Marco Abel's work delves into the intricate relationships between literature, film, and critique, often exploring how artistic creations grapple with representation. His analyses are renowned for their deep engagement with theoretical concepts, examining their impact on our understanding of violence and affect. Abel's approach offers a sophisticated lens through which to view contemporary cultural productions and their critical underpinnings.
Exploring the evolution of Christian Petzold's filmmaking over 25 years, this collection features thirty-five interviews that reveal his intellectual approach to cinema. Petzold examines the challenges of genre filmmaking in postunification Germany, often referencing classic films while resisting easy viewer identification. The interviews, thirty of which are published in English for the first time, emphasize his focus on the interplay between economic conditions and personal narratives. This volume serves as a valuable resource for those interested in contemporary German cinema and theoretical film discourse.
The contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitute the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because their films mark the emergence of a new film language. The Berlin School filmmakers, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent of the directors of the New German Autorenkino and of French cinéma des auteurs of the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of the Berlin School in any language. Its central thesis - that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" - is built around the unusual style of realism employed in its films, a realism that presents images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political: they are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" - a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
