In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often plays a crucial role. Whether it’s the seaside (in The State I Am In, Jerichow and Barbara), lakes and…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s and would intermittently return to in the following decade. As explored elsewhere in our Retrospective series, German television was…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in the 1980s, and Phoenix, which takes place in the immediate wake of WWII in a rubble-strewn Berlin. The detailed,…
Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense, it acts as an overwhelming release, a moment of long-awaited triumph over schemes and betrayal, all conveyed through glances, the…
In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a readily identifiable hook — the eponymous doctor (Nina Hoss) wants to escape 1980s East Germany — its actual progression,…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described…
Jerichow isn’t really an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, at least not any more than Transit is an adaptation of Casablanca or Undine an adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Christian Petzold doesn’t translate familiar stories to the screen so much as he…
The liminal sensibilities of Christian Petzold’s films accord their material spaces an air of contradiction: the gleaming surfaces of steel walls and glass doors exude preciousness and luxury — desirable qualities. But at the same time, it is this very preciousness and luxury that…
Over the course of his decades-long career, Christian Petzold has come to shape something like a cinema of failure; potently and precisely carving itself from lives immobilized and drowning in the quicksand of historical progress. More than any of his Berlin School contemporaries, time…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only if you choose to tease it out, as he’s otherwise content to foreground the immediate virtues of each film,…
