The most radical, the least known – perhaps because her work may seem difficult to understand – and therefore the most interesting figure from the New Berlin School. Angela Schanelec has been revolutionizing German cinema for 20 years now, using avant-garde film language and social critique.
Anyone who still dreams in the house of fictions can find themselves and all that words cannot describe in Angela Schanelec's cinematic realm, writes the German critic Patrick Holzapfel, comparing Schanelec's films, with their precision and intellectual elegance, to the books of Susan Sontag. Both require concentration and inquisitiveness, thus thrusting their audiences into the thicket of the authors' emotional ambivalence and cognitive doubts. Angela Schanelec's films speak, Holzapfel continues, [t]hey express personal thoughts and feelings (…) Her films are naked. Sounds, images, words and colors move on the screen in a determined, yet fragile way. As with a naked body, there is something obscure in these works, something that lingers between the images. Something familiar that doesn't demand identification. A longing that doesn't yield to romance. It is a sincere cinema of in-betweenness, of hesitation, of doubt.
It's complicated!
I Stayed in Berlin All Summer (1994) opens with a blank gray frame with voiceover typed on an electric typewriter by a young woman (played by Schanelec). It is not yet a full-length debut, the film is only 47 minutes long, and follows the lives of three women and their two partners. Although relationships (and facts themselves) are rarely presented in an absolutely transparent way in Schanelec's films, her characters' dissatisfaction is usually clear. They are not necessarily unhappy, but they are in no state of bliss.
At one point, a woman and her partner silently smoke cigarettes. Outside, another man and his girlfriend walk past their building. A third woman is listening to them while sitting in her car. This narrative shift towards new characters would become the director's trademark. Someone who we follow from the beginning of the film suddenly disappears, and we start following the life of a completely different character, wondering how he or she could be related to our original character. Sometimes we get a shadow of a clue, other times the relationship between them is purely metaphorical.
At the end of the film, the writer meets the publisher. While reviewing her book, he makes a meta-commentary on the movie we just watched; It's a bit short. It reads fast. It's over before you've engaged with the characters. It's more guessing than being told what you mean. Do you want it to be understood?the publisher asks.
Of course. I would like that one remembers it as one remembers a certain music.
Sometimes you have a melody in your head but you can’t sing it. You remember everything else… the moment you heard it, who was with you or the feeling it evoked (...)
Then someone comes along and sings it and everything falls into place so that for one moment a truth exits that one can understand and even bear,Schanelec replies, outlining a manifesto of her future work.
Berlin school, but
Angela Schanelec, winner of the Silver Bear at Berlinale 2019 for the film I Was Home, but ..., is, along with Maren Ade, Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold and Valeska Grisebach, one of the key figures of the New Berlin School. The group appeared on the German cinema scene in the 1990s and influenced the form of European and international art-house movies over the last two decades, both through its avant-garde film language as well as accurate social critique. The referenced school is, of course, the DFFB - German Film and Television Academy, where some of the above-mentioned artists studied. While the term "Berlin School" refers more to its creators' aesthetic and narrative innovations, their films tend to focus on Berlin as a specific place. And Schanelec's films focus on it so intensely that, as critics agree, [t]hey don't film Berlin, they are Berlin. Her cinematic Berlin consists of fragments: places one goes through and the stories that are brought there, left behind or forgotten. It is what you see from the window while lying in bed.
In Schanelec's films, no character is detached from their current location. Sometimes passers-by almost disappear in the motion imposed by architecture. Places in Cities (1998) is a particularly psychogeographic film. The camera carefully follows the main character of Mimmi to the places she frequents. Flats, a swimming pool, school, cafes, nightclubs, streets - they create her world, but they do not define it, because the young woman, like many of Schanelec's protagonists, is in a constant process of searching for herself and her place on Earth.
Let's Dance
Schanelec is a key figure of the Berlin School, but when you get to know her work closely, you can clearly see that her inspirations are more French than German. In interviews, she often admits, when I started out, I wasn't interested in cinema in a systematic way. I came across films that influenced me and, in turn, they made me discover some others. There was Antonioni, Ozu, and also, to be sure, Bresson, Godard, Eustache. But not a single German film.It is no accident that her only non-Berlin films Marseille and Orly were made in France.
Marseille (2004) begins with an apartment swap. Sophie (Maren Eggert) comes to the eponymous city to take a break from Berlin. She speaks French with Zelda (Emily Atef), the owner of the apartment where she is to stay. When Sophie asks if she speaks German, Zelda recites: Good day. Goodbye. My friend the tree is dead.
As Zelda begins singing Mein Freund, der Baum, Sophie sings a few notes of Charles Trenet's French classic La Mer in response.This is typical for this director's study of communication beyond the barriers of the literal meaning of words. What happens between words is more than what is said.
Body language is as important as verbal communication. Schanelec's experience as a theater actress manifests itself in the antipsychological way of directing actors and her unique film language, based not on dialogues but on gestures and choreography. The world of fleeting gestures, hesitations and unnamed emotions is full of secrets. It is a very visual cinema, in which the narrative is based on movement and images aimed at reaching the deepest feelings. Releasing emotions through the movement of bodies is particularly visible in dance scenes, of which there are quite a few in her films. When a character is dancing, the body is perceived in a special way; it reveals something that has been concealed until that point. On the other hand, there are few moments of physical contact. Instead of touch, there is hesitation and various alternative gestures, which, however, reveal more about the characters than would a deliberate act.
Hidden
My films are based on the idea that a large part of life is impenetrable, full of misunderstandings and delivered at random.We often get to know a group of people and spend time with them. In Afternoon (2007), we spend summer days with the family at the lake house. In Orly (2010), we observe passengers at the eponymous Paris airport. There is a lot of everyday life and ordinariness, states between events that move the action forward. Time and attention devoted to these "in-between" states reveal something extraordinary about the ordinary. Time and time again there are intimate moments in places where seemingly nothing is happening. When things slow down, it's easier to look at ourselves and others and see all the little mornings we're trying to hide.
Just as the characters often experience a crisis of knowledge or identity, the director uses ellipses to avoid the conventional cues about space, time or relationships to which we are accustomed in cinema. As a result, we don't watch stories about individuals in confusing circumstances, but as viewers we experience them ourselves.
It is often only at the end of the film that we learn how the threads of individual characters connect. This is the main organizational principle of Orly where, while waiting for the story to unfold, we fall into the trap of narrative expectations of the "change films" subgenre, which are then largely thwarted.
Several of her earlier films are defined by an almost sadistic withholding of basic narrative information, notes Michael Sicinski in a brilliant essay on Schanelec's editing. This strategy gains the most uncompromising expression in showing family relationships. It would seem that blood ties are the easiest to trace, everyone has a place in the family, but not in Schanelec movies. Passing Summer (2001), Marseille (2004) and Afternoon (2007) focus on family and friendships. Yet, in almost every case, the director maintains the confusion about these relationships until the very end.
The most radical film is A Dream Path (2016), a story of the breakdown of relationships between two couples divided into four time slots. The characters disappear only to suddenly appear in the same clothes and the same age, but several decades hence.
The viewers' confusion reflects that of the characters, who are breaking through the maze of social and family ambiguities. "I don't understand," usually spoken in response to someone's sincere attempts to express inner anxiety, is almost certainly the most common line of dialogue in her films. And, at the same time, it tells you that understanding a movie means engaging in a journey that will take you beyond the work itself.
Feelings are facts
Perceptiveness and attention to detail make Schanelec a great portraitist. She perfectly captures the female experience in a neoliberal society, closely examining the changing social roles, dilemmas and challenges faced by women in a rapidly changing world. As well as the price they pay for their personal freedom and the expansion of their field of activity. What forms do human relationships take in postmodern society? The director examines problems related to family, friendship and romantic relationships - revealing emotions that usually operate in secret. Her films do not offer solutions, they ask questions. What is motherhood and what is love and what is loyalty - in a world where we molted our traditional roles while new ones have not yet been written. Or, perhaps at the deepest existential level, nothing has changed, because feelings evolve much slower than culture. The austere but sensitive way in which Schanelec looks at her alienated female characters bares them, but also her own tenderness. She becomes not a critic, but an empathetic observer, a participant in contemporary life in every big city.
Ewa Szabłowska
Bibliography:
Fireflies #5: Agnes Varda / Angela Schanelec: words and art inspired by film, by Annabel Brady Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia, Berlin 2017
Angela Schanelec (Textur, #1) , by James Lattimer, Eva Sangiorgi, Vienna 2019
Always Somewhere ElseThe Cinema of Angela Schanelec in Dialogue, by Patric Holzapfel, Goethe Institute, London 2018
Angela Schanelec: The Decisive Cut, by Michael Sicinski
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/angela-schanelec-the-decisive-cut
Selected filmography
1993 Ich bin den Sommer über in Berlin geblieben / I Stayed in Berlin All Summer
1995 Das Glück meiner kleinen Schwester / My Sister's Good Fortune
1998 Plätze in Städten / Places in Cities
2001 Mein langsames Leben / Passing Summer
2004 Marseille
2007 Nachmittag / Afternoon
2016 Der traumhafte Weg / The Dreamed Path
2019 Byłam w domu, ale… / Ich war zuhause, aber / I Was at Home, But…
Partner: Goethe Institut
