The black-and-white footage shows people fleeing through the streets of Berlin, chased by mounted police. An armoured car loaded with police officers drives off. Others, in their spiked imperial helmets, wield their truncheons against protestors and bystanders alike. These are images of the street fighting that erupted in Berlin in 1929, when the city’s spd-appointed police chief tried to ban the Communist Party’s Mayday demonstration, resulting in over thirty deaths—the so-called Blutmai, or Bloody May. They were filmed from windows, balconies and rooftops by kpd supporters and edited into a short film, Blutmai/Kampfmai, by Piel Jutzi, a tailor’s son working as a cameraman for Prometheus, one of the film companies set up by ‘red media’ entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg. They constitute some of the few surviving fragments of a collective working-class cinematic project that flourished in Germany in the late 1920s.footnote¹

This kind of filmmaking—people working together to depict reality from their own perspective—represented a utopian aspiration: the idea of movies by the working class, as well as for and about it. The cinematographic moment of Blutmai/Kampfmai thus speaks directly to the questions mooted by Emilie Bickerton and William Harris a few years ago about the possibility of what was half-jokingly dubbed a new proletkino: an emerging cinema of the 21st-century working class, notwithstanding—and not unmarked by—its multiple political defeats.footnote² The history of cinema, from the Lumière brothers’ first screening of Workers Leaving the Factory in 1895, famously overlapped with the rise of mass working-class organizations. From Eisenstein’s Strike! to Renoir’s Toni, through Italy’s neo-realists and Brazil’s cinema novo, working-class subjects and experimentalist aesthetic breakthroughs went together. It was more of a surprise to see signs of a new cinema centred on the proletariat in the 2010s and 2020s, after the ferocious neoliberal assault on organized labour. Yet in ‘A New Proletkino?’, Bickerton cited a raft of films across three continents with working-class experience at their heart.footnote³

Through close readings of five films—Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night, Robert Guédiguian’s La ville est tranquille, Pedro Costa’s Ossos and Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl—Bickerton aimed to identify a set of common motifs and ‘structures of feeling’ that might constitute a genre. She noted a shared tendency to open within the protagonists’ milieu, with little broader contextualization; producing a filmic ‘way of seeing’ that reached only minimally beyond the experience of the characters themselves. Close-up camera work reinforced the sense of intimacy and sympathy that was at the same time a limitation. Often, it was the semi-documentary use of locations which supplied a larger picture of social or historical forces: the Job Centre and public library in Daniel Blake, the slums of Ossos, the Marseille fishmarket in La ville est tranquille. The narratives, too, were often set in motion by an exogenous social shock: the threat of redundancy, eviction or benefit cuts. In contrast to earlier proletkino attempts to bring a collective subject to the screen, these were usually representations of individual experience; a recurring motif was a sustained long shot of the protagonist walking alone through the urban environment. The political agenda was muted—earning enough to live on, keeping a job—and rebellion was generally limited to individual acts of defiance. Yet this was not a ‘cinema of consolation’, Bickerton argued. Forgoing happy endings, the films carried an undeniable moral charge.footnote⁴

In his n+1 essay, Harris looked beyond Europe and its ‘art cinema’ to take stock of the more varied landscape of cultural institutions across the Global South. On the one hand, he explored the possibility of new forms arising within the diversified national cinemas and state-backed streaming series of the brics-plus countries, singling out Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau for their popular-commercial takes on class war via a delirious mingling of genres—thriller, comedy, revenge drama, farce—which softened their registration of social ‘bleakness’. On the other, he suggested that new forms of social-democratic community building in 21st-century Latin America were creating the means for imaginative self-expression, with positive readings of young filmmakers’ work fostered by pt cultural institutions in Brazil’s favelas. Uneven and partial though it was, hardly mass-democratic in its achievements, ‘the social-democratic, quilombo story of Brazilian film’ had nevertheless succeeded in opening up a diverse landscape for ‘new stories from new people’.footnote⁵ 

The evidence of Blutmai/Kampfmai and other early proletarian films suggests that one way to take this discussion forward might be to deepen the comparative-historical frame. In the 1920s, Weimar Germany saw the rise of a highly articulated culture of filmmaking by, for and about the working class. Crushed under the Nazi dictatorship, its legacy exerted a vital influence over radical directors under the Bonn Republic in the 1960s and 70s. Here I will look briefly at the achievements and limitations of these earlier forms, before turning to representations of the working class in contemporary German cinema.

The Berlin camera operators who shot the footage for Blutmai/Kampfmai were part of a popular movement of amateur photographers and filmmakers, the Arbeiterphotographenbewegung, which was itself part of a broader world of radical cultural organizations—workers’ education groups, sports associations, theatre troupes, societies of revolutionary visual artists, writers, poets, journalists and so on—articulated around the branch structures of the two mass workers’ parties, the kpd and spd. Photography had become a popular hobby in Germany by the late 1920s and there were left-aligned working-class photographic societies in many cities. Some would pool their funds in order to buy one of the new portable film cameras. Typically, they covered such subjects as strikes, assemblies or local party activities, like the distribution of food and clothes to the poor. For many of these filmmakers, straightforward documentation first of all provided a chance for workers to discuss their own lived experience and share it through screenings at party or union meetings as well as events organized by other workers’ organizations, alongside professional feature films. But their work was also informed by the extraordinary creativity of early German cinema during the long decade of the 1919–33 Weimar Republic.

The infrastructure for a national film industry had been thrown up at breakneck speed by the German authorities during the First World War, when the Entente’s blockade of the Central Powers halted the import of French and American silent movies, while the Kaiser’s government belatedly grasped the importance of the cinema for the propagation of militarist bravado and nationalist sentimentality. Such films flourished in the traumatic aftermath of the War and the catastrophe of hyperinflation; but the German cinema, one of the few growth industries of the time, also bred astonishing experiments in the new realism, expressionism and psycho-dramatic figuration, from Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari to Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Pabst’s Joyless Street, Siodmak’s People on Sunday, Sagan’s Girls in Uniform and Lang’s Metropolis. The ufa production consortium, founded in 1917 with Ludendorff’s backing, built studios to rival Hollywood’s at Berlin-Tempelhof and Babelsberg. In the interwar era, their output was the subject of an explosion of film comment and criticism in the feuilleton pages of the broadsheet press and cultural weeklies, with writers like Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim and Walter Benjamin arguing over the evaluative formal and aesthetic paradigms at stake, as well as the social and political hermeneutics.