Christian Petzold in New York

In his breakthrough feature, The State I’m In (2000), singer Julia Hummer plays a fifteen-year-old whose parents, former Red Army Faction operatives who’ve been on the run since the 1970s, have kept her unrooted since she was born. In 2003, Neil Young called the film an “unclassifiable combination of teen romance, coming-of-age drama, and paranoid political thriller.” Hummer also stars in Ghosts (2005) as an orphan whom an older woman believes is her long lost daughter. “What’s fascinating about the film,” wrote Max Nelson for Film Comment in 2014, “is that it keeps briefly becoming the fairy tale its heroine wants it to be, then returning, somewhat cruelly, to its real subject: the way that individuals have their identities slowly effaced when their society fails to give them either a share in the past or a place in the present.”

One of the most intriguing titles in the retrospective, all the more so because it’s seldom screened in the States, is Beats Being Dead, Petzold’s entry in Dreileben, a trilogy of three feature-length films made for television. The project sprang from a conversation about the state of German cinema conducted via e-mail between Petzold, born in 1960, Dominic Graf, who’s eight years older, and Christoph Hochhäusler, born in 1972. The exchange was published in 2007 in Revolver, a magazine cofounded by Hochhäusler and other filmmakers, programmers, and cinephiles associated with what some regard as a second generation of the Berlin School. Dreileben serves as a showcase of the divergent styles of these three filmmakers. The trilogy approaches a single event, a murder, via three narratives whose overlap is kept to the barest minimum. As Dennis Lim has written for Cinema Scope, each of the three films, “despite existing within the same clearly delineated physical world, suggests a subtly different universe from the others.” Beats Being Dead is “as taut as it is volatile, a fever-dream compound of romantic tragedy and slasher noir that focuses on two young people who cross paths with the killer,” writes Lim. “As in Jerichow (2008) and Yella (2007), Petzold inscribes cold, hard truths of class and money into almost every scene, fusing erotic tensions with socioeconomic ones.”

Something to Remind Me (2001), a sort of anti-romantic non-comedy that riffs on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, is the first of six collaborations—so far—between Petzold and Nina Hoss. “I always know the frame I’m in,” Hoss told Adam Nayman at the A.V. Club in 2016. “That’s why I work with Christian, and why I’m interested in the stories he writes or the movies he makes. I know we’re talking about personal life, but it’s always a reflection on the country we live in, and on society, and pressures in society on individuals.”

Petzold’s next collaboration with Hoss would be Wolfsburg (2003), which Neil Young has called “an effective, slow-burning study of guilt and grief.” Yella is a recasting of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls by way of Hitchcock that, as Chris Darke suggests in Film Comment, “succeeds in making the modern world strange again. Jerichow sets The Postman Always Rings Twice in a modestly sized town in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The New York Times’ A. O. Scott finds “something haunting about this film, a sense of desperation and defeat that seems less like a generic convention than like a genuine insight, an intuition into what can happen at the crossroads of lust, loneliness and materialism.” Barbara, set in East Germany in 1980, is a “coolly controlled, tensely watchable, subtle psychological thriller,” as Phillip Lopate put it in Film Comment in 2012. And Phoenix, another nod to Vertigo and, as Michael Koresky writes in the essay accompanying our release, a “film preoccupied with how war forever changes personal and national identities.”

In 2008, Marco Abel interviewed Petzold for Cineaste, and the conversation covered the roots of his cinephilia—by the way, Petzold’s listed his favorite ten films of the past ten years for Grasshopper Film—his work with Farocki and another filmmaker and professor at the DFFB, Hartmut Bitomsky; the paintings of Edward Hopper and Gerhard Richter; and framing. “I always try to forge a connection between the mental and the objective image,” said Petzold. “This may be the source of my esthetic style. At times my figures are part of a spatial psychology, a spatial rhythm, whereas at other times they appear as if in a portrait. That is, sometimes it’s the space that is being rendered as a portrait with people, at others it’s the figures themselves who make up the classic portrait. This composition of the frame changes, depending on how the characters themselves feel. That is, sometimes they are beaten down by their environment, and sometimes the environment exists merely because of them.”

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