In March 2013, Christian Petzold was awarded the Helmut Käutner Prize by the state capital Düsseldorf. The jury recognized in him, due to his "art of merging uncorrupted realism with psychological depth," an "outstanding heir" of Käutner. It was his desertation films, "Unter den Brücken" and "Romanze im Moll," that Petzold saw when he arrived in Berlin in the early 80s. Films against the spirit of the times. Films that have little trust in the permanence of feeling.
Since the year 2000 with the feature film debut "The Inner Security", Petzold has directed eight feature films—one as good as the other—alongside television productions: "Wolfsburg", "Ghosts", "Yella", "Jericho", the 2012 Silver Bear winner "Barbara", "Phoenix", "Transit" and most recently "Undine". Films that deal with redemption and the unredeemed. He demands from his craft, says Petzold, "that films be made that have seen what happens here. To make films like Alexander Kluge writes about Germany".
Petzold's parents came as refugees from "over there" in the late fifties. The son was born in Hilden, grew up in Haan near the motorway. In 1981, he moved to Berlin to study. For him, the West does not shine. He sends injured men and women like Yella, Laura, and Leyla into the world, lets them be in Berlin, Stuttgart, Wolfsburg, but hardly at home: except in "Bodyland", as he says. In the German film of the short thousand-year Reich and its subsequent continuity, there was "no light and no sensuality". "We can no longer sing the old songs," says Petzold: "There is no more innocence and lightness" after the break point of 1933/1945. Before that. Petzold mentions the Weimar touch film "People on Sunday", in which Billy Wilder also participated before going into exile. To find something of that again is only possible in a very small space, a bubble. Intimacy and "regionalization".
"A narrative needs the crisis", knows Petzold, conditioned by external circumstances or internal states. His films sublimely connect one with the other. A paradigmatic example, additionally charged with tension due to the personal relationship of the director and his star, is Roberto Rossellini's and Ingrid Bergman's "Stromboli" and "Viaggio in Italia". "In these two films, the whole cinema is contained."
Petzold has a sense for nuances, accuracy, coherence. Something that is so often lacking here. Every crisis demands a different language and form, its own pace, a specific rhythm, brings forth a different physicality, says Petzold. "How does one love at a certain time in a certain place, what do region, descent, class, historical situation achieve?"
Above Petzold's films stands emblematic: D for Germany. In a way, they are homeland films, West German, East German, unified German, filmed in "respectful distance", but not without being "infected by the characters". The trace of the documentary remains legible – Petzold was an assistant to Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky – even in the cinematic clarity and ordering complexity.
Petzold is a conjurer of the present. In none of his pure, open films ("One must leave leftovers") do the characters deserve the name ghosts more than in "Yella" and in "Undine", who seem to be made of phantom pain. Nina Hoss has been his protagonist several times, Paula Beer follows her. She goes "through the films as if through an exile", Petzold said about Hoss. Like Barbara, who sets an aesthetic, moral, social, and political veto against the miserable conditions of the already collapsing GDR. She resists the system and its collective, but also against the superficial brilliance of the West with its role models. Petzold enjoys bringing systems to collapse or at least to dance.
Petzold's "The Inner Security" about the late consequences of RAF terrorism tells that the ghost of freedom is a vampire. A study about how one becomes what one fights against, about the exercise of control, the mechanics of violence, and familial authority. For Petzold, authority means "consolidation and power".
Petzold, one of the protagonists of the "Berlin School", is a highly reflective director, not naïve. His films are also road movies, made by someone who grew up with the noise of the A 46 from Düsseldorf to Wuppertal: We see intersections, country roads, highways, traffic routes, and train paths. Once a romantic motif, the being on the road of his heroes shows that they are at a point where the direction could change. Life-changing. They are travelers through a present, the nature of which can move one to tears and whose asphalt jungle of concrete, stone, and glass clinks in coldness. Everything is possible – freedom or downfall, departure and loss of security. Petzold: "I'm always interested in this threshold."
