Considered the key players in a movement which would later be dubbed by critics and academics as the Berlin School, Petzold, Schanelec and Arslan began exploring and questioning their Germany; a contemporary Germany now unified, but haunted and fragmented by its checkered past. Petzold's earlier works were pulp-inspired thrillers (Die Beischlafdiebin), while Schanelec's gaze was more on young couples and artists (I Stayed In Berlin This Summer), and Arslan explored the young Turkish-German population (Brothers And Sisters). The directors continued to do some of their best work from these perspectives with, respectively, Jerichow, Marseille, and Dealer, but continued to expand in other directions. And to be sure, the Berlin School is not a dogme 95 style movement with certain aesthetic rules or content markers, but an umbrella term for a loose collection of filmmakers, many who got their start at the DFFB.
If there has been a typical Berlin School film over the past 15 or so years, these would be defined as meditative works on post-wall Germany with echoes of genre that are politically and socially minded pictures mostly absent of rhetoric. Characters, many of them youth or members of young families or couples, wander the unified Germany, or into neighboring countries, lost like apparitions on the plain, searching for a cause, searching for an identity; a self that can define their future as much as their present. It has been my summation over the last two years of watching these films that the Berlin School is, for the most part, a cinema of haunted people in haunted places. Of course I don't mean this in a supernatural way, but more in how these people encounter the specter of society, of expectation, of a past and of a place that is foreign and yet uncannily something you came from. If anything, many of these films show how the present can prove strangely illusive and hard to distil.
With both Petzold and Arslan now having made period films (Petzold's Barbara takes place in 1980 East Germany, while Arslan's Gold is a 1890s western) can we say that the Berlin School, as it has been charted up to this point, is dead? Or is it now merely a reflection of a much larger wave that isn't really all that defined by time and place and subject, nor by where the actual films are being made. If anything many Berlin School filmmakers penchant for naturalism, socially minded and socially impactful storytelling, and long shot/long take aesthetic has arguably been at the core of so called "art house" European and Asian cinema for decades. So why then has the Berlin School New Wave been so captivating to those that have been caught up in it? A short answer is that while the films' identity crises are unquestionably German, which makes them indubitably fascinating in their own right, many of these characters' experiences are universal in nature, and could thus, apply to most developed nations experiencing cultural and economic upheavals in the 21st century.
Starting November 20th and running til December 6th, The Museum Of Modern Art in New York City will be looking at 17 films that have operated under the moniker of the Berlin School. On November 22nd and 23rd, a symposium will take place with Petzold, Schanelec and Arslan, as well as filmmakers Benjamin Heisenberg (The Robber), Christoph Hochhäusler (I Am Guilty) and Ulrich Köhler (Bungalow), plus cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider (In The Shadows, Marseille), and the Berlin School's very own poster child, actress Nina Hoss, who has starred in half a dozen films within the movement.
Dustin Chang and I bring to you this precursor to the series, which highlights some important works and figures in the movement as well as some personal favorites. Click through the header picture to read on!
THE STATE I AM IN (November 20 & 30)
Christian Petzold's filmography, from the economic nightmares of Yella to the wayward youth of Ghosts, largely explores the structures and systems people choose to exist in, or try and escape from. The State I Am In exemplifies this tenfold, and is considered to be the first film from the Berlin School to truly break out on the international stage, premiering at Cannes in 2000, and garnering the FIPRESCI "discovery of the year".
At its core Petzold's film is a coming-of-age tale like no other I have ever seen. Julia Hummer stars as Jeanne, the teenage daughter of two ex-Red Army members. All are on the lamb in Spain, and out of desperation must return to Germany. Jeanne is vulnerable and blunt; a chameleon, a nobody by training; silently screaming with every inch of her body to be seen, to just be a teenager.
Petzold's treatment of the West as a commodity, as a prepackaged American approved product is fascinating to watch unfold. To consider the autobahn in comparison to American highways; a German boy's impression of Brian Wilson; the spark of youth and onset of consumerism and influx of immigrants (here inverted and morphed back on the German heritage itself). The director's fascination with surveillance cameras, an interesting aesthetic and story element he's revisited in numerous films across the years, is also present here. The way figures move across the screen every 3 frames or so in fuzzy gray scale is unsettling. Which in turn is another way to consider the notion of ghosts, of the haunted and of the dispossessed. --Ben Umstead
EVERYONE ELSE (November 21 & December 2)
There is a very telling moment early on in Maren Ade's second feature: Birgit Minichmayr's Gitty shows her boyfriend's young niece how to mock-shoot her. The little girl says, "I hate you," and with a moan, Gitty is hit by the child's imaginary bullet and stumbles backwards into their vacation home's pool. Funny and awkward to the point of embarrassment, Chris (Lars Eidenger) stands at the edge of the pool watching his girlfriend float on her belly, playing dead. As much as they need a vacation, his anxieties are with work, an architecture competition, and at all costs avoiding a colleague who also happens to be staying in the same Mediterranean town as the young couple.
What Ade and her actors bring to a seemingly familiar story of young love is that rare mutability of life, of a relationship, where the nature of each moment houses many truths. Everyone Else is a tender film without being sentimental, a painful one without being hurtful. And if Ade's first feature The Forest For the Trees(Also playing in this series) wasn't indication enough, it is the arrival of a filmmaker with an astute observational sense of human nature sans the blunt commentary, and with more than a hint of everyday strangeness. -- Ben Umstead
I AM GUILTY (November 23 & December 6)
Fragmented, distant and elliptical, Christoph Hochhäusler's I am Guilty aka Falscher Bekenner (False Confessor) is a deeply disturbing film that stays with you for a long time after viewing. It tells the story of Armin (Constantin Von Jascheroff), an aimless teen from a middle-class household, who might be a terrorist in the making. He seems to have a fascination for mechanical objects but not much else. Being a third son in a German household, therefore exempt from the mandatory military service isn't really helping him to get a headstart in life by any means. Because his concerned parents' constant nagging, Armin goes to job interviews only to get rejected, one after another. He lacks enthusiasm, focus, social skills, qualifications...everything. The interviewers absurd questions and methods are as troubling as Armin's withdrawal. There is no discernible human quality to the process.
The film keeps things as lucid as possible. Did Armin actually commit the arson in his neighborhood? Is he engaging in some dark sexual activities in public bathrooms at night? The thing is, because of Hochhäusler's precise, impeccable direction, you can't dismiss the boy's lethargic behavior as shallow characterization. His troubled inner life, however hidden, beckons more of your attention.
Hochhäusler, a former critic turned filmmaker, says that this loss of identity theme in his, as well as many other films of the Berlin School, is not particularly limited to reflect the post-Wall German society. He sites that many of these German compatriots see themselves as cosmopolitan and get their influences from filmmakers from other parts of the world. With that in mind I feel there is an unspoken fraternity with Armin and all the young protagonists on the periphery of society with identity problems in so-called 'skipped generation' of wayward youth films around the world (films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Gus Van Sant and current Greek cinema immediately come to mind).
Hochhöusler talks about loose connections (among other things) in his essay in the companion book to this series The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule - between Bungalow and I am Guilty, as they are in response to each other - a young man in the army/exempt from the army, parents absent/nagging parents, role model in straight shooter Devid Striesow (who plays big brother in both) as Petzold's, Ghosts is to Schanelec's Marseille - A German woman in Paris/French in Berlin. An interesting tidbit. -- Dustin Chang
BUNGALOW (November 25 & December 4)
A teenage soldier, Paul (Lennie Burmeister), deserts his squad at a roadside gas station and comes back home. His parents are on holiday in Italy, so the house is empty. Things get complicated when his older brother Max (Devid Striesow, Yella, Three, The Heart is a Dark Forest) shows up with his pretty Danish actress girlfriend, Lene (Trine Dyrholm). They are on the way to Munich because Lene is about to star in a low grade German Sci-fi flick. They leave in two days. It's quite obvious that the brothers don't get along. Paul lies about in his AWOL status and develops an unhealthy obsession with Lene. Stooped, sulking and completely inept in human interactions, Paul is not just another lost, wayward youth. There is something more dangerous hidden in his unmotivated actions. There is something missing in him.
The post-Wall Germany's collective identity crisis and its angst is articulated in Bungalow by an unexplained, ominous explosion in the middle of the film, as our characters watch the plume of smoke rising in the distance from the roof of the house in their quiet suburban town. No one knows what exactly happened. Everyone has their own theories and no one believes the news media. Everyone remains suspicious and on guard. Director Ulrich Köhler does an amazing job at showing the German society treading dangerous, unforeseen territory in the new millennium. --Dustin Chang
IN THE SHADOWS (November 27 & December 3)
Thomas Arslan's foray into genre exercise is perhaps one of the tightest heist films in recent years, one that would make Michael Mann blush. There is nothing remarkable about the plot: A criminal gets out of jail. He regroups and plans another job with his former associates. His old boss and a corrupt cop are on his trail, and that sets up for various confrontations.
It's not the 'what' that's important in In the Shadows, it is the 'how'. The mechanics of procedural takes a precedent: getting unregistered guns, counting money, getting rid of the bodies and simple wait-in-the-corners-until-bad-guys-approach-then-shoot set ups. Not one moment of the film is wasted. Arslan's treatment of locations is also impeccably economical and has an almost documentary feel to it. It's the empty parking lot, non-descriptive hotel rooms and corridors and gas stations off the freeway, not some recognizable landmarks. But the still shots of those places provide the sense of real and concreteness against the characters who are constantly in motion. People are speaking German but our aptly named protagonist Trojan (Mišel Matičević), with his broad lion face, doesn't come across as a German. In this economical climate, even the heist money is modest- 600,000 euros.
Arslan, a German-Turkish filmmaker who has made a point early in his career not to repeat what he's done previously, makes a sly turn with In the Shadows. At the onset, the film might not appear to be the best film to represent him as one of the filmmakers of the tenuous Berlin School. Although not politically as blunt as fellow filmmaker Petzold in his films, Arslan acknowledges in his (whatever the genre might be) the influx of immigrants which Germany had never experienced before in its history. Please check out his new film, Gold, a Western starring the indomitable, Nina Hoss in this series. -- Dustin Chang
ORLY (November 29 & December 4)
While Marseille, considered to be another highpoint in the Berlin School, is curiously absent from the program (I am hoping that is more an issue of available materials vs. a curatorial choice), Angela Schanelec does have two of her features showing. 2001's charming yet melancholic Passing Summer and this, her most recent work.
Orly, of course, takes place in the airport, and follows a patch work of people in-flux: The woman flying back to Montreal, the music producer flying to San Fransisco for work, the mother and son returning to Marseille, an airport check-in officer, a young German couple and a young woman in the process of leaving her much older husband. The way these people's stories come together, or do not, is rather remarkable. Schanelec ends on a rather lovely, nearly elliptical note, though beyond that her approach for structure remains loose, unconcerned with plot, outside of time, for when one is in the airport, one is in a bubble, a vacuum filled with a seemingly mindless sense of motion and foreign air that belongs to no place.
One of the many pleasures in Orly is to just let your eyes wander through the widescreen frame, through the hustle and bustle of people moving with the possibility of not going anywhere, to the father soothing his newborn, to the inexperienced cafe counter clerk. What is rather remarkable from a technical standpoint is how Schanelec and cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider use long lenses. While seemingly easy to stage (you set up way far away so as not to disturb the flow of the airport) I would love to know how they pulled this off. Then again, wouldn't want to ruin the magic of the film either... -- Ben Umstead