6 - Crisis of Cinema/Cinema of Crisis: The Car Crash and the Berlin School

Summary

To assert that the Berlin School film movement was ushered in with a car crash requires some qualification. Let us begin with the final shot of Christian Petzold's 2000 film Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In). A close-up image features the profile of the teenage Jeanne (Julia Hummer) after an excessively violent smash-up. Blood wells on her lower lip and her face is smudged with dirt. She bears the signs of the crash, but unlike her parents she has survived. Critics have hailed this image as ‘the symbol for a younger German cinema, for the Berlin School and beyond’ (Möller 2007: 40). Although this film's crash scene comes at the close of the film, it has been read as marking the beginning of something new, forcibly displaced beyond the film's diegetic borders. Not only does the image offer a striking, albeit ambiguous, conclusion to the film’s dramatic final scene and the end of the first instalment of Petzold's so-called Ghost Trilogy, but as the first (relatively) commercially successful film of the Berlin School, Die innere Sicherheit and its final frame have also become a sign of the school itself. Some years later, Petzold declared that the car crash is indeed the locus of the birth of cinema: ‘Wenn es Unfälle gibt, beginnt das Kino’ (‘Where there are accidents, cinema begins’) (Petzold, qtd. in Suchsland 2007). Despite the particular reference to his own films, Petzold appears to make a sweeping statement about cinema in general.

The car crash is no stranger to cinema. Karen Redrobe goes so far as to call it ‘one of film's earliest and most persistent self-reflexive tropes’ (2010: 1). It holds an elemental place in early cinema as a response both to the accidental and unstable nature of the medium itself and to the explosion of technology and speed in modernity of the late nineteenth century. Yet its place in the cinema of the Berlin School, a German movement typically dated from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s and frequently characterised as slow and contemplative, is more complex.