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Christian Petzold
By Jaimey Fisher UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09523-8
CHAPTER 1
A Ghostly Archeology The Art-House Genre Cinema of Christian Petzold
I will never make a film that tries to lead to some conclusion—instead [my films] try to narrate an abeyance [Schwebezustand]. Films that do not give answers, rather pose questions.
—Christian Petzold, interviewed by Caroline Buck
It's not really about how people are hiding something; rather, it concerns how they become economic.
—Christian Petzold, interviewed by Christof Siemes and Katja Nicodemus
Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Christian 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 more recent films have only affirmed his status as an auteur transcending art-house cinema: Petzold's participation, with two other directors, in the 2011 three-part Dreileben project has been called the most interesting development in German television in decades (Suchsland); and his Barbara (2012) not only won the Silver Bear for best director at the Berlin Film Festival but was also named Germany's submission for the 2013 Oscar for best foreign-language film. He is usually regarded as the most prominent and important of the group of filmmakers known as the Berlin School, which some French critics have declared a "German New Wave" (Lim). The themes Petzold unfolds in his films are global in scope and engage with the present moment in general, particularly with the spread of the economics, practices, and beliefs of neoliberalism. Although Petzold regularly invokes neoliberalism and its operations—for example, in the interview in this volume—his work approaches it in unusually intriguing ways.
Midway through Jerichow (2008), for example, Petzold offers a brief, seemingly tangential conversation that is nonetheless revealing for his unusual approach. Two of the film's three main characters, Ali and Thomas, sit in the front seats of a parked work van, the vehicle with which they deliver supplies for Ali's snack bars sprinkled throughout the former East German Prignitz region. The camera rests, as it does in many shots of automobiles across Petzold's films, in the backseat. It shoots over the shoulder of the figures, a position that allows the bodies of the actors, as Petzold repeatedly emphasizes, to adapt to the relevant physical activity of driving (figures 1 and 2; Nord and Petzold, "Das Auto").
Such images of characters in a "movement space" (a space remade by the systems of mobility in modern society [Urry, Mobilities 45–46]) recur throughout Petzold's cinema. For John Urry, movement and mobility in general have been key developments in modernity, transforming spaces and individuals alike (6–7). These movement spaces, as I shall discuss in the sections on Pilots (Pilotinnen; 1995) and on Wolfsburg (2003), become for Petzold a crucial point of contact between individuals and the socioeconomic world changing around them. In fact, shallow-focus shots of individuals in such movement spaces, with natural surroundings (landscapes, forests, lakes, and so on) in the blurred background, rank among the most important images in Petzold's cinema. Here, in Jerichow, as they sit watching the traffic in the provinces, Ali quizzes Thomas on where he would suggest locating a new snack bar. Parked before an intersection—another key movement space in Petzold's cinema—they debate where the most customers would flock, what time of day they would most likely stop by, what impact a traffic light would have on customers' ebbs and flows. The casually cold calculus of the business-minded, car-based conversation seems all the more surprising because Thomas has just slept with Laura, Ali's wife, and will soon plot to kill him.
Thomas starts the film unemployed and broke, and Petzold offers this conversation to demonstrate how, as he says, Thomas is becoming economic—how love and economy intersect at this literal street-crossing. As someone unemployed and socially marginal, Thomas has become a "ghost," as Petzold terms such characters, in the modern economy. Petzold's films are devised to register and track developments in German economy and society, especially since unification in 1989–90—these rapid and accelerating changes generate ghosts out of older modes of individual existence, ghosts and/or near-ghosts that recur throughout his cinema (from Karin in his first feature to Ana and Barbara in his two most recent works). Such ghosts, and Petzold's interest in them, recall the "social dead" that Orlando Patterson and, more recently, Joao Biehl have sketched (Patterson 38–39; Biehl 41 and 68). But here, viewers sense that Ali's employing Thomas as a chauffeur and now asking him to think through his business options give this ghost an opportunity to return to "normal" life. Such economic spectrality is not a question of simple financial disadvantage or oppressions but rather one in which Petzold's characters are active agents in their own desperation and alienation, often through, as in Jerichow, banal acts of theft, betrayal, and even murder.
The scene notably revisits and restages one from The Postman Always Rings Twice, an American hard-boiled novel and then series of films noirs that Petzold cites, as he does with many other films, as a generic model. In Postman, the male friends, the entrepreneur Nick and the drifter Frank, discuss the details of how to advertise Nick's restaurant most effectively with a sign similarly at the roadside. Postman also seems symptomatic of what Urry terms (and what Petzold consistently explores as) a "mobility turn" in the contemporary world that has fundamentally remade natural and artificial spaces, bodies, and the psychologies that inhabit them (Urry, Mobilities 6–7). Petzold's recasting of Postman shows how he consistently restages a genre predecessor in contemporary Germany, offering mutually illuminating readings of both the classic film and his own contemporary context. This may be the most unusual achievement of his films, 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.
It is no accident that Thomas falls in love with his employer's wife Laura, whom he imagines saving as he labors alongside her for Ali's business. Petzolds films explore individuals' tendency, consciously or not, to remake themselves for the socioeconomic context, not only by adjusting their overtly economic activities but also by adapting their desires, dreams, and fantasies. A key aspect of this remaking, what I call an economic "refunctioning," of people centers on how their desires change through work and the mobility it now brings. The recent refunctioning of people, for Petzold, results above all from the fundamental economic and social changes wrought by neoliberalism in a country where political and socioeconomic developments usually lag behind those of the Anglo-American countries. If neoliberalism has privatized formerly public institutions, deregulated markets, and valorized entrepreneurial initiative, it has also shifted the risks generated by those markets and formerly insured against by those public institutions—like unemployment—to individuals (Peck and Tickell; Bourdieu and Wacquant 4). Such shifts are facilitated by, and have facilitated, the "flexibility" of labor, the fading of collectivized political solidarities, and the widespread financialization of the economy, with its ancillary explosion of debt (all of these, especially debt, figure repeatedly in Petzolds films). These developments in the dismantling of public institutions, the transformation of labor, and financialization of life have, as Petzold's cinema repeatedly underscores, changed how individuals experience work, relationships, and themselves (see Bauman).
Petzolds films consistently explore these new and transformational modes of individualities, especially the compromised, even tainted, character of desire in the wake of such economic adaptability, accommodation, and mobility. This kind of adaptability, productive desire, and subsequent movement are emphatically historicized in Petzolds cinema, in which history regularly intrudes upon individuals' dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit. Such relentless "progress" of history is what has rendered people like Thomas ghostlike, spectral presences on history's inexorable march forward (see Gordon 8). As noted above, Petzold's ghosts, like Biehl's social dead, are invariably remnants from an earlier moment generated by socioeconomic change; in fact, as I shall detail below, this spectrality compels the viewer to confront history's transformations, dissonances, and losses. Individuals, families, even whole communities are knocked out of time and rendered undead before they realize it. Petzold's films consistently explore the coldness, paranoia, and fear bred of such economic adaptability, tainted desire, and sudden spectrality.
Contexts 1: Biographical-Historical
The wide-ranging constellation of themes that inhabit Petzolds films arises in part from the environment in which he grew up and now works. Petzold is the most distinguished contemporary auteur in Germany, but it bears underscoring that his training and career are well woven into recent historical events of tectonic importance: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the "reunification" of the two Germanys, the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and the accelerated integration of the European Union. Although our relative proximity to these events may obscure their significance, they have fundamentally recast the city, the country, and the continent in and on which Petzold operates. Indeed, during all of these events, Petzold was resident in Berlin, his adopted city, chosen in the early 1980s for cultural and political reasons. The Berlin Wall had not only divided Germany; it had kept the two Germanys, East and West, rutted in an ossified monument to the cold war and its Manichean logic. This charged, chosen place of residence interweaves Petzold's personal story with the history of Germany and the European continent. It located him at the most important front of the cold war that crumbled around him with unexpected speed and unforeseen consequences, an important subtext to many of his films.
Petzold was born in Hilden and grew up largely in Haan, in the western part of West Germany near the Ruhr region (Ruhrgebiet), more or less midway between the wealthy state-capital city Düsseldorf and industrial Wuppertal. The Ruhr region is Germany's industrial core, the engine of the country's spectacular economic rise from a fragmented mosaic of small states to, by the end of the nineteenth century, a world industrial power. For these obvious strategic reasons, the region proved a recurring target during Germany's twentieth-century wars. In World War II, the Ruhr region was heavily bombed to degrade the country's industrial capacity, but was then rapidly rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. The result was an industrial and often postindustrial landscape that seems to have left its mark on Petzold's vivid cinematic imagination (as reflected in Pilots or The Sex Thief). The area has a large number of small cities that tend, with the exception of notably wealthier Düsseldorf, to have more of a working-class character than Germany's better-known metropolises like Munich, Hamburg, or Frankfurt (Berlin constitutes an important exception on which I shall elaborate below).
Petzold recounts how his parents arrived in this region as political refugees from Soviet-dominated East Germany, where they had grown up. His father was originally from Saxony and his mother from what is now the Czech Republic. Their origins in a terrain of shifting borders and migrating masses is typical of the constant and fundamental remaking that has marked Central Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the interview contained in this book, Petzold discusses the impact of his parents' growing up as "refugee children" on his own childhood. He inhabited a series of "transit spaces," referring to bungalows and other inexpensive, semidisposable domiciles, and even called the site of much of his upbringing the German equivalent of "trailer parks" (said to me in English). Related to the movement spaces of modern mobility—they are by-products or second-order effects of such mobility—these transit spaces (like gas stations and roadside rest areas, but also hotels, motels, and other disposable buildings) play a central role in Petzold's cinema. His background recalls and underscores how Germany and its neighbors witnessed one of the largest (if self-inflicted) movements of people ever. An estimated fourteen to sixteen million people, including Petzold's parents, migrated in Central and Eastern Europe during the latter stages of World War II and in its aftermath. Later in the early postwar period, the 1949 creation and then 1950s political trajectory of East Germany created further westward-migratory waves. It was an era of often forgotten but utterly breathtaking movement and resettlement, whose magnitude and depths are only recently being tended and tallied by historians (Moeller).
Having left behind first eastern territories lost in the war and then East Germany itself, Petzold's parents became avowed anti-Communists, something against which a young Petzold reacted. The anti-Communist posture of West Germany not only positioned it against its immediate neighbors of East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact countries, it also helped integrate it into the western alliance of NATO and inclined it fatefully toward the United States. The Ruhr region was reconstructed with the help of the United States not least to bolster Western Europe economically and militarily as a bulwark against the feared westward expansion of the Soviet bloc. This postwar political inclination has created an abidingly complex relationship for many postwar Germans with the United States (memorably manifest, for example, in Wim Wenders's famous declaration that "the Yanks have colonized our subconscious" in his Kings of the Road [Im Laufe der Zeit; 1976]). This ambivalence toward the United States runs throughout Petzold's work, both in its love-hate relationship with Hollywood genre films and with the impact of what many Germans regard as the accelerating "Americanization" of their country. For one of many examples, in responding to a question about the spread of American economic and cultural practices in the former East Germany, Petzold said that he did not have to introduce such phenomena, as the American is already there, in fast-food restaurants, sport-utility vehicles, and exercise gyms (Uehling and Petzold).
Somewhat contrary to this anti-Communist background, Petzold chose to forego mandatory military service in favor of (likewise mandatory) civil service and then to study (modern) German literature in Berlin. In his civil-service position, he had his first professional experience with film, running a film program for young people at a kind of German YMCA, with whom he watched hundreds of films. The program was divided into popular and art-house cinema, a false distinction with which Petzold has never agreed and one I argue has been formative in his open-minded approach to genre films. After completing this civil service, he relocated to Berlin in 1981 and enrolled at the Freie Universitat (Free University), the origins of which also rest in the cold-war history of the city and the country. The main campus of the university, including its literature departments where Petzold studied, is in the southwestern section of Berlin, in what was the U.S. sector of the city. During the 1960s and 1970s student movements, the Freie Universitat became one of West Germany's most leftist academic institutions, hosting political actions, protests, and student strikes on a sometimes daily basis. This owed as well to the political demographics of West Berliners, often self-selected transplants from West Germany seeking to escape mandatory military or civil service, as West Berlin residence alone was seen as contributing sufficiently to the defense of the country. In the interview herein, Petzold stresses that his move to Berlin was driven by politics and by a cultural affinity for the (then once and future) capital.
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Excerpted from Christian Petzold by Jaimey Fisher. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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