The Berlin School: A Melancholic Film Movement

Throughout its twenty-year history, the film movement known as the “Berlin School” has proven itself to be one of the most important inheritors of the cinema of poetry. Film critics began using the term “Berlin School” in acknowledgement of the similarities between filmmakers Angela Schanelec, Thomas Arslan and Christian Petzold, all graduates of the Deutsche Filmund Fernsehakademie Berlin (The German Film and Television Academy, or simply the DFFB). The term has since been applied to an expanding group of filmmakers around Germany with different educational backgrounds, including Ulrich Köhler, Christoph Hochhäusler, Maren Ade, Henner Wickler and others. Interestingly enough, a preoccupation with melancholy may in fact be the Berlin School's defining characteristic, particularly when faced with the difficulty of grouping the movement's films together through more established categories of criticism. Without unity of place or programme, the Berlin School is a fairly dispersed network of filmmakers who only occasionally collaborate with one another and have no overarching film manifesto. The absence of a clear political programme, coupled with the movement's sustained refusal to narrate topical macropolitical issues in contemporary Germany has provoked accusations of political apathy amongst mainstream film critics and cultural commentators who are left frustrated and bewildered by the films’ brooding melancholy. In contradiction to these sorts of reactions, what I would like to suggest here is that the Berlin School's melancholy aesthetics are its political gesture, because these aesthetics investigate how feeling unwell is a psychosocial problem conditioned by the imperatives of neoliberal power.