Day for Night Magazine

Contemporary German Cinema

The Newer Wave
By Kyle Tidd

Just over a decade ago, the work of a group of Danes began to appear on the screens of the world’s top international film festivals. These works were largely the product of a collective of film-makers called Dogme 95, which was founded in 1995 in Copenhagen. Dogme 95 centered around a ten-point “vow of chastity” that attempted to wrest film away from Hollywood-style decadence and return it to a more “real-to-life” aesthetic. Dogme 95 insisted on employing no added sound, lighting, or props; it maintained that the camera must be hand-held to achieve a film that carried reality directly from the eye of the camera to the eye of those sitting in front of the movie screen. At the heart of Dogme 95 was the desire to “bring the truth out of character and settings” in contrast to a moment when stage tricks and editing dominated film. As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, many of the Dogme 95 artists are now revered as established film-makers, and the frontier of contemporary independent cinema has shifted across the border from Denmark to Germany with a movement the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema dubbed the “Nouvelle Vague Allemande,” more commonly known by its German title, “Berliner Schule,” or Berlin School. The Berlin School maintains a similarly inglorious aesthetic credo while breaking from the strict formal confines of Dogme 95.

The Berlin School is a loose affiliation of Germans with a similar aesthetic approach to film-making. Its original members studied at the Berlin Film and Television Academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This first group of students has since been joined by filmmakers from across the German-speaking world. Among the ranks of the German New Wave are Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Henner Winckler, Thomas Arslan, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maria Speth and Ulrich Köhler. The sensibilities of these artists tend, like the vision of the Danes before them, toward a minimally-filtered, yet carefully-framed view of the quotidian.

The work of these artists shares common elements in both form and content. The films tend to follow the actions of middle-class protagonists moving through cinescapes which provoke little emotional or intellectual response, except for occasional displays of melancholy or, on more strained occasions, even anguish. The protagonist of Ulrich Köhler’s Bungalow is a case in point. Paul, an introverted young man, defects from the German army when his convoy stops at a fast-food restaurant and makes his way back to his parents’ vacant cottage in rural southern Germany. Much of the film follows Paul’s interactions with his solitary surroundings: repairing a broken door, flying a toy plane, exploring old familiar paths on skateboard.

During the occasional moments of interpersonal contact, Paul primarily interacts with his older brother Max and Max’s girlfriend Lene, who have come to the empty cottage to enjoy some time together. His older brother is surprised and angered to find Paul at the bungalow, but Paul does not take much account of his brother’s emotions. On the contrary, Paul even attempts to seduce his brother’s girlfriend, an effort which at first is met with little apparent success. These actions are emblematic of his attitude toward his life in general, within which nothing seems to be of much consequence to him and his actions appear hardly motivated. The film begins with an act of nonchalantly executed desertion; Paul’s advances on his brother’s girlfriend seem sporadic and half-hearted. Throughout the film Paul seems not to reflect or show emotion with regard to his choices.

One is left with the feeling that Paul has little will to live, as he meanders through a small cadre of characters in a psychologically barren environment. The camera follows Paul’s everyday movement, yet paradoxically, during – or even despite – all this diaristic portraiture, the viewer gains little access to the mind of the protagonist. Because of the exclusionary quality of this narrative style it is difficult to call the central character a “protagonist”, and this is true of many of the Berlin School films. The characters that populate Berlin School cinema are characterized by a melancholy detachment from life, expressing disenchantment with middle-class economic success and its accompanying materialistic lifestyle. But, in many of the films, nothing much happens to the lead characters, and what does occur seems of little interest to the viewer. In short, these films do not offer much in the way of narrative, leaving little room for character development, and perhaps no room at all for plot investment; there is always a deficit of information to latch on to with regard to the primary characters. It is as if, instead of following these films out of narrative interest, we are carried along in the vacuum created behind the characters’ actions, simply viewing the calculated and methodically-composed shots that populate these pieces. Moreover, the minor characters play unusually minimal roles in almost all of these films.

While the shots almost always appear carefully composed, they never make attempts at grandeur. The Berlin School does not aim to impress through any feat of grandiose cinematography. Rather, the films maintain an elegant compositional simplicity, conveyed through long still or panning shots, often with one sole figure moving away from the camera to convey a sense of detachment, or by placing the viewer face-to-face with one of the characters to reveal subtle emotional gestures, creating what is often the only view of an interior given to the audience. The films make sparse use of dialogue and, as with the films of Dogme 95, include almost no music.

To take another example, in Angela Schanelec’s Marseille, the main character, Sophie, moves from Berlin to Marseille, temporarily swapping apartments with a woman we never come to know. Sophie moves about without any apparent aim. She takes random pictures as she walks through the city streets. Small exchanges occur between her and the city’s inhabitants, and few of them shed light on Sophie’s life, her purpose, or her motives. As with Bungalow, Marseille is dominated by an almost stubborn avoidance of narrative structure, emblematic of that Berlin School aesthetic in which the camera never pierces the superficial layer of appearances or provides any explanations outside those few we can glean from the characters’ environment.

The directors of Berlin School achieve a stark beauty in their portrayals of middle-class Germans with little emotion, or investment in their lives. Initially, in viewing these films, I reacted to the sparseness of action, dialogue, music, and even depth of character, with an equal feeling of coldness, a feeling of having experienced nothing. Yet as I become more acquainted with the aesthetic project as a whole and more invested in its portrayal of the world, I find that the strength of these films lies in the very delicacy of their cinematic gesture, in their unassuming ability to convey a world of unadorned starkness that aptly characterizes the detached and mediated experience of contemporary Western culture. For Berlin School film, a “non-realist” aesthetic, i.e., one which resists traditional narrative and character forms, becomes a kind of new realism in which the very ‘lack’ of realist mechanisms conveys an ‘experience’ of reality. Rather than presenting a story that offers wisdom through the experience of a fully developed character, these films find their strength in the meandering camera as it traces the banal movements of a set of “characters.” This allows us to place – and even reflect upon – our own life experiences through the world of the camera, without the distraction of those traditional narratives, strong characters, and the ideologies through which they are inevitably presented. These films, in their hushed portrayals of human life in all of its bleakness, achieve an aesthetic success by implementing a conventional “realism” turned inside out, whose profundity becomes more evident with further reflection upon the object it is attempting to represent.