The Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project

When on February 16, 2011, on a cold, wintry evening, I arrived at the venerable Delphi Filmpalast, I joined a quickly growing crowd of people eagerly anticipating what, in the days leading up to this evening's event, had been hyped by Berlin's daily newspapers as one of the few must-see screenings at what was otherwise considered yet another disappointingly mediocre Berlinale vintage.¹ Among those excitedly awaiting entry to the theater I spotted Christian Petzold, director of some of the best German films of the third millennium, including Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), Yella (2007), and most recently Barbara (2012). After managing to squeeze myself through the crowd to say hello to the filmmaker with whom I had a few years earlier conducted what at the time had been the most comprehensive interview of his career, I had occasion to chat with Petzold for a while. At one time during our conversation, Petzold recalled a moment from our interview where he discusses his admiration for Dominik Graf 's tireless—Petzold calls it Sisyphean—labor to create a genre cinema in the context of film production circumstances that could be described as "industrial" only if one were either unduly generous or simply delusional with regard to the reality of the German filmmaking landscape of the last half century.² In the interview Petzold argues that unlike Graf, who keeps making genre films—especially policiers—against all odds, he works in the "cemetery of genre cinema." Petzold, that is, thinks of himself as making films that are marked by a strong yearning for genre cinema and a concomitant awareness of this desire's impossibility; he makes his films knowing that genre filmmaking is impossible in a film production environment characterized by the absence of the very industrial structures that would be able to forge and sustain (by enabling the serialized repetition of Versatzstücke, for instance) the cinematic "neighborhood" that is the prerequisite for individual genre films to succeed commercially.³

One might of course suggest that over the course of some thirty years, Graf has managed to create his own genre neighborhood, albeit predominantly within the context of German television.⁴ But what Petzold wanted to bring across, as he nervously smoked one more cigarette before the people surrounding him would commence the ritualistic dash for the best seats in the house, was his sheer excitement about the film project, the premiere screening of which we were about to witness. Petzold considered this project, I gathered, the manifest expression of his desire not to be alone, or, more positively, the desire to work within what he calls a "neighborhood."⁵ And this desire not to be alone, to be part of a "neighborhood," is a desire that is in fact shared not only by Graf and Petzold but also by Christoph Hochhäusler, the third filmmaker involved in what is collectively known as the Dreileben (Three Lives) project, which consists of three films: Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011), Graf's Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around, 2011), and Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011). Made for German television where they premiered on August 29, 2011, they can be regarded as forming a cinematic triptych consisting of "three individual stories [set in remote Thuringia] revolving around the same 'fait divers'" (the escape of a convicted sex offender from police custody) filmed by three directors using three different "styles, three exciting approaches, variations, analyses."⁶

What is unique about this project, however, is that it is the result of a style of interaction that one doesn't usually associate with the concept of "neighborhood" and its connotations of commonality, likeness if not like-mindedness, and, perhaps, even an implied sense of consensus and peace that one seeks artificially to maintain if only because one wants to be left alone. The idea for and realization of the Dreileben project emerged from what might best be described as an agonistic encounter between, on the one hand, Graf, and, on the other hand...