Introduction: The Dreileben Experiment

The panel on the so-called Dreileben trilogy was one of two at the 2012 German Studies Association (GSA) convention in Milwaukee devoted to the Berlin School (with the other panel focusing exclusively on the work of Christian Petzold, arguably the key director of this loosely defined group of contemporary German filmmakers). As such, the two events followed a series of previous panels on the Berlin School at recent GSA meetings and at various conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), discussing the movement's main thematic concerns and aesthetic trends and its affinities with international independent cinema. The panels also attest to a proliferating literature on the Berlin School and on Dominik Graf.¹

The idea for the Dreileben (Three Lives) panel can be traced back to the trilogy's 2011 premiere at the Berlinale, where Marco Abel, Rick Rentschler, and I first saw the 270-minute event in crammed houses at the Delphi Filmpalast and Hackesche Höfe and quickly agreed in our postscreening debriefing that one ought to do "something" with this amazing material. Based on a Streitgespräch (debate) conducted via e-mail between Dominik Graf, a key proponent of genre filmmaking in both television and film, and Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler, two directors closely associated with a style of filmmaking committed to the aesthetics and politics of independent cinema, the Dreileben trilogy is an unprecedented experiment in the history of German television, for it seeks to render theoretical differences in concrete filmic terms. A conference panel devoted to the trilogy, we surmised early on, would have not only to shed light on the larger conceptual and theoretical stakes of the debate but also to focus closely on how each director's contribution translates these in his cinematic approach. These initial ideas were then combined with Christina Gerhardt's idea to organize a series of panels on the Berlin School for the upcoming GSA and SCMS conventions, with the intent of leading to a series of publication in German Studies Review and other venues.

Since its Berlin premiere, the three films have been shown at numerous other festivals, and in select national and international venues, largely to positive and even enthusiastic reviews. It was first screened on German TV in August 2011 and subsequently awarded the 2012 Grimme Prize, which is annually given for exemplary work in television. The films are now available on DVD without English subtitles, while some US Goethe Institutes offer a subtitled version for rental purposes. Produced by the television stations of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, ARD, and Degeto, the Dreileben trilogy is comprised of three interlocking 90-minute films—Christian Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011), Dominik Graf's Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around, 2011), and Christoph Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011)—that share two important premises: they are all set in the small fictional town of Dreileben in Thuringia, and the respective plots revolve around the escape of an alleged murderer. A unique experiment in collaborative filmmaking, the trilogy has its origins, as noted, in a 2006 debate between the three directors about the current state of filmmaking in Germany. Parts of the so-called Mailwechsel were subsequently published by the dffb (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin) and in the journal Revolver, which Hochhäusler edits.² As Marco Abel outlines in his article, this public debate was a polemical but cordial exchange about the future of genre filmmaking in Germany, about the vestiges of Autorenkino (the German variant of auteurism), and about the general nature of current narrative cinema.³ While Graf, an outspoken critic of the Autorenfilm as well as the author of several invectives against the Berlin School, did play the role of agent provocateur, the seeming Wahlverwandte Petzold and Hochhäusler were eager to engage with him as they partly agree with Graf 's diagnosis of what is wrong with contemporary German film. Following Jacques Rancière, Abel chooses the term agonistic, rather than antagonistic, to describe the politics of the exchange, as all three...