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285 Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands Kristin Kopp Christoph Hochhäusler’s 2003 debut feature-length film, Milchwald (ThisVery Moment),is a translation of the traditional“Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale into a contemporary idiom. The film recycles the well-known story according to an easily recognizable set of narrative components: two young siblings are a burden in the house of their remarried father; they are brought to a location symbolically external to the domestic space of the family by their stepmother and abandoned in this realm of the unheimlich (uncanny). The main difference is that This Very Moment is staged across the German-Polish border in the postunification period. Extracted from its conventional home in mythical time and space, the tale is stripped of its supernatural elements to reflect the real, political time of the present. These children are not led into the depths of an enchanted forest but instead mundanely packed into the car and driven across the border. The film thus transposes the fairy tale’s dual spatial order (the everyday world of home vs. the magical space of the forest) over a contemporary national divide. Christoph Hochhäusler has indicated that he intends his film to be read politically, and he has provided a loose set of interpretive impulses gesturing in this direction.1 Yet This Very Moment has been treated primarily as an aesthetic object,with critics generally limiting their analyses to descriptions of the film’s form rather than interpretations of its content . Reviewers have not shown much interest in exploring the ways in which This Very Moment addresses post-Communist realities, critiques assumptions about German unification, or questions Germany’s position in an expanding European Union. Instead, they focus on categoriz04 Chapters_10_12.indd 285 7/7/10 8:25 AM 286 K R I S T I N K O P P ing the film according to stylistic parameters and are typically most interested in identifying the ways in which Hochhäusler’s film participates in the new wave of German auteur cinema and the extent to which his film practice conforms to the precedents set by the Berlin School of recent acclaim.2 Such exclusive attention to the surface of the film does the film injustice on two levels: First, descriptive treatments of the film’s form do not serve the purpose of rendering the film more accessible because they fail to explain how this form interacts with the film’s content to communicate a message (or mediate an experience) to the viewer. Such explication is particularly desirable in the context of the Berlin School, because these films are asking viewers to engage with the filmic medium in an unconventional—and, for many, unfamiliar—way. To a significant extent, Berlin School films minimize the narrative structures on which audiences are so accustomed to focusing their attention and present instead nonnarrative (or only minimalistically narrative) filmic portraits. This shift away from narrative means that Berlin School directors do not guide their audiences along chains of tightly knit plot points. Instead, they closely observe individuals in situations without providing the causal links that would contextualize their behavior. The films thereby generate unanswered questions and frame intriguing narrative absences, a strategy that asks audiences to engage with the films in a more contemplative fashion.Although most Berlin School filmmakers express the desire for their films to reach larger, more mainstream audiences, many viewers have not easily followed the shift from plot to portrait and from narrative to enigma and, as a result, have found the Berlin School films unengaging.3 Analyses focusing on the interaction between form and content are needed to help audiences access these films and find pleasure in the cinematic experiences they mediate. Second, Berlin School films—and This Very Moment in particular— resonate with much more meaning when assessed in relation to the specific social, political, and historical contexts of their production. Indeed, much of the contemplation that these films elicit involves attempting to “fill in the blanks” with information derived from one’s own contextual knowledge. If the film works to carefully frame an intriguing absence and provide the viewer with a compelling enigma,it is to this knowledge of context that the viewer must appeal in attempting to solve the puzzle . In This Very Moment, for example, this “compelling enigma” is the question of the stepmother’s motivations for abandoning the children. 04...

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