Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Robert van Ackeren's Deutschland Privat and the Economics of Eroticism‪.‬

A cult film doubtless reveals more about its audience than its creators. It is a barometer of social movement and brings to bear on the ideological currents of a discreet time, place, and social group. Timothy Corrigan has defined the cult film as an "adopted child," one which has been uprooted from its original destiny (91). Recouped by an unexpected, yet astute audience, such a film proffers movement to offset stagnation, rebellion to counter complacence. From the milestone Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) of New York and Los Angeles to the international rage of Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior (1981), the late Seventies and early Eighties were especially rife with the cult film phenomenon. Audiences could seek new modes of identification, act out, and redefine themselves in the grim socio-political climate of recession and Reagonomics. The Federal Republic of Germany was no exception. Robert van Ackeren's Deutschland privat (1980), a feature-length collage of amateur Super 8 films, both homey and pornographi c, selected from over 200 submissions, quickly became a cult film among West Germans and received, at the same time, international critical acclaim for its deconstruction of the West German film mechanism of the previous decades. In a surprisingly homespun manner, Deutschland privat responds to Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) (1976), which predated it by some four years. In the final sequence of Wenders' film, the elderly proprietress of a closed-down movie theatre on the desolate border with the GDR laments the decadent state of film in West Germany at a time when major distributers offered provincial cinemas nothing more than mindless exploitation. Assessing the decline of cinema in Germany, she states: "My father used to say that film is the art of seeing, and that's why I can't show these pictures that exploit anything that is left to exploit from people's eyes and minds, where people stumble out benumbed by stupidity that destroys their very lust for life." As Kathe Geist has argued, an earlier sequence in Wenders' film in which the narration to a porno film promises "Violence, sex, action! Ninety minutes of film you won't see on television" dramatically reveals the validity of the woman's fears (59). John Sandford echoes this claim, yet reminds us that the plight of which the proprietress speaks is in part a by-product of Americanization (111-112). As a protagonist of Kings of the Road affirms, "the Yanks have colonized our subconscious."