Christian Petzold

A Ghostly Archeology: The Art-House Genre Cinema of Christian Petzold

A Ghostly Archeology The Art-House Genre Cinema of Christian Petzold I will never make a film that tries to lead to some conclusion—instead [my films] try to narrate an abeyance [Schwebezustand]. Films that do not give answers, rather pose questions. —Christian Petzold, interviewed by Caroline Buck It’s not really about how people are hiding something; rather, it concerns how they become economic. —Christian Petzold, interviewed by Christof Siemes and Katja Nicodemus Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Christian Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in Germany. Five of his last eight films have won Best Film from the Association of German Film Critics (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2012). It is not only the critics, however, who admire Petzold’s work: his breakthrough The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000) won the Federal Film Prize in Gold, the equivalent of a best-film prize for its year, an unusual recognition for an art-house film. His more recent films have only affirmed his status as an auteur transcending art-house cinema: Petzold’s participation, with two other directors, in the 2011 three-part Dreileben project has been called the most interesting development in German television in decades (Suchsland); and his Barbara (2012) not 2 | Christian Petzold only won the Silver Bear for best director at the Berlin Film Festival but was also named Germany’s submission for the 2013 Oscar for best foreign-language film. He is usually regarded as the most prominent and important of the group of filmmakers known as the Berlin School, which some French critics have declared a “German New Wave” (Lim). The themes Petzold unfolds in his films are global in scope and engage with the present moment in general, particularly with the spread of the economics, practices, and beliefs of neoliberalism. Although Petzold regularly invokes neoliberalism and its operations—for example, in the interview in this volume—his work approaches it in unusually intriguing ways.1 Midway through Jerichow (2008), for example, Petzold offers a brief, seemingly tangential conversation that is nonetheless revealing for his unusual approach. Two of the film’s three main characters, Ali and Thomas, sit in the front seats of a parked work van, the vehicle with which they deliver supplies for Ali’s snack bars sprinkled throughout the former East German Prignitz region. The camera rests, as it does in many shots of automobiles across Petzold’s films, in the backseat. It shoots over the shoulder of the figures, a position that allows the bodies of the actors, as Petzold repeatedly emphasizes, to adapt to the relevant physical activity of driving (figures 1 and 2; Nord and Petzold, “Das Auto”). Such images of characters in a “movement space” (a space remade by the systems of mobility in modern society [Urry, Mobilities 45–46]) recur throughout Petzold’s cinema. For John Urry, movement and mobility in general have been key developments in modernity, transforming spaces and individuals alike (6–7). These movement spaces, as I shall discuss in the sections on Pilots (Pilotinnen; 1995) and on Wolfsburg (2003), become for Petzold a crucial point of contact between individuals and the socioeconomic world changing around them. In fact, shallow-focus shots of individuals in such movement spaces, with natural surroundings (landscapes, forests, lakes, and so on) in the blurred background, rank among the most important images in Petzold’s cinema. Here, in Jerichow, as they sit watching the traffic in the provinces, Ali quizzes Thomas on where he would suggest locating a new snack bar. Parked before an intersection—another key movement space in Petzold’s cinema—they debate where the most A Ghostly Archeology | 3 Figures 1–2. Thomas (Benno Fürmann) and Ali (Hilmi Sözer) discuss optimizing Ali’s business at an intersection in Jerichow (2008). customers would flock, what time of day they would most likely stop by, what impact a traffic light would have on customers’ ebbs and flows. The casually cold calculus of the business-minded, car-based conversation seems all the more surprising because Thomas has just slept with Laura, Ali’s wife, and will soon plot to kill him. Thomas starts the film unemployed and broke, and Petzold offers this conversation to demonstrate how, as he says, Thomas is becoming 4 | Christian Petzold economic—how love and economy intersect at this literal street-crossing. As someone unemployed...