For the last twenty-five years, Germany's 4 th largest city, Köln (Cologne), has been host to an underground filmmaking community that barely ever formed more than a blimp on the radar of national, let alone international, cinephiles: the "Kölner Gruppe" (Cologne Group). When watching their films, one cannot not tune in to their peculiar mix of melancholia, sincerity, and lighthearted joy, all of which accompanied by a sense of hope that the old myths of friendship, love, and daring as one might recall them from the early period of cinema will be resurrected. These films share an attitude towards the cinema that revels both in cinephilic pleasures and local specificity, refuses to ally itself with either the avant-garde or the mainstream, and, ultimately affirms a joyful lightheartedness while still seriously reflecting on the world from which they emerge.
For example, notwithstanding the fleeting, incidental nature of many of these films, which ironically are made in one of the geographical hearts of contemporary European media and communication industries, one might still gain a sense of how they subtly counter these industries' ideologically-driven imperative to "express yourself!"; they do so by cinematically dramatizing how this very demand functions as nothing less than a crucial operating force in the production process of neoliberal capitalism or of what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls "control societies." Intriguingly, however, the Kölner Gruppe films exemplarily appear to heed Deleuze's suggestion that in the age of communication-driven control societies "we've got to hijack speech" because "speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money--and not by accident but by their very nature."
Indeed, one could argue that the films of Markus Mischkowski and Kai Maria Steinkühler, the co-writers and -directors of the "Westend" series of films, are precisely about the insidious logic of control operative in the age of neoliberalism. In what are to date five shorts and one feature film, we follow the activities--and more often lack thereof--of Alfred (played by Steinkühler) and Mike (played by Mischkowski), two largely unemployed buddies whose main desire seemingly consists of being able to scrape together enough money to sustain their daily consumption of Kölsch, the city's delectable top fermented beer specialty. Refusing to cater to potential financiers' desire to psychologize their characters and turn the still ongoing serialization of Mike and Alfred's story into yet another social problem film so popular with German television producers, Mischkowski and Steinkühler instead rely on offbeat, deadpan humor reminiscent of Buster Keaton's slapstick comedies, Kevin Smith's slacker classic, Clerks , the oeuvre of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, as well as a visual aesthetic evoking both Jim Jarmusch films and Spaghetti Westerns. Shot in beautiful black and white 16- and 35mm, the "Westend" films' visual compositions primarily rely on a mise-en-scène rendered in deep focus long takes and are frequently shot from low angles. The results are visual compositions that simultaneously make our anti-heroes ironically seem larger than life, situate them in a specific locale, and aestheticize their environment--a suburban, industrial wasteland on the western edge of Cologne that today no longer exists--so much so that it is retrospectively charged with a mythological quality it never possessed in actuality. But why should such mythologizing be reserved merely for Paris or the wide-open spaces of John Ford's American West?
As part of their effort to lend working class spaces their own mythology and, in so doing, image them with a sense of dignity that is usually absent from mainstream representations thereof, the filmmakers are particularly attuned to the role language has assumed under the reign of neoliberalism. For instance, with regard to the situation in Westend (feature film) where Alfred and Mike have found temporary employment in a roadside pit stop and are instructed by the business' owner, Rasto (Jens Classen), to apply what is easily recognizable as a neoliberal service discourse, the directors argue that such scenes dramatize the fact that in the age of low-wage jobs "a simple discourse is being aestheticized. Neoliberalism works by aestheticizing the most banal operations and things. And persons look to acquire identities through such discourses, and if this does not work out then humor emerges out of this discrepancy between discourse and content, as it does in Westend . Such moments might be considered political, as this occurrence of laughter also encourages viewers to reflect on what this neoliberal discourse does to people." The "Westend" series as a whole engages the topic of unemployment and the attending boredom experienced by characters who do not know what to do with their time; the films dramatize how neoliberalism constantly tries to introduce, as Deleuze writes, "an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition [into labor processes], a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself." Yet, rather than making a dismal social drama, Mischkowski and Steinkühler opt for more poetic and joyful means to confront viewers with the mechanisms by which post-industrial capitalist culture has turned communication into a myth that today forbids people even to question its own imperative to communicate and the belief that you can achieve everything with proper communication skills. Crucially, however, what Mischkowski and Steinkühler's films reveal is that the rhetoric of the neoliberal service economy does not disguise from its customers that it offers them a bad deal; rather, it makes it so obvious that resistance to it is, at least momentarily, almost rendered impossible precisely because of how this rhetoric affectively impinges upon its addressees, thereby ensuring that we take pleasure in our own exploitation. And, ingeniously, their films are also suggestive of a strategy of resistance--a strategy that is rooted in the flat-out refusal of work rather than the belief that one can reform capitalism piecemeal. In terms of cultural genealogies, then, Alfred and Mike's ultimate precursor might very well be Herman Melville's scrivener, Bartleby, whose (in)famously repeated slogan, "I prefer not," still stands as the most singular expression of absolute refusal--a refusal of work so radical that it blocks capitalism's considerable capacity to appropriate, and then sell back to us, the very resistance to it.
At a time when we should be asking questions about the very viability of capitalism as a system that can, let alone should, be reformed, these super low-budget independent films from Köln offer a provocative perspective on our present circumstances without ever becoming heavy-handed, "pedagogical," or proselytizing. The beauty of these small, charming gems lies, without a doubt, in the fact that they never fail to entertain--a quality that does not depend on their analytic import, though the latter might enrich the pleasure we take in watching them.