States of Longing: Films from the Berlin School
Ort: Toronto
Ereignis: Das Goethe-Institut Toronto und Cinematheque Ontario präsentieren 15 der besten Filme der “Berliner Schule”.
There’s an immediately apparent irony to Cinematheque Ontario’s current retrospective of films from the so-called ‘Berlin School’, a group of loosely aligned German filmmakers which has ostensibly arisen in response to the awards-and box-office baiting likes of Downfall (2004), The Lives of Others (2006), et al. As Andrea Picard observes in her program notes, [it is a] “radical rebirth of the politics of the image, a cool, minimalist and sophisticated filmmaking, political in its form rather than overtly through its content.” […] [The films] pointedly illustrate social or political issues—as in the matter-of-fact episodes within a low-security prison for mothers and children in Maria Speth’s Madonnas (2007). […] Yet what is most evident about these films in both their content and their aesthetics is not any revolutionary zeal, but a tactful reticence that adds a formalist sheen and a sense of mystery to what are, for the most part, conventional narrative forms. For all that the Berlin School films evince various lessons learned from the touchstones of modern Asian cinema (wide framings, distended, single-shot dialogues, seemingly random wanderings and contemplations) and those of Europe past and present (Picard invokes Eustache, Garrel and Pialat, with the Dardennes lurking nearby), this is a decisively protagonist-driven, implicitly psychological cinema—a cinema of traditional concerns and intentions given a fresh, incisive spin by an increasingly common set of cinematic methods. This should not be taken as derogation. Rather, what the best of the Berlin Scholars attest to is the power of these international currents of cinematic exchange. […] Even the least of these films evinces a strong sense of place that grounds their cosmopolitan aesthetics in a crystalline atmosphere, in which their protagonists are suspended with a sometimes frightening opacity or an equally frightening clarity. The Berlin Scholars are elliptical in both senses of the term: in their economy of means, and the cryptic (when not sometimes maddeningly obscure) constructs they build out of seemingly familiar material. […] Rather than searching out wellsprings of ‘genius’, it might be instructive to view the most distinctive artists—whether within this one ‘School’ or anywhere else—as nodal points of eminently shareable stylistic strategies and narrative concerns; as beneficiaries of a common inheritance who have learned how best to focus and direct that which has been passed on to them. Not a radical rebirth, then, but a birthright, a truly national cinema (or counter-cinema) drawing on a wealth of lessons emanating from both within and without the borders of that or any one country. […]
Ereignis: Das Goethe-Institut Toronto und Cinematheque Ontario präsentieren 15 der besten Filme der “Berliner Schule”.
There’s an immediately apparent irony to Cinematheque Ontario’s current retrospective of films from the so-called ‘Berlin School’, a group of loosely aligned German filmmakers which has ostensibly arisen in response to the awards-and box-office baiting likes of Downfall (2004), The Lives of Others (2006), et al. As Andrea Picard observes in her program notes, [it is a] “radical rebirth of the politics of the image, a cool, minimalist and sophisticated filmmaking, political in its form rather than overtly through its content.” […] [The films] pointedly illustrate social or political issues—as in the matter-of-fact episodes within a low-security prison for mothers and children in Maria Speth’s Madonnas (2007). […] Yet what is most evident about these films in both their content and their aesthetics is not any revolutionary zeal, but a tactful reticence that adds a formalist sheen and a sense of mystery to what are, for the most part, conventional narrative forms. For all that the Berlin School films evince various lessons learned from the touchstones of modern Asian cinema (wide framings, distended, single-shot dialogues, seemingly random wanderings and contemplations) and those of Europe past and present (Picard invokes Eustache, Garrel and Pialat, with the Dardennes lurking nearby), this is a decisively protagonist-driven, implicitly psychological cinema—a cinema of traditional concerns and intentions given a fresh, incisive spin by an increasingly common set of cinematic methods. This should not be taken as derogation. Rather, what the best of the Berlin Scholars attest to is the power of these international currents of cinematic exchange. […] Even the least of these films evinces a strong sense of place that grounds their cosmopolitan aesthetics in a crystalline atmosphere, in which their protagonists are suspended with a sometimes frightening opacity or an equally frightening clarity. The Berlin Scholars are elliptical in both senses of the term: in their economy of means, and the cryptic (when not sometimes maddeningly obscure) constructs they build out of seemingly familiar material. […] Rather than searching out wellsprings of ‘genius’, it might be instructive to view the most distinctive artists—whether within this one ‘School’ or anywhere else—as nodal points of eminently shareable stylistic strategies and narrative concerns; as beneficiaries of a common inheritance who have learned how best to focus and direct that which has been passed on to them. Not a radical rebirth, then, but a birthright, a truly national cinema (or counter-cinema) drawing on a wealth of lessons emanating from both within and without the borders of that or any one country. […]
von Andrew Tracey, theauteur.com, 2. März 2009
info@toronto.goethe.org
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