Looking East: Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012)

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Notes

1. For more information on the Berlin School, see Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School; Cook, Koepnick, Kopp, and Prager, Berlin School Glossary; and Roy and Leweke, The Berlin School: Films of the Berliner Schule.

2. See Fisher, Christian Petzold.

3. On the Dreileben trilogy, see also Abel and Gerhardt, “The Berlin School: The Dreileben Project,” in German Studies Review.

4 Petzold's film Phoenix (2014) likewise considers the pre-Wende era: it is set in 1945 and focuses on a woman who has survived the Holocaust, played by regular Petzold collaborator, actor Nina Hoss as well as Ronald Zehrfeld, both of whom also star in Barbara.

5. Scott, “Neo-Neo-Realism - American Directors Make Clear-Eyed Movies for Hard Times,” in New York Times Magazine.

6. See Abel, “Christian Petzold: Heimat-Building as Utopia,” in The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School.

7. See the interview with Petzold included on the Jerichow DVD, as well as Kothenschulte, “Die blaue Stunde der einsamen Heimat,” in Frankfurter Rundschau.

8. Kaes, “Germany as Memory: Edgar Reitz's Heimat,” From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. See also von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema.

9. For exceptions, see Prager, “Passing Time Since the Wende: Recent German Film on Unification,” in German Politics and Society; and Gerhardt, “‘Winning a (Hi)Story out of Places’: Petzold's Germany in Etwas Besseres als den Tod (2011),” in German Studies Review.

10. See Fisher, “Globalization as Uneven Geographic Development: The ‘Creative’ Destruction of Place and Fantasy in Christian Petzold's Ghost Trilogy,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies.

11. Abel, “Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold,” in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century; “Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the Berlin School,” in Cineaste; “‘The Cinema of Identification Gets on My Nerves’: An Interview with Christian Petzold,” in Cineaste; and “‘Tender Speaking’: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler,” in Senses of Cinema.

12. King, “The Postman Always Rings Twice: Christian Petzold's Heimat Film Noir,” in Jerichow.

13. Miller, “Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold's Yella and Jerichow in Comparison,” in German Quarterly, p. 60.

14. Wagenbach, “Der Verlag Klaus Wagenbach. Wie ich hereinkam und wie er zwischen 1965 und 1980 aussah,” in Ausgerechnet Bücher. Einunddreissig verlegerische Selbstporträts.

15. See also Gerhardt, “Working Through the Past: Christian Petzold's The State I am In,” in Zeiträume: Potsdamer Almanach, pp. 31–42.

16. See also Abel's reading of this sequence in “Old Dürer,” in The Berlin School, pp. 85–90.

17. Koepnick, “Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s,” in New German Critique.

18. Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation.

19. Koepnick, Heritage Cinema, p. 78.

20. Rentschler, From New German Cinema.

21. Ibid., p. 264.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 266.

24. Fisher, Christian Petzold, p. 140. Discussing Barbara in an interview Petzold “implies he was responding to… this historical or ‘heritage’ trend.”

25. On East Germany in post-1989 cinema, see also Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Reunification: From Colonization to Nostalgia; Kapczynski, “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good-bye Lenin,” in Germanic Review; and the special section encompassing five articles “Dealing with the GDR Past in Today's Germany: The Lives of Others,” in German Studies Review.

26. See Vincendeau, Film/ Literature/ Heritage.

27. On this issue, see also Cook, “Goodbye Lenin! Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism,” in Seminar.

28. See also Fisher, “German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others”, Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Political at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.

29. This tendency in contemporary German cinema, of the Berlin School and of Petzold in particular, is evidenced by the two-day symposium held at the Goethe Institute in London, UK entitled “The Return of the Real: Realism and Everyday Life in Contemporary German Language Film.” Petzold's Barbara was one of three films screened and discussed.

30. Scott, Neo-Neo-Realism.

31. Andrew, “Foreword,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, p. viii.

32. Seibert, “Revolver Live: Neue realistische Schule?” in Revolver: Kino muss gefährlich sein.

33. Fisher, too, comments on how the film contrasts in this regard with previous post-1989 films about East Germany:

It is notable how Petzold avoids the kind of fetishizing preciousness many historical drama / heritage films manifest in their treatment of mis-en-scène. Andrew Higson, in his groundbreaking work on the heritage film, criticizes the way in which the specularization of period sets, props, and costumes / makeup overwhelm the narrative, and Petzold has criticized this aspect of historical dramas explicitly (Christian Petzold, p. 145, footnote 22.

34. Petzold discusses the importance of perspective in “Barbara: Interview with Christian Petzold,” Electric Sheep. http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2012/09/28/barbara-interview-with-christian-petzold/

35. On the role of surveillance in Berlin School films more generally, see also Strathausen, “Surveillance,” in Berlin School Glossary.

36. For a sustained discussion of the role of genre in Petzold's oeuvre, see also Fisher, Christian Petzold. For how Petzold's previous film Beating Being Dead (2011) engages genres, see Gerhardt, Winning a (Hi)story.

37. Of course, some film scholars, such as Peter Brooks and Linda Williams, among other feminist theorists, have contested melodrama as a genre, referring to it instead as a “mode.” See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess and Williams, “The American Melodramatic Mode,” in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. I thank Nicholas Baer for illuminating discussions of the genre or mode of melodrama.

38. Petzold, Barbara: Ein Film von Christian Petzold—Making of [web page].

39. Nicodemus, “Berlinale 2012: Ein Festival der Frauen,” in Die Zeit. Translation my own.

40. Strathausen, Surveillance. As Strathausen puts it, “the most obvious examples [of surveillance] are in films by Christian Petzold, who frequently includes what appears to be actual surveillance footage in his movies.” For the role of surveillance cameras in Berlin School director Christoph Hochhäusler's contribution to the Dreileben trilogy of films, see also Rentschler, “The Surveillance Camera's Quarry in Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel,” in German Studies Review.

41. Petzold said in an interview that he was inspired by the novella Barbara (1936) penned by Austrian author Hermann Broch. See Broch, Novellen, Kommentierte Werkausgabe and Die Verzauberung, vol. 3, Kommentierte Werkausgabe. See also Lutzeler, “Die Männer sind anders: Christian Petzolds und Hermann Brochs Barbara,” in Der Tagesspiegel.

42. In fact, Barbara shares thematics with Stella Dallas. See also Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” in Cinema Journal.

43. Moreover, the lead actress playing Stella is coincidentally named Barbara Stanwyck.

44. The films of Max Ophüls, such as Caught (1949) and The Reckless Moment (1949), also come to mind as film noir melodramas, in which the women make extraordinary and often unacknowledged sacrifices under difficult circumstances. The former also links women and medicine discursively, which Mary Ann Doane writes about in The Desire to Desire.

45. Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) was, for example, inspired by Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).

46. Petzold, Barbara: Interview, Electric Sheep.

47. Fisher, German Historical Film.

48. See also the entries on “ambient sound,” “forests,” and “wind” in Cook's Berlin School Glossary.

49. Ibid.

50. Dargis. “Pushed and Pulled, A Doctor Wants a Way Out,” in New York Times, C1.

51. Petzold, Barbara: Interview, Electric Sheep.

52. Ibid.

53. The Flight is an anomaly in East German cinema—it is the only East German film about fleeing ever produced.

54. Hoss, Barbara: Ein Film. Translation my own.

55. Nord, “Ich wollte, dass die DDR Farben hat: Interview mit Christian Petzold,” die tageszeitung, p. 47. The decision to shoot the film on 35 mm heightens the richness of the colors.

56. Statements made in the commentary accompanying their respective DVDs. The Lives of Others (Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007); The Legend of Rita (Dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 2000).

57. Broch, Novellen. Broch later inserted a longer version of the novella into his novel Die Verzauberung.

58. Lutzeler, Die Männer.

59. Fisher, Petzold, p. 141.

60. In an interview Petzold stated that the other novel that served as an inspiration for this film is Werner Bräunig's Rummelplatz (Petzold, Barbara: Interview, Electric Sheep). An excerpt of Bräunig's novel was originally published in Neue Deutsche Literatur 10 (1965) but then censored and prevented from publication in East Germany. Bräunig's Rummelplatz was eventually published in 2007 after re-unification by Aufbau Verlag in Berlin. In addition to the literary and filmic intertexts, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) forms a pivotal intertextual moment in the film and, as Petzold shared with Fisher in an interview, an homage to W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, where it also appears. See Fisher, Christian Petzold, pp. 138–143, especially pp. 138–139.

61. Here again, Petzold's screening of Roland Gräf's Die Flucht, a DEFA film from 1977 set in a hospital and about an attempt to flee East Germany, comes to mind.

62. Petzold also discusses the role of the outsider narrator in this interview:

The problem is the kind of stuffiness that exists in Germany, that narrow thinking that only someone who has lived through a story has the right to tell it. But if you look at the great works of world literature, many of these stories are actually told from the perspective of an outsider. Like in The Great Gatsby, for example, the narrator is the only character who is dead (Petzold, Barbara: Interview, Electric Sheep).

63. Ausreisen oder Dableiben? Regulierungsstrategien der Staatssicherheit, p. 17.

64. Petzold, Christian. “Director's Note.” Translation my own.

65. Zehrfeld, “Barbara: Ein Film von Christian Petzold, Making of [web page]. The actor Ronald Zehrfeld (André), who grew up in former East Germany, described it as, ”This more social being with one another, which one misses more and more nowadays, which existed then, at least during my childhood. That was redeemed for me. I felt it again, how it was between people.” Translation my own.