Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria ed. by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore (review)

Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria, edited by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, includes fifteen chapters that examine twenty-first-century film and “filmmakers’ interventions in discourses on the concept of ‘national cinema,’ the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a ‘global culture’” (18). Cinema has been analyzed as a reflection of culture and society and has been identified as social critique, a form of resistance, and an agent of change as well as singled out for its ability to emancipate since the very first films were made. This volume recognizes and draws on the critical engagement in German-language film studies that situates these most modern examples within the realities of a changing media landscape and, increasingly, changing relationships in a global landscape.

The authors provocatively open the conversation in the first chapter by exploring the usefulness and limits of the concept “cinema of consensus” that came into use after 1990 as well as its possible opposite, a “cinema of dissent.” In this introduction, Mueller and Skidmore attend to the transnational elements at play in contemporary cinema, ranging from aesthetics to funding sources and benefactors to the themes of the films themselves. Categorizing multiple chapters that reveal the complex relationship between society and contemporary German-language film proves difficult, but three broadly defined groupings provide the frame of the book: “Challenging Viewing Habits,” “Reassessing and Consuming History,” and finally, “Questioning Collective Identities.”

The first section, “Challenging Viewing Habits,” includes three chapters that analyze films focused on how social realities in film are projected to fuel social critique and action by arousing the discomfort of the viewer. Marco Abel’s chapter, “The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School,” describes how “Berlin School” directors increasingly reject the character/viewer dichotomy, instead opting for suspending the audience between those two worlds. Sophie Boyer’s chapter on Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s oeuvre and Morgan Koerner’s on Christoph Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000 analyze these two vastly different filmmakers as they confront the audience by setting traps for society’s blind spots.

The middle section of the book, “Reassessing and Consuming History,” features six chapters. Four of the chapters treat specific films, Das Leben der Anderen, Heimat 3: Chronik einer Zeitenwende, Schtonk!, and Mein Führer—The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler and assess their reinterpretions of history in a postmillennial context. Joanne Leal and Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien take more thematic approaches; Leal tackles the legacy of 1968 in three films, Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare, Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit, and Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahren sind vorbei. Her study reveals both a more positive than expected assessment of the 1968 generation and a challenge to contemporary Germany “not dissimilar to the 1968 generation’s own authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist stance” (115). O’Brien’s chapter considers Die fetten Jahren sind vorbei and adds Marcus Mittermeier’s film Muxmäuschenstil as she illustrates the filmmakers’ use of a politicized “‘creative chaos’ whereby established patterns of behavior are disrupted through playful or innovative acts in the hope of generating wide-spread cognition of society’s failures and the need for a new social order” (134). Each chapter identifies a fundamental dissatisfaction with the accepted narrative where history and contemporary life intersect, with the authors appraising the potential of the film to seek explanations, antecedents, and even attempts to ameliorate inherent conflicts.

Questions of identity, deeply interwoven with historical contexts, are the subject of the four chapters in the “Questioning Collective Identities” section. These chapters center on filmmakers’ efforts to restructure and refocus questions of identity: Myriam Léger addresses the context of German-Jewish identity in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Ein ganz gewöhlicher Jude; author Jakub Kazecki surveys four contemporary films related to the German-Polish borderlands; Michael Zimmermann examines intra- and inter-German questions of minorities in Germany...