Die Berliner Schule.

"Christian Petzold comes from Hilden, Valeska Grisebach from Bremen. Henner Winckler hails from Gießen, Christoph Hochhäusler from Munich. Angela Schanelec was born in Aalen, Benjamin Heisenberg in Tübingen. Ulrich Köhler's cradle was in Marburg an der Lahn, Thomas Arslan's in Braunschweig. And the latest addition to the 'Berlin School' seems to be Matthias Luthardt from the Dutch city of Leiden, with his debut film, Pingpong."

For signandsight, Toby Axelrod translates a piece in Die Welt by Hanns-Georg Rodek, who chooses this debut as a way into a vague outline of what some French are calling the "Nouvelle Vague Allemande." Rodek: "If you have to pigeon-hole the Berlin School" - and this, of course, is precisely what each and every one of its "students" would resist - "then it is best placed alongside France's second New Wave, with the likes of Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, Maurice Pialat. It shares their conviction that societal change is imperative, but also shares their experience of the collapse of political utopias." The filmmakers are "not polemicists but observers."

Whether or not there is such a thing as a Berliner Schule and in what ways (and whom) it'd help or hurt if there, in fact, is are questions that have been tickled in the German-language press all year. Some of the more recent entries: a "collage" in kolik.film and, following a symposium in the Filmmuseum, reactions to that one at Dirty Laundry and Parallel Film; and in the papers, Kerstin Decker in the Tagesspiegel and Dietmar Kammerer in the taz.

Posted by dwhudson at December 6, 2006 7:23 AM