Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, Wolf-Eckart Bühler; Manfred Blank, Ingemo Engström, Gerhard Theuring, Hanns Zischler; Rudolph Thome, the young Wim Wenders of 3 AMERICAN LPs (West Germany, 1969) and SUMMER IN THE CITY (West Germany 1969-1971, with Helmut Färber and Zischler, dedicated to the Kinks), reminiscences of it in Nick's Film – LIGHTNING OVER WATER (West Germany/Sweden 1979-80): Each an auteur with an unmistakably individual voice. Nevertheless, all of them more or less share something we could perhaps call the Filmkritik style, just as there once were Warner-style gangster films or MGM-style musicals (see ill. 3).

This style is only applicable to those authors (in every sense) who made up the Filmkritik group from the 1970s until its demise in 1984, who formed a collective that owned the magazine, even if not all its members were, strictly speaking, editors or part owners. Rather, the magazine existed as an open space in which whatever the authors considered important was written about. Put another way, for the sake of clarity, Theodor Kotulla, one of the leading Filmkritik authors of the early 1960s, by this reckoning does not belong to this collective. Why? Have a look at his film AUS EINEM DEUTSCHEN LEBEN (FROM A GERMAN LIFE, West Germany 1977), and compare it to Farocki's ZWISCHEN ZWEI KRIEGEN (BETWEEN TWO WARS), released the following year. Kotulla made a ‘proper’ feature film, with lots of money, a star (Götz George), using a conventional realist style; that is, he told the biography of a man in simple, clear steps. Farocki takes a chemical process and the people who are linked to this process as an image to illustrate how Germany headed toward fascism during the period between the two world wars. In Kotulla's film, fascism is merely reactivated, while Farocki shows that Germany decided for fascism from among several ‘options’.With Kotulla the facts add up to a final sum, so that a closed, cohesive picture emerges; with Farocki the contours blur, exposing what is latent in every construction, in every image.