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A Ghostly Archeology: The Art-House Genre Cinema of Christian Petzold

Jaimey Fisher

in Christian Petzold

This chapter analyzes the films of Christian Petzold. Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in ... More

This chapter analyzes the films of Christian Petzold. Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in Germany. Five of his last eight films have won Best Film from the Association of German Film Critics (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2012). It is not only the critics, however, who admire Petzold's work: his breakthrough The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000) won the Federal Film Prize in Gold, the equivalent of a best-film prize for its year, an unusual recognition for an art-house film. His films consistently explore new and transformational modes of individualities, especially the compromised, even tainted, character of desire in the wake of economic adaptability, accommodation, and mobility. This kind of adaptability, productive desire, and subsequent movement are emphatically historicized in Petzold's cinema, in which history regularly intrudes upon individuals' dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit.Less

Competing with Hollywood: National Film Industries Outside Hollywood

Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith

in Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader

This chapter discusses the competitors of the American film industry. The German film industry competed most successfully with America in that its domestic productions outweighed foreign imports in ... More

This chapter discusses the competitors of the American film industry. The German film industry competed most successfully with America in that its domestic productions outweighed foreign imports in the 1920s, and Britain put up a very good fight at the box office, with 1927 its annus mirabilis. However, protectionist measures would characterise a decade in which national cinemas sought to hold their own against Hollywood's incursions into other national cinemas. The American challenge to European and other cinemas was also underwritten by the federal support that the American film industry received from the US Government's Commerce Department, designed to support a developing industry. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’ by Thomas Elsaesser, a revisionist study that pays tribute to two classic film studies of the era — Siegfried Kracauer's sociological From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Lotte Eisner's aesthetic study The Haunted Screen (1969). Elsaesser critiques what had become their ‘consensus’ view of the cinema of the period.Less

The horror of the Nazi past in the reunification present: Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantiks

Linnie Blake

in The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity

This chapter explores two recent works of experimental, historically grounded and hence political German films that effectively encapsulate the conceptual and critical agenda. They are Jörg ... More

This chapter explores two recent works of experimental, historically grounded and hence political German films that effectively encapsulate the conceptual and critical agenda. They are Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2. These films are not only more thematically complex and technically sophisticated than is popularly supposed, but they also share a set of artistic and ideological concerns more usually associated with the canonic auteurs of the Young German Cinema and the New German Cinema of the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. In both Nekromantik films then, Buttgereit was keen to expose the highly manipulative nature of the film medium—specifically in the second film's depiction of heterosexual pornography and the first's re-creation of the slasher horror genre. Buttgereit not only produced stylistically inventive and conceptually sophisticated works of modern horror cinema but also offered a new model of German subjectivity for a post-reunification age. It is a considerable achievement for one whose films have been widely banned, critically neglected and commonly viewed as low-budget shockers of little artistic and intellectual merit. Such attitudes, needless to say, are entirely predictable responses from a still wounded, still traumatised national culture unable yet to engage with Buttgereit's unflinchingly radical stance.Less

No Farewell to Yesterday: New German Cinema from 1962 to 1981 as Seen from 2011

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter studies Alexander Kluge's reflections on the organizational politics that gave rise to New German Cinema as seen through the uncertainty of cinema's future in the new millennium. It has ... More

This chapter studies Alexander Kluge's reflections on the organizational politics that gave rise to New German Cinema as seen through the uncertainty of cinema's future in the new millennium. It has been nearly fifty years since a group of young filmmakers, who up until that point had distinguished themselves only with shorts, spoke up at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen. In their now-famous Oberhausen Manifesto they demanded a renewal of the intellectual attitude in filmmaking in a direction toward authenticity and away from commerce; an intellectual center for German film, meaning film education; and opportunities for young filmmakers to make their first films. The Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board for Young German Film) emerged out of the final demand with an endowment of five million marks. North Rhine-Westphalia's funding agency for short film, which formed the foundation of the Oberhausen group, added up to 800,000 marks distributed over six years. A shift in German film occurred right from the start. At that point, the history of film was seventy years old. What later grew out of the Oberhausen movement up until Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death filled a quarter of this history. This included lots of mistakes, a lot of claims to fame, variety, enthusiasm, and many works that have enriched the history of film.Less

Interview with Christian Petzold

Jaimey Fisher

in Christian Petzold

This chapter presents an interview with Christian Petzold, which mainly took place in July 2011, with a shorter followup in October 2012, at Petzold's office in Berlin. Topics covered include where ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Christian Petzold, which mainly took place in July 2011, with a shorter followup in October 2012, at Petzold's office in Berlin. Topics covered include where Petzold grew up; the first film he can remember seeing in a movie theater; the atmosphere in Berlin when he arrived to study literature; his decision to transfer to the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin; his collaborations Harun Farocki; how he finds Farocki's nonfiction films; the impression left by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990; and the influence of genre films such as Detour on Cuba Libre, Near Dark on The State I Am In, and Driver on Wolfsburg on his own films.Less

Casting for a Socialist Earth: Multicultural Whiteness in the East German/Polish Science Fiction Film Silent Star

Evan Torner

in The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film

This chapter discusses East German/Polish science-fiction co-production Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960), the world’s first film to feature a mixed-racial spaceship crew, in terms of ... More

This chapter discusses East German/Polish science-fiction co-production Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960), the world’s first film to feature a mixed-racial spaceship crew, in terms of socialist conceptions of race and gender. Director Kurt Maetzig conceptualized the expensive film, based on Stanislaw Lem novel Astronauci (1951), as an anti-racist epic leveled against nuclear war. Yet the resultant production made only tokenist attempts at integrating its multi-racial, multicultural cast into a believable, agentic space crew, remaining otherwise firmly entrenched in a German film tradition of racial performance and asymmetrical gender relations. The chapter uses new archival and press research to address the depiction of racial and international unities in this utopian film. It examines the ideology behind socialist multiculturalism, and how the production and aesthetics of the film itself model such a worldview with all its dilemmas intact.Less

The Spanish Civil War in East German cinema: Fünf Patronenhülsen/Five Cartridges

Archibald David

in The war that won't die: The Spanish Civil War in cinema

This chapter explores the East German film Fünf Patronenhülsen/Five Cartridges, looking at the way it corresponded with the then-ruling Socialist Unity Party's desire to construct an anti-fascist ... More

This chapter explores the East German film Fünf Patronenhülsen/Five Cartridges, looking at the way it corresponded with the then-ruling Socialist Unity Party's desire to construct an anti-fascist national heritage, one which valorised the International Brigades as part of the attempt to legitimise the existence of the East German state and its communist leadership, many of whom had fought for the Republic. Although superficially, Five Cartridges appears to be an uncritical homage to the International Brigades, the chapter argues that a tension arises from the complex characterisation of the International Brigade members.Less

Romancero Marroquí and the Francoist Kitsch Politics of Time

Alejandro Yarza

in The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: From Raza to Pan's Labyrinth

This chapter examines the colonial politics of Franco’s Spain through an analysis of Romancero marroquí (Morrocan Romance, Carlos Velo 1938), a documentary about Spanish Morocco produced during the ... More

This chapter examines the colonial politics of Franco’s Spain through an analysis of Romancero marroquí (Morrocan Romance, Carlos Velo 1938), a documentary about Spanish Morocco produced during the Spanish Civil War by Franco’s provisional government. While in traditional colonial representations the colony becomes an alluring, albeit inferior, other to the colonizing Metropolis in need of progress and civilization, in its Francoist representation Spanish-Moroccan society becomes a model to be imitated, a kitsch paradise opposing—like Francoism itself—modern materialism and parliamentary democracy.Less

Introduction

Anne Fuchs

in Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role of technology in people's relationship with time. Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990, digital technologies have ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role of technology in people's relationship with time. Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990, digital technologies have revolutionized the relationship between individuals, their worlds, and their temporal horizons. The ever-tighter enmeshing of human worlds with digital media alters the very notion of experience. Indeed, the ontological difference between lived and virtual experience is diminishing as technology transmutes dispositions, habits, and perceptions. Because the information age promotes instant access, it also erodes the expectation of temporal processing. The new era of the “digital now” challenges not only established notions of delayed gratification but also the very idea of time as a multidimensional concept that integrates past, present, and future into human experience. This book therefore investigates temporal anxieties from a broad cultural-historical perspective that illuminates alternative temporal trajectories and experiences. It does this by analyzing how contemporary German literature, film, and photography stage, perform, and bring forth other kinds of time.Less

Casting for a Socialist Earth: Multicultural Whiteness in the East German/Polish Science Fiction Film Silent Star

Evan Torner

in The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film

This chapter discusses East German/Polish science-fiction co-production Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960), the world’s first film to feature a mixed-racial spaceship crew, in terms of ... More

This chapter discusses East German/Polish science-fiction co-production Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960), the world’s first film to feature a mixed-racial spaceship crew, in terms of socialist conceptions of race and gender. Director Kurt Maetzig conceptualized the expensive film, based on Stanislaw Lem novel Astronauci (1951), as an anti-racist epic leveled against nuclear war. Yet the resultant production made only tokenist attempts at integrating its multi-racial, multicultural cast into a believable, agentic space crew, remaining otherwise firmly entrenched in a German film tradition of racial performance and asymmetrical gender relations. The chapter uses new archival and press research to address the depiction of racial and international unities in this utopian film. It examines the ideology behind socialist multiculturalism, and how the production and aesthetics of the film itself model such a worldview with all its dilemmas intact.Less

1918–1921

Patrick McGilligan

in Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

This chapter details events in Fritz Lang’s life in Germany from 1918 to 1921. Lang was in Berlin for the Armistice of November 11, 1918; for the collapse of the monarchy; for the dismal conclusion ... More

This chapter details events in Fritz Lang’s life in Germany from 1918 to 1921. Lang was in Berlin for the Armistice of November 11, 1918; for the collapse of the monarchy; for the dismal conclusion of the World War and the commencement of the 1920s, a decade of rampant unemployment, malnutrition, crime, black marketeering, profiteering, inflation, and political turmoil. Germany was a sea of strife, but the film world was a fantasy island. Lang would thrive there, insulated and immune from outside forces. The years 1918–1919 were among the most crammed and hectic of his long, prodigious career. In that time he managed to write seven full-length features, and was credited for the first time as fully fledged director of two films.Less