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White Noise Enigmatic and sui generis, The Parallel Street is the magnum opus of Ferdinand Khittl, a near-forgotten filmmaker who helped kick-start the New German Cinema
FEBRUARY 28, 1962, DAY THREE OF THE Oberhausen Short Film Festival's eighth edition: a group of West German: directors have called a press conference. Nineteen of them assemble on stage, and one of them, Ferdinand Khittl, reads a brief statement that concludes with the following words: "The old film is dead. We believe in the new one."
This statement became known as the Oberhausen Manifesto, and in retrospect it is probably the most important rupture in German film history. Germans tend to consider their cinema traditions not in terms of continuities but of breaks, which in the past were often due to historical or political events (some key years: 1918, 1933, 1945, 1949, 1989). But that day in Oberhausen, it was the filmmakers themselves who broke with the past and artistic tradition; it was unprecedented, and has never been repeated, although the time is now ripe in Germany for another filmmaking manifesto.
Of the 26 who signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, 10 are still alive. Two of them are still remembered (Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz), while those who seemed to be the future of West German cinema at the time (Haro Senft, Hans Rolf Strobe!, Heinrich Tichawsky, Herbert Vesely) are more or less forgotten. Even in Germany, you probably won't find anybody, even among its geekiest historians and archivists, who could name all 26 without consulting books or the Internet.
Yet the small oeuvre of Khittl has been rediscovered, and he's now recognized as one of the few true Moderns of postwar German cinema. It's easy to see why the 38-year-old Khittl was chosen to be the Manifesto's spokesman: he was tall and broad-shouldered, with an unusual voice that could easily reach the far corners of the room without sounding unduly commanding.
The filmmaker had just finished his masterpiece, The Parallel Street (62), which few had seen - and few would ever get the chance to see. It premiered at San Sebastian in 1962, screened at Cannes in 1964, and opened in Germany two years later in just one city, without the support of a distributor, where it was...
