Table Of ContentThe Berlin School
and Its Global Contexts
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found
online at wsupress.wayne.edu.
General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University
Advisory Editors
Robert J. Burgoyne
University of St. Andrews
Caren J. Deming
University of Arizona
Patricia B. Erens
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Peter X. Feng
University of Delaware
Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh
Frances Gateward
California State University, Northridge
Tom Gunning
University of Chicago
Thomas Leitch
University of Delaware
Walter Metz
Southern Illinois University
The Berlin School
and Its Global
Contexts
A Transnational Art Cinema
Edited by Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
© 2018 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the
United States of America.
Library of Cataloging Control Number: 2018932938
ISBN 978–0-8143-4200-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978–0-8143-4490-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978–0-8143-4201-5 (ebook)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Berlin School and Beyond 1
Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher
1. The Berlin School and Women’s Cinema 38
Hester Baer
2. Gender, Genre, and the (Im)Possibilities of Romantic Love
in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010) and Maren Ade’s
Everyone Else (2009) 59
Lisa Haegele
3. Countercinematic Reflections and Non/National Strategies:
New Austrian Film and the Berlin School 76
Robert Dassanowsky
4. “Life Is Full of Difficult Decisions”: Imaging Struggle
in Henner Winckler’s Lucy and Kelly Reichardt’s
Wendy and Lucy 96
Will Fech
5. Cinema as Digest, Cinema as Digesture: Corneliu Porumboiu’s
Metabolism (2013) and the Cinema of the Berlin School 115
Alice Bardan
6. No Place Is Home: Christian Petzold, the Berlin School,
and Nuri Bilge Ceylan 135
Ira Jaffe
7. The Forces of the Milieu: Angela Schanelec’s Marseille
and the Heritage of Michelangelo Antonioni 154
Inga Pollmann
8. New Global Waves: Abbas Kiarostami and the Berlin School 174
Roger F. Cook
vi Contents
9. Bifurcated Time: Ulrich Köhler / Apichatpong Weerasethakul 193
Michael Sicinski
10. East of Berlin: Berlin School Filmmaking
and the Aesthetics of Blandness 211
Lutz Koepnick
11. Politics in, and of, the Berlin School:
Terrorism, Refusal, and Inertia 232
Chris Homewood
12. Running Images in Benjamin Heisenberg’s Films:
A French Connection 252
Brad Prager
13. Ghosts at an Early Age: Youth, Labor, and the Intensified
Body in the Work of Christian Petzold and the Dardennes 271
Jaimey Fisher
14. The Making of Now: New Wave Cinema
in Berlin and Buenos Aires 293
Gerd Gemünden
15. Toward an Aesthetics of Worldlessness:
Béla Tarr and the Berlin School 313
Roland Végső
Contributors 331
Index 339
Acknowledgments
T
he idea for this volume goes as far back as 2010–11, when both of us were
still working on our monographs on the Berlin School and Christian Petzold,
respectively. Soon thereafter we decided to address more directly emerging crit-
icism of how scholars interested in the Berlin School engage them and how the
Berlin School films as such function as “good objects” in the field of German
film studies. The result was the panel we organized, titled “Good Objects and
Their Discontents: The Berlin School and the Current State of German Film
Studies,” at the 2013 Modern Language Association Conference, on which Lutz
Koepnick and Nora Alter also presented. We thank both for their stimulating
provocations that pushed us to pursue this project for real. “For real,” then, hap-
pened in 2014 when we proposed this volume to Wayne State University Press
and invited contributions. At the 2015 German Studies Association conference,
for which we organized a three-day miniseminar on “The Berlin School and Its
Global Contexts,” we then had occasion to workshop a good number of essays
that are now included herein. We want to thank all of our colleagues who partici-
pated in this seminar; even those participants who are not represented in this vol-
ume had a significant impact on its final shape. Furthermore, we want to thank
Will Mahan for helping us with formatting the contributions as well as Annie
Martin at WSUP for all the support she has lent this project. We also thank
Barry Keith Grant, editor of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media
series at Wayne State, for his expert guidance. Much gratitude goes as well to all
of our colleagues, many of whom are good friends, who have supported us over
the years as tireless interlocutors about the Berlin School, whether at conferences
and specially organized workshops or in private conversations, offering to read
materials and give feedback on work in progress. Last but not least, we want to
thank our contributors for their excellent work: The Berlin School and Its Global
Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema would not exist without you.
vii
Introduction
The Berlin School and Beyond
Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher
I
n late 2013, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted a major
exhibition of works by contemporary German directors associated with the so-
called Berlin School. Given the preeminent role MoMA enjoys among cultural
institutions across the world, this two-week event can be considered a milestone
in the history of this filmmaking movement. That MoMA decided to commit
considerable resources to promoting works by these filmmakers at that particular
moment, however, was no coincidence. Over the preceding ten years, the films of
the Berlin School had been increasingly acknowledged and feted across the world,
as evidenced by the many retrospectives featuring the films in countries including
England, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, and the United States;
by special screenings and guest appearances at major film festivals (Cannes, Ven-
ice, Berlin, Toronto, New York, Locarno, San Sebastián, Rome) as well as by the
increasing attention the filmmakers have received among film scholars in both
North America and Europe (especially, but not exclusively, in France, the United
Kingdom, and Spain) and the broader international cinephile community, as
evidenced by the covers of the prominent Canadian film magazine, Cinema Scope
(no. 61 and no. 67), which feature Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014) and Maren
Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), respectively, as well as Film Comment, which also
features Ade’s widely acclaimed film that Amy Taubin views as “the 21st century’s
equivalent of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game” (Taubin 2016, 32).
Both the MoMA’s exhibition and this burgeoning attention in the broader
(film) scholarly and cinephilic community around the world were our primary
inspirations for editing The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational
Art Cinema. This anthology of fifteen scholarly essays analyzes the Berlin School
for its simultaneous global origins and aftereffects—both to address this significant
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