Art/Obscenity/Underground Cinema in West Germany, 1968–1973: Circulating through the Debates

“The intensity of the ‘Underground Explosion’ environment holds in it both the exhilaration of discovery and the panic of overstimulation involved in the hallucinogenic experience. One could perhaps dismiss the event as “trippy” but for the ways that Kren’s camera jarringly jerks us around. Dizzying in-camera edits make clear that the generative potential of psychedelia is also the stuff of which bad trips are made. In this drug-induced, sexualized, and theretofore forbidden space, our view continuously shifts from the stadium seating through which the camera point of view weaves, to the stage and its activities—projection screens, clusters of sound equipment, and chaotically moving bodies—to the reflective surfaces and flashing bulbs of the media photographers’ cameras, which flicker as the gathered journalists attempt to capture what is going on.”

A text recounting the five-day 1968 experimental film screening event “Underground Explosion,” which took place in Cologne and was organized by the group of filmmakers around XSCREEN: Studio for Independent Film. Thinking with the event and its dramatic police shutdown as a key moment within the West German debates around sexuality and the political Left, the essay asks: What is left? As in, What remains? and What is a radical politics?