As a result of the attention they garnered, they were able (particularly in the case of Wenders, Petersen, and Schlöndorff) to create better-financed productions which were backed by the big US studios.
As a reaction to the artistic and economic stagnation of West German cinema, a group of young filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto on 28 February 1962.
This call to arms, which included Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Peter Schamoni, Haro Senft and Franz-Josef Spieker among its signatories, provocatively declared "Der alte Film ist tot.
For their influences, the new generation of filmmakers looked to Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague and the British New Wave but combined this eclectically with references to the well-established genres of Hollywood cinema.
Films such as Kluge's Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) found international acclaim and critical approval.
The work of post-war Germany's leading novelists Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass provided source material for the adaptations The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) (by Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta) and The Tin Drum (1979) (by Schlöndorff alone) respectively, the latter becoming the first German film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.