TOUCHING FROM A DISTANCE
“I have the feeling that when you meet someone, you’re meeting yourself,” says a character in Angela Schanelec’s 2010 film Orly, a fiction about chance encounters at the titular Paris airport. This idea would explain a lot about the work of the German writer-director. We meet people in Schanelec’s films, but not as we usually expect to meet characters in narratives, in the hope of coming away with an illusion of knowing flesh-and-blood beings. We learn very little about the people in her work, often only bare hints of their social situation and relation to others. We only sometimes have access to their emotional states, which often reveal themselves in spectacular performative bursts. Schanelec’s people come across as opaque, inexpressive, seemingly lost in interior reverie—then suddenly they’ll erupt in a flurry of speech or movement, of anguish or fury. Take, for example, the following scene in her latest feature, I Was at Home, But…, which won her this year’s Berlin Silver Bear for best director. A widowed mother Astrid (Schanelec regular Maren Eggert) erupts in a fit of rage at her two children—a moment that comes as a cathartic release of energy and emotion, but is then comically defused by a shot of the kids sitting glumly in the street, waiting to be allowed back into their home.
Despite such occasional moments of emotional display, Schanelec is a notoriously difficult filmmaker to connect with. She is one of the first names, along with Thomas Arslan and Christian Petzold, to be identified with the generation(s) of new German cinema known as the Berlin School. Born in 1962, she started out as a stage actress before turning to cinema, and studied at the Berlin Film and Television Academy alongside those other directors, where her teachers included filmmaker and theorist Harun Farocki (a long-term writing collaborator of Petzold’s). As well as appearing in her own work, she has intermittently continued to act on screen, notably in films by Arslan and Cynthia Beatt, and most recently in Matt Porterfield’s 30-minute Take What You Can Carry (2015).
Schanelec is not the only member of the Berlin School whose work has been attacked as inaccessible or forbiddingly oblique. However, her oeuvre in particular is often and her previous (2016) suggests that her work is now significantly overcoming resistance. These two in particular prove that Schanelec’s cinema offers pleasures as well as rigors, although she continues to make considerable demands of the viewer: we are required to find our own entry points into these sometimes hermetic-seeming dramas, or anti-dramas. Characteristically slow, visually austere, opposed to linearity and the pleasures of identification, Schanelec’s films tend to have open endings—but open beginnings and middles too.
