Marco Abel Livres

The contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitute the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because their films mark the emergence of a new film language. The Berlin School filmmakers, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent of the directors of the New German Autorenkino and of French cinéma des auteurs of the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of the Berlin School in any language. Its central thesis - that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" - is built around the unusual style of realism employed in its films, a realism that presents images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political: they are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" - a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Germany's most important filmmaking movement in conversation with its peers across the globe.

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is the best-known filmmaker associated with the “Berlin School” of postunification German cinema. Identifying as an intellectual, Petzold self-consciously approaches his work for both the big and the small screen by weaving critical reflection on the very conditions of contemporary filmmaking into his approach. Archeologically reconstructing genre filmmaking in a national film production context that makes the production of genre cinema virtually impossible, he repeatedly draws on plots from classic films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s, in order to provide his viewers with the distinct pleasures only cinema can instill without, however, allowing his audience the comforts the “cinema of identification” affords them.Including thirty-five interviews, Christian Interviews is the first book in any language to document how one of Germany’s best-known director's thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema’s most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined. The interviews collected here—thirty of which are published in English for the first time—highlight Petzold’s career-long commitment to foregrounding how economic operations affect individual lives. The volume makes for a rich resource for readers interested in Petzold’s work or contemporary German cinema but also those looking for theoretically challenging and sophisticated commentary offered by one of global art cinema’s leading figures.

In den Sechzigerjahren war die »Neue Münchner Gruppe« eine der interessantesten Strömungen im deutschen Kino. Marco Abel hebt in seiner Untersuchung den Affekt der Nonchalance dieser Filme hervor und stellt ihn als eine ästhetische Haltung dar, die eine linke Attitüde verkörperte, die nicht nur die »politische Linke« der Zeit von links kritisierte, sondern auch die aufkommenden neoliberalen sozialen Veränderungen in spielerischer Weise einer kritischen Betrachtung preisgab. Für diese erstmalige Analyse lässt er auch die Filmemacher selbst zu Wort kommen.

Die Berliner Schule gilt als die wichtigste Strömung im deutschen Kino seit den 1970er Jahren. Gleichzeitig kann sie als wesentlicher Teil der globalen New-Wave-Filme verstanden werden, die an den traditionellen Rändern des Weltkinos angesiedelt sind. In 15 Essays setzen die Beiträger*innen des Bandes die Berliner Schule mit Beispielen des globalen Kinos in Verbindung - von Europa über Südostasien und den Nahen Osten bis hin zu Süd- und Nordamerika - und laden dazu ein, sie als zentralen Aspekt des Nachwende-Kinos in einem transnationalen Licht zu betrachten. Damit liefern sie zum ersten Mal eine systematische Untersuchung dieser Gattung und stellen sie als eine der wichtigsten Entwicklungen des gegenwärtigen Arthouse-Kinos heraus.