Faraway, So Close

OF ALL THE BERLIN SCHOOL FILMMAKERS, ANGELA SCHANELEC HAS SET OUT to push the boundaries of narrative cinema the furthest, using a minimal, elliptical, and highly selective approach to cinematic storytelling. Her films appear to be devoid of dramatic tension; her characters deprived of any kind of psychology or intelligible motivation. Her detached style problematizes viewer identification and works against conventional emotional sympathy. As scholar Marco Abel writes in his book The Counter- Cinema of the Berlin School, the most important question regarding Schanelec’s cinema is: how can one enter her films? And, going further, how does one relate to her opaque characters and her actors’ similarly impenetrable modes of performance?

This question becomes crucial in Schanelec’s (2004), which centers is not its story or the different interpretations that could be devised about its unsettling ending, but rather the unforgettable sensory experience conveyed both through Schanelec’s style and Eggert’s evasive performance.