The MRRMAC's "Retrospective of Contemporary German Cinema" invites you to explore over the next 2 weeks a cinema that is largely unknown in the U. S. but that has recently received much positive attention in Europe.   The world's most famous film magazine, the Cahiers du Cinéma, recently coined the phrase nouvelle vague Allemande upon seeing a number of films made by young German directors who in their native country are associated with the so-called "Berlin School."   Likewise, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound devoted a special feature to contemporary German cinema in its December 2006 issue.   Although its focus went beyond the films of the Berlin School-- S & S also calls attention to some of the more successful mainstream films German cinema has produced in the last few years, including the Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and Oscar winner The Lives of Others (2006), as well as winners of major international film awards such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), The Edukators (2004), and Head-On (2004)--they too took note of this new Teutonic film 'movement'.   Simply put, the Berlin School constitutes the first significant collective attempt at advancing the aesthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the New German Cinema of the 1970s.

The label "Berlin School" was invented and gradually disseminated by a small number of German film critics.   Though many of the directors who now find themselves associated with this label at best reluctantly tolerate being associated with it, fearing that their individuality gets subsumed under an overly generalizing classification, as a critical category this label enables the description and, perhaps, even advocacy of a cinema that otherwise finds itself ignored by a mainstream press more concerned with the latest box office numbers than with challenging its readers to seek out films that actively try to re-envision what German cinema could be(come) and that, to this end, attempt to negotiate the dialectical tension consisting of affirming cinematic pleasures on one hand and insisting on an intellectual, critical mode of engagement with what this medium can do.

So even though we should exercise due caution when applying the "Berlin School" tag to individual films and directors lest we de-differentiate what is, in the end, merely a loosely configured group of Berlin-based filmmakers, we can still provide a tentative description of an 'ecological' consistency generated by these films.   Visually, for instance, many of these films pursue an 'aesthetics of reduction' reminiscent of filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, or Michael Haneke.   Many of these films are dominated by long takes, medium and long shots, clinically precise framing, a certain deliberateness of pacing, sparse usage of musical scores, and, frequently, the reliance on unknown, or even non-professional, actors who appear to be chosen for who they 'are' rather than for whom they could be.   Cumulatively, these cinematic aspects stress the specificity of the characters' spatio-temporal existence.   Unlike so many other German films of the last 20 years, these films unmistakably take place in a specific time and place--in the here and now of reunified Germany.

One of the effects of such spatio-temporal precision is that the viewer's attention is sharpened for the poetic texture of what could easily be mistaken for an artlessly realist mise en scène.   Instead, these remarkably precise films solicit our attention in such fashion that our sense perceptions become alert to the extra-ordinary qualities of otherwise rather ordinary lives.   Many of these films, that is, focus on the everyday and attempt to capture normality; however, they do this in such a way that in their visual intensification of normality the extraordinary at the heart of everydayness emerges.   It is as if they intentionally heeded Erich von Stroheim's adage for directing--take a close look at the world and keep on doing so : relentlessly focusing their camera on seemingly unremarkable events, these films' tendency to 'stare' effects an alteration of that which they stare at from within the act of seeing itself.   These films should therefore not be reduced to the "documentary-like" moniker that is so often used to describe films that call in the services of so-called "realism."   If anything, the Berlin School's aesthetic is more akin to what legendary French film critic André Bazin once defined as "true realism" (as opposed to what he derided as "pseudo-realism"): these films are too obviously stylized by means of camera movement and mise en scène as that they could be described as "documenting" reality.   Forgoing any attempt at psychological realism, many of these films instead flaneur with their characters, seemingly aimlessly or, perhaps better, phlegmatically.  In so doing, their ethnological gaze--which frequently is directed at in-between or borderline spaces--shows contemporary Germany as if from the perspective of a stranger.

Although the Berlin School does decidedly not exhibit the traditional characteristics of 'avant-garde' cinema, these films' attitude towards reality is nevertheless akin to that of an experiment whose outcome is yet to be determined.   These films approach the world they depict with the assumption that they do not yet know who or what this object--the other--is.   Instead of trying to express something about this other and thus reducing it to the pre-existing point of view of a subject that speaks from a position of superior knowledge, they instead heed, as German critical theorist Theodor Adorno might have said, "the primacy of the object."   They neither speak for this object nor make it speak; rather, they create maps of the very socio-political, economic, cultural, and emotional forces that have paralyzed post-wall Germany since 1989, when Germany's most recent emotional rollercoaster ride began with the heights of the fall of the Berlin wall and the country's subsequent reunification only to end in massive unemployment and an attending social malaise, culminating around the turn of the millennium in a public debate on the Germans' unwillingness to become more mobile.   These maps, however, are 'untimely' rather than 'representational' maps, for they delineate less a series of images of post-wall Germany 'as it is'--cliché impressions that would merely have the questionable appeal of tourist snapshots--than a network of images that, as if by accident, emerge from within the characters' subjective existence.   Generative in nature, these images do not represent a pre-existing reality but rather render visible aspects of social reality that are either inaccessible to, or simply absent in, the current 'real' reality of post-wall citizens.   We might say that it is their 'untimeliness' that finally imbues these images with a political quality: they are 'of' their time only in so far as they are offered up in hopes of a better future to come.   In other words, the Berlin School produces films that are politically necessary, not because these directors make 'political' films (i.e., message-driven films such as Michael Moore's) but because they make their films politically--because their images don't so much pretend to represent some invisible knowledge of 'real' Germany offered up as indispensable (moral) insights as point to the future in hopes that the force of these images bears enough virtual potential for affecting yet-to-come moments with transformative energy, with the capacity to alter the very reality from within which these images initially emerged.

It's this aesthetic dwelling in the here and now that points to another key aspect of the Berlin School.   These films neither willfully universalize their cultural-historical specificity as do, for instance, many contemporary German "comedies of consensus" such as Maybe, Maybe Not (1994) nor sidestep the difficulties of the present by once again dutifully (re)turning to the by now neatly codified horrors of the past as did the recent wave of 'Hitler' films such as Sophie Scholl (2005), which not coincidentally appealed to an international audience--as if pathologically (wanting) to corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated abroad that Germany is still almost exclusively reducible to its Nazi past.   Instead, the Berlin School presents us with a passionate and innovative effort to find new ways of describing and analyzing the present of a country that continues to struggle with finding its "true" identity 6 decades after the end of WWII and more than 15 years after its reunification.   This presentism--pursued in the name of affecting the future--should not be considered a denial of history, as if this new generation of filmmakers, born after 1960, turned its back on the horrors perpetuated by an earlier generation of Germans.   Rather, the films' insistence on discovering, and tapping into, the plentitude of stories available in the country's present sheds light on the very conditions of possibility in today's Germany for ethically heeding a sense of responsibility--for habituating one's capacity to become response-able before the other at the very moment when the socio-psychic environment of Germany faces great pressure from within and without in form of both the economic and psychological cost of the reunification that went anything but smoothly and, concurrently, the brutal socio-economic effects produced by the logic of neo-liberalism, which, among other things, accelerate the erosion of Germany's once celebrated welfare state.

Notwithstanding their individual differences, then, we might view the Berlin School as undertaking the effort to create an 'itinerary of the present'--not in order to deny history but to speculate about how a different future might be brought about.   Since speculation-- specere is Greek for 'to look at'--is by definition 'of' the sphere of the visual, it is only proper that these filmmakers pursue their conjecture by carefully attending to how their practices realize their medium's inherent qualities.   In so doing, these films appear to operate based on the utopian belief that, as Jean-Luc Godard once oracled, the future of a country can improve only if its images improve.

We invite you to examine for yourself whether these films indeed bear out this utopian hope.