Berlin School (films)

Berlin School is the name for a style in German cinema, which has emerged since the mid-1990s away from the at that time dominant in the German film romantic comedies.

Term and membership

Already in the 1970s there was talk of the Berlin School, then in terms of the so-called workers' movie. However, this article deals with the Berlin school of the 1990s and 2000s, which refers to the New German Cinema or author films of the 1960s and 70s.

At the loose group of filmmakers to count in the first generation Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec that ( dffb) met together at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. Since the early 1990s, they inspire the German film criticism with plants in the aesthetics of the Berlin School.

In 2003, the film Milk Wood by Christoph Hochhäusler at the Berlinale ran. The following year, the film Marseille by Angela Schanelec was seen at the International Film Festival in Cannes. Both German and other films of similar style met with French film critics with a positive response, which was reflected in enthusiastic reviews in Cahiers du cinéma and Le Monde. The French journalists call this trend " Nouvelle Vague Allemande ", the German press was also a " Berlin School". This term works as a marketing label, but including subsumed films are very different and varied, the film aesthetics not a Berliner phenomenon.

Currently assigned to mainly the works of Christopher Hochhäusler ( Milk Wood and Am Guilty ), Benjamin Heisenberg ( Sleeper ), Maren Ade, Henner Winckler ( school trip ) and Valeska Grisebach ( My Star) in the Berlin School a. Although Hochhäusler, Heisenberg and Ade are graduates of the University of Television and Film in Munich, "Berlin School" is the name recorded. In their entirety, the directors reflect the full range of German film schools resist, some were also trained abroad, some are working closely together with each other not know each other or even reject collectivism from.

More Regisseur_innen that are associated with the Berlin School are, among others, Valeska Grisebach, Elke Hauck, Sonja Heiss, Ulrich Köhler, Jan Krüger, Hannes Lang, Matthias Luthardt, Pia Marais, Timo Müller, Ayse Polat Jan Schomburg, Maria Speth, Isabelle Stever and Sören Voigt.

Models

The models of the directors of the Berlin School are Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Bresson, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul or the Belgian directors Jean -Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. Stylistic similarities as well as the content can also be found on the Austrian cinema with Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Ruth Mader and the director and producer association coop 99 Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec are clear role models for younger directors of the Berlin School.

Features

With a distinctive style will it goes to the directors of the Berlin school less about telling stories spectacular, but they make cinema away from sensations and melodrama. It will be explored more mundane, fed from personal experience scenarios. The backgrounds of the characters shown in the movies are usually only hinted at, but not described in detail. People are often on the run, but without being able to reach new horizons or a better life. The films of the Berlin school play of anonymous non-places and in sprawling, run-down landscape or city neighborhoods. In contrast to the socially critical New German Cinema of the 1970s no alternatives to the present social system are offered. The depressive mood of many of these films reflected ultimately increasing social insecurity and crash fears the intellectual middle class, from which these young filmmakers.

Engine of the stories is often the desperation of the protagonists in the struggle for personal happiness. This often open end leaves the viewers whether fulfills the longing of the characters, sometimes there is but a bitter end. Crucial issues of society are broken down into feelings and motives of individuals or dealt with at the microcosm of the family or the relationship between two people. For the people there are disasters, there is rarely redemption.

A unifying feature of the Berlin School is the narrative visual aesthetic that is the responsibility of style defining camera men and women, such as Jürgen Jürges, Hans Fromm, Reinhold spurs, Nikolai von Grävenitz, Bernhard Keller, Bernadette Paaßen and Patrick Orth and film editor inside and Bettina Böhler. A Stylistics of parsimony ( long camera settings, few cuts, reduced dialogues and extended silence and sparingly used musical background ) focuses the viewers attention to the characteristics of the film characters. The events often take place in perceived real time, which sometimes reminds us of the quality of documentation. The spectators can feel this way or uninvited voyeur.

Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec are role models for younger directors of the Berlin School.

Discourse

The journalistic mouthpiece of the directors of the Berlin School is the twice-yearly magazine Revolver, in which the discourse of the filmmaker develops and maps. . Edited it is by Jens Börner, Benjamin Heisenberg, Christoph Hochhäusler, Franz Müller, Nicolas Wacker Barth and Saskia Walker. From this relationship out events are organized such as film screenings and discussions. Experienced international directors and young German directors are introduced and incorporated into the discourse. The American mumblecore director Andrew Bujalski was invited to a workshop and panel to Berlin, for example, in January 2012. In the same year there was a detailed retrospective on the film work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new generation of future Berlin School directors has been presented by the turret editorial in May 2012: Jessica Krummenacher ( Totem ), Hannes Lang ( peak), Maximilian Linz ( The Oberhausen feeling). and Timo Müller ( Morscholz )

Meanwhile, an anthology of essays by authors Revolver is published, the discourse around cinema influenced: Cinema must be dangerous. Revolver movie book. The best of 14 editions revolver. 40 texts and interviews for the film.

Reception

• The American filmmaker Miranda July refers positively to the director Maren Ade.
• "They are always brittle, always strict. In the films actually do anything. They are slow, drab and it is ever really said. That is the Berlin School. They come with the critics away always good and have as 5,000 to 10,000 spectators. " ( Oskar Roehler )
• " Intrusion of reality into the German film " (Christoph Hochhäusler about Bungalow by Ulrich Köhler )
• Film critic Gerhard Midding complained that in the films of the Berlin School, the drama will overly withdrawn. He doubts that the adherence to reduced Stories and reduced aesthetic is a permanently sustainable program.