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Cinema of Germany

The film industry in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema made major technical and artistic contributions to early film, broadcasting and television technology. Babelsberg became a household synonym for the early 20th century film industry in Europe, similar to Hollywood later. Early German and German-speaking filmmakers and actors heavily contributed to early Hollywood. German movies and German artists earned 230 Oscar nominations and 54 Oscar wins.

Germany witnessed major changes to its identity during the 20th and 21st century. Those changes determined the periodisation of national cinema into a succession of distinct eras and movements.

1895–1918 German Empire
The history of cinema in Germany can be traced back to the years shortly after the medium's birth. On 1 November 1895, Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self-invented film projector, the Bioscop, at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin. A 15-minute series of eight short films were shown – the first screening of films to a paying audience. This performance pre-dated the first paying public display of the Lumière brothers' Cinematographe in Paris on 28 December of the same year, a performance that Max Skladanowsky attended and at which he was able to ascertain that the Cinematographe was technically superior to his Bioscop. Other German film pioneers included the Berliners Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe, two of several individuals who independently in 1896 first used a Geneva drive (which allows the film to be advanced intermittently one frame at a time) in a projector, and the cinematographer Guido Seeber.

In its earliest days, the cinematograph was perceived as an attraction for upper class audiences, but the novelty of moving pictures did not last long. Soon, trivial short films were being shown as fairground attractions aimed at the working class and lower-middle class. The booths in which these films were shown were known in Germany somewhat disparagingly as Kintopps. Film-makers with an artistic bent attempted to counter this view of cinema with longer films based on literary models, and the first German "artistic" films began to be produced from around 1910, an example being the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Student of Prague (1913) which was co-directed by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye, photographed by Guido Seeber and starring actors from Max Reinhardt's company.

Early film theorists in Germany began to write about the significance of Schaulust, or "visual pleasure", for the audience, including the Dada movement writer Walter Serner: "If one looks to where cinema receives its ultimate power, into these strangely flickering eyes that point far back into human history, suddenly it stands there in all its massiveness: visual pleasure." Visually striking sets and makeup were key to the style of the expressionist films that were produced shortly after the First World War.

Cinemas themselves began to be established landmarks in the years immediately before World War I. Before this, German filmmakers would tour with their works, travelling from fairground to fairground. The earliest ongoing cinemas were set up in cafes and pubs by owners who saw a way of attracting more customers. The storefront cinema was called a Kientopp, and this is where films were viewed for the most part before the First World War broke out. The first standalone, dedicated cinema in Germany was opened in Mannheim in 1906, and by 1910, there were over 1000 cinemas operating in Germany. Henny Porten and Asta Nielsen (the latter originally from Denmark) were the first major film stars in Germany.

Prior to 1914, however, many foreign films were imported. In the era of the silent film there were no language boundaries and Danish and Italian films were particularly popular in Germany. The public's desire to see more films with particular actors led to the development in Germany, as elsewhere, of the phenomenon of the film star; the actress Henny Porten was one of the earliest German stars. Public desire to see popular film stories being continued encouraged the production of film serials, especially in the genre of mystery films, which is where the director Fritz Lang began his illustrious career.

The outbreak of World War I and the subsequent boycott of, for example, French films left a noticeable gap in the market. By 1916, there already existed some 2000 fixed venues for movie performances and initially film screenings were supplemented or even replaced by variety turns. In 1917 a process of concentration and partial nationalisation of the German film industry began with the founding of Universum Film AG (UFA), which was partly a reaction to the very effective use that the Allied Powers had found for the new medium for the purpose of propaganda. Under the aegis of the military, so-called Vaterland films were produced, which equalled the Allies' films in the matter of propaganda and disparagement of the enemy. Audiences however did not care to swallow the patriotic medicine without the accompanying sugar of the light-entertainment films which, consequently, Ufa also promoted. The German film industry soon became the largest in Europe.

1918–1933 Weimar Republic

The German film industry, which was protected during the war by the ban on foreign films import, became exposed at the end of the war to the international film industry while having to face an embargo, this time on its own films. Many countries banned the import of German films and audiences themselves were resisting anything that was "German". But the ban imposed on German films involved commercial considerations as well – as an American president of one of the film companies was quoted, "an influx of such films in the United States would throw thousands of our own... out of work, because it would be absolutely impossible for the American producers to compete with the German producers". At home, the German film industry confronted an unstable economic situation and the devaluation of the currency made it difficult for the smaller production companies to function. Film industry financing was a fragile business and expensive productions occasionally led to bankruptcy. In 1925 UFA itself was forced to go into a disadvantageous partnership called Parufamet with the American studios Paramount and MGM, before being taken over by the nationalist industrialist and newspaper owner Alfred Hugenberg in 1927.

Nevertheless, the German film industry enjoyed an unprecedented development – during the 14 years which comprise the Weimar period, an average of 250 film were being produced each year, a total of 3,500 full-feature films. Apart from UFA, about 230 film companies were active in Berlin alone. This industry was attracting producers and directors from all over Europe. The fact that the films were silent and language was not a factor, enabled even foreign actors, like the Danish film star Asta Nielsen or the American Louise Brooks, to be hired even for leading roles. This period can also be noted for new technological developments in film making and experimentation in set design and lighting, led by UFA. Babelsberg Studio, which was incorporated into UFA, expanded massively and gave the German film industry a highly developed infrastructure. Babelsberg remained the centre of German filmmaking for many years, became the largest film studio in Europe and produced most of the films in this "golden era" of German cinema. In essence it was "the German equivalent to Hollywood".

Films about an exaggerated version of Japanese culture that included "geishas, samurai, and Shinto shrines" were popular in Germany during this era.

Due to the unstable economic condition and in an attempt to deal with modest production budgets, filmmakers were trying to reach the largest audience possible and in that, to maximize their revenues. This led to films being made in a vast array of genres and styles.

One of the main film genres associated with the Weimar Republic cinema is German Expressionism which was inspired by the expressionist movement in art. Expressionist movies relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than stark realism to tell their stories. Given the grim mood in post-World War I, it was not surprising that these films focused heavily on crime and horror. The film usually credited with sparking the popularity of expressionism is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), produced by Erich Pommer. The film tells the story of a demented hypnotist who is using a sleepwalker to perform a series of murders. The film featured a dark and twisted visual style – the set was unrealistic with geometric images painted on the floor and shapes in light and shadow cast on walls, the acting was exaggerated and the costumes bizarre. These stylistic elements became trademarks of this cinematic movement. Other notable works of Expressionism are Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), a classic period-piece horror film that remains the first feature-length film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), a Gothic retelling of the Jewish folktale, and Metropolis (1927), a legendary science-fiction epic directed by Fritz Lang. The Expressionist movement began to wane during the mid-1920s, but perhaps the fact that its main creators moved to Hollywood, California, allowed this style to remain influential in world cinema for years to come, particularly in American horror films and film noir and in the works of European directors such as Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman.

Despite its significance, expressionist cinema was not the dominant genre of this era. Many other genres such as period dramas, melodramas, romantic comedies, and films of social and political nature, were much more prevalent and definitely more popular.

The "master" of period-dramas was undoubtedly Ernst Lubitsch. His most notable films of this genre were Madame DuBarry (1919) which portrayed the French Revolution through the eyes of the King of France's mistress, and the film Anna Boleyn (1920) on the tragic end of King Henry VIII's second wife. In these films, Lubitsch presented prominent historic personalities who are caught up by their weaknesses and petty urges and thus, ironically, become responsible for huge historical events. Despite modest budgets, his films included extravagant scenes which were meant to appeal to a wide audience and insure a wide international distribution.

As the genre of expressionism began to diminish, the genre of the New Objectivity (die neue Sachlichkeit) began to take its place. It was influenced by new issues which occupied the public in those years, as the rampant inflation caused deterioration in the economic status of the middle class. These films, often called "street films" or "asphalt films", tried to reflect reality in all its complexity and ugliness. They focused on objects surrounding the characters and cynically symbolized the despair felt by the German people, whose lives were shattered after the war. The most prominent film maker who is associated with this genre is Georg Wilhelm Pabst in his films such as: Joyless Street (1925), Pandora's Box (1929), and The Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927). Pabst is also credited with innovations in film editing, such as reversing the angle of the camera or cutting between two camera angles, which enhanced film continuity and later became standards of the industry.

Pabst is also identified with another genre which branched from the New Objectivity – that of social and political films. These filmmakers dared to confront sensitive and controversial social issues which engaged the public in those days; such as anti-Semitism, prostitution and homosexuality. To a large extent, Weimar cinema was playing a vibrant and important role by leading public debate on those issues. Pabst, in his film Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), tells the story of a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, is thrown out into the street by her family and has to resort to prostitution to survive. As early as 1919, Richard Oswald's film Different from the Others portrayed a man torn between his homosexual tendencies and the moral and social conventions. It is considered to be the first German film to deal with homosexuality and some researchers even believe it to be the first in the world to examine this issue explicitly. That same year, the film Ritual Murder (1919) by Jewish film producer Max Nivelli came to the screen. This film was the first to make the German public aware of the consequences of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. It portrayed a "pogrom" which is carried out against the Jewish inhabitants of a village in Tsarist Russia. In the background, a love story also evolves between a young Russian student and the daughter of the leader of the Jewish community, something that was considered a taboo at the time. Later on, in an attempt to reflect the rapidly growing anti-Semitic atmosphere, Oswald confronted the same issue with his film Dreyfus (1930), which portrayed the 1894 political scandal of the "Dreyfus affair", which until today remains one of the most striking examples of miscarriage of justice and blatant anti-Semitism.

The polarised politics of the Weimar period were also reflected in some of its films. A series of patriotic films about Prussian history, starring Otto Gebühr as Frederick the Great were produced throughout the 1920s and were popular with the nationalist right-wing, who strongly criticised the "asphalt" films' decadence. Another dark chapter of the Weimar period was reflected in Joseph Delmont's film Humanity Unleashed (1920). The film was an adaptation of a novel by the same name, written by Max Glass and published in 1919. The novel described a dark world consumed by disease and war. The filmmakers decided to take the story to a more contemporary context by reflecting the growing fear among the German public of political radicalization. They produced what was to become the first fictional account of the events of January 1919 in Berlin, the so-called "Spartacist Uprising". This film is also considered one of the anti-Bolshevik films of that era.

Another important film genre of the Weimar years was the Kammerspiel or "chamber drama", which was borrowed from the theater and developed by stage director, who would later become a film producer and director himself, Max Reinhardt. This style was in many ways a reaction against the spectacle of expressionism and thus tended to revolve around ordinary people from the lower-middle-class. Films of this genre were often called "instinct" films because they emphasized the impulses and intimate psychology of the characters. The sets were kept to a minimum and there was abundant use of camera movements to add complexity to the rather intimate and simple spaces. Associated with this particular style is also screenwriter Carl Mayer and films such as Murnau's Last Laugh (1924).

Nature films, a genre referred to as Bergfilm, also became popular. Most known in this category are the films by director Arnold Fanck, in which individuals were shown battling against nature in the mountains. Animators and directors of experimental films such as; Lotte Reiniger, Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttmann, were also very active in Germany in the 1920s. Ruttman's experimental documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) epitomised the energy of 1920s Berlin.

The arrival of sound at the very end of the 1920s, produced a final artistic flourish of German film before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. As early as 1918, three inventors came up with the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system and tried to introduce it to the industry between 1922 and 1926. UFA showed an interest, but possibly due to financial difficulties, never made a sound film. But in the late 1920s, sound production and distribution were starting to be adopted by the German film industry and by 1932 Germany had 3,800 cinemas equipped to play sound films. The first filmmakers who experimented with the new technology often shot the film in several versions, using several soundtracks in different languages. The film The Blue Angel (1930), directed by the Austrian Josef von Sternberg and produced by Erich Pommer, was also shot in two versions – German and English, with a different supporting cast in each version. It is considered to be Germany's first "talkie" and will always be remembered as the film that made an international superstar of its lead actress Marlene Dietrich. Other notable early sound films, all from 1931, include Jutzi's adaptation to Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Pabst's Bertolt Brecht adaptation The Threepenny Opera and Lang's M, as well as Hochbaum's Raid in St. Pauli (1932). Brecht was also one of the creators of the explicitly communist film Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was banned soon after its release.

In addition to developments in the industry itself, the Weimar period saw the birth of film criticism as a serious discipline whose practitioners included Rudolf Arnheim in Die Weltbühne and in Film als Kunst (1932), Béla Balázs in Der Sichtbare Mensch (1924), Siegfried Kracauer in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Lotte H. Eisner in the Filmkurier.

1933–1945 Nazi Germany
The uncertain economic and political situation in Weimar Germany had already led to a number of film-makers and performers leaving the country, primarily for the United States; Ernst Lubitsch moved to Hollywood as early as 1923, the Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz in 1926. Some 1,500 directors, producers, actors and other film professionals emigrated in the years after the Nazis came to power. Among them were such key figures as the producer Erich Pommer, the studio head of Ufa, stars Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, and director Fritz Lang. Lang's exodus to America is legendary; it is said that Metropolis so greatly impressed Joseph Goebbels that he asked Lang to become the head of his propaganda film unit. Lang fled to America instead, where he had a long and prosperous career. Many up-and-coming German directors also fled to the U.S., having a major influence on American film as a result. A number of the Universal Horror films of the 1930s were directed by German emigrees, including Karl Freund, Joe May and Robert Siodmak. Directors Edgar Ulmer and Douglas Sirk and the Austrian-born screenwriter (and later director) Billy Wilder also emigrated from Nazi Germany to Hollywood success. Not all those in the film industry threatened by the Nazi regime were able to escape; the actor and director Kurt Gerron, for example, perished in a concentration camp.

Within weeks of the Machtergreifung, Alfred Hugenberg had effectively turned over Ufa to the ends of the Nazis, excluding Jews from employment in the company in March 1933, several months before the foundation in June of the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Chamber of Film), the body of the Nazi state charged with control of the film industry, which marked the official exclusion of Jews and foreigners from employment in the German film industry. As part of the process of Gleichschaltung all film production in Germany was subordinate to the Reichsfilmkammer, which was directly responsible to Goebbel's Propaganda ministry, and all those employed in the industry had to be members of the Reichsfachschaft Film. "Non-Aryan" film professionals and those whose politics or personal life were unacceptable to the Nazis were excluded from the Reichsfachschaft and thus denied employment in the industry. Some 3,000 individuals were affected by this employment ban. In addition, as journalists were also organised as a division of the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels was able to abolish film criticism in 1936 and replace it with Filmbeobachtung (film observation); journalists could only report on the content of a film, not offer judgement on its artistic or other worth.

With the German film industry now effectively an arm of the totalitarian state, no films could be made that were not ostensibly in accord with the views of the ruling regime. However, despite the existence of anti-semitic propaganda works such as The Eternal Jew (1940)—which was a box-office flop—and the more sophisticated but equally anti-semitic Jud Süß (1940), which achieved commercial success at home and elsewhere in Europe, the majority of German films from the National Socialist period were intended principally as works of entertainment. The import of foreign films was legally restricted after 1936 and the German industry, which was effectively nationalised in 1937, had to make up for the missing foreign films (above all American productions). Entertainment also became increasingly important in the later years of World War II when the cinema provided a distraction from Allied bombing and a string of German defeats. In both 1943 and 1944 cinema admissions in Germany exceeded a billion, and the biggest box office hits of the war years were Die große Liebe (1942) and Wunschkonzert (1941), which both combine elements of the musical, wartime romance and patriotic propaganda, Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (1941), a comic musical which was one of the earliest German films in colour, and Vienna Blood (1942), the adaptation of a Johann Strauß comic operetta. Titanic (1943) was another big-budget epic that arguably inspired other films about the ill-fated ocean liner. The importance of the cinema as a tool of the state, both for its propaganda value and its ability to keep the populace entertained, can be seen in the filming history of Veit Harlan's Kolberg (1945), the most expensive film of the Nazi era, for the shooting of which tens of thousands of soldiers were diverted from their military positions to appear as extras.

Despite the emigration of many film-makers and the political restrictions, the period was not without technical and aesthetic innovations, the introduction of Agfacolor film production being a notable example. Technical and aesthetic achievement could also be turned to the specific ends of the Nazi state, most spectacularly in the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), documenting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and Olympia (1938), documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, pioneered techniques of camera movement and editing that have influenced many later films. Both films, particularly Triumph of the Will, remain highly controversial, as their aesthetic merit is inseparable from their propagandising of Nazi ideals.

1945–1989 East Germany
East German cinema initially profited from the fact that much of the country's film infrastructure, notably the former UFA studios, lay in the Soviet occupation zone which enabled film production to get off the ground more quickly than in the Western sectors. The authorities in the Soviet Zone were keen to re-establish the film industry in their sector and an order was issued to re-open cinemas in Berlin in May 1945 within three weeks of German capitulation. The film production company DEFA was founded on 17 May 1946, and took control of the film production facilities in the Soviet Zone which had been confiscated by order of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany in October 1945. A joint-stock company on paper, the majority interest in DEFA was actually held by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) which became the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after 1949, formally placing DEFA as the state-owned monopoly for film production in East Germany. A sister "company", Progress Film, had also been established as a similar monopoly for domestic film distribution, its principal "competition" being Sovexportfilm, which handled distribution of Soviet films.

In total, DEFA produced some 900 feature films during its existence as well as around 800 animated films and over 3000 documentaries and short films. In 1946 DEFA produced The Murderers are Among Us, which was the first German film released after World War II and created the groundwork for the so-called Trümmerfilme, or rubble films, which were filmed amidst the rubble of structures bombed during World War II. Early on, production of East German film was limited due to strict controls imposed by the authorities which restricted the subject-matter of films to topics that directly contributed to the Communist project of the state. Excluding newsreels and educational films, only 50 films were produced between 1948 and 1953. However, in later years numerous films were produced on a variety of themes. DEFA had particular strengths in children's films, notably fairy tale adaptations such as Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella) (1973), but it also attempted other genre works: science-fiction, for example Der schweigende Stern (The Silent Star) (1960), an adaptation of a Stanisław Lem novel, or "red westerns" such as The Sons of the Great Mother Bear (1966) in which, in contrast to the typical American western, the heroes tended to be Native Americans. Many of these genre films were co-productions with other Warsaw Pact countries.

Notable non-genre films produced by DEFA include Wolfgang Staudte's adaptation of Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan (1951); Konrad Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven) (1964), an adaptation of Christa Wolf's novel; Frank Beyer's adaptation of Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar (1975), the only East German film to be nominated for an Oscar; The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973), directed by Heiner Carow from Ulrich Plenzdorf's novel; and Solo Sunny (1980), again the work of Konrad Wolf.

However, film-making in the GDR was always constrained and oriented by the political situation in the country at any given time. Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader in the Weimar period, was the subject of several hagiographical films in the 1950s (Ernst Thälmann, 1954), and although East German filmmaking moved away from this overtly Stalinist approach in the 1960s, filmmakers were still subject to the changing political positions, and indeed the whims, of the SED leadership. For example, DEFA's full slate of contemporary films from 1966 were denied distribution, among them Frank Beyer's Traces of Stones (1966) which was pulled from distribution after three days, not because it was antipathetic to communist principles, but because it showed that such principles, which it fostered, were not put into practice at all times in East Germany. The huge box-office hit The Legend of Paul and Paula was initially threatened with a distribution ban because of its satirical elements and supposedly only allowed a release on the say-so of Party General Secretary Erich Honecker.

In the late 1970s, numerous film-makers left the GDR for the West as a result of restrictions on their work, among them director Egon Günther and actors Angelica Domröse, Eva-Maria Hagen, Katharina Thalbach, Hilmar Thate, Manfred Krug and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Many had been signatories of a 1976 petition opposing the expatriation of socially critical singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann and had had their ability to work restricted as a result.

In the final years of the GDR, the availability of television and the programming and films on television broadcasts reaching into the GDR via the uncontrollable airwaves, reduced the influence of DEFA productions, although its continuing role in producing shows for East German television channel remained. Following the Wende, DEFA had ceased production altogether, and its studios and equipment was sold off by the Treuhand in 1992, but its intellectual property rights were handed to the charitable DEFA-Stiftung (DEFA Foundation) which exploits these rights in conjunction with a series of private companies, especially the quickly privatized Progress Film GmbH, which has issued several East German films with English subtitles since the mid-1990s.

1945–1960 Reconstruction
The occupation and reconstruction of Germany by the Four Powers in the period immediately after the end of World War II brought a major and long-lasting change to the economic conditions under which the industry in Germany had previously operated. The holdings of Ufa were confiscated by the Allies and, as part of the process of decartelisation, licences to produce films were shared between a range of much smaller companies. In addition, the Occupation Statute of 1949, which granted partial independence to the newly created Federal Republic of Germany, specifically forbade the imposition of import quotas to protect German film production from foreign competition, the result of lobbying by the American industry as represented by the MPAA.

Amidst the devastation of the Stunde Null year of 1945 cinema attendance was unsurprisingly down to a fraction of its wartime heights, but already by the end of the decade it had reached levels that exceeded the pre-war period. For the first time in many years, German audiences had free access to cinema from around the world and in this period the films of Charlie Chaplin remained popular, as were melodramas from the United States. Nonetheless, the share of the film market for German films in this period and into the 1950s remained relatively large, taking up some 40 percent of the total market. American films took up around 30 percent of the market despite having around twice as many films in distribution as the German industry in the same time frame.

Many of the German films of the immediate post-war period can be characterised as belonging to the genre of the Trümmerfilm (literally "rubble film"). These films show strong affinities with the work of Italian neorealists, not least Roberto Rossellini's neorealist trilogy which included Germany Year Zero (1948), and are concerned primarily with day-to-day life in the devastated Germany and an initial reaction to the events of the Nazi period (the full horror of which was first experienced by many in documentary footage from liberated concentration camps). Such films include Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are among us) (1946), the first film made in post-war Germany (produced in the soviet sector), and Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Liebe 47 (Love 47) (1949), an adaptation of Wolfgang Borchert's play Draußen vor der Tür.

Despite the advent of a regular television service in the Federal Republic in 1952, cinema attendances continued to grow through much of the 1950s, reaching a peak of 817.5 million visits in 1956. The majority of the films of this period set out to do no more than entertain the audience and had few pretensions to artistry or active engagement with social issues. The defining genre of the period was arguably the Heimatfilm ("homeland film"), in which morally simplistic tales of love and family were played out in a rural setting, often in the mountains of Bavaria, Austria or Switzerland. In their day Heimatfilms were of little interest to more scholarly film critics, but in recent years they have been the subject of study in relation to what they say about the culture of West Germany in the years of the Wirtschaftswunder. Other film genres typical of this period were adaptations of operettas, hospital melodramas, comedies and musicals. Many films were remakes of earlier Ufa productions.

Rearmament and the founding of the Bundeswehr in 1955 brought with it a wave of war films which tended to depict the ordinary German soldiers of World War II as brave and apolitical. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that German films of the 1950s showed the average German soldier as a heroic victim: noble, tough, brave, honourable, and patriotic while fighting hard in a senseless war for a regime that he did not care for. The 08/15 film trilogy of 1954–55 concerns a sensitive young German soldier who would rather play the piano than fight, and who fights on the Eastern Front without understanding why; however, no mention is made of the genocidal aspects of Germany's war in East. The last of the 08/15 films ends with Germany occupied by a gang of American soldiers portrayed as bubble-gum chewing, slack-jawed morons and uncultured louts, totally inferior in every respect to the heroic German soldiers shown in the 08/15 films. The only exception is the Jewish American officer, who is shown as both hyper-intelligent and very unscrupulous, which Bartov noted seems to imply that the real tragedy of World War II was the Nazis did not get a chance to exterminate all of the Jews, who have now returned with Germany's defeat to once more exploit the German people.

In The Doctor of Stalingrad (1958) dealing with German POWs in the Soviet Union, Germans are portrayed as more civilized, humane and intelligent than the Soviets, who are shown for the most part as Mongol savages who brutalized the German POWs. One of the German POWs successfully seduces the beautiful and tough Red Army Captain Alexandra Kasalniskaya (Eva Bartok) who prefers him to the sadistic camp commandant, which as Bartov comments also is meant to show that even in defeat, German men were more sexually virile and potent than their Russian counterparts. In Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, do you want to live forever?) of 1959, which deals with the Battle of Stalingrad, the focus is on celebrating the heroism of the German soldier in that battle, who are shown as valiantly holding out against overwhelming odds with no mention at all of what those soldiers were fighting for, namely National Socialist ideology or the Holocaust. This period also saw a number of films that depicted the military resistance to Hitler. In Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) of 1954, a Luftwaffe general named Harras loosely modeled after Ernst Udet, appears at first to be cynical fool, but turns out to an anti-Nazi who is secretly sabotaging the German war effort by designing faulty planes. Bartov commented that in this film, the German officer corps is shown as a group of fundamentally noble and civilized men who happened to be serving an evil regime made up of a small gang of gangsterish misfits totally unrepresentative of German society, which served to exculpate both the officer corps and by extension Germany society. Bartov wrote that no German film of the 1950s showed the deep commitment felt by many German soldiers to National Socialism, the utter ruthless way the German Army fought the war and the mindless nihilist brutality of the later Wehrmacht. Bartov wrote that German film-makers liked to show the heroic last stand of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, but none has so far showed the 6th Army's massive co-operation with the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Soviet Jews in 1941.

Even though there are countless film adaptations of Edgar Wallace novels worldwide, the crime films produced by the German company Rialto Film between 1959 and 1972 are the best-known of those, to the extent that they form their own subgenre known as Krimis (abbreviation for the German term "Kriminalfilm" (or "Kriminalroman"). Other Edgar Wallace adaptations in a similar style were made by the Germans Artur Brauner and Kurt Ulrich, and the British producer Harry Alan Towers.

The international significance of the West German film industry of the 1950s could no longer measure up to that of France, Italy, or Japan. German films were only rarely distributed internationally as they were perceived as provincial. International co-productions of the kind which were becoming common in France and Italy tended to be rejected by German producers (Schneider 1990:43). However a few German films and film-makers did achieve international recognition at this time, among them Bernhard Wicki's Oscar-nominated Die Brücke (The Bridge) (1959), and the actresses Hildegard Knef and Romy Schneider.

1960–1970 cinema in crisis

In the late 1950s, the growth in cinema attendance of the preceding decade first stagnated and then went into freefall throughout the 1960s. By 1969 West German cinema attendance at 172.2 million visits per year was less than a quarter of its 1956 post-war peak. As a consequence of this, numerous German production and distribution companies went out of business in the 1950s and 1960s and cinemas across the Federal Republic closed their doors; the number of screens in West Germany almost halved between the beginning and the end of the decade.

Initially, the crisis was perceived as a problem of overproduction. Consequently, the German film industry cut back on production. 123 German movies were produced in 1955, only 65 in 1965. However, many German film companies followed the 1960s trends of international co-productions with Italy and Spain in such genres as spaghetti westerns and Eurospy films with films shot in those nations or in Yugoslavia that featured German actors in the casts.

The roots of the problem lay deeper in changing economic and social circumstances. Average incomes in the Federal Republic rose sharply and this opened up alternative leisure activities to compete with cinema-going. At this time too, television was developing into a mass medium that could compete with the cinema. In 1953 there were only 1,000,000 sets in West Germany; by 1962 there were 7 million (Connor 1990:49) (Hoffman 1990:69).

The majority of films produced in the Federal Republic in the 1960s were genre works: westerns, especially the series of movies adapted from Karl May's popular genre novels which starred Pierre Brice as the Apache Winnetou and Lex Barker as his white blood brother Old Shatterhand; thrillers and crime films, notably a series of Edgar Wallace movies from Rialto Film in which Klaus Kinski, Heinz Drache, Karin Dor and Joachim Fuchsberger were among the regular players. The traditional Krimi films expanded into series based on German pulp fiction heroes such as Jerry Cotton played by George Nader and Kommissar X played by Tony Kendall and Brad Harris. West Germany also made several horror films including ones starring Christopher Lee. The two genres were combined in the return of Doctor Mabuse in a series of several films of the early 1960s.

At the end of the 1960s softcore sex films, both the relatively serious Aufklärungsfilme (sex education films) of Oswalt Kolle and such exploitation films as Schulmädchen-Report (Schoolgirl Report) (1970) and its successors were produced into the 1970s. Such movies were commercially successful and often enjoyed international distribution, but won little acclaim from critics.

1960–1980 New German Cinema
In the 1960s more than three-quarters of the regular cinema audience were lost as consequence of the rising popularity of TV sets at home. As a reaction to the artistic and economic stagnation of German cinema, a group of young film-makers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto on 28 February 1962. This call to arms, which included Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Peter Schamoni and Franz-Josef Spieker among its signatories, provocatively declared "Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen" ("The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema"). Other up-and-coming filmmakers allied themselves to this Oberhausen group, among them Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Jean-Marie Straub, Wim Wenders, Werner Schroeter and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in their rejection of the existing German film industry and their determination to build a new cinema founded on artistic and social measures rather than commercial success. Most of these directors organized themselves in, or partially co-operated with, the film production and distribution company Filmverlag der Autoren established in 1971, which throughout the 1970s brought forth a number of critically acclaimed films. Rosa von Praunheim, who formed the German lesbian and gay movement with his film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), also plays an important role.

Despite the foundation of the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Film Committee) in 1965, set up under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of the Interior to support new German films financially, the directors of this New German Cinema were consequently often dependent on money from television. Young filmmakers had the opportunity to test their mettle in such programmes as the stand-alone drama and documentary series Das kleine Fernsehspiel (The Little TV Play) or the television films of the crime series Tatort. However, the broadcasters sought TV premieres for the films which they had supported financially, with theatrical showings only occurring later. As a consequence, such films tended to be unsuccessful at the box office.

This situation changed after 1974 when the Film-Fernseh-Abkommen (Film and Television Accord) was agreed between the Federal Republic's main broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, and the German Federal Film Board (a government body created in 1968 to support film-making in Germany). This accord, which has been repeatedly extended up to the present day, provides for the television companies to make available an annual sum to support the production of films which are suitable for both theatrical distribution and television presentation. (The amount of money provided by the public broadcasters has varied between 4.5 and 12.94 million euros per year. Under the terms of the accord, films produced using these funds can only be screened on television 24 months after their theatrical release. They may appear on video or DVD no sooner than six months after cinema release. Nevertheless, the New German Cinema found it difficult to attract a large domestic or international audience.

The socially critical films of the New German Cinema strove to delineate themselves from what had gone before and the works of auteur film-makers such as Kluge and Fassbinder are examples of this, although Fassbinder in his use of stars from German cinema history also sought a reconciliation between the new cinema and the old. In addition, a distinction is sometimes drawn between the avantgarde "Young German Cinema" of the 1960s and the more accessible "New German Cinema" of the 1970s. For their influences the new generation of film-makers looked to Italian neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague and the British New Wave but combined this eclectically with references to the well-established genres of Hollywood cinema. The New German Cinema dealt with contemporary German social problems in a direct way; the Nazi past, the plight of the Gastarbeiter ("guest workers"), and modern social developments, were all subjects prominent in New German Cinema films.

Films such as Kluge's Abschied von Gestern (1966), Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) found critical approval. Often the work of these auteurs was first recognised abroad rather than in Germany itself. The work of post-war Germany's leading novelists Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass provided source material for the adaptations The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) (by Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta) and The Tin Drum (1979) (by Schlöndorff alone) respectively, the latter becoming the first German film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The New German Cinema also allowed for female directors to come to the fore and for the development of a feminist cinema which encompassed the works of directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jutta Brückner, Helke Sander and Cristina Perincioli.

German production companies have been quite commonly involved in expensive French and Italian productions from Spaghetti Westerns to French comic book adaptations.

1980–1989 popular productions

Having achieved some of its goals, among them the establishment of state funding for the film industry and renewed international recognition for German films, the New German Cinema had begun to show signs of fatigue by the 1980s, even though many of its proponents continued to enjoy individual success.

Among the commercial successes for German films of the 1980s were the Otto film series beginning in 1985 starring comedian Otto Waalkes, Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of The NeverEnding Story (1984), and the internationally successful Das Boot (1981), which still holds the record for most Academy Award nominations for a German film (six). Other notable film-makers who came to prominence in the 1980s include producer Bernd Eichinger and directors Doris Dörrie, Uli Edel, and Loriot.

Away from the mainstream, the splatter film director Jörg Buttgereit came to prominence in the 1980s. The development of arthouse cinemas (Programmkinos) from the 1970s onwards provided a venue for the works of less mainstream film-makers like Herbert Achternbusch, Hark Bohm, Dominik Graf, Oliver Herbrich, Rosa von Praunheim or Christoph Schlingensief.

From the mid-1980s the spread of videocassette recorders and the arrival of private TV channels such as RTL Television provided new competition for theatrical film distribution. Cinema attendance, having rallied slightly in the late 1970s after an all-time low of 115.1 million visits in 1976, dropped sharply again from the mid-1980s to end at just 101.6 million visits in 1989. However, the availability of a back catalogue of films on video also allowed for a different relationship between the viewer and an individual film, while private TV channels brought new money into the film industry and provided a launch pad from which new talent could later move into film.

1990–Modern Germany

Today's biggest German production studios include Babelsberg Studio, Bavaria Film, Constantin Film and UFA. Film releases such as Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer, Good Bye Lenin! by Wolfgang Becker, Head-On by Fatih Akin, Perfume by Tom Tykwer and The Lives of Others by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, have arguably managed to recapture a provocative and innovative nature. Movies like The Baader Meinhof Complex produced by Bernd Eichinger achieved some popular success.

Notable directors working in German currently include Sönke Wortmann, Caroline Link (winner of an Academy Award), Romuald Karmakar, Dani Levy, Hans-Christian Schmid, Andreas Dresen, Dennis Gansel and Uli Edel as well as comedy directors Michael Herbig and Til Schweiger.

Internationally, German filmmakers such as Roland Emmerich or Wolfgang Petersen or Uwe Boll built successful careers as directors and producers. Hans Zimmer, a film composer, has become one of the world's most acclaimed producers of movie scores. Michael Ballhaus became a renowned cinematographer.

Germany has a long tradition of cooperation with the European-based film industry, which started as early as during the 1960s. Since 1990 the number of international projects financed and co-produced by German filmmakers has expanded.

The new millennium since 2000 has seen a general resurgence of the German film industry, with a higher output and improved returns at the German box office.

The collapse of the GDR had a large effect on the German cinema industry. The viewer count increased with the new population's access to western movies. The movies produced in the United States were the most popular, due to the fact that the market was dominated by them and the production was more advanced than Germany's. Some other genres that were popular consisted of Romantic Comedies, and Social Commentaries. Wolfgang Petersen and Roland Emmerich both established international success.

Internationally, German productions are benefitting from streaming. Their global market share is rising. Domestically, the German movies improved their market share of about 16% in 1996 to around 30% in 2021., so the movie culture is partly recognized to be underfunded, problem laden and rather inward looking.

Film funding
The main production incentive provided by governmental authorities is the Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF) (German Federal Film Fund). The DFFF is a grant given by the Staatsministerin für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media). To receive the grant a producer has to fulfill different requirements including a cultural eligibility test. The fund offers 50 million euros a year to film producers and or co-producers and grants can amount to up to 20% of the approved German production costs. At least 25% the production costs must be spent in Germany, or only 20%, if the production costs are higher than 20 million euros. The DFFF has been established in 2007 and supported projects in all categories and genres.

In 2015, the Deutsche Filmförderungsfond was reduced from 60 million euros to 50 million euros. To compensate, Finance minister Gabriel announced that the difference will be made up from the budget of the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action). For the first time in Germany high-profile tv series and digital filmmaking will be funded at a federal level in the same manner as feature films. Funding is also increasingly flowing to international co-productions.

In 1979, the German states also began to establish funding institutions, often with the intention of supporting their own production locations. Today, film funding by the federal states makes up the largest share of film funding in Germany. A total of more than 200 million euros in grants are distributed annually, with an upward trend.

The history of film funding began in Germany with the founding of the UFA GmbH (1917), which was to produce pro-German propaganda films - equipped with funds from industry and banks. During the period of National Socialism (1933–1945), the state indirectly promoted the financing of film projects by establishing the Filmkreditbank GmbH (FKB) (Film Credit Bank).

After the end of World War II, many feature films were initially supported by federal guarantees. However, film funding in its current form did not develop until the 1950s, when television began to supplant motion pictures. In 1967, a film funding law was passed for the first time. The Berlin-based Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA) (Film Funding Agency) was the first major funding institution to be founded in 1968.

Critics accuse film funding in Germany of being institutionally fragmented, making it virtually impossible to coordinate all measures, which would ultimately benefit the quality of productions. They also say that a blanket distribution of grants stifles the incentive to produce films that recoup their production costs.

Film funding institutions
Film funding in Germany is provided, among others, by the following institutions:

Federal

 * Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF) (German Federal Film Fund) of the Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media)
 * Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA) (Film Funding Agency), since 1968
 * Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board of Trustees for Young German Film)

Regional

 * MFG Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg, since 1995
 * FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, seit 1996
 * Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, since 1994
 * Filmbüro Bremen
 * MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein
 * Filmbüro Hessen
 * Hessische Filmförderung
 * Film- und Medienbüro Niedersachsen
 * Nordmedia – Film- und Mediengesellschaft Niedersachsen/Bremen mbH
 * Film- und Medienstiftung NRW
 * Filmbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen
 * Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, since 1998
 * MV Filmförderung, since 2020
 * Filmbüro Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, until 2020
 * Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz für Kultur
 * Saarländisches Filmbüro, until 1998
 * Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Medienstandortes Saarland
 * Filmverband Sachsen
 * Kulturelle Filmförderung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt through the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt
 * Filmbüro Schleswig-Holstein
 * Kulturelle Filmförderung Schleswig-Holstein
 * Kulturelle Filmförderung Thüringen

Lokal:

 * Filmbüro Franken (City of Nürnberg)
 * Förderverein Filmkultur Bonn

Festival

The Berlin International Film Festival, also called Berlinale, is one of the world's leading film festivals and most reputable media events. It is held in Berlin, Germany. Founded in West Berlin in 1951, the festival has been celebrated annually in February since 1978. With 274,000 tickets sold and 487,000 admissions it is considered the largest publicly attended film festival worldwide. Up to 400 films are shown in several sections, representing a comprehensive array of the cinematic world. Around twenty films compete for the awards called the Golden and Silver Bears. Since 2001 the director of the festival has been Dieter Kosslick.

The festival, the EFM and other satellite events are attended by around 20,000 professionals from over 130 countries. More than 4200 journalists are responsible for the media exposure in over 110 countries. At high-profile feature film premieres, movie stars and celebrities are present at the red carpet.

German Film Academy
The Deutsche Filmakademie was founded in 2003 in Berlin and aims to provide native filmmakers a forum for discussion and a way to promote the reputation of German cinema through publications, presentations, discussions and regular promotion of the subject in the schools.

Awards
Since 2005, the winners of the Deutscher Filmpreis, also known as the Lolas are elected by the members of the Deutsche Filmakademie. With a cash prize of three million euros it is the most highly endowed German cultural award.

Film schools

Several institutions, both government run and private, provide formal education in various aspects of filmmaking.

 * Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) Berlin
 * Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HfbK) Hamburg
 * Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, Ludwigsburg
 * International Film School Cologne, Cologne
 * University of Television and Film Munich, Munich
 * Filmuniversität Babelsberg, Potsdam

title: Cinema of Germany


text:
Frivolous litigation

Frivolous litigation is the use of legal processes with apparent disregard for the merit of one's own arguments. It includes presenting an argument with reason to know that it would certainly fail, or acting without a basic level of diligence in researching the relevant law and facts. That an argument was lost does not imply the argument was frivolous; a party may present an argument with a low chance of success, so long as it proceeds from applicable law.

Frivolous litigation may be based on absurd legal theories, may involve a superabundance or repetition of motions or additional suits, may be uncivil or harassing to the court, or may claim extreme remedies. A claim or defense may be frivolous because it had no underlying justification in fact, or because it was not presented with an argument for a reasonable extension or reinterpretation of the law. A claim may be deemed frivolous because existing laws unequivocally prohibit such a claim, such as a Good Samaritan law.

In the United States, Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and similar state rules require that an attorney perform a due diligence investigation concerning the factual basis for any claim or defense. Jurisdictions differ on whether a claim or defense can be frivolous if the attorney acted in good faith. Because such a defense or claim wastes the court's and the other parties' time, resources and legal fees, sanctions may be imposed by a court upon the party or the lawyer who presents the frivolous defense or claim. The law firm may also be sanctioned, or even held in contempt.

US Federal statutes and rules of court penalizing frivolous litigation
In the United States Tax Court, frivolous arguments may result in a penalty of up to $25,000 under. Similarly, section 7482 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals may impose penalties in which the taxpayer's appeal of a U.S. Tax Court decision was "maintained primarily for delay" or where "the taxpayer's position in the appeal is frivolous or groundless." A common example, as shown below, is an argument based on tax protestor claims.

In a noncriminal case in a U.S. District Court, a litigant (or a litigant's attorney) who presents any pleading, written motion or other paper to the court is required, under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, to certify that, to the best of the presenter's knowledge and belief, the legal contentions "are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law or the establishment of new law". Monetary civil penalties for violation of this rule may in some cases be imposed on the litigant or the attorney under Rule 11.

In one case, the Seventh Circuit Court issued an order giving such an attorney "14 days to show cause why he should not be fined $10,000 for his frivolous arguments". A similar rule penalizing frivolous litigation applies in U.S. Bankruptcy Court under Rule 9011.

The U.S. Congress has enacted section 1912 of Title 28 of the U.S.C. providing that in the U.S. Supreme Court and in the U.S. Courts of Appeals where litigation by the losing party has caused damage to the prevailing party, the court may impose a requirement that the losing party pay the prevailing party for those damages.

Litigants who represent themselves (in forma pauperis and pro se) sometimes make frivolous arguments due to their limited knowledge of the law and procedure. The particular tendency of prisoners to bring baseless lawsuits led to passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which limits the ability of prisoners to bring actions without payment.

Court treatment of frivolous arguments
An example of a Court's treatment of frivolous arguments is found in the case of Crain v. Commissioner, 737 F.2d 1417 (1984), from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit:

"Glenn Crain appeals from the dismissal of his Tax Court petition challenging the constitutional authority of that body and defying the jurisdiction of the Internal Revenue Service to levy taxes on his income. Crain asserts that he 'is not subject to the jurisdiction, taxation, nor regulation of the state,' that the 'Internal Revenue Service, Incorporated' lacks authority to exercise the judicial power of the United States, that the Tax Court is unconstitutionally attempting to exercise Article III powers, and that jurisdiction over his person has never been affirmatively proven.

We perceive no need to refute these arguments with somber reasoning and copious citation of precedent; to do so might suggest that these arguments have some colorable merit. The constitutionality of our income tax system—including the role played within that system by the Internal Revenue Service and the Tax Court—has long been established. We affirm the dismissal of Crain's spurious 'petition' and the assessment of a penalty imposed by the Tax Court for instituting a frivolous proceeding. .

The government asks us to assess penalties against Crain for bringing this frivolous appeal, as is authorized by Fed. R. App. P. 38. In Parker v. C. I. R., 724 F. 2d 469, 472 (5th Cir. 1984), we sounded 'a cautionary note to those who would persistently raise arguments against the income tax which have been put to rest for years. The full range of sanctions in Rule 38 hereafter shall be summoned in response to a totally frivolous appeal.'

We are sensitive to the need for the courts to remain open to all who seek in good faith to invoke the protection of law. An appeal that lacks merit is not always—or often—frivolous. However, we are not obliged to suffer in silence the filing of baseless, insupportable appeals presenting no colorable claims of error and designed only to delay, obstruct, or incapacitate the operations of the courts or any other governmental authority. Crain's present appeal is of this sort. It is a hodgepodge of unsupported assertions, irrelevant platitudes, and legalistic gibberish. The government should not have been put to the trouble of responding to such spurious arguments, nor this court to the trouble of 'adjudicating' this meritless appeal.

Accordingly, we grant the government's request. The United States shall recover from appellant Crain twice its cost of this appeal. Additionally, we assess against Crain a damage award of $2000 in favor of the appellee United States."

Impact upon filing attorney
Filing a claim that is ultimately deemed frivolous can be highly damaging to the attorney so filing. Most frivolous lawsuits that are successful are filed without an attorney. Attorney Daniel Evans writes:

"[W]hen a judge calls an argument 'ridiculous' or 'frivolous,' it is absolutely the worst thing the judge could say. It means that the person arguing the position has absolutely no idea of what he is doing, and has completely wasted everyone's time. It doesn't mean that the case wasn't well argued, or that judge simply decided for the other side, it means that there was no other side. The argument was absolutely, positively, incompetent. The judge is not telling you that you were 'wrong.' The judge is telling you that you are out of your mind."

Washington v. Alaimo
In Washington v. Alaimo the court listed more than seventy-five frivolous "motions" (a request for a court to issue an order), all of which required the attention of the Court, including the following:
 * "Motion to Behoove an Inquisition"
 * "Motion for Judex Delegatus"
 * "Motion for Restoration of Sanity"
 * "Motion for Deinstitutionalization"
 * "Motion for Publicity"
 * "Motion to Vacate Jurisdiction"
 * "Motion for Cesset processus"
 * "Motion for Nunc pro tunc"
 * "Motion for Psychoanalysis"
 * "Motion to Impeach Judge Alaimo"
 * "Motion to Renounce Citizenship"
 * "Motion to Exhume Body of Alex Hodgson"
 * "Motion to Invoke and Execute Rule 15 —Retroactive Note: The Court's School Days are Over"
 * "Motion for Skin Change Operation"
 * "Motion for Catered Food Services"
 * "Motion to Kiss My Ass"

Washington, an inmate from Georgia, was eventually prohibited from filing any future lawsuits or motions in any district court unless he first posted a contempt bond of $1,500. To be deemed frivolous, a litigant's arguments must strike beyond the pale.

Pearson v. Chung
In 2005, in Pearson v. Chung, Roy Pearson, a Washington, D.C. judge, sued a dry cleaning business for $67 million for allegedly losing a pair of his pants. This case has been cited as an example of frivolous litigation. According to Pearson, the dry cleaners lost his pants (which he brought in for a $10.50 alteration) and refused his demands for a large refund. Pearson believed that a sign saying "Satisfaction Guaranteed" in the window of the shop legally entitled him to a refund for the cost of the pants, estimated at $1,000. The $54 million total also included $2.0 million in "mental distress" and $15,000 which he estimated to be the cost of renting a car every weekend to go to another dry cleaners. The court ultimately ruled against Pearson, whose judgeship was subsequently not renewed due to this case and several other actions he filed during his divorce, which were found to demonstrate a lack of "judicial temperament".

Jonathan Lee Riches
In 2010, federal prosecutors asked a judge to help them stop Jonathan Lee Riches from filing any more lawsuits, arguing that his frequent filings were frivolous.

Gloria Dawn Ironbox
In July 2013, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario dismissed a complaint laid by a man posing as Gloria Dawn Ironbox, a fictional feminist attorney on television series Family Guy. The claimant alleged that a marketing scheme by A&W Restaurants was "heteronormative", "phallocentric" and promoted "cross-sectional hegemony". Citing feelings of distress and alienation over the lack of "LGBT" representation in A&W naming conventions, he demanded $50,000 in damages for injury to dignity and self-respect as well as an order requiring A&W to adopt naming conventions which include non-traditional families. One such product the claimant demanded was the "Pillow Biter", described by the claimant as "a large, dark slab of meat stuffed firmly between two, white, clenched buns".

Sirgiorgio Sanford Clardy
In January 2014, Sirgiorgio Sanford Clardy, who is serving a 100-year prison sentence for a beating of a prostitute and her customer, filed a $100 million lawsuit against Nike, in which he claimed that Nike was partially responsible for the assault he committed. Clardy said that Nike should have placed a label in his Jordan shoes warning consumers that they could be used as a dangerous weapon. He was wearing a pair when he repeatedly stomped the face of a client who was trying to leave a Portland hotel without paying Clardy's prostitute in June 2012. This lawsuit gained "considerable attention across the nation and the world".

Romine v. Stanton
In March 2016, James Romine, one-half of the independent video games developer Digital Homicide Studios, sued video game critic James Stephanie Sterling for criticizing the games published under his studios' name, seeking $10 million in damages for "assault, libel, and slander" to Romine's business. He claimed that Sterling's coverage of his studio's game The Slaughtering Grounds as "Worst Game of 2014 Contender" was not protected under fair use law because he did not believe it was "fair" criticism. An additional lawsuit for $18 million was filed against 100 users on the Steam gaming platform for criticizing their games and business practices, which he had interpreted as "harassment". The judge issued a subpoena against Valve to disclose the identities of those 100 users. This resulted in Valve removing all published games from Digital Homicide Studios. In addition, Romine filed the lawsuit as an individual and not as a corporation, so such criticism was protected under the right to freedom of speech. The case was dismissed with prejudice in February 2017. This case is also an example of abuse of DMCA takedown requests on YouTube.

Erik Estavillo vs Twitch, Inc
In June 2020, Erik Estavillo filed a lawsuit against Twitch, claiming that the streaming platform was responsible for his sex addiction, with damages of $25 million, which was to be split between him, Twitch Prime subscribers, and COVID-19 charities. He claimed that Twitch's "twisted programming and net code" made it "nearly impossible to use Twitch without being exposed to sexual content". Other claims included him "chaffing his penis every day with [a fleshlight]" and causing a fire by ejaculating on his computer monitor. The filing contained pictures of the female Twitch streamers (such as Amouranth and Pokimane), who he wanted banned from the platform. Estavillo had previously sued Blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. All of these lawsuits were dismissed with prejudice. This case was dismissed as frivolous in January of 2021.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Frivolous litigation


text:
Fiddle

A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres, including classical music. Although in many cases violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a "brighter" tone than the deep tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional (folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught "by ear" rather than via written music.

Fiddling is the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians who play it. Among musical styles, fiddling tends to produce rhythms that focus on dancing, with associated quick note changes, whereas classical music tends to contain more vibrato and sustained notes. Fiddling is also open to improvisation and embellishment with ornamentation at the player's discretion, in contrast to orchestral performances, which adhere to the composer's notes to reproduce a work faithfully. It is less common for a classically trained violinist to play folk music, but today, many fiddlers (e.g., Alasdair Fraser, Brittany Haas, and Alison Krauss ) have classical training.

History
The first recorded reference to the bowed lira was in the 9th century by the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. 911); in his lexicographical discussion of instruments he cited the lira (lūrā) as a typical instrument of the Byzantines and equivalent to the rabāb played in the Islamic Empires.

The medieval fiddle emerged in 10th-century Europe, deriving from the Byzantine lira (λύρα, lira, lyre), a bowed string instrument of the Byzantine Empire and ancestor of most European bowed instruments.

Lira spread widely westward to Europe; in the 11th and 12th centuries European writers use the terms fiddle and lira interchangeably when referring to bowed instruments.

West African fiddlers have accompanied singing and dancing with one-string gourd fiddles since the twelfth century, and many black musicians in America learned on similar homemade fiddles before switching over to the European violin. As early as the mid-1600s, black fiddlers ("exquisite performers on three-stringed fiddles") were playing for both black and white dancers at street celebrations in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (New York City), and by 1690 slave fiddlers were routinely providing the music at plantation balls in Virginia.

Etymology
The etymology of fiddle is uncertain: it probably derives from the Latin fidula, which is the early word for violin, or it may be natively Germanic.

The name appears to be related to Icelandic Fiðla and also Old English fiðele. A native Germanic ancestor of fiddle might even be the ancestor of the early Romance form of violin.

In medieval times, fiddle also referred to a predecessor of today's violin. Like the violin, it tended to have four strings, but came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Another family of instruments that contributed to the development of the modern fiddle are the viols, which are held between the legs and played vertically, and have fretted fingerboards.

Ensembles
In performance, a solo fiddler, or one or two with a group of other instrumentalists, is the norm, though twin fiddling is represented in some North American, Scandinavian, Scottish and Irish styles. Following the folk revivals of the second half of the 20th century, it became common for less formal situations to find large groups of fiddlers playing together—see for example the Calgary Fiddlers, Swedish Spelmanslag folk-musician clubs, and the worldwide phenomenon of Irish sessions.

Orchestral violins, on the other hand, are commonly grouped in sections, or "chairs". These contrasting traditions may be vestiges of historical performance settings: large concert halls where violins were played required more instruments, before electronic amplification, than did more intimate dance halls and houses that fiddlers played in.

The difference was likely compounded by the different sounds expected of violin music and fiddle music. Historically, the majority of fiddle music was dance music, while violin music had either grown out of dance music or was something else entirely. Violin music came to value a smoothness that fiddling, with its dance-driven clear beat, did not always follow. In situations that required greater volume, a fiddler (as long as they kept the beat) could push their instrument harder than could a violinist. Various fiddle traditions have differing values.

Scottish, with cello
In the very late 20th century, a few artists successfully reconstructed the Scottish tradition of violin and "big fiddle", or cello. Notable recorded examples include Iain Fraser and Christine Hanson, Amelia Kaminski and Christine Hanson's Bonnie Lasses, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas' Fire and Grace, and Tim Macdonald and Jeremy Ward's The Wilds.

Balkan, with kontra
Hungarian, Slovenian, and Romanian fiddle players are often accompanied by a three-stringed variant of the viola—known as the kontra—and by double bass, with cimbalom and clarinet being less standard yet still common additions to a band. In Hungary, a three-stringed viola variant with a flat bridge, called the kontra or háromhúros brácsa makes up part of a traditional rhythm section in Hungarian folk music. The flat bridge lets the musician play three-string chords. A three-stringed double bass variant is also used.

Styles
To a greater extent than classical violin playing, fiddle playing is characterized by a huge variety of ethnic or folk music traditions, each of which has its own distinctive sound.

Great Britain

 * English folk music fiddling, including
 * Northumbrian fiddle style, which features "seconding", an improvised harmony part played by a second fiddler.
 * Lakeland or Cumbrian fiddling has a repertoire largely based upon hornpipes but also incorporates reels and jigs.
 * Scottish fiddling, including:
 * Shetland fiddling, which includes trowie tunes said to come from peerie folk. The style is characterised by "ringing strings" and syncopated rhythms.
 * A North East (particularly Aberdeenshire and Moray) tradition strongly influenced by baroque violin technique with staccato and Scotch snap bowing techniques and double stops.
 * A Scottish Borders tradition with a repertoire heavy in hornpipes and with heavy use of double stops.
 * A Highland tradition, highly influenced by the ornamentation and mixolydian scale of the Great Highland Bagpipe, as well as smoother bowing than other Scottish fiddle styles and a swinging of the 6/8 jig rhythm.
 * A West Highland and Hebridean Tradition, very closely related to the Highland tradition with major influence from the Gaelic song tradition.
 * An Orkney tradition with simpler bowing and ornamentation but with tunes featuring accidentals.
 * Welsh fiddling (Welsh Ffidil; see Ar Log), a recently revived tradition.

Ireland

 * Irish folk music fiddling including:
 * Donegal fiddling from the northwest in Ulster, which features mazurkas and a Scottish-influenced repertoire including Strathspey and Highland Fling dances. Fiddlers tend to play fast and make heavy use of staccato bowing and may from time to time "play the bass", meaning a second fiddler may play a melody an octave below where a first fiddler is playing it.
 * Sligo fiddling from northern Connacht, which like Donegal fiddling tends to be fast, but with a bouncier feel to the bowing.
 * Galway fiddling southern Connacht, which is slower than Sligo or Donegal traditions, with a heavier emphasis on ornamentation. Tunes are occasionally played in Eb or Bb to match the tonality of flat pipes.
 * Clare fiddling from northern Munster, which tends to be played near the slower Galway tempo yet with a greater emphasis on the melody itself rather than ornamentation.
 * Sliabh Luachra fiddling from the southwest in Munster, characterized by a unique repertoire of polkas and slides, the use of double stops and drones, as well as playing the melody in two octaves as in Donegal.

Nordic countries

 * Norwegian fiddling (including Hardanger fiddling; see also Bygdedans and Gammaldans), including traditions from:
 * Røros and Nord-Noreg styles, both using the standard fiddle.
 * Finnskogen, using the standard fiddle, but featuring some flatted notes influenced by Finnish folk music.
 * Voss and Telemark styles, both using the Hardanger fiddle.
 * Setesdal, which uses both standard and Hardanger fiddles.
 * Swedish fiddling (including Låtfiol playing; see also Spelmanslag and Gammaldans), including traditions from:
 * Jämtland
 * Dalarna
 * Finnish fiddling, including the regional styles of:
 * Kaustinen
 * Ostrobothnia, heavily influenced by Swedish fiddling.

Continental Europe

 * Austrian fiddling
 * French fiddling, including an old tradition from Corrèze and a revived one from Brittany
 * Hungarian folk music traditions
 * Italian fiddling
 * Klezmer fiddling
 * Polish fiddling
 * Mainland Portuguese and Azorean fiddling
 * Romanian fiddling

United States
American fiddling, a broad category including traditional and modern styles

Traditional

 * Blues fiddling
 * Cajun and Zydeco fiddling
 * Native American fiddling, including:
 * Cherokee
 * Creek
 * Tohono O'odham waila music, a style heavily influenced by Mexican fiddling and featuring irregular counts and harmonies in thirds, fourths, and sixths.
 * Old time fiddling, including:
 * Fiddling from Appalachia, the most well-known style today, featuring heavy use of droning and double-stops as well as syncopated bowing patterns.
 * Athabaskan fiddling of the Interior Alaska.
 * Midwestern fiddling, highly influenced by Scandinavian music.
 * Ozarks fiddling, faster and crisper bowing than Appalachia.
 * Texas fiddling, with influences from Mexican fiddling and an emphasis on competitive playing.Kenny Baker-fiddle.jpg]]
 * New England fiddling, with strong influences from Québécois/French Canadian and British repertoires.
 * Northwest fiddling, with influences from both Ozark and Midwestern fiddle styles, though with a strong emphasis on competitive playing like Texas fiddling.

Modern

 * Bluegrass fiddling
 * Country fiddling
 * Western swing style fiddling

Canada
Fiddling remains popular in Canada, and the various homegrown styles of Canadian fiddling are seen as an important part of the country's cultural identity, as celebrated during the opening ceremony of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
 * Cape Breton fiddling, with a distinct Scottish influence
 * French Canadian fiddling including "crooked tunes", that is, tunes with irregular beat patterns.
 * Métis fiddling, of central and western Canada featuring strong French Canadian influence, but with even more "crooked" tunes.
 * Newfoundland fiddling
 * Maritimes, Acadian or Downeast style of fiddling, which has many similarities to Cape Breton fiddling
 * English Canadian fiddling or Anglo-Canadian fiddling

Mexico
Mexican fiddling includes
 * Danza indígena
 * Mariachi
 * Son arribeño
 * Son calentano
 * Son huasteco
 * Son planeco
 * Violín-tambora
 * Violín tuxtleco
 * Violín mixteco

South America

 * Forró, a type of music from Brazil, including the rabeca fiddle tradition
 * Peruvian violin

Africa, Asia and Australia

 * African fiddle
 * Australian folk music traditions
 * Huqin Chinese fiddles
 * Morna fiddling from Cape Verde
 * Indian fiddle
 * Indian classical music

Variants

 * Hardanger fiddle
 * Stroh violin or phonofiddle, known in Romanian as Vioara cu goarnă.

Near relations

 * Cello
 * Double bass
 * Kontra
 * Låtfiol
 * Rebec
 * Rabeca
 * Viola

Distant relations

 * Apache fiddle
 * Byzantine lyra, the medieval bowed instrument of the Byzantine Empire
 * Cretan Lyra
 * Crwth
 * Gadulka
 * Gudok
 * Gusle
 * Hurdy-gurdy also known as the wheel fiddle
 * Kamancheh
 * Lijerica
 * Nyckelharpa
 * Rebab
 * Erhu
 * morin khuur

title: Fiddle


text:
List of female tennis players

This is a list of female tennis players who meet one or more of the following criteria:

 * Singles:
 * Officially ranked among the top 25 by the Women's Tennis Association (since 1975)
 * Ranked among the top 10 by an expert (e.g. A. Wallis Myers) before 1975
 * Reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament
 * Reached the finals of or won the year-end championships
 * Won a medal at the Olympic Games
 * Doubles:
 * Won a Grand Slam tournament or year-end championship
 * Officially ranked No. 1 by the WTA (since 1984)
 * Won a medal at the Olympic Games

title: List of female tennis players


text:
Flugelhorn

The flugelhorn, also spelled fluegelhorn, flugel horn, or flügelhorn, is a brass instrument that resembles the trumpet and cornet but has a wider, more conical bore. Like trumpets and cornets, most flugelhorns are pitched in B♭, though some are in C. It is a type of valved bugle, developed in Germany in the early 19th century from a traditional English valveless bugle. The first version of a valved bugle was sold by Heinrich Stölzel in Berlin in 1828. The valved bugle provided Adolphe Sax (creator of the saxophone) with the inspiration for his B♭ soprano (contralto) saxhorns, on which the modern-day flugelhorn is modelled.

Etymology
The German word Flügel means wing or flank in English. In early 18th century Germany, a ducal hunt leader known as a Flügelmeister blew the Flügelhorn, a large semicircular brass or silver valveless horn, to direct the wings of the hunt. Military use dates from the Seven Years' War, where this instrument was employed as a predecessor of the bugle.

Structure and variants
The flugelhorn is generally pitched in B♭, like most trumpets and cornets. It usually has three piston valves and employs the same fingering system as other brass instruments, although four-valve versions and rotary-valve versions also exist. It can therefore be played by trumpet and cornet players, although it has different playing characteristics. The flugelhorn's mouthpiece is more deeply conical than either trumpet or cornet mouthpieces, but not as conical as a French horn mouthpiece.

Some modern flugelhorns feature a fourth valve that lowers the pitch by a perfect fourth (similar to the fourth valve on some euphoniums, tubas, and piccolo trumpets, or the trigger on trombones). This adds a useful low range that, coupled with the flugelhorn's dark sound, extends the instrument's abilities. Players can also use the fourth valve in place of the first and third valve combination (which is somewhat sharp).

A compact version of the rotary valve flugelhorn is the oval shaped kuhlohorn in B♭. It was developed for the German protestant trombone choirs.

A pair of bass flugelhorns in C, called fiscorns, are played in the Catalan cobla bands which provide music for sardana dancers.

Timbre
The tone is fatter and usually regarded as more mellow and dark than the trumpet or cornet. The sound of the flugelhorn has been described as halfway between a trumpet and a French horn, whereas the cornet's sound is halfway between a trumpet and a flugelhorn. The flugelhorn is as agile as the cornet but more difficult to control in the high register (from approximately written G5), where in general it locks onto notes less easily.

Use and performances
The flugelhorn is a standard member of the British-style brass band, and it is also used frequently in jazz. It also appears occasionally in orchestral and concert band music. Famous orchestral works with flugelhorn include Igor Stravinsky's Threni, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony, and Michael Tippett's third symphony. The flugelhorn is sometimes substituted for the post horn in Mahler's Third Symphony, and for the soprano Roman buccine in Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome. In HK Gruber's trumpet concerto Busking (2007) the soloist is directed to play a flugelhorn in the slow middle movement. The flugelhorn figured prominently in many of Burt Bacharach's 1960s pop song arrangements. It is featured in a solo role in Bert Kaempfert's 1962 recording of "That Happy Feeling". Flugelhorns have occasionally been used as the alto or low soprano voice in a drum and bugle corps.

Another use of the flugelhorn is found in the Dutch and Belgian "Fanfareorkesten" or fanfare orchestras. In these orchestras the flugelhorns, often between 10 and 20 in number, have a significant role, forming the base of the orchestra. They are pitched in B♭, with sporadically an E♭ soloist. Due to poor intonation, these E♭ flugelhorns are mostly replaced by the E♭ trumpet or cornet.

The 1996 film Brassed Off features a flugelhorn performance of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, Adagio, as a key moment. The solo is played by Paul Hughes.

Notable players
Joe Bishop, as a member of the Woody Herman band in 1936, was one of the earliest jazz musicians to use the flugelhorn. Shorty Rogers and Kenny Baker began playing it in the early fifties, and Clark Terry used it in Duke Ellington's orchestra in the mid-1950s. Chet Baker recorded several albums on the instrument in the 1950s and 1960s. Miles Davis further popularized the instrument in jazz on the albums Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain, (both arranged by Gil Evans) though he did not use it much on later projects. Other prominent flugelhorn players include Donald Byrd, Freddy Buzon, Freddie Hubbard, Tom Browne, Lee Morgan, Bill Dixon, Wilbur Harden, Art Farmer, Roy Hargrove, Randy Brecker, Hugh Masekela, Feya Faku, Tony Guerrero, Gary Lord, Jimmy Owens, Maynard Ferguson, Terumasa Hino, Woody Shaw, Bobby Shew, Guido Basso, Kenny Wheeler, Tom Harrell, Bill Coleman, Thad Jones, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Loughnane of the rock band Chicago, Roddy Lorimer of The Kick Horns, Mike Metheny, Harry Beckett, Till Brönner and Ack van Rooyen. Most jazz flugelhorn players use the instrument as an auxiliary to the trumpet, but in the 1970s Chuck Mangione gave up playing the trumpet and concentrated on the flugelhorn alone, notably on his jazz-pop hit song "Feels So Good". Mangione, in an interview on ABC during the 1980 Winter Olympics, for which he wrote the theme "Give It All You Got", referred to the flugelhorn as "the right baseball glove".

Pop flugelhorn players include Probyn Gregory (Brian Wilson Band), Ronnie Wilson of the Gap Band, Rick Braun, Mic Gillette, Jeff Oster, Zach Condon of the band Beirut, Scott Spillane of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, Terry Kirkman of the band The Association, Annie Chappell and Rashawn Ross of the Dave Matthews Band. Marvin Stamm played the flugelhorn solo on "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" by Paul and Linda McCartney.

Classical flugelhorn players include Sergei Nakariakov and Kirill Soldatov.

title: Flugelhorn