GERMAN DESIRE IN THE AGE OF VENTURE CAPITALISM
an essay by marco abel
Yella is a film about Germany-about contemporary Germany. How important it is to emphasize this seemingly banal fact becomes quickly obvious once we acknowledge the reality of the state of affairs suffered abroad by German films in the last two decades. Just recall the recent German films that managed to find major international distribution deals and even received Academy Awards accolades. With few exceptions such as Fatih Akin's films, these were precisely productions such as Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa (2001), Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! (2003), Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006)-films that proved to have significant appeal for international audiences not least because they almost pathologically corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated outside Germany's borders that this nation is still almost exclusively reducible to its totalitarian past(s). Even Tom Tykwer's seminal Run Lola Run (1998)-a film equally beloved for its iconic red-headed protagonist and its stylish look-cannot really be regarded as a film about contemporary Germany precisely because of how it uses editing and mise en scène to transform the real social spaces of post-reunification Berlin into a more or less mythical, universal space that in the final analysis has rather little to do with the reunified city itself; the film, that is, could have taken place anywhere.
Christian Petzold's eighth feature, Yella, in contrast, is not merely about contemporary Germany but is indeed of it. In this regard Yella is not only typical of Petzold's oeuvre, which from the beginning has examined the conditions of possibility for living in post-reunification Germany, but also representative of a number of films that can be productively grouped together under the label "Berlin School." This term, popularized by various German film critics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, forges a film-historical relation among a dozen or so contemporary German filmmakers who today all live and work in Berlin. Although it is important not to eradicate the aesthetic differences that ultimately distinguish the individual 'members' from each other (some of whom view their alleged membership in this 'school' with considerable anxiety), the films by directors such as Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Valeska Grisebach, Maren Ade, Ulrich Köhler, Maria Speth, Elke Hauck, Henner Winckler, and, of course, Christian Petzold can be considered related by their efforts to present viewers with new images of contemporary Germany-images that do not already preexist in the minds of their viewers and that, as a result, actively block precisely those tourist-like viewing habits to which the better known and commercially more successful German films of the last decade shamelessly cater. In short, what the Berlin School directors and their films, of which Yella may perhaps be the group's first real masterpiece, have in common is a desire to create a cinematic itinerary of Germany's present.
This desire to create an itinerary of the country's present should not, however, be misconstrued as somehow being expressive of these filmmakers' desire to deny their country's history (especially its totalitarian pasts) and instead escape into the realm of pure fiction; rather, by drawing upon the vast pool of stories and experiences to be found in Germany today, these films suggest an urgently felt need to engage the present and do so especially by positing questions about how and under what specific conditions people live through such experiences. These films are thus very much about German history, but their relationship to this history is not defined by its 'representational' quality as it is the case with films such as Downfall or The Lives of Others-films which, because they flaunt so excessively their alleged 'authenticity', demand to be measured against the accuracy with which they engage the real historical circumstances that they evoke.
In contrast, the Berlin School films' relation to German history is more akin to how violent events tend to be rendered in Jean-Luc Godard's films: rather than obsessively returning to the violent event itself and actually depicting it, Godard's camera tends to focus on the effects the event had on the subjects that it affected. Likewise, the Berlin School films are not interested in depicting, say, the actual fall of the wall, nor are they keen on representing the horrors of German history, be they those perpetrated by the Nazis, the Stasi, or the Red Army Faction (the 'terrorist' group that combated the West-German state in the 1970s and 1980s); instead, these films try to find ways to image the myriad effects Germany's troubled history has had, and continues to have, on the subjectivities of the people living in Germany today. Indeed, these films appear to insist that an event such as Germany's reunification can be shown only by rendering visible its effects in and on the present precisely because an event has no existence outside of its effects. The desire to encounter how German history affects the present moment, however, commits these filmmakers to directing their cinematic eyes and ears on the interstices of German social history, that is, on the micro-histories that constitute life in the present rather than on the well-codified 'major' narratives of officially sanctioned historical and political discourses, which the German film industry keeps reproducing in a steady stream of history films.
One of the most significant aspects of these filmmakers' collective effort to image Germany in the present-an effort that is collective not despite but because of the singularity with which the individual directors pursue it-is, perhaps paradoxically, that their commitment to image the present of Germany is imbricated by a sense that such a task can successfully be undertaken only based on the counter-historical premise that a German people, and a concomitant German nation, does not yet have existence. Unlike most German films of the last two decades, that is, the Berlin School looks at contemporary Germany as a new nation-for as a nation, Germany is barely twenty years old-and wonders where its people actually are: not east-Germans, not west-Germans, not Leitkultur "lets-eradicate-all-differences" Germans-but the very people that are still missing, not least because of the political failure to constitute them through a proper constitutional act after the country's reunification in 1990. The Berlin School films are thus quite literally directed at a people still missing-and hence at a people that is yet to come-rather than at a community, imagined or real, that has coherence across time and space, that is, across the ups and downs of 20th and 21st century German history/histories.
Christian Petzold's work, from his early television films such as Pilotinnen (1995), Cuba Libre (1996), and Beischlafdiebin (1998), through his first theatrical features, The State I Am In (2000) and Ghosts (2005)-which together with Yella form his so-called "ghost trilogy"-has consistently investigated how this absence of an already constituted German people manifests itself in the present, post-reunification reality of characters populating and moving through the geographical spaces constituting 'Germany'. Not coincidentally, then, Petzold's films are dominated by mostly female characters (Petzold claims that he prefers to write stories about women at least partially because this prevents him from becoming overly autobiographical) who are perpetually on the move, driving in their cars, riding trains, or simply roaming through spaces that frequently lack clear definition. These spaces, or what Marc Augé calls "non-places" (Petzold cites Augé's book of that title as one of the many reference points he drew upon when conceptualizing Yella), include the seemingly endless German Autobahn-net on which his protagonists restlessly drive to and fro in smoothly running, German-engineered cars, but without ever really knowing where they're going or why they are in motion to begin with; they also include amorphous postmodern hotel rooms and lobbies, office parks, car dealerships, and coldly stylized homes, as well as the oddly depopulated urban landscapes that always appear in his films as spaces through which his characters are forced to travel rather than as locations where they would feel welcomed to socialize and forge communities.
Yella, too, is full of such spaces. Characteristic of the director's work at large, Petzold's camera (which is, as always, handled by his cinematographer Hans Fromm) renders these spaces visible without providing establishing shots that would allow viewers to orient themselves and gain a feeling of familiarity and recognition-a feeling that would almost inevitably territorialize the ghost-like, shapeless quality of these non-places onto the overly familiar psychic terrain that Germany has come to assume in and through the myriad cinematic representations of its past. By refusing, however, to clearly identify these spaces-that is, by aesthetically rendering these spaces as non-places-Petzold subjects viewers to assuming a point of view that forces them to encounter these images as images of the present: the lush landscape by the Elbe river that asserts its presence sonically even more so than visually, that way calling attention to its existence in the here and now while simultaneously also evoking Japanese ghost story films and the rich psychic territory mapped out by German fairy tales; the forsaken streets of the (east-German) city of Wittenberge, which was once home to the Protestant Reformation and subsequently became a bustling industrial city, but which today shows all the traces of a city that has seen most of its youngest and brightest leave in hopes of finding a more prosperous future in the West; or the late capitalist environs of the medium-sized (west-German) city of Hannover, host of the World Expo 2000, with its many postmodern business parks and 'tastefully' designed hotels, which simultaneously exude a coldness that affectively prevents anyone from ever feeling at home in these non-places and, mysteriously, an aesthetic charm all their own-one to which Petzold's camera is clearly attracted.
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