Big-screen TV.

What's the most important date for postwar German film? 1962, the year of the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which young representatives of a "new German film" rejected the commercial offerings of "Dad's cinema" of the '50s? 1982, the year in which Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death marked the demise, for many observers, of the terminally ill New German Film? Or perhaps the key date is 1992. With the revision of the law governing federal film subsidies in December of that year, market forces won out over critical considerations, and only films considered commercially viable were candidates for support from the Federal Film Board. Today, a film must be projected to draw 100,000 viewers over the first two years of its release to receive federal support (in special cases - if a film is deemed "especially worthy" by the Film Assessment Board or takes honors at a festival - the figure drops to 50,000). Deregulation and cultural policy-making have rarely been so hand-in-glove.

When the law on film subsidies was originally promulgated by industry lobbyists in 1967, the first to profit were producers belonging to what director and novelist Alexander Kluge called the "schmaltz alliance" - heimat-kitsch movies, Karl May-style Westerns and adventure films, and flat melodramas that had dominated the industry since the '50s but had been unable to compete with television. In 1972, Kluge demanded: "In view of the obvious weakness of . . . German film, it is not a chauvinistic view to insist that native interests be defended first and foremost." Willy Brandt's social-democratic government carried out the leftist filmmaker's somewhat paradoxical cultural-nationalist initiative, and the law on film subsidies was reformed so that support became virtually aligned with the aesthetic and political agenda of the generation of '68. Kluge's "native interests" were protected, and the foundations were laid for the boom in German film of the '70s.

Since that time, state funding and support of film has metamorphosed into a neoliberal version of cultural policy overlaid with the imperatives of post-Reunification nationalism. Much as in France, where domestic film production since the '80s has been enlisted by the state in a culture war against the hegemony of the US film industry, filmmakers and bureaucrats in Germany continually spin a David vs. Goliath myth. Success is measured, above all, by the degree of functionality for goals of national representation in a global competition - especially against the demonized US film industry. A prime example is the development of "Media City Babelsberg," located in Berlin-Babelsberg on the 6.5 million-square-foot former site of the DEFA Studios and managed beginning in 1992 by Volker Schlondorff and Pierre Couveinhes. Just before his 1997 departure, Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) produced the 27 million mark (over 16 million dollars) flop Der Unhold (The Ogre). The 1996 film, based on Michel Tournier's novel and starring John Malkovich, was a total bust at the box office. It's no surprise, given the administration of state support, that such spectacular failures have become rarer and rarer of late. And it's no accident that an old master at turning literature into film like Schlondorff has foundered under the new conditions.

The most important indicator of success for politicians and investors alike is the share of German cultural products on the national market. When the films Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Rossini, and The Little Bastard achieved a domestic market share of 37 percent in the first quarter of 1997, the enthusiasm was boundless. Knockin' on Heaven's Door, a clumsy Pulp Fiction rip-off packed with hollow violence-plus-irony gestures and bland action humor, played to 3-3 million German viewers, nearly three times as many as Pulp Fiction itself. When market share slipped to 24.4 percent in the next six months, the figure still represented a gain over the mere 19 percent achieved during the same span in 1996. The market surge has been dubbed everything from a "renaissance in Teutonic production" (Variety) to the "new German film miracle" (Spiegel).

Constituting and accompanying the "new German film miracle" is an ideological front cobbled together from simple economic interests, cultural-nationalist jubilation, and the satisfaction of having been liberated at last from the burden of a socially critical cinema. As director Rainer Kaufmann (Stadtgesprach) put it, "Only since reunification have we felt whole enough to make films about normal people in normal situations, to look at ourselves and say, I'm O.K." It's not only the film industry that has allowed itself the mantle of normality. After the first visible successes under the new regime of film sponsorship, the critical ability of the press seemed to melt away: no one wanted to appear to have difficulties with the direct entertainment value of successful drivel like Katja von Garnier's Making Up! (Abgeschminkt!, 1993) or Sonke Wortmann's Maybe, Maybe Not (Der bewegte Mann, 1994).

When Spiegel listed a few months back "what aging reviewers hate about new German film," the summary, overwhelming response was "an unrestrained will to entertainment American style; a desire for superficial appeal, speed and that shimmering flair for which German film has long lacked the spirit (and money)." Spirit and money and a splash of Hollywood - the three crucial ingredients of the "national cinematography," as critic Georg Seesslen puts it. And you might add a peculiar "sense" of history and harmony, of Teutonic heritage and bourgeois privacy, as provided by such recent successes as Rainer Kaufmann's Die Apothekerin, a stiff tale about a murderous woman surrounded by men who fall victim to her deadly charm, and Joseph Vilsmaier's Comedian Harmonists, the bittersweet story of Germany's "first boy group," as they've been dubbed, of the '20s and '30s.

The creation of a celebrity culture goes hand in hand with the new national cinematography. Though little came of the hopes for an internationally competitive "narrative cinema" that followed the commercial success of the 1986 Manner . . . (Men...), the leads from the film, Heiner Lauterbach and Uwe Ochsenknecht, were pioneers in making the transition from actor to macho superstar (an unusual move, by German standards). Meanwhile, the proliferation of TV programs after 1984, when private channels were first allowed to compete with public broadcast stations, created an enormous demand for films with German actors (the high salaries offered by the film and television industries also lured away ensemble players from the theaters). Made-for-TV movies became the vehicles for a whole generation of actors who were made over by promotion departments into a glittering team of so-called stars. Those like Gotz George (son of Nazi-friendly actor Heinrich George), Til Schweiger, Katja Riemann, Jurgen Vogel, Maria Schrader, Nicolette Krebitz, and Ben Becker began turning up on every channel, and the transition from television to big-screen fame became a fait accompli. Seemingly overnight, successful TV producers like Helmut Dietl became much-courted filmmakers. With the film Rossini (1997), Dietl elevated the staple of German television, the "social comedies," to the level of a major cinematic event. On the big screen in Rossini, the whole minor universe of German TV stars, and the ostentatious Munich industry in-crowd, reached full, deadening fruition. The weekly Die Zeit tightly dubbed Rossini's attempt to step up to the seemingly global big time "the lukewarm catastrophe of the ridiculous."

Fassbinder was convinced that film was an "instrument of entertainment." In 1979, he told an interviewer: "One just has to make it capitalistic, take the risk in spite of what they might think." Of course, this remark was directed against a conception of filmmaking that had founded an esoteric cult of art and anti-commerciality in the Federal Republic of the '70s. Today, the competence to judge has been wholly passed on to the public that Fassbinder longed for, but one that seems interested in other matters. Those who don't support the "film miracle" and the joys of a dehistoricized Germany of the present-since-1989 stick out as spoilsports. As Dietrich Schwanitz, whose antifeminist, anti-PC bestseller The Campus has been shot in grand style with Heiner Lauterbach and other "stars," puts it in his most recent book, The Shylock Syndrome, "The apocalyptic horror of the past is not suited to the costume balls of a democratic present."

Schwanitz's remark is typical, and it's another indicator that ideological pressure in the German culture industry is increasing, subtly but constantly. Good films are becoming rare, and tautologies (farces for the "democracy farce," as Schwanitz has put it) flourish. Those who want to participate had better be ready for "fun."

Thomas Holert is the coeditor, most recently, of Mainstread der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgeschafte (Mainstream of the minority: Pop in the control society).

Translated from the French by Diana Reese.