“I believe more and more that Nestler has been the most important filmmaker in Germany since the war” —Jean-Marie Straub

We continue our partnership with New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center to showcase highlights from their summer program A Vision of Resistance: Peter Nestler. Admired by the likes of Jean-Marie Straub and Harun Farocki, Peter Nestler was one of the most important filmmakers to emerge from postwar Germany. From his early films about the changing realities of rural and industrial areas in Germany and the UK, to his work for Swedish television, Nestler has remained a precise observer of the poetry and politics of labor, crafting meticulous portraits of industrial processes, working conditions, and workers themselves, as well as the background of struggle and oppression against which the era’s proletariat toiled. A vigorous yet nuanced opponent of fascism, an excavator of lost histories and a masterful formalist whose works are rich with a materiality all their own, Nestler has spent five decades chronicling how things get made, whether in a factory or at the level of ideology.

MUBI is showing five documentary shorts from the director’s time making poignant and provocative films in Germany in the 1960s, and concludes with his recent and highly personal documentary, Death and Devil.