The panel which included German film director Christoph Hochhusler, German professor Gerd Gemunden, film major Tien-Tien Jong '10 and Eric Rentschler, a Germanic languages and literatures professor at Harvard University was organized in conjunction with Gemunden's seminar on the Berlin School and the ongoing Loew series "The Making of Now: New Berlin Cinema."
The "Berlin School" is a term used to describe contemporary German films made by a small community of filmmakers who all attended film school and predominantly reside in Berlin, according to Gemunden.
The Berlin School films are usually low-budget efforts that adopt a minimalist approach as "an aesthetic of reduction," Gemunden said. The films strive to achieve an objective depiction of reality by using long takes, opting for natural sound over a musical score and featuring unknown or amateur actors. The films stress the characters' spacial and temporal existence in the "here and now," as the films emphasize the specificity of actual locations and times, Gemunden said.
Although the films often focus on the mundane and everyday, they aim to tease out the extraordinary from the ordinary, according to Gemunden. The narratives minimize plot in favor of a real-time, visceral depiction of action. Often the camera lingers for much longer than is necessary to tell the story. These criteria, however, do not make up a definitive "checklist" for films in the Berlin School, Gemunden said. In fact, the Berlin School directors have grown stylistically apart since the movement's beginning in the 1990s, Gemunden said.
Hochhusler pointed out that his films do not always fit into the trends of the Berlin School his work does not always focus on "everydayness" and he still includes plot as an important element of his films. Hochhusler does, however, seek to depict a film's narrative in a way that is different from mainstream cinema, like many other Berlin School directors.
Hochhusler is also in frequent contact with other Berlin School directors. He has interviewed many of them for the German film journal Revolver, of which he is a founder. Berlin School directors are no strangers to writing about and intensely studying film in that way, they are similar to the French New Wave, Rentschler said.
Several panelists commented on the differences in opinion among the Berlin School directors about the benefits of being categorized as part of a film movement.
Directors do not generally appreciate being grouped by their similarities into one school and would instead prefer to be recognized for their individuality, Gemunden said.
The Berlin School films do not usually reach a wide audience, and therefore films deemed "Berlin School" could have a hard time finding financial support by association, Gemunden said. He cited the observations of the president of the German Film Academy, who pointed to a trend among German film critics of panning big-budget films and giving high praise to small ones. These critics, therefore, lose the trust of the blockbuster-loving public and discourage audiences from viewing small but critically acclaimed films such as those of the Berlin School.
Rentschler, on the other hand, cited films similar in style to Berlin School films, yet existing outside of movements. These "orphan films" were therefore dismissed and hardly seen.
"For all the misapprehensions, the term Berlin School' allows viewers to see films in creative and constructive contexts rather than in isolation," Rentschler said.
Predecessors to the Berlin School movement include filmmakers such as John Ford and Jean-Luc Godard, according to Rentschler. Stressing the Berlin School's obsession with depicting an objective reality, he described the Berlin School as "cinema of observation, not fabrication." Parallels also exist between the Berlin School and movements such as Sensibilism, an approach popular in Munich in the 1960's that also employed lengthy shots.
The symposium included a screening of Hochhusler's short film, "Sance" (2009), one of the shorts featured in "Deutschland 09" (2009), a German film comprised of 13 shorts exploring the state and history of Germany.
"Sance" is told in a series of still images. Over photographs from Germany's rich and tumultuous past, an elderly narrator tells a futuristic tale, presented as history, of how the German people began a colony on the moon and eventually forgot about their homeland. Through a combination of images from the past and the tale of a speculated future, "Sance" is a powerful comment on the current state of German nationalism.
Hochhusler noted that many aspects of the movement are not distinctly German, citing filmmakers from around the globe currently working "in a similar frame," such as Lucretia Martel of Argentina, Hirokazu Koreeda of Japan and Jessica Hausner of Austria.
Jong, who is new to study of the movement, discussed the commonalities between Berlin School films and films she has previously studied at Dartmouth. She compared the Berlin School style to the work of American filmmakers such as Kelly Reichardt and David Lynch, who map out specific areas of America in their work as Berlin School directors do with Germany.
Gemunden began planning the Loew series, his course on the subject and the symposium two years ago after years of attending the Berlin Film Festival. Many of the films in the series, having previously achieved very limited releases in Germany, are currently making their stateside debut in Hanover as part of this term's Loew series, Gemunden said. The films screen Thursday nights at 7 p.m. in Loew Auditorium.
"If you are a viewer who enjoys being challenged, you will enjoy these films," Gemunden said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
