Affectless Economies: The Berlin School and Neoliberalism

30 Pages·2013·0.123 MB·English

by  Hester Baer

Affectless Economies: The Berlin
School and Neoliberalism
Hester Baer
The Berlin School is a loosely affiliated group of contemporary
German filmmakers whose work can be said to constitute a new
countercinema. Emerging in the 1990s, when first-generation
Berlin School filmmakers Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, and
Christian Petzold released their first features, the group has gained
increasing recognition over the past decade for a growing body of
films that pay renewed attention to film form and aesthetics, turn-
ing their lens on life in Germany and Europe during the era of late
capitalism and globalization.1 Much interest in German cinema
during recent years has focused on big-budget high-profile mov-
ies, which are Oscar-friendly (in fact, they are sometimes produced
by Hollywood companies) and capitalize on audience familiarity
with German history, especially the Nazi or East German past. By
contrast, Berlin School films are typically set in the present day.
Conveying a strong sense of contemporaneity, they represent not
Germany’s turbulent twentieth-century history but rather its less
sensational aftermath. In particular, these films experiment with
narrative time and the representation of space, shifting focus away
from dramatic historical events and onto the everyday lives of their
characters. These average Germans have lived through the dissolu-
tion of their national borders, radical alterations to the spaces of
their cities and towns, and an acceleration of time and a decrease
Discourse, 35.1, Winter 2013, pp. 72–100.
Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
Affectless Economies 73
in spatial distances due to technological developments as well as a
host of other changes brought about by German unification, the
expansion of the European Union, the impact of globalization,
and the hegemony of the free-market economy. Berlin School films
examine the effects of these transformations in an understated
way, exploring their impact on social structures, on family and love
relationships, and on the struggle to overcome alienation and find
happiness.
Berlin School films have been the subject of public debate
about the role of cinema in contemporary Germany and Europe,
not least because, like the New German Cinema films of the 1970s,
they have received a warmer critical reception on the festival cir-
cuit and abroad than at home. Critics and scholars have tended
to focus on the rigorous aesthetics of the films, viewing them as
attempts to redeem a European tradition of realism in the face of
the predominant transnational style of commercial filmmaking. At
the same time, a number of vocal detractors of the Berlin School
have decried the fact that films with so little commercial appeal
have generated so much discussion.2
Accounts of the place of cinema in the contemporary world,
especially those that emphasize production and finance, have been
relatively united in their assessment of present-day art cinema as a
nostalgic throwback to the twentieth century. According to such
accounts, the rise of digital technologies means that cinema has
become a residual form of visual culture, an analog relic that art
cinema attempts to resuscitate. More significantly, in the era of
neoliberal media regimes, the strategies of art cinema—defamiliar-
ization techniques, distantiation, contemplative aesthetics, self-ref-
erentiality, and subversion, among others—have been thoroughly
recuperated for mainstream cinema, draining art cinema of its
oppositional value.
In his discussion of emblematic postcinematic works from the
early twenty-first century, for example, Steven Shaviro dismisses
the current vogue for “contemplative cinema” as nostalgic recy-
cling with no political basis.3 Shaviro privileges video and film pro-
ductions that map the present moment by pushing contemporary
multimedia aesthetics to an extreme, thereby “up[ping] the ante
on our very complicity with the technologies and social arrange-
ments that oppress us.” In an era when it is impossible to imagine
alternatives to capitalism, Shaviro argues, postcinematic media
perform a valuable function of cognitive and affective mapping
of the present moment: “They help and train us to endure—and
perhaps also to negotiate—the complexity of cyberspace and mul-
tinational capital.”4
74 Hester Baer
From a different perspective, Randall Halle’s discussion of
“German film after Germany” attends to the commercial, transna-
tional mode of production that emerged in Europe in the 1980s
and 1990s, after the dismantling of film subvention schemes to pro-
mote national cinema, in a new market-driven era that mandated
self-sustainable, profitable filmmaking. Despite the aesthetic con-
ventionalism and consensus-driven politics of such filmmaking,
Halle suggests that the transnational production model charac-
teristic of contemporary commercial cinema “heightens sensitivity
to cultural specificity,” represents new conceptions of space and
community, and offers a new and enriched visual language for
the contemporary moment. Not only do the new transnational
films reach an audience far wider than did postwar European art
cinema (not least because they are entertaining), but they also
speak to an entirely new function of film: transnationalism “orga-
nizes and mediates public spheres; it offers new imaginings of
community.”5
Halle makes the case that the “profitability and self-sustainabil-
ity of the audiovisual industry serve to secure the stability of critical
and experimental Cultural production” alongside big-budget pop-
ular entertainment fare. Nonetheless, he cautions against a nos-
talgic attachment to art cinema as political cinema and sees little
point in the project of a renewed contemporary art film. Like Sha-
viro, Halle points out that the strategies of art cinema have been
co-opted. Halle also makes the case that films are reflective rather
than constitutive of social conditions: “Films are only as revolution-
ary as the eras out of which they emerge.”6
Yet the question of whether films can create images of the
present moment has as much to do with modes of production as
with representational choices.7 In both regards, the films of the
Berlin School present a challenge to the contemporary tendency
to reject art cinema as a nostalgic enterprise that reflects an out-
dated production scheme, and one whose strategies of engaging
spectators are anodyne relics without political currency. In an era
when film production in Germany has been largely concentrated
in the hands of a very few media conglomerates, the Berlin School
has created a successful independent production model. Relying
like most German film productions on a combination of funding
through regional film boards, private investment, and television
financing, these low-budget films (costing on average little more
than one million euros) have mostly played in cinemas only in lim-
ited release, where they have rarely drawn many viewers, not least
due to low advertising budgets. However, on television they have
done exceedingly well, often topping the charts for their time slots
Affectless Economies 75
and drawing large market shares (8–15 percent, indicating well
over a million and sometimes as many as several million viewers).8
Berlin School productions are virtually all shot on 35mm film, and
they are not “made for television” in terms of their formal style or
content.9 Nonetheless, television exhibition and reception under-
pin the films’ production model and expand their viewership.
Thus, Berlin School films reflect a transnational, postcinematic
mode of production and reception, and they are firmly embedded
in (and also place on display) the same neoliberal mediascape as
the big-budget star vehicles discussed by Shaviro or the commercial
blockbusters lauded by Halle.10
Yet in contrast to those mostly affirmative hits, the Berlin
School’s largely noncommercial films work to disorganize con-
temporary reality by adopting an affectless aesthetic, as seen in
their use of dialogue, acting styles, and refusal of closure as well
as their technique of “representing emotions without emotional-
izing.”11 This affectless aesthetic is a central vector not only of the
films’ mode of production (using lay actors and a minimalist style
reduces production costs) but also of their representation of every-
day life and ambivalent appeal to the spectator.
Critics have struggled to discern the precise nature of the politi-
cal or oppositional value embodied by Berlin School films, perhaps
because they seem to fit so easily into the received dichotomies (of
high/low, cinema/media, art/commercial, intellectual/popular,
international/national) that continue to inform our apprehension
of contemporary culture. Thus, the critical tendency has been to
view Berlin School films as a kind of redemption of art cinema or
even of the medium of cinema itself. My reading, by contrast, sug-
gests that the films resignify cinematic legacies under the sign of
postcinema and that they do so by engaging the central trope of
disorganization (as opposed to distanciation) in mapping contem-
porary reality. Focusing on two paradigmatic Berlin School films
from 2001, Arslan’s Der schöne Tag (A Fine Day) and Schanelec’s
Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer), I examine in particular the
films’ resignification of art cinematic conventions of representing
young female protagonists within the cityscape and the way this
resignification contributes to a disorganized view of everyday life
in neoliberal capitalism.
In contrast to theories about how capitalism orders the
everyday, Lauren Berlant has suggested an approach to “the
overwhelming ordinary that is disorganized by it, and many other
forces besides.”12 Her emphasis on insecurity and precarity as
the dominant contemporary structures of experience connect to
Volker Woltersdorff’s discussion of “precarious sexualities”; that
76 Hester Baer
is, of the erosion (but not disappearance) of gender and sexual
norms in neoliberalism. As Woltersdorff argues, neoliberalism is
characterized by a paradoxical ambivalence between destabiliz-
ing and strengthening heteronormativity: “It is merely the site
of femininity and masculinity that has become increasingly pre-
carious, for the neo-liberal flexibilization of gender and sexual
identities allows traditional and flexible gender roles to coexist.”13
As Woltersdorff suggests, the neoliberal discourse of mobility and
deregulation appears to open up spaces for nonnormative gender
identifications, sexual practices, and affective ties, but the institu-
tional sex-gender system is still an imperative, creating a situation
of permanent insecurity. In this context, I argue that A Fine Day
and Passing Summer present a disorganized view of statuses such as
race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, statuses that no longer
form the basis for an oppositional politics in the contemporary
context and yet still inform the subjective lives of individuals, their
“adjustments to the present,” and their ability to survive or be pro-
tected in the world.14
As many critics have pointed out, neoliberalism, though rarely
named, has become increasingly hegemonic, so much so that its
concepts have come to seem like common sense or second nature.15
The imperceptibility of neoliberalism, along with the impossibility
of grasping the abstraction of the transnational financial system,
leads to a situation in which the contemporary world itself appears
incomprehensible and unrepresentable. As affect theorists have
argued, in this situation individuals perceive the present largely via
affective responses; affect becomes a way of tracking adjustments
to transformations in society, politics, and the economy that can
augment or diminish “a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to
connect.”16 As “machines for generating affect,” films are uniquely
poised to construct, perform, or make palpable qualities of the
contemporary moment for spectators.17
The anthropologist Marc Augé has described the contempo-
rary situation thus: “We live in a world that we have not yet learned
to look at.” Augé argues that in neoliberalism, “where there is no
longer an elsewhere,” it is both more crucial and more difficult for
art to convey something about the world: “[Art] has to be expres-
sive and reflexive if it wants to show us anything we do not see daily
on TV or in the supermarket.” Augé thus proposes that artists today
are “doomed to seek beauty in ‘non-places,’ to discover it by resist-
ing the apparent obviousness of current events,”18 a proposition
that the Berlin School filmmakers, who often cite Augé, could be
said to have adopted as an aesthetic program for their films.
Affectless Economies 77
Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, and the Berlin School
Born in 1962, the bicultural filmmaker Thomas Arslan grew up
in both Germany and Turkey before studying directing at the
Berlin Film and Television Academy. The writer and director of
seven features and a documentary, he has also coproduced most
of his own films. Arslan came to prominence with his so-called Ber-
lin Trilogy of films about Turkish Germans in that city: Geschwis-
ter (Siblings, 1996), Dealer (1999), and A Fine Day. His subsequent
work has moved away from the Turkish German focus and increas-
ingly toward genre cinema, and his most recent films are a crime
story and a western. All of Arslan’s filmmaking is characterized by
a unified “aesthetic of reduction,” featuring static tableaux, slow
narrative exposition underpinned by minimal editing, and a neu-
tral documentary-like camera.19 Focusing on the politics of every-
day life and emphasizing the trope of mobility as both possibility
and limit, especially for Turkish Germans, Arslan’s Berlin Trilogy
unreels in the nonplaces of the metropolis.
Angela Schanelec, also born in 1962, was a successful theater
actress before quitting the stage to study directing at the Berlin
Film and Television Academy in 1990. She is the director of six
feature films and also wrote, produced, and sometimes edited and
acted in each of these films. A central figure in the Berlin School,
Schanelec has said that what interests her about filmmaking is form
rather than stories. Her films are united by a very specific authorial
style deriving especially from her choice to “edit in the camera,”
filming one paragraph of the script at a time. This typically means
using extremely lengthy shots (it is not uncommon for more than
a minute to elapse before a cut), and it doesn’t allow for shooting
multiple takes or different angles. Despite her professed resistance
to stories, almost all of Schanelec’s films present narratives about
the precarity and contingency of contemporary life, set in the non-
places of French and German cities, and they specifically focus on
female characters who are figuring out how to build a life amid the
changed expectations of the neoliberal present.
As auteur directors, Arslan and Schanelec share a commitment
to creating an open-ended, polysemic cinema that demands the
spectator’s participation. This polysemic quality is produced not
least by their shared aesthetic of affectlessness, which drains emo-
tion both from the filmic text itself (through affectless acting styles,
fragmentary narratives, a refusal of closure, and so on) and from
the address to the spectator (by disorganizing the viewing process,
foreclosing processes of identification, and resisting emotionaliza-
tion). Notably, they do not describe the spectator’s participation as
78 Hester Baer
a process of making meaning from their films. Rather, Arslan and
Schanelec leave open to the spectator possibilities for sensing the
scenarios of contemporary life they display.
Shaviro has described recent works of postcinema as “expressive:
that is to say, . . . they give voice (or better, give sounds and images)
to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our
society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in par-
ticular. By the term expressive, I mean both symptomatic and produc-
tive.” Like other examples of postcinema, Arslan’s and Schanelec’s
films can also be viewed as symptomatic, in Shaviro’s sense of
providing “indices for complex social processes,” and productive,
insofar as they do not so much represent these social processes as
participate in constituting them.20 Yet in contrast to Shaviro’s exam-
ples (which employ both genre normativity and clichéd represen-
tations of race and gender, elements that he argues help to expose
neoliberal ideologies), Arslan’s and Schanelec’s films disorganize
such normative representations, suggesting a different framework
for interpretation.
Crucial here is the way that both Arslan and Schanelec resignify
elements of European art cinema, including New Wave, feminist,
and minority countercinemas, in their disorganization of ethnic,
gender, and sexual binaries. Both Arslan and Schanelec cite Rob-
ert Bresson as a primary influence (Arslan’s production company
is called Pickpocket, after Bresson’s masterpiece), and they adapt
elements of his work, including using lay actors and emphasizing
a parity between aesthetic form and plot or story. Films of Jean-
Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, and Eric Rohmer are also significant
intertexts.
Arslan’s films overlap in a number of ways with the indepen-
dent transnational film genre identified by Hamid Naficy, which
mobilizes the intersections between transnational subjectivity in
general and specific migrant (auto)biographies in particular. Inde-
pendent transnational films are produced by diasporic filmmakers
who, like Arslan, “not only inhabit interstitial spaces of the host
society but also work on the margins of the mainstream film indus-
try.”21 In terms of form, Naficy’s discussion of the independent
transnational genre shares something in common with the femi-
nist film project described by Teresa de Lauretis and other feminist
film theorists who argued in the 1970s and 1980s that in order to
achieve a new space of representation, feminist film production
must mobilize precisely the contradictions between woman as
image or sign and women as historical subjects.22
Arslan has described his own oeuvre as an attempt not so much
to break free of received images, clichés, or stereotypes but instead
Affectless Economies 79
to rework them. One way in which he does this is by creating delib-
erate connections across his films so that they can be viewed in
cyclical relation to one another, as in a cycle of poems. Specific
themes and shots reappear across films, allowing viewers to rein-
terpret similar ideas in new ways. Using lay actors and repeatedly
casting the same actors in different roles across his films, Arslan
creates characters whom he describes as “empty pages—projection
screens for the spectator.”23 Arslan has made clear that he deliber-
ately deploys particular stereotypes of Turkish Germans and par-
ticular conventions of transnational cinema in order to complicate
them for viewers. In the case of Dealer, for example, he explains
that “My task was not to abandon the clichés altogether—because
then you can’t narrate anything at all—but rather to dissolve them
in the course of the film, in order to make another reality visible.”24
In these ways, Arslan’s filmmaking practice echoes de Lauretis’s
description of “the aesthetic of reception” practiced by feminist
filmmakers such as Helke Sander and Chantal Akerman (also cited
by Arslan as a direct influence on his work), “where the spectator
is the film’s primary concern—primary in the sense that it is there
from the beginning, inscribed in the filmmaker’s project and even
in the making of the film.”25 Similarly, Schanelec invokes the femi-
nist film project when she says that shooting an actor directly from
the front is “brutal,” an act of violence—“I don’t want to attack in
that way.” Instead, she relies heavily on sound to bind together the
artistic process, asking viewers to trust “words and ears” rather than
eyes and in this way to “develop the imagination.”26
In an interview they gave together shortly after the release of
A Fine Day and Passing Summer, Arslan and Schanelec spoke exten-
sively about the way they conceptualize an address to the specta-
tor.27 Describing the choice to restrict his characters’ affect in order
to open up spaces of reception, Arslan explains: “Making a film
always poses the question of how to produce vitality aesthetically.
This artistic process does not work for me by setting up life in all its
intensity in front of the camera, but rather by activating something
comparable in the audience. You have to leave the viewer some lee-
way to participate [Spielraum: literally, ‘room to play’]. That doesn’t
happen if the actors perform every emotion.” Similarly, Schanelec
describes the decoupling of sound and image as a central facet of
her address to the spectator and as a formal device for undoing
affect: “For me, the question arises: How can I engage both the
eye and ear of the spectator, without doubling everything I show.”28
Both of these strategies—avoiding overtly emotionalized presen-
tations of contemporary life and resignifying the sound/image
correspondence—disorganize conventional modes of viewing and
80 Hester Baer
create a slippage between identification and voyeurism that is often
mirrored at the level of the narrative as well.
The films of Arslan and Schanelec typically leave both char-
acters and viewers wanting to feel something. A common thread of
the many debates about the Berlin School in the German media
is a strongly articulated frustration about filmmakers “who have
digested all of film history, who think up one pretentious title after
another, but who are not capable of generating one single authen-
tic feeling, not to mention of representing love in a convincing
way.”29 As I wish to suggest, this response is emblematic of the con-
temporary situation where, as critics have argued, subjective emo-
tion has waned.30 By creating an awareness, even frustration, about
dwindling emotions, the films of Arslan and Schanelec make pal-
pable the insecurity and precarity of the present moment.
A Fine Day
A Fine Day follows the protagonist Deniz, an aspiring actress,
through the course of a summer day spent in transit as she cir-
culates through the trains, taxis, subways, public parks, apartment
complexes, cafés, and workplaces of Berlin. In the course of the
movie, Deniz breaks up with her boyfriend Jan, auditions for a film
role, meets with her mother and sister, and pursues an attractive
stranger whom she repeatedly encounters on subways and trains.
In many ways the ideal neoliberal subject, Deniz embodies mobil-
ity and possibility, underscored filmically by the incessant shots of
her moving through public spaces, on foot and on various forms
of urban transport. While Deniz embraces the freedom of choice
and movement promised by neoliberalism, the other women she
encounters—her mother, her sister, and even the professor with
whom she discusses the history of love at the end of the film—serve
as potent reminders of the limits of that freedom.
Arslan’s initial critical reception focused closely on his status as
a minority filmmaker and his contributions to the representation
of migration and the German-Turkish cultural exchange, and his
work has been consistently praised for defying stereotypes of Turk-
ish Germans. For example, Deniz Göktürk has identified Arslan’s
films as exemplary of a “new mode of depicting immigrants and
their hybrid offspring,” which departs from the “cinema of duty”
that characterized the representation of migrants during the 1970s
and 1980s.31 As Joanne Leal and Klaus-Dieter Rossade note, Arslan’s
films also defy gender stereotypes, often by contrasting a passive
male character with an “active female counterpart” who appears
Affectless Economies 81
“successful in determining her own existence with the help and
support of other women.”32 Thus, Arslan’s films are seen to empha-
size freedom of movement and freedom of choice in the construc-
tion of identities.
Although Arslan’s filmmaking career closely mirrors that of
the transnational independent filmmaker, his films—especially A
Fine Day—engage with gender and space in ways that challenge
Naficy’s description of the negatively coded “phobic spaces” that
characterize the transnational independent genre.33 Rather, like
other Berlin School filmmakers, Arslan is chiefly concerned with
the liminal spaces of contemporary society. Unlike the claustropho-
bic spaces inhabited by characters of diasporic cinema (especially
female characters), these nonspaces seem to foster mobility and
transition. They also coincide with an exploration of in-between
times—adolescence, vacation, the breakup of a long-term relation-
ship—when characters find themselves on the brink of a transition.
Indeed, the formal and aesthetic emphasis on such transitional
nonplaces and times is strongly imbricated with Arslan’s narra-
tive focus on the search for the good life and the possibilities for
adjustment to the present. While his films focus precisely on the
search as process, reflected in Arslan’s repeated shots of charac-
ters moving through space and his regular images of crossroads,
they most often end at an impasse. In the world of Arslan’s films,
traditional structures of extended family, religion, and social wel-
fare are crumbling, replaced by discourses of personal responsibil-
ity and individual self-fashioning. While the absence of traditional
structures undoubtedly releases his characters from conventional
expectations in what could be construed as beneficial ways, on the
other hand, the choices they face are those between irreconcilable
alternatives.
In A Fine Day, several momentous events occur in Deniz’s life,
including her breakup from a long-term relationship and her
meeting with her sister, whom Deniz learns is pregnant. But Den-
iz’s affectless demeanor (and the utterly affectless acting style of
Serpil Turhan, who plays Deniz) gives us little clue as to her own
apprehension of or response to these events. Arslan combines this
reductive aesthetic with an expressly reflective discourse on affect
itself (in particular the emotions of happiness and love), elements
that contribute to the film’s mapping of the “cruel optimism” that
characterizes the neoliberal present.34
Drawing on formal characteristics of feminist cinema, Arslan
makes Deniz the bearer of the look, and lengthy sequences empha-
size her active gaze, not least at Diego, a man she watches on sub-
way platforms and trains and with whom she initiates contact in the