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The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School
by Marco Abel
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Book Presentation:
The contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitute the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because their films mark the emergence of a new film language. The Berlin School filmmakers, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhausler, Ulrich Kohler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent of the directors of the New German Autorenkino and of French cinema des auteurs of the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of the Berlin School in any language. Its central thesis - that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" - is built around the unusual style of realism employed in its films, a realism that presents images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political: they are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" - a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing. MARCO ABEL is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
See the publisher website: Camden House
> From the same author:
New German Cinema and Its Global Contexts (2025)
A Transnational Art Cinema
Dir. Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher
Christian Petzold (2023)
Interviews
Dir. Marco Abel, Aylin Bademsoy and Jaimey Fisher
Subject: Director > Christian Petzold
Celluloid Revolt (2019)
German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968
Dir. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel
The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts (2018)
A Transnational Art Cinema
Dir. Jaimey Fisher and Marco Abel
Violent Affect (2009)
Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation
by Marco Abel
Subject: Sociology
> On a related topic:
Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics (2023)
Temporality, Relationality, and Intimacy in the Cinema of the Berlin School
Berlin School Glossary (2013)
An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema
by Roger F. Cook, Lutz P. Koepnick, Kristin Kopp and Brad Prager
Charting Asian German Film History (2025)
Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation
Dir. Qinna Qinna Shen, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick and Qingyang Freya Zhou
Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism (2024)
Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics
Dir. Claudia Breger and Olivia Landry
Cinematically Transmitted Disease (2024)
Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany
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