Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the “Berlin School” (Cineaste)

No sólo pego esta nota porque me parece interesante, sino en defensa de mi amigo, el tan defenestrado "crítico alemán" quien, aparentemente, es responsable de uno de los términos más en boga del cine en los últimos años (lean la parte en bold). Ya sé que eso no lo convierte en un gran talento de la crítica, pero algo es algo... Al menos para mí, que no leo alemán!

By Marco Abel

After a quarter century of neglect, German cinema has rekindled international interest in its productions. The many awards and recognitions German films have recently garnered evidence this renaissance of German film culture. For instance, Wolfgang Becker’s bittersweet Ostalgie comedy about Germany’s reunification, Goodbye, Lenin! (2003), became the first German film to win the European Film Award; it also won the French and Spanish Film Awards for “Best European Film” and earned a nomination for “Best Foreign-Language Film” at the Golden Globes.[1] German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s go-for-broke migration melodrama, Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), became not only the first German film in almost two decades to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival (“Berlinale”) but also received the European Film Award only one year after Becker’s triumph. And Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004), a drama about three good-looking twenty-somethings confronting the (im)possibility of engaging in effective political action in the age of globalization, was the first German film production to compete at the Cannes Film Festival since 1993—an honor subsequently enjoyed by Akin’s complexly layered, episodic drama, Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), for which Akin received the prize for best screenplay. Most remarkably, German films have also risen to prominence at the Academy Awards since the beginning of the second millennium. Two films won the Oscar for “Best Foreign Language Film”: in 2001, Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa), which follows a Jewish family’s flight from Nazi Germany to Kenya and its struggle to adjust to the African environment; and in 2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s controversial Stasi-drama Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). (In 2007 this award was won by Austrian-born director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s German-language production, Die Fälscher [The Counterfeiters], a film about a Jewish counterfeiter whom the Nazis approach for help in their effort to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged currency.) Two additional films were honored with a nomination for this award: in 2004, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s portrait of Hitler’s last three days in the Führerbunker, Der Untergang (Downfall); and in 2005, Marc Rothemund’s Kammerspielfilm, Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl—The Final Days), which revisits the final confrontation between the Nazi regime and Ms. Scholl, a member of one of the few bona fide German anti-Nazi resistance groups, the “White Rose.” Of these four recent German success stories at the Academy Awards (five, if we include The Counterfeiters), all but one deal with the country’s fascist legacy, with The Lives of Others still fitting this pattern given that it, too, focuses on the country’s past troubles—in this case, the state totalitarianism perpetrated by “real existing socialism.”

Notwithstanding the many accolades these films received, they did not really advance the art of filmmaking in Germany. For all but Akin’s films embrace thoroughly conventional film esthetics and narrative strategies. However, that they nevertheless hold significant appeal for an international audience is, at least in my view, hardly coincidental, since they almost pathologically corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated outside Germany’s borders that this nation is still almost exclusively reducible to its totalitarian past(s). Further, even though films such as Downfall, The Lives of Others, and Goodbye, Lenin! promote themselves by way of their ‘big’, historically and politically charged, topics—the Nazis!; the Stasi!; the Reunification!—the politics of the image which they perpetuate is remarkably conservative. Yet, since these films seemingly offer a window onto Germany’s internal struggles with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), this lack of esthetic adventurousness, which might have functioned to problematize the exoticizing voyeuristic point of view these films afford international audiences, did not seem to hinder their (relatively) successful runs abroad.

Only too predictably, the German press and the country’s film industry representatives jumped on the opportunity to appropriate these recent success stories, as if to declare, “We’re somebody again.” This nationalistic rhetoric eagerly espouses the belief in a German film resurgence—a convenient myth that via a synecdochal logic allowed more nationalistically minded journalists and bureaucrats to dream of the long hoped-for fulfillment of their desire to see the country itself emerge out of the long shadows cast by its totalitarian history (and post-reunification economic woes) and emerge, at long last, as a ‘normal’ country. However, as appealing as this view of German film history may be, the picture it draws is simply incorrect, as one of Germany’s leading film critics, Katja Nicodemus, asserts in response to this newfound nationalist feeling about German film productions. The mainstream press and film industry representatives, which now celebrate the success of Downfall or The Lives of Others as ingenious entrepreneurial endeavors that almost single-handedly pulled German films into the limelight of international film culture, have always obsessively focused their attention on how well the country’s film productions fare at the box office; but they have only rarely paid attention to developing a healthy film-cultural infrastructure capable of nurturing and sustaining a broad range of homemade productions—including artistically innovative small-scale films that do not generally rake in big returns at the box office but that are, esthetically, considerably more challenging than the nation’s best-known productions. And yet, as Nicodemus argues, it is precisely these small films that constitute the proper “we” at the heart of German film culture, rather than the few mainstream, international successes opportunistically celebrated by the country’s culture industry.

Accounting for the recent developments in German film culture, French film critics coined the phrase nouvelle vague Allemande. Pleased with this positive reception across the Rhine, the German film industry un-self-critically appropriated this assessment into their own self-satisfied nationalist sentiments, all the while ignoring that for the French this term encompasses not merely films such as Goodbye, Lenin! but also Ulrich Köhler’s Bungalow (2002), Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003), or Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004). It is films such as these—persistently ignored at home—that cumulatively demonstrate the emergence of a new film language in German cinema. Yet, what appeared to Cahiers du Cinéma as a ‘new’ wave of creatively innovative German films are in fact only more recent examples of a subterranean genealogy of German filmmaking that hearkens back to the first half of the 1990s. Consequently, what appears to many as a ‘resurgence’ of German cinema is much better thought of as a continuation of an ongoing filmmaking process since reunification—one that predominantly took place below the radar of the country’s self-appointed cultural guardians.

This, if you will, counter-cinema, has become known in Germany as the “Berlin School.” The films associated with this school distinguish themselves from other post-wall German films primarily in that they constitute the first significant (collective) attempt at advancing the esthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the New German Cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Lemke, Margarethe von Trotta, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and others. So who or what is the Berlin School? The label, coined by German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland, originally referred to what is now known as the first generation of the Berlin School: Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Thomas Arslan. All three attended and graduated in the early 1990s from the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), arguably the country’s most intellectual film school, and were taught by avant-garde and documentary filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. However, as others have observed, the Berlin School label is somewhat misleading when its scope is widened to a second generation of filmmakers such as Köhler and Henner Winckler, graduates of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Maren Ade, graduates of the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, Maria Speth, who honed her skills at the HFF “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Valeska Grisebach, who studied film in Vienna, or Aysum Bademsoy, who studied theater at the Freie Universität Berlin and is, like Arslan, a child of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in the 1960s.

In short, many so-called Berlin School directors neither hail from, nor learned their filmmaking skills in, Berlin (even though most of them have moved there by now). Nor, I hasten to add, are many Berlin School films about, or even set in, Berlin; in fact, one of the more interesting aspects of these films is their willingness to encounter spaces outside of Germany’s urban centers. Still, the label has unquestionably become part of the daily vocabulary of German film critics—so much so that discussions of the merits of individual films are often subordinated to considerations of them as examples of this school. That this de-singularization is something neither filmmakers nor more adventurous film critics are particularly fond of is understandable. Symptomatically, Olaf Möller claims in his program notes for “A German Cinema,” a side series he curated for the 2007 Indie Lisboa Film Festival, that he did not include certain directors usually associated with the Berlin School at least partially because he did not want to perpetuate already existing prejudices. He points out the danger involved in pigeonholing these directors, citing the reception of the latest films by Arslan, Schanelec, and Petzold (Ferien [Vacation], Nachmittag [Afternoon], and Yella, respectively), which were often discussed upon their premiere at the Berlinale in 2007 only in relation to each other rather than based on their own, individual merits.

Agreeing with Möller’s concerns, I still think the label remains useful because it enables the description and even advocacy of a cinema that otherwise finds itself ignored by a mainstream press more concerned with the latest box office numbers than with challenging its readers to seek out films that actively try to re-envision what German cinema could be(come). So what are these films like? Oskar Roehler, one of Germany’s foremost directors of the post-wall era who decidedly does not belong to the Berlin School, characterizes these films as recalcitrant and stern. According to him, nothing much happens in films such as Arslan’s Mach die Musik leiser (Turn Down the Music) (1994), Schanelec’s Plätze in den Städten (Places in Cities, 1998), Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), Grisebach’s Mein Stern (Be My Star, 2001), Hochhäusler’s Falscher Bekenner (Low Profile a.k.a. I’m Guilty, 2005), or Köhler’s Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006). Instead, to Roehler, these films are slow and dreary, feature hardly any dialogue, are admired by critics—and attract 5,000-10,000 viewers. Indeed, box office receipts confirm Roehler’s negative assessment. For instance, whereas films such as Downfall, Michael “Bully” Herbig’s (T)raumschiff Surprise (2004), and Tom Tykwer’s Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume—Story of a Murderer, 2006) attracted 4.6, 9.1, and 5.5 million theatrical viewers, respectively, Jan Krüger’s Unterwegs (En Route, 2004) was seen in Germany by merely 1,200 theatrical viewers, Winckler’s first feature, Klassenfahrt (School Trip, 2002) by 2,300, Schanelec’s Marseille by 3,100, Low Profile by 6,600, Heisenberg’s Schläfer (Sleeper, 2005) by 10,600, Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006) by 22,500, and Petzold’s Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005) by 40,000. Only Petzold’s The State I Am In, the winner of the German film award in 2001, found a considerably broader theatergoing audience, attracting a respectable 120,000 viewers, which makes it the most successful Berlin School film to date.

Yet it would be misleading to consider this group of filmmakers merely successful with cineastes in France and England (BFI’s Sight & Sound has probably paid more attention to contemporary German cinema than any other international publication) and a handful of film critics in Germany. With a production cost that rarely exceeds one million Euros, most of these films reach a 12-15% audience-share during their TV screenings. Furthermore, judging by the Berlinale of the last few years, this film movement is picking up some steam. For instance, among the fifty or more German films the festival screens annually were new efforts by Arslan, Petzold, Schanelec, Grisebach, Heisenberg, Hochhäusler, Köhler, Speth, and Winckler. Even more remarkable, Grisebach’s second feature-length film, Longing, a provocative study of longing in small town East Germany shot with non-professional actors, was screened in the festival’s main competition in 2006, rather than as part of the artistically more adventurous “Forum” or “Perspective German Cinema” series. Although Grisebach’s film didn’t win any prizes, audiences enthusiastically applauded the film, and many critics considered it the best competition entry. Likewise, many praised Petzold’s Yella as the best film of the 2007 competition. Yet the film’s positive critical reception did not prevent it from fizzling out at the German box office at around 80,000 theatrical viewers; and as one of the few Berlin School films that received U.S. distribution, it has thus far earned less than $20,000 since its May 2008 release in New York City.

It would be preposterous to suggest that the Berlin School has become, or is at least part of, the establishment, either in Germany or elsewhere. Indeed, most Germans have never even heard of these directors and their films. Nor, for that matter, has this group as a whole received unanimous critical praise. In fact, their general lack of commercial success has made them vulnerable to polemical attacks from representatives of the German mainstream film industry and media. Writing for the Berlin Tagesspiegel, film critic Harald Martenstein, for instance, lambasted the Berlinale premiere of Ghosts, complaining that upon viewing the film he “felt thrown back into the hell of the German Autorenfilm of the 1970s, in which protagonists remain meaningfully silent and each character functions as a metaphor for [Heidegger’s concept of] existential thrownness.” And Doris Dörrie, one of Germany’s best-known directors ever since her breakthrough film, Männer (Men, 1985), chimed in on the ongoing backlash against the Berlin School by accusing them in the German film monthly Film-Dienst of hiding too much behind film theory and playing it too safe, adding, “I secretly hold against them […] that they do not risk enough and hide behind form. I don’t like this: to hide oneself behind form.”

Most notoriously, the Berlin School cinema recently became the implied subject of a highly visible public put-down by the president of the German Film Academy, Günter Rohrbach. Rohrbach once was an important supporter of the New German Cinema. He produced, for instance, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and also left his mark on German film culture as the producer of some of the country’s most commercially successful movies, including Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (The Boat, 1981). Having presided over the Academy since its founding in 2003, Rohrbach, in an essay originally published in Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, attacked German film critics as vain self-publicists for their tendency to trash commercially successful German film productions such as Tykwer’s Perfume while celebrating films such as Longing that “wither away in the cinema.” Rohrbach singled out Grisebach’s film because German film critics enthusiastically reviewed it and vehemently complained that this personal film, unlike Tykwer’s blockbuster, received no nominations for the German Film Prize, which as of 2005 is being awarded by a body of voters resembling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In addition to the charge of box office impotence, Ekkerhard Knörer reports that another common criticism of Berlin School films is that they supposedly lack interest in the political and instead present us with a “bourgeois poetics of middle class navel gazing.” According to Christina Nord, this tendency has hypostatized in some cases into a sense of bourgeois “melancholic suffering” affecting the films’ protagonists and, simultaneously, a formal mannerism affecting the films themselves. It’s impossible to argue against the empirical evidence of these films’ struggle at the box office; however, to charge these films with the ‘crime’ of being apolitical strikes me as questionable. In the age of finance capitalism, the conception of the ‘political’ at work in such accusations seems unproductive, not least because it nostalgically relies on a version of traditional ‘leftist’ politics that may no longer have any purchase on the objects of its critique (for more on this issue see my interview with Christian Petzold, Cineaste online, June 2008). Indeed, part of the reason the Berlin School films are so compelling—and deserving of greater (inter)national recognition—is their specific cinematic nature, which renders these films political, albeit not in the traditional (content-based, or ‘agitational’) sense of the term.

If one wanted a shorthand description for the films of the Berlin School one could do worse than considering their tendency to pursue an esthetics of reduction reminiscent of the work of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, or the Dardenne Brothers, as well as the second generation directors of the French New Wave such as Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, and Philippe Garrel. Many, though not all, Berlin School films are dominated by long takes, long shots, clinically precise framing, a certain deliberateness of pacing, sparse usage of non-diegetic music, poetic use of diegetic sound, and, frequently, the reliance on unknown or even non-professional actors who appear to be chosen for who they ‘are’ rather than for whom they could be. In so doing, films such as This Very Moment, a contemporary riff on the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” set in the German-Polish border region, Winckler’s Lucy (2005), a patiently observant study of a teenage girl’s reluctance to live up to the expectations and responsibilities she suddenly faces as a new mother, Arslan’s Aus der Ferne (From Far Away, 2006), his nearly voice-over-free travelogue of Turkey, his country of birth, or Karger (2007), a Ken Loach-like study of the fate suffered by working class life in the post-industrial age by Elke Hauck, another dffb graduate, sharpen the viewer’s attention while effortlessly creating ‘un-dramatic’ tensions. And cumulatively, these cinematic aspects stress the characters’ spatio-temporal existence—the fact that, unlike the films belonging to what Eric Rentschler influentially described as the “cinema of consensus” cycle, these films unmistakably take place in a specific time and place: in the here and now of reunified Germany.

Such spatio-temporal precision directs viewers’ attention to the poetic texture of what could easily be mistaken for an artlessly realist mise-en-scène. These remarkably precise films solicit audience attention so that our sense perceptions are made to tune in to the extraordinary qualities of otherwise rather ordinary lives. Many of these films, that is, thematically focus on the every day and attempt to capture normality—though they do this so that in their visual intensification of normality the extraordinary at the heart of everydayness emerges. And as Benjamin Heisenberg remarked in a conversation with me, what these films have in common is “that the camera does not allow the viewer to identify with the characters, but it’s not really distancing us from them either. Instead, it creates and positions us in an in-between space that pulls us to and fro, ultimately holding us suspended in a middle space that’s quite akin to the characters’ own subjectivity/subject position.” It is as if they intentionally heeded a filmmaking adage André Bazin once attributed to Erich von Stroheim: “Take a close look at the world and keep on doing so.” Relentlessly focusing their camera on seemingly unremarkable events, these films exhibit a tendency to ‘stare,’ thus effecting an alteration of that which they stare at from within the act of seeing (and listening) itself.

We should therefore not reduce these films to the ‘documentary-like’ moniker that is so often used to describe films that call in the services of so-called realism. Certainly, as Hochhäusler says of Köhler’s Bungalow, a distinctive feature of the Berlin School films is that they allow for an “incursion of reality into the German film.” If anything, though, the Berlin School’s aesthetic is more akin to what Bazin once defined as “true realism”: these films are too obviously stylized by means of camera movement and mise-en-scène to be described as ‘documenting’ reality. For instance, the sheer length of most of Schanelec’s shots in Marseille foreground the artificial choices that give rise to the sense of reality we feel when exposed to her images: reality isn’t just ‘captured’ but rendered sensible through the effects her images have on the viewer. Likewise, the ambient diegetic sounds (car and street noises, the sounds of trees swaying in the wind) in Petzold’s Ghosts or Yella, which often intrigue us because of their astonishing, indeed eerie, clarity, don’t so much declare “that’s the way reality is” as provoke in us a sense of wonder about the materiality at the heart of the everyday. These films force us to confront something that is ‘real’ enough for us but that usually remains outside of our day-to-day purview because of how our perceptive apparatus tends to block out such aspects of social reality. Rather than aiming to ‘represent’ reality ‘as it is,’ these films abstract from our preexisting perceptions of reality in order to induce a different experience of it by making reality itself appear more intensely sensible.

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