluded to the Vietnam war and European fascism. Herzog also turned to Weimar models in remaking Murnau's Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu - The Vampire, 1978). In his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, Herzog's romantic vision again took him to strange inaccessible places, as Kinski's character acted out mad colonial fantasies, attempting to erect an opera house in the wilderness, an ambition defied by the overwhelming forces of nature.

One of the most celebrated "authors" of New German Cinema was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the "enfant terrible" of German film. The most prolific of German filmmakers, his work was also most versatile. New German filmmakers were suspicious of their parents' fascist legacy and eager to break with the traditions of both German and Hollywood classic cinema. The political unrest of the 1968 student revolts, and the period of radical left-wing terrorism that followed, led to a cinema which was political in orientation and experimental in form.

Fassbinder's 1973 remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul), was a brutal condemnation of German racism that transformed the melodramatic romance between Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman into a doomed relationship between a sixty-year-old Munich cleaning woman and an African immigrant in his twenties. His Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978) with Hanna Schygulla, the story of a woman's struggle through the post-war years, was an international success and introduced the director to American audiences. The trilogy Lili Marleen (1980), Lola (1980), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1981) also reexamined German history in looking at Nazi divas in the entertainment industry of the Third Reich. In a similar vein, Volker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), adapted from the novel by Günther Grass, dealt with National Socialism and told the story of a boy who stops growing after the Nazis come to power.

In the 1970s, feminism had also begun to make its mark in German culture and finally a few female filmmakers - most prominantly Margerete von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Helke Sander - got the chance to express their own views and tell their own stories. Sanders-Brahms's Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1979) concentrates on the female experience of World War II and the post-war years, showing childbirth during an air-raid, a rape by enemy soldiers, and the rebuilding of cities by so-called rubble-women. The film takes a feminist perspective by emphasizing that women during wartime got to be self-reliant and independent and were subsequently stifled and suppressed by the returning men. Margarete von Trotta also chose an historical subject in Rosa Luxemburg (1985) telling the story of the Marxist revolutionary who was assassinated in 1919. In Die Bleierne Zeit (German Sisters, 1981), she turned to contemporary politics, investigating the life and death of Gudrun Enslin, a left-wing German terrorist who died under suspicious circumstances in a high security prison. The story is told from the perspective of the surviving sister and stresses the sisters' relationship and family history. By connecting the personal with the political, women directors of New German Cinema responded to the feminist call that women look into their personal lives to see oppression at work. Helke Sander's Redupers (The All-Around Reduced Personality, 1978) is a dark comedy that follows the struggle of a photographer to combine motherhood, feminist activism, and career. In making the Berlin Wall the central metaphor for the torn identity of modern women, the film connected social politics with daily experience, giving reality to the abstract political demands of feminists. Sanders's Befreier und Befreite (Liberators take Liberties, 1992) is a shocking documentary on the mass rape of German women by allied troops, which pointed to a dimension of war that is seldom addressed.

Nevertheless, while it was critically acclaimed and intellectually sophisticated, New German Cinema was unpopular with mainstream audiences and in the 1980s German productions began to embrace a more commercial, entertainment-oriented attitude towards movie-making. German spectators were bored with German films and stayed at home to watch television or went to see American movies. Many longed for the good old days of Ufa when film stars were glamorous and movies told an amusing or gripping story. Wolfgang Peterson's international blockbuster Das Boot(The Boat, 1981) fulfilled the public's desires. The film was an intensely suspenseful WWII submarine drama that easily fit into the Hollywood war genre. Peterson's Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, 1984), a children's fantasy, similarly followed mainstream narrative techniques. It was shot in English and starred Hollywood talent to ensure international success. Wim Wenders was another director who turned to a more accessible film language. Paris, Texas (1983), set in the United States, and his poetic Berlin film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) both reached a wider audience than his previous pictures. The 1980s also revived an element in German film that New German filmmakers had entirely avoided: humor. Doris Dörrie's {Männer (Men, 1985), inspired by Billy Wilder's German and American films, was a lighthearted comedy that revolved around yuppy lifestyles and consumerism: a thematic shift that separated the conservative 1980s from the radical mood of the 1970s. Michael Verhoeven's Das schreckliche Mädchen (The Nasty Girl, 1988), while dealing with the serious issue of a young girl probing into the Nazi history of her Bavarian village, similarly used humor to tell its story. Finally, gay and lesbian filmmakers like Rosa von Praunheim and Monika Treut surfaced, making low-budget films, such as Ein Virus kennt keine Moral (A Virus Has No Morals, 1986 and Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine, 1989).

In addition to facing low attendance at the box office, German film once again faced an old problem: as during the Weimar and Nazi years, directors with affinity for Hollywood storytelling simply left to establish themselves overseas. Soon after being successful on American screens, Jürgen Peterson moved to Hollywood altogether, where he has directed popular films, such as Shattered (1991), In the Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood, and Air Force One (1997), with Harrison Ford. German film had again lost one of its talents to the lure of Hollywood. Others did not even try to work in the German industry. Prospective action director Roland Emmerich, for instance, left for California immediately after his first German successes, which included Das Arche Noah Prinzip (Noah's Ark Principle, 1984), and proceeded to make such US blockbuster as Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998). and The Patriot (2000). German actors, like Armin Müller-Stahl or Jürgen Prochnow, also appear in American productions occasionally. But unlike in earlier years, when Hollywood had made foreign actors like Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier or Sophia Loren into stars, Hollywood realist casting practices of today, as well as its emphasis on American stories, do not accommodate non-English language performers. Austrian screen idol, Arnold Schwarzenegger, might serve here as an exception who proves the rule.

In the post-war period, while West German cinema either concentrated on contemporary social criticism, stylistic experimentation, and historical self-inspection or else attempted Hollywood-style entertainment, state-controlled East German films dealt with socialist idealism, covert resistance, conformist acquiescence, and the poetry of the everyday. In 1946 the Defa film production company started with stories that critically investigated German Nazi history, such as Kurt Matzig's Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadow, 1946), which was based on the true story of Ufa star Joachim Gottschalk who committed suicide with his Jewish wife when she and their children were to be deported to a concentration camp. But soon the political bent of Defa films became as ideologically determined as Nazi cinema. Stalinist doctrine influenced film production more than intellectual self-expression and filmmakers had to operate under tight censorship control. Maetzig's films Ernst Thälmann - Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann - Son of his Class, 1954) and Ernst Thälmann - Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann - Leader of his Class 1955), celebrating the famous communist leader, for instance, are prime examples of East German cinema's propagandistic hero worship. Films that did not fit the party program, such as Konrad Wolff's Sonnensucher) (Sunseeker, 1957), which included complicated, conflicted characters, were often banned from release. Nonetheless, East German cinema produced some remarkable films. Defa's {#Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1973) by Heiner Carow, for instance, was an immediate success with the public. Rather than highlighting politics, the film concentrated on the unconventional and tragic romance of its protagonists, allowing for the fantasy of personal happiness and individual fulfillment under a repressive regime. Konrad Wolf's {Solo Sunny (1978/9) similarly introduced sharp irony and wit. {Frank Beyer's Jacob, der Lügner (Jacob, the Liar, 1974) - which was remade in Hollywood in 1999, starring Robin Williams - was nominated for an academy award. In 1989, the collapse of socialism and the fall of the Berlin Wall brought an immediate end to GDR film production and the Defa film studios in Babelsberg were soon re-opened as the resurrected Ufa film company, which proclaimed as its goal the production of a more commercial entertainment cinema for the reunited Germany.

The lack of homemade popular entertainment and the dominance of Hollywood has always irked the German public and the 1990s began with the resolve to support a kind of filmmaking that was more competitive. The methods that were employed to achieve this, however, did not always prove successful. In order to match the financial capabilities of Hollywood, the films produced needed to appeal at home as well as to non-German audiences, which usually meant international co-productions and an English language film starring internationally recognized actors. The results were often formulaic and lacked a unique signature. German films, however, were still frequently concerned with the Nazi past. Werner Herzog's 1996 multi-million dollar production, Der Unhold (The Ogre) combined both tendencies. The film was set in a Nazi training camp for young boys and starred Hollywood's John Malkovich, but it failed with the German public and did not even find distribution in the US. Wenders's Bis ans Ende der Welt (Until the End of the World, 1991) and In weiter Ferne, so nah (Far Away, so Close, 1993) both bombed at the box office. Smaller films, like Agnieszka Holland's Hitlerjunge Salomom (Europa, Europa, 1992), a sensitive portrayal of a young Jewish boy passing for "Aryan" in an elite Hitler youth group, were more successful. The 1998 lesbian drama, Aimée & Jaguar by Max Färberböck, which tells the love story between a Nazi housewife and a Jewish girl in hiding, was beautifully photographed and movingly told. While directors that had belonged to the New German Cinema were now often struggling, finding neither critical nor commercial success, a new generation, unencumbered by history or politics, moved to the front. Romantic comedies like the bisexual farce {Der Bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, 1995), starring heartthrob Til Schweiger, started to move up the top ten list at the box office, sometimes displacing American A-list films. Tom Tykwer's Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998), a fast paced experimental action comedy with a pumping techno soundtrack, was an international success with young audiences of the 21st century. Wim Wenders's 1998 documentary The Buena Vista Social Club also played successfully in international art cinemas. Nevertheless, German film's attempts at big, expensive productions are still floundering. Marlene (1999), a fictionalized biography of Marlene Dietrich, was one of the first big films released in the year 2000 and was not well received by critics and spectators alike. To compete with Hollywood money and talent without abandoning a unique aesthetic of its own, remains one of the main challenges German cinema will have to face in the new century.