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

With verve, this essay collection tackles with verve the question of recent German and Austrian films’ engagement with the social problems of the present. The editors seek to refocus attention on the complex film landscape that has emerged since the early 1990s, when light, genre-driven, popular fare prevailed. While the introduction leaves open whether or not it is too early to talk about a new, critical “cinema of dissent” (Sabine Hake), the individual contributions leave no doubt as to the concept’s relevance. Both thematically and aesthetically, contemporary films refract the large-scale social changes under way in an increasingly fluid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman).

In the first section, “Challenging Viewing Habits,” Marco Abel examines the ways in which critically acclaimed directors such as Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and others from the Berlin School create a politically sophisticated counter-cinema. Abel’s article, a revised reprint of an essay from 2008, dialogues nicely with Sophie Boyer’s essay on Michael Haneke’s hyperreality and the closing essay by Barbara Pichler, the director of the Austrian national film festival Diagonale, on the Austrian documentary mode. Abel’s argument about the qualities of the Berlin School are applicable to the prickly films emerging from Austria and associated with directors as various as Ulrich Seidl, Anja Salomonowitz, Ruth Mader, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter. They, too, “render visible aspects of social reality that are either inaccessible to, or simply absent in, the current ‘real’ reality of post-wall [and post-EU–F.N.] citizens,” to quote and expand on Abel. Finally, Morgan Koerner looks at Christoph Schlingensief’s ambivalent mockumentary Freakstars 3000 (2003). The enfant terrible’s rhetoric of authenticity mixed with irreverence highlights society’s normative biases about disability.

Roger Cook’s phenomenal essay on The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, 2006) opens the section “Reassessing and Consuming History.” He shows how Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck steers the viewer’s affect through tight control over the image. By limiting the visual in favour of the textual and playing off (West) German against East German literature, von Donnersmarck insinuates that the German tradition of aesthetic education should take precedence over politically engaged literature. In another strong contribution, Alasdair King looks at Edgar Reitz’s engagement with time-space in the third instalment of the miniseries Heimat (2004). Working against the dematerialization of space, Reitz attempts to register the being-in-time of his main characters – albeit in an elegiac mode. Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to the legacy of the 1968 generation. Joanne Leal looks at Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go (Die Unberührbare, 2000), Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit, also 2000), and Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, 2004) to argue that these films all grapple with the repressive authoritarianism inhabiting the Red Army Factions’s legacy and contemporary capitalism. Mary Elizabeth O’Brien delves more deeply into the specificity of the “creative chaos” in these works, in particular The Edukators and Marcus Mittermeier’s Muxmäuschenstill (2004). For her, the films waiver schizophrenically between hopefulness and cynicism, between their desire for a utopian collective answer to society’s problems and skepticism regarding such grand solutions. Chapters 9 and 10 likewise complement one another in their attention to Hitler’s incessant media presence since the 1980s and the pitfalls and potentials in using humour to confront this phenomenon, with Florentine Strzelczyk’s sophisticated essay examining Helmut Dietl’s comedy Schtonk! (1992) and Peter Gölz’s focusing on Dani Levy’s unsuccessful Mein Führer (2007).

The section “Questioning Collective Identities” strives to bring together heterogeneous issues: Myriam Léger analyzes contemporary German-Jewish life in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s problematic Just an Ordinary Jew (Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude, 2006); Jakub Kazecki examines the German-Polish border as a site of alterity in films since 2000; Michael Zimmermann discusses...