Nuancing Movement and Stasis in Berlin School Films

Olivia Landry’s ambitious monograph offers new frameworks for reading that intriguing German film movement scholars and critics have come to refer to as the “Berlin School.” These films, produced between the late 1990s and the contemporary moment (assuming that school is not yet out), continue to captivate cineasts for their auteurist mode of production, the discerning gaze they cast upon rapid social change in twenty-first-century Germany, and their loosely shared aesthetic and stylistic affinities that include dedramatized storytelling and open endings. The author references no fewer than twenty-five films in building a case for movement and performance as conceptual categories that enhance our understanding of this cinema’s broader significance.

While some scholars have applied the label of “slow cinema,” Landry maintains that what is at stake is less a matter of tempo than of heightened tension between movement and stasis. There is so much stasis, even stupor, in these films that movement comes to assume an entirely different valence and significance than in much plot-driven film. Whereas dialogue and action sweep the storyline forward in the Deleuzian action-image, in the Berlin School films, Landry argues, movement is uncoupled from character motivation and conventional causality and is grasped by the spectator on its own terms as phenomenological or performative. Yet, what does it mean to assert that movement is effectively staged for the viewer? For whom else, if not the camera and, by extension, the viewer is movement proffered? Here, the thoughtfully prepared monograph could make more explicit earlier on a key distinction not so much explained as assumed, namely that between acting and performance. Acting in film is understood as predicated upon heightened artifice, potentially rehearsed innumerable times until a particular take meets the director’s expectations and is spliced into the larger syntagma. In turn, it is the long take, a prevailing technique in Berlin School cinema, that enables acting to be perceived as performance, involving e/motion sustained without the interventions of the cut.

In chapter 1, Landry points to liveness and presence as qualities associated with Berlin School screen performance, often underscored through remediations such as photographs and closed-circuit television surveillance footage, with the latter’s televisual associations subconsciously eliciting a sense of cotemporality between diegetic and spectatorial realities. The second chapter goes on to read liveness through the notion of presence developed in performance and theater studies—an apt recourse given the propensity of actors in Berlin School films also working on the German stage. Building on Claudia Breger’s compelling case for “an aesthetics of presence” in twenty-first-century German cinema, Landry targets dance in particular as a vehicle featured in fully half the films tackled in her study.¹ Dance coaxes forth the exhibitionism associated with performance, and these films consistently capture the dancing body as a whole, rather than as fragmented parts, and do so in a sustained take from beginning to end of the dance. The artifice of movement overall that is revealed through unchoreographed performance is, I suggest, also attributable to the palpable self-consciousness and awkwardness that these free, uncharted moves elicit from the actor.

Chapter 3, Landry’s lengthiest, draws inspiration from Volker Pantenburg’s “automobilized gaze,” exploring what she coins as a shared “point of sense” that scenes shot within a car convey to the spectator.² Such scenes bind immobility in the vehicle’s interior to heightened mobility in and mastery of the space beyond the windshield, doubling as film screen. As potential allegory of late stage capitalism, the car wrecks ubiquitous across Berlin School cinema could be said to exemplify the narrative culmination of an un relenting acceleration that intensifies to the point of self-destruction. Landry posits the automobile as a veritable cinema machine, one whose destruction via the unexpected crash not only troubles our conventions of cinematic perception but also enacts a radical deterritorialization, literally veering off the beaten track to enact new flight lines in...