Introduction: So This Was Germany—A Preliminary Account of the Berlin School

Summary

If art is political then it is so in exactly this manner: it resists its appropriation for daily political and social concerns. Its strength lies in its autonomy.

—Ulrich Köhler, “Why I Don't Make Political Films”

Séance: Longing for a Germany That Will Have Been

An ominous cacophony made by string instruments assaults our ears as our gaze is pulled through an unfocused camera space until the zooming motion stops on a close-up of a glass mug containing an unidentifiable yellowish-brown fluid. The liquid becomes cloudy, as if disturbed by the same catastrophic event that a male voice-over narration begins to describe as having forced people to relocate to the moon. The sudden cinematic rescaling of the mug renders the relatively familiar sight strange in the same way that Jean-Luc Godard rendered coffee and common pebbles strange in the 1960s. We might say that these opening seconds of the film immediately effect what French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls a “redistribution of the sensible”—with the French sensible, as one of his translators explains, referring to “what is aisthēton or capable of being apprehended by the senses”—because the sudden rescaling of the familiar directly affects our nervous system: that is, our ability to sense, and make sense, by linking our perception in the moment to a precoded cognitive frame of reference.