Monatshefte

Analyses of Berlin School cinema have often emphasized the long takes, static shots, minimal editing, and plodding pacing that connect these German films to a broader contemporary cultural preoccupation with the aesthetics and politics of slowness. By contrast, Olivia Landry's dynamic new study forcefully demonstrates that, while they may unfold along decelerated temporal lines, Berlin School films also exhibit concerted attention to movement and, as such, they display pronounced forms of energy and vitality. Evident in their well-known penchant for scenarios depicting bodies in motion—walking, cycling, dancing, driving—as well as their noteworthy and ubiquitous inclusion of car-crash sequences, this abundant diegetic movement, in Landry's reading, opens onto modes of performance that accentuate lived experience and bodily sensation, heightening the phenomenological and affective experience of viewing these films.

As noted in the book's introduction, scholarship on Berlin School cinema has now established the parameters and significance of this movement, laying the groundwork for new approaches. While building on the insights of earlier work, Landry complicates the common understanding of the Berlin School as slow or contemplative cinema by reconsidering it as "a cinema against stasis" in which "the actors' diegetic bodies take on a more prominent role than cinematography and editing in orienting the perception of the viewer" (5). In taking up the question of movement as a mode of performance, Landry engages throughout the study with a wide range of theoretical approaches, introducing concepts from performance studies into film studies, and drawing on a trajectory of thought within film theory that extends from early materialist approaches via Siegfried Kracauer to film phenomenology and affect theory. This welcome engagement with a broad-based theoretical framework is a notable strength of the book, bringing a fresh approach not only to the films of the Berlin School but to German film studies more broadly, where many of the concepts Landry considers have yet to gain a foothold. She astutely brings them to bear here, offering very clearly formulated overviews of complex ideas, and weaving them into her perceptive close readings of a wide range of films.

A structuring question of Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema regards the ontology of film in the digital age and the place of cinema in an era rife with a profusion of images (a question that is also taken up by the directors affiliated with the Berlin School, both in their writings and in the films themselves). Accordingly, Landry begins with "the question of the medium, its treatment, and its status"(18), interrogating the medium specificity of cinema relative to new media. The book's first chapter explicitly attends to how the remediation techniques employed by Berlin School films (particularly the films of Christian Petzold), including the common insertion of both photographs and surveillance-camera footage, enliven filmic representation and point to a register beyond the cinematic: "In sum, remediation serves to incite and animate film beyond its own conventions of representation in the direction of liveness" (22). Ultimately, Landry argues that the reality effects generated by such remediation techniques call into question received distinctions of liveness/mediation and presence/absence, heightening both the complexity of cinematic aesthetics and [End Page 163] the sensory experience of film viewing in ways that, if not unique to Berlin School films, nonetheless emerge as one of the central contributions of the movement.

In the three central chapters of the book that follow, Landry extends this line of argumentation via detailed investigations of dance, kinetic bodies, and automobility. Chapter Two offers an especially persuasive new take on the many noteworthy scenes—in films by Valeska Grisebach, Angela Schanelec, Maren Ade, and Jan Krüger—featuring protagonists dancing. Whether these unchoreographed dances register as solipsistic, exuberant, or campy, they revive a legacy of theatricality and cinematic spectacle for twenty-first-century film, operating as a "souvenir" of the early cinema of attractions (56) that communicates corporeal presence to create a relation of physical proximity between actor and viewer. Chapter Three amplifies attention to embodiment and forms of embodied viewing through an explicit engagement with film phenomenology and affect theory. Considering the mobile body in films by Thomas Arslan, Maria Speth, and Christoph Hochhäusler, this chapter argues that the intense rendering of (especially women) protagonists' movement through the ordinary spaces of the city, whether on foot or by bicycle, propels a particularly visceral, sensate form of viewing that can best be understood not as an emotional experience of feeling good or bad, but as an affective registering of "the force of what makes us feel" (105).

The longest in the book, Chapter Four brings together many of the strands explored in the preceding analyses via an extensive consideration of the variable performances of movement conveyed by cars—including driving, riding, and crashing—in a panoply of Berlin School films. An everyday mode of experiencing the world and one that engages motion, viewing, and embodiment, automobility is—not coincidentally—a key trope of these films. It therefore proves crucial to Landry's contention that the political and aesthetic force of the Berlin School lies in its "refusal—a refusal to remain within the boundaries, a refusal to go slow, a refusal to obey the line and obey the limit" (154). Indeed, the destructive car crash figures a form of negation that smashes the present while opening onto an (albeit ambiguous) sense of possibility about the future.

This sense of possibility also forms the crux of Landry's reading of Nina Hoss, the Berlin School's most emblematic actor and the subject of the book's final chapter. Landry characterizes Hoss's unique acting style as "the performance of fugitivity" (158). Whether in Petzold's Barbara (2012), Arslan's Gold (2013), or Phoenix (2014), also directed by Petzold, Hoss's performance captures a flight away from heteropatriarchal social structures and repressive political regimes and toward (an elusive) freedom.

Such a flow also characterizes the experience of reading Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema: Landry's often breathless and exhilarating prose gives form to the motion and vitality she finds in these contemporary films. The book's style makes it a pleasure to read, as does Landry's treatment of sometimes unexpected combinations of films, theories, and topics within individual chapters. Sophisticated and complex, but not dense, the book will be accessible for a broad range of readers across the academic spectrum and is certain to spark new forms of engagement with the vibrant and ever-changing ensemble of Berlin School films. [End Page 164]