2 - Christian Petzold: Heimat-Building as Utopia

Summary

The mainstream European Left shares this sense of nostalgia for traditional social forms and communities, but in Europe it is most often presented not in laments of our current state of isolation and individualism but in sterile repetitions of worn-out community rites. Community practices that used to be part of the Left now become empty shadows of community that tend to lead to senseless violence…. The parties and trade unions of the Left, in search of the strong values of old, seem too often to fall back on old gestures like an automatic reflex. The old social bodies that used to sustain them are no longer there. The people is missing.

—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Heimat-Building

Toward the end of the first minute of Christian Petzold's sixty-eight-minute, rarely seen made-for-TV debut feature, Pilotinnen (Drifters, 1995), the voice of a French man, whose face the camera studiously withholds from our view, tells his female interlocutor, “At some point, we'll have a place to call our own.” Looking back at Petzold's eleven-feature-film career to date, we can recognize in this overt expression of Sehnsucht or longing, enhanced cinematically by the man's tender tone of voice and the woman's lowered eyes and head, the director's first attempt to articulate what I consider the core of his—perhaps the best-known Berlin School filmmaker's—oeuvre.