Julian Radlmaier’s 2021 political comedy, Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers), is set in the late summer of 1928 in an unnamed Baltic Sea coastal village in Germany. Communism, capitalism, and fascism are in the sultry sea air, and vampires occupy the upper echelons of society. Indeed, entry into capitalism, specifically through the purchasing of stocks, is predicated on sucking the blood of an unsuspecting proletarian. In this freighted historical setting, we already know how the tale of political parody will end. In the diegetic world of Radlmaier’s film, a local Chinese man, known simply as “der Algensammler” (algae collector), becomes a scapegoat for hate against the capitalists: the proletarian crowd turns into a fascist lynch mob. The capitalists perceive the communists as a much greater threat than the fascists because, as Corinna Harfouch’s character Tante Erkentrud unapologetically declares, “Mit denen kann man wenigstens reden” (One can at least talk to them).

We evoke Radlmaier’s most recent feature to open our discussion about contemporary transnational German film and the futures it points to, because Blutsauger’s portrayal of capitalists not only as vampires but as facilitators of fascism in a historical setting also appears to speak to our era of neoliberal crises and the sweeping embrace of authoritarianism across the globe. Through the diegetic employment of an array of old and new objects and styles, the film’s anachronistic portrait of the Weimar period indirectly locates it in contemporary Germany and foregrounds the link between past and present. Despite its comedic mode and playfulness, Radlmaier’s potentially historical projection of neoliberalism’s trajectory is unmistakably bleak: the film dramatically concludes with murder by a fascist lynch mob. Beginning with a reading circle of volume one of Marx’s Capital, however, the film also reminds us of the collective possibilities that open up at any moment of political instability, including the present late neoliberal moment.

Already in the early 2000s, Lisa Duggan declared that “if the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s, and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling—if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall.”

Gerd Kroske is probably best known for his East German documentary about the anti-regime protests in Leipzig in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall, 1989), co-directed with Andreas Voigt. This historically important film was made on the streets, contemporaneous to the movement. Maintaining a commitment to radical political and social topics in his documentary filmmaking, Kroske has more recently turned to West German activist history and the anti-psychiatric Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). His film titled SPK Komplex (2018) documents the collective’s emergence in the early 1970s in Heidelberg through the experimental therapeutic practices of Wolfgang Huber, its politicization of the stigmatized perception of illness, and its subsequent dissolution with the imprisonment of Huber and other members.

Influenced by both the historically parallel student and anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s, the SPK challenged the practice and philosophy of psychiatric determination of mental illness as an individual problem. Such a diagnosis not only stigmatized and institutionalized patients but also criminalized them. In the West German context, the SPK also confronted the practices of the Nazis and their T4 Aktion, which prompted the euthanasia of tens of thousands of people deemed intellectually and physically unfit for life. But the anti-psychiatry movement stretched well beyond national borders. From the publication of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking critique of psychiatry, Madness and Civilization, in 1961 to the wide-spread theories and practices of the likes of psychiatrists Franco Basaglia and David Cooper, the SPK contributed to a broad international discourse. Taking a Marxist approach, the collective understood mental illness as the consequence of capitalist society and its unequal power relations of production. Brief but significant, the history of this collective has long been overshadowed by that of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Even the film’s title evokes this connection. We are immediately reminded of Uli Edel’s 2008 fiction film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

What does it mean in our neoliberal present to bring such a radical history at long last to the screen through documentary? First, the politics of the SPK clash with the reality of our ever-diminishing public sphere, the increased relegation of feelings and affective life to the confines of the private realm and the family, and the cultural attack on nurture, human dependency, and care.

Could these two books on Bertolt Brecht and cinema mark a renewed interest in the early twentieth-century playwright and author and a reclaiming of his insights for film studies? I am hopeful. For the return to Brecht is among other things a return to an investment in radical politics. With recent turns to aesthetics and affect, a political lens is something film studies could use more of. But I wouldn't want to oversimplify the work of these two monographs, whose aims are not merely to bring politics back to film studies. A return to Brecht offers so much more. Indeed, Nenad Jovanovic and Angelos Koutsourakis also explore the relevance of theater and theatrical techniques for film. However, both do not begin with film but with Brecht and a challenge in the form of a corrective. First, we need to understand what it means to deploy the term “Brechtian” and not use it so arbitrarily. Second, whoever might have claimed that Brecht was not interested in cinema was wrong. While very different in their approaches, at the heart of both of these books is a demonstration of Brecht's continuing importance to and influence on filmmakers (and not simply the usual suspects: Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) in ways that may not have been previously apparent.

I happened to pick up Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema first and was glad to have read the two books in this order. As its title reveals, Koutsourakis's study goes beyond the analysis of film form and narrative. The first half of the book investigates the crossovers between Brechtian theory and film theory. Critical to Koutsourakis's analysis is an undoing of the claim that Brechtian theory is at odds with theories of realism, which became so formative to film theory in its early years with the writings of André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. As Koutsourakis argues, “Brecht's modernism was in actual fact committed to a realist project” (6). Probing the theoretical kinships of Brecht and figures like Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière, the early chapters of the book are—not surprisingly—especially dense but ultimately worth the work for the reader.

To assert that the Berlin School film movement was ushered in with a car crash requires some qualification. Let us begin with the final shot of Christian Petzold's 2000 film Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In). A close-up image features the profile of the teenage Jeanne (Julia Hummer) after an excessively violent smash-up. Blood wells on her lower lip and her face is smudged with dirt. She bears the signs of the crash, but unlike her parents she has survived. Critics have hailed this image as ‘the symbol for a younger German cinema, for the Berlin School and beyond’ (Möller 2007: 40). Although this film's crash scene comes at the close of the film, it has been read as marking the beginning of something new, forcibly displaced beyond the film's diegetic borders. Not only does the image offer a striking, albeit ambiguous, conclusion to the film’s dramatic final scene and the end of the first instalment of Petzold's so-called Ghost Trilogy, but as the first (relatively) commercially successful film of the Berlin School, Die innere Sicherheit and its final frame have also become a sign of the school itself. Some years later, Petzold declared that the car crash is indeed the locus of the birth of cinema: ‘Wenn es Unfälle gibt, beginnt das Kino’ (‘Where there are accidents, cinema begins’) (Petzold, qtd. in Suchsland 2007). Despite the particular reference to his own films, Petzold appears to make a sweeping statement about cinema in general.

The car crash is no stranger to cinema. Karen Redrobe goes so far as to call it ‘one of film's earliest and most persistent self-reflexive tropes’ (2010: 1). It holds an elemental place in early cinema as a response both to the accidental and unstable nature of the medium itself and to the explosion of technology and speed in modernity of the late nineteenth century. Yet its place in the cinema of the Berlin School, a German movement typically dated from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s and frequently characterised as slow and contemplative, is more complex.

ACCORDING TO ITS CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION in magazines and newspapers of the newly reunited Germany of 1992, Helmut Dziuba’s final DEFA directorial endeavor, Jana und Jan, met with mixed reviews. Some of the more insightful and poignant articles from the period can be found in two established GDR newspapers based in Berlin. Junge Welt and Neue Zeit offer two disparate perspectives of this Wende youth film.

René Römer interviews the director for Junge Welt in “Nahe der Katastrophe liegt immer die Chance,” published on May 27, 1992. The piece reveals the intriguing context of the film’s production, including the hardship and uncertainty experienced by the director as well as the crew. In addition, the article divulges the provocative historical and political motivations behind not only the story but also the film’s historically charged mise-en-scène.

On the other hand, the second article, Michael Hanisch’s “Die Wehen beginnen am Todesstreifen,” which appeared in Neue Zeit on June 3, 1992, urges the viewer to consider Jana und Jan more critically vis-à-vis its representational function. Hanisch praises the film for engaging with the weighty topic of life in a youth rehabilitation home in the GDR; however, he also admonishes the film’s turn, especially toward the second half, to cliché and heavy-handed symbolism. While the article does not elaborate on how Dziuba uses this symbolism, or to what end, the author’s emphasis on these representational and aesthetic questions foregrounds the importance of the film as an artwork as well as a political and historical document.

René Römer

Next to Catastrophe There Is Always Opportunity

First published as “Nahe in der Katastrophe liegt immer die Chance” in Junge Welt (May 27, 1992).

Translated by Olivia Landry.

The name Helmut Dziuba is synonymous with DEFA’s children’s and youth films. His new film “Jana und Jan,” a poetic as much as tense love story in a juvenile rehabilitation home, opens in German cinemas in the next few days.

Film students have just installed his computer. Right now, he is recounting how Peter Sodann called him (fishing for information about a new film, although the “old one” is only just starting to play in theaters). Just now, he is considering if it is worthwhile to have a fax machine.