[4] Efforts to found the Filmverlag had resulted from recurring frustrations the directors had faced in acquiring funding for their politically and aesthetically ambitious films.
Notable productions of this era included Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Wenders's The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1972), Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1974), Kluge's In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death (1974), and the collaborative work Germany in Autumn (1977/'78) about German society's reaction to the terrorism of the Red Army Faction and the state's counter-measures during the German Autumn events of 1977.
The Filmverlag's orientation shifted towards a more mainstream program throughout the 1980s after Der Spiegel-publisher Rudolf Augstein with the help of Bohm had bought himself into the venture in 1977, an event which prompted many of its founding members to leave and start their own production and distribution companies, such as Pro-ject Filmproduktion (started for Kluge's documentary Der Kandidat on Franz-Josef Strauß's 1980 campaign running for German chancellor) and Theo Hinz's Futura-Film (founded in 1983).
While the Filmverlag during Augstein's era scored impressive commercial successes such as Theo Against the Rest of the World [de] (1980, starring Marius Müller-Westernhagen) and Men… (1985), it also began German distribution of less ambitious films such as The Terminator (1984) and Up the creek (1984), and in the eyes of many of its founders its original political and intellectual credibility suffered.
They are: In 2008, Dominik Wessely and Laurens Straub published the 120-minute documentary Gegenschuß - Aufbruch der Filmemacher ("Countershot: Dawn of the filmmakers") on the Filmverlag.