Die Berliner Schule / The Berlin School
Die Berliner Schule
• Refers to a group of recent and contemporary
German filmmakers
• Originated in post-1990 Germany
• Recognised first in France: “Nouvelle Vague
Allemande” (German New Wave cinema)
“Die Berliner Schule”
• Turn towards post-unification social reality –
political dimension
• Many of the directors studied at the Deutsche
Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin
• Not all are based in Berlin (e.g. Christoph
Hochhäusler studied in Munich)
• Early 1990s: Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan,
Angela Schanelec (older generation)
• Since late 1990s: Christoph Hochhäusler,
Benjamin Heisenberg (and many others)
• Film magazine Revolver since 1998 – forum for
discussing new film aesthetics
Aesthetics of boredom, or just boring?
• Film critic and film maker, Oskar Roehler, on
the films of the Berlin School:
“austauschbar, depressiv und langweilig”
“sie [vertreiben] die Leute aus den Kinos”
“slow cinema”
• Focus on everyday life of contemporary
Germans, e.g. work
• Affluent, bored bourgeois characters
searching for meaning / action
• Presents gaps between events rather than the
events themselves
Aesthetics of Boredom
• Paul Cook: Berlin School films fit into
established European aesthetic tradition of
bourgeois boredom
• Interplay between boredom and expectation
defines characters: what happens?
• Cinema of inaction?
Aesthetics of Boredom
• Characters are often looking for a new life, a
new beginning
• Often they have no choice but to give way to
their reality of tedium and lack of action
• Slow pace of storytelling allows for prolonged
periods of hollow time
• Political potential: films reveal tensions in
German society today
• Marco Abel: insecurities around social
mobility in neoliberal present
• Cook: Yella exposes “the grotesquely
ephemeral workings of white-collar corporate
capitalism”
Christian Petzold
• One of the leading figures of the Berlin School
• Famous for his Gespenster trilogy:
Die innere Sicherheit (2000)
Gespenster (2005)
Yella (2007)
• Depiction of post-wall Germany on level of
micropolitics (not big macro-political issues)
• Characters populate in-between, ghostlike
spaces, real and dreamlike
• These spaces constitute heart of post-wall,
neoliberal Germany