This course explores how West German art cinema of the 1960s-80s reinvented filmmaking, remembered the Nazi past, and rebelled against cultural and political institutions. In dialogue with films by Werner Herzog, Helke Sander, R. W. Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, and others, we will examine the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinema, in the context of an affluent consumer society with a violent past that many preferred to forget.