Die Berliner Schule / The Berlin School

Die Berliner Schule

• Refers to a group of recent and contemporary German filmmakers

• Originated in post-1990 Germany

• Recognised first in France: “Nouvelle Vague Allemande” (German New Wave cinema)

“Die Berliner Schule”

• Turn towards post-unification social reality – political dimension

• Many of the directors studied at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin

• Not all are based in Berlin (e.g. Christoph Hochhäusler studied in Munich)

• Early 1990s: Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec (older generation)

• Since late 1990s: Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg (and many others)

• Film magazine Revolver since 1998 – forum for discussing new film aesthetics

Aesthetics of boredom, or just boring?

• Film critic and film maker, Oskar Roehler, on the films of the Berlin School:

“austauschbar, depressiv und langweilig”

“sie [vertreiben] die Leute aus den Kinos”

“slow cinema”

• Focus on everyday life of contemporary Germans, e.g. work

• Affluent, bored bourgeois characters searching for meaning / action

• Presents gaps between events rather than the events themselves

Aesthetics of Boredom

• Paul Cook: Berlin School films fit into established European aesthetic tradition of bourgeois boredom

• Interplay between boredom and expectation defines characters: what happens?

• Cinema of inaction?

Aesthetics of Boredom

• Characters are often looking for a new life, a new beginning

• Often they have no choice but to give way to their reality of tedium and lack of action

• Slow pace of storytelling allows for prolonged periods of hollow time

• Political potential: films reveal tensions in German society today

• Marco Abel: insecurities around social mobility in neoliberal present

• Cook: Yella exposes “the grotesquely ephemeral workings of white-collar corporate capitalism”

Christian Petzold

• One of the leading figures of the Berlin School

• Famous for his Gespenster trilogy:

Die innere Sicherheit (2000)Gespenster (2005)Yella (2007)

• Depiction of post-wall Germany on level of micropolitics (not big macro-political issues)

• Characters populate in-between, ghostlike spaces, real and dreamlike

• These spaces constitute heart of post-wall, neoliberal Germany