Christian Petzold by Jaimey Fisher (review)

Jaimey Fisher's thorough introduction to the œuvre of Christian Petzold is suitable for scholars and lay people alike. After a brief biography and an explanation of the context in which the films evolved, Fisher proceeds chronologically, beginning with Pilots (1995) and ending with Barbara (2012). Tracing important recurring themes, most notably those of neoliberalism, spectrality, and movement spaces, he makes productive connections among films and highlights Petzold's global appeal and fascination with genre. Interestingly, given that Petzold is associated with the Berlin School, Fisher concludes that "the most unusual achievement of [Petzold's] films," may be "the level of socioeconomic and political engagement they attain while nonetheless deploying deception, crime, and love—very much the conventional purview of popular genre films" (4). Berlin School directors have been associated with an avoidance of the political in the interest of a pure aesthetic of sorts, but Fisher underscores Petzold's important commentaries on the contemporary German socioeconomic context.

Returning repeatedly to Petzold's depiction of the individual in the neoliberal, capitalist, contemporary world, Fisher discusses how Petzold explores human alienation through a variety of filmic means, including, but not limited to his archeological excavation of genre, deviation from the mainstream cinematic way of treating bodies and faces, and fascination with how socioeconomics shape human interactions. Seemingly casual observations that, for example, intimate, loving moments often take place inside a car—Wolfsburg (2003) and Ghosts (2005)—and that characters are often shown looking into an upper middle-class, well-appointed house—Yella (2007) and The State I'm In (2000)—allow Fisher to establish continuities and thus to venture convincing, overarching conclusions about the director's driving interests and motivations. Indeed, in the interview at the end of the book, Fisher rolls out some of his ideas and theories and finds them confirmed by Petzold.

Fisher argues that the overlapping concepts of "remnants, remains, and ghosts" and a related state of "abeyance" permeate Petzold's films. These concepts serve as descriptors for characters and themes and as a way of understanding Petzold's aesthetics, relationship to genre, and style. This triad allows Fisher to show us why many of Petzold's subjects are on the margins. Because some element of their past cannot be reconciled or because some realization makes them incapable of completely embracing their present, the contemporary neoliberal capitalist structure renders them a kind of unusable byproduct. "Remnants, remains, and ghosts" also figure into Petzold's thematizations of socioeconomics. Fisher emphasizes how Petzold bemoans the ravages of neoliberal capitalism, the associated dematerialization of work and human labor (74–75), and "the gap between sociopolitical narrative [sic] about work and the socioeconomic reality, between individuals' reliance on work for identity and that work's evaporation" (84). Interested in money and its corruptions—corruptions of people, processes, systems, history, and intimate desire—Petzold explores characters who try to achieve economic viability in a market that has spit them out, thus exposing the virtual impossibility of a lifestyle beyond the domestic and economic, hegemonic "normality" of contemporary culture.

Formally, Fisher delineates Petzold's debts to American genre cinema and sees Petzold's project as an archeological excavation, a digging up and exposing of forgotten elements of popular genres and, simultaneously, a defamiliarizing of those genres. Formal elements that Fisher identifies as part of the trinity of "remnants, remains, and ghosts" are the manner in which Petzold gives vague directives to his actors and has them turn or walk away from the camera and how he deploys bright, razor-sharp images. These choices, Fisher argues, cause a "fundamental cognitive confusion" like that caused by "remnants, remains, and ghosts." In short, Fisher distills Petzold's style to "a ghostly archeology" and uses the metaphor of digging in a graveyard to elucidate Petzold's incorporation of popular genre cinema as leftovers into his own work (17). Importantly, this digging is not a way of taking care of specters and residues once and for all though, of exorcising historical ghosts. Rather...