Angela Schanelec's Transformative Images
This essay was written for the capstone of my Aesthetics in Film course at the Univeristy of Nebraska - Lincoln. In it, I argue that Angela Schanelec's films, through an "aesthetic of slow", are successful in making a particular kind of commentary on the then state of "consensus" films being made in post-Berlin Wall Germany.
The current state of contemporary German cinema has seen a revival in the last decade after a brief period of “consensus” films during the 80s and 90s. With a variety of politically and aesthetically relevant films now being produced in the unified country, critical discussion of German cinema dots the film circuit, particularly discussion of films associated with the “Berlin School.” These young filmmakers are working against commercial successes such as Niergendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, Caroline Link, 2001), Goodbye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), Der Untergang (Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006), telling narratives that have little to do with post-wall Germany or the country’s fascist past, instead examining what it means to be a modern German interpreting images that surround. Angela Schanelec’s films—Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer, 2001), Marseille (2004), Nachmittag (Afternoon, 2007), Erster Tag (2009) and Orly (2010), her latest four features and short—exemplify images that work outside the trajectory of contemporary German film while working with and against contemporary notions of “slow cinema.” Instead, Schanelec employs an “aesthetic of slow,” allowing a particular type of access into a film that depicts an imitation of reality that is unlike previously imaged (German) reality. Ultimately, I will argue that she constructs a cinema that brings the viewer outside the flow of contemporary images of Germany, affecting how one sees their surroundings.
Schanelec’s Marseille opens with two women driving down a busy urban street, speaking French, one asking the other if she knows her way around. The camera is in the back seat, making it difficult to identify either of the women and offering little in the way of placing us in the setting of the film (presumably Marseille as evidenced by the language and the title of the film, Marseille). Our suspicions are confirmed when the driver quickly gets out of the car and returns with a Marseille travel guide for the other woman; she must be a foreign (German?) traveler. We then cut to a shot through a closed glassed door that is eventually opened, revealing a rather drab apartment, as a little more of the plot is explained when the driver welcomes the traveler into the apartment and explains how to use the keys, mail and futon. The traveler asks if she speaks German and offers her keys; they must be trading flats in Marseille and Germany. The German woman, now revealed to be a foreigner, stumbles through the French language, invites the other to leave and stares out her window for nearly 30 seconds. We cut to her purposely walking down a small residential street, eyes straight forward, stoically avoiding the ambient noises that make up the soundtrack. The camera lingers on a street corner as she enters a fruits and legumes storefront, with a mechanic in the out-of-focus foreground glancing her direction. She exits shortly after, the camera still unmoved, and subtly glances towards us only to cut to another shot through a store front window, as she stares out, buying photography supplies for the camera she now holds in her hand.
At this point, seven minutes into the film, there has been six cuts, little in the way of introducing the film in terms of characters, plot or setting, and an obviously deliberate minimalist aesthetic design characteristic of many of the Berlin School films: long takes with often static cameras and lack of extradiegetic music. After watching this scene, and many other scenes like it, one wonders what Schanelec’s position is in the contemporary notion of ‘slow cinema.’ In opposition to the quickening pace of mainstream filmmaking, many filmmakers are building contemplative cinemas that center around plotless-ness, long takes often with a static camera, sparse soundtracks, pronounced emphasis on the quietude and everyday and an overall minimalist aesthetic design. The camera often allows the viewer’s eyes to drift through a frame, sometimes well after the action in the frame that has taken place. A cinema such as this “compels us to retreat from a culture of speed, modify our expectations of filmic narration and physically attune to a more deliberate rhythm” (Flanagan). Blogs such as at www.unspokencinema.blogspot.com, penned mostly by Harry Tuttle, have formalized such a genre of film into paradigmatic cases, highlighting what Tuttle terms ‘Contemporary Contemplative Cinema’ and its basics and technical profile.
Tuttle approaches the notions of ‘slow cinema’ with a rather polemic argument, opting to enter debates with various authors and critics, seeming to typically argue for stylistic decisions made by filmmakers such as Pedro Costa, Carlos Reygadas and Gus Van Sant. While Schanelec probably fits into the group, it may be a limiting categorical that renders her films merely stylistically deviant rather than aesthetically substantial. Consenting with Mathew Flanagan in his essay “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema”, it seems beneficial to frame films such as these, and most notably Schanelec (though I have not looked through the entire unspokencinema website, it appears Schanelec is never discussed), “as pertaining not to an abstract notion of “slowness” but a unique formal and structural design: an aesthetic of slow” (Flanagan). It is this mode that mediates a particular aesthetic of slow. It comes not from a stylistic design or narrative slowness but, rather, a certain type of access into the film which I will continually refer to as an ‘aesthetic of slow’ or Schanelec’s aesthetic. We can look at Thierry Jutal’s essay, “No Country for Old Men, Visual Regime, Mental Image and Narrative Slowness”, to further understand this concept.
Jutal develops in his essay on Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007) the concept of the visual regime, which he defines as “a form of address to a viewer, that manages the viewer’s entry into the film” (Jutal). Gilles Deleuze primarily informs Jutal as he builds the case for the visual regime affecting the ability for the spectator to mediate filmic knowledge. Working inside and with the narrative slowness of a film, one must learn to watch a film, not from the context of objective reality, but, rather, how the film allows us to observe filmic reality. This is exemplified in Marseille, primarily mediated through Jutal’s visual regime, or an aesthetic of slow, and the use of image-making as a thematic, and subsequently, an aesthetic motif.
While in Marseille, Sophie (Maren Eggert) uses her camera to observe her surroundings, searching for something that becomes difficult to identify. Instead of providing over-the-shoulder shots as Sophie looks through her camera’s lens, we only get to see her see. Occasionally, Schanelec gives us the second shot of what Sophie saw, but, ultimately, the photographs hung on her wall provide the context for understanding the images she perceives and exposes on film. In a similar way, in Orly, the young German man (Jirka Zett) walks through the airport terminal, though we only see a telephoto shot of him moving through groups of people, looking through his viewfinder, we see him taking pictures of his surrounding. We see him click through his camera display screen, as he zooms in, presumably, on the pictures he just took, one of which has the woman we assume he was attempting to photograph. These images are how we must learn about the characters, both of a man wooing a baby in the image or even the young German man choosing to shoot photos in a public space, mirroring the film’s cinematographer. Schanelec uses photographers to provide a certain type of access into her films; a type of access that relates to image-making and perception and seeing the world that surrounds: the image is how we are privileged to see.
In another way, the narrative slowness of Schanelec’s films foregrounds Jutal’s visual regime. The long takes she employs provide the time and space for a type of access into the film that allows us a prolonged sense of vision; a vision that is paralleled by the vision of Schanelec’s characters, specifically those that are photographers. One learns not to just watch the film on our own terms—this would make us undoubtedly bored as some have probably come to experience when watching a film such as Marseille or Afternoon—but, rather, we must learn to watch the film on its own term. We come into the ‘narrative’ of the film when we allow ourselves to look at the characters looking. It is not that we apply our real experiences of the empirical world to the experiences of watching a film—again, this would leave us quite bored—but we can only watch the film with the terms it posits to us, that mediated through an aesthetic of slow. These terms, as seen in Schanelec’s films, relate to the affiliation between objective reality and the reality that exists in the cinema and its images.
Schanelec’s films, though they relate to reality as it exists which will be discussed later, are not to be interpreted as realistic, an easy mistake to make that has mislead filmmakers, philosophers, anthropologists and spectators as long as images have been produced. Andre Bazin says in his essay, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” that “realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice” (26). The aesthetic rendering of observed reality is ultimately “an illusion of reality” (27). One can witness this in Passing Summer through thematic framings of windows and trees as well as the ambiguous use of shots that are later presumed to be explained though never confirmed.
A third of the way through the film, Passing Summer, Thomas (Andreas Patton) and his son shop in a record store and we see them walk away down a street, holding hands, for a rather long take. We then cut to a different day, Thomas appears to be wearing a different shirt, and, without his son, purchases a ticket at the cinema—it is important to note here too that the cinema continually returns in Schanelec’s films, further acknowledgment of the processing of image-making and presenting. The next shot appears to be out a window of a tree that fills the entire frame, quite an ambiguous image at this point in the narrative. It may seem like this cut is to the film Thomas just entered but it quickly becomes obvious we are not seeing the film as the ambient noises of birds chirping and murmuring seems to be coming from the tree and below the frame, near street level. This shot makes little sense in the context of the film at this point and may only be understood several minutes later in the film. But before this, Schanelec reminds us of the images we watch and how they affect our perceptions.
We then cut to the top of some sort of monument. The camera is placed inside the double paned windowed doors, as Thomas sits at the top of the stairs outside. Thomas is framed within a thinner section of the double paned window as a man approaches him and asks for him to “make a photo of me over there” in English. The foreigner then approaches the window and turns to face Thomas, lined up exactly where Thomas was just sitting, framed inside the thinner portion of the double paned window. This scene serves to remind us of the artificial context of the film in that Thomas and the foreigner are both being photographed, mediated by two photographers (Thomas and the cinematographer, Reinhold Vorschneider, who worked on all of Schanelec’s films). Further so, this entire scene is shot through the double paned window, distorting dimensions, colors and depth. We are not seeing reality as it really is, but one that, mediated through Schanelec’s aesthetic of slow, is rendered by a photographer (cinematographer) and constructed images and framing.
In the next scene, Thomas and another man discuss an interview that he conducted. The conversation alludes to the previous shot of the tree outside the window full of birds chirping. Thomas plays back an audio recording (we have possibly already seen the image of it, so why not just include the audio?) and we hear the man on tape say, “There’s nothing to say. Nothing.” The audiotape playback device, which we are not even able to see as Thomas stands between it and us, is disrupted by the loud sounds of chirping birds and Thomas’s partner questions the noise. Thomas’s explanation accurately describes the previous tree scene: there was an incredible racket but not a bird to be seen. One begins to ask if the shot of the tree was the interview scene that we heard on tape, if this was the image associated with it and, indeed, the interviewee had nothing to say. More importantly, Schanelec cuts the scene together in a deliberately ambiguous way. We may have initially had no idea what the purpose was of the tree, let alone if we do know after Thomas and his partner discuss the audiotape. This scene foregrounds Jutal’s visual regime and, in particular, Schanelec’s aesthetic of slow. The untethering of audio and video reminds us of the artificiality that Bazin suggests as well as provides a certain context for the viewer to access the film: one that concerns itself with presentation of images and sounds. It must be no coincidence that the film ends with a shot of another tree outside an apartment window, this time with just as much bird chatter and ambiguity.
An aesthetic of slow, as we have witnessed in Schanelec’s films, mediates a particular type of access into her films that relates to imaging and perceiving the images that her characters create, often through use of photographers as characters and deliberate choices of framing. The means of getting to this point, that of stylistic and aesthetic minimalism, demonstrates Schanelec’s possible inclusion into categorical ‘slow cinema’ terminology; but this analysis cannot end here. Ultimately, Schanelec’s films say something about the current state of German images and how one perceives their surroundings. Schanelec’s aesthetic of slow “extends to the relation between the forms and modes of address of cinema and the ways in which it predisposes us to look at other media texts and the world in a certain way” (Jutal). Schanelec’s film, through her choice of structured and formal aesthetic decisions, affects the spectator’s ability to perceive and understand images that surrounding them. Through an aesthetic of slow, she teaches us to watch the films, and, also, teaches us about perceiving other images, even that of the world around us. This has a special implication for contemporary German cinema in a climate of clichéd German historical dramas and multilingual, multicountry-funded features.
Schanelec’s films can be better understood in this shift that Eric Rentschler discusses in his introduction to “Postwall Prospects.” German reality, as well as German cinema, has become “drastically transformed” through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this context, a great deal of retrospection has taken place, chiefly that of heritage and Nazi films though “many young directors remain convinced that the Nazi period need not be the only sector of German history worthy of scrutiny” (Rentschler, 5). The short film collection, Deutschland 09 – 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation (2009), approaches the question of retrospection in Germany as a variety of filmmakers, both young and old, address the state of contemporary Germany. Schanelec’s contribution, Erster Tag, consistent with her oeuvre up to his point as I hope I have pointed out, deals entirely with images and perception. Her short film consists of a series of static takes, seemingly unrelated and relatively uninteresting material: city streets, hospitals, schools and a lake landscape. Perhaps this short sheds light on her entire filmography, a body of work that asks the viewer what type of relationship we have with images, what we desire from them and how we desire to understand them. To Schanelec, defining Germany is not so much wrapped up in the German language or the German borders (her films are sometimes in French and located in French airports and cities) but, rather, how we imagine what Germany is. Schanelec’s films allow us, and encourage us, to see Germany different, to see it in new ways. Her images ultimately affect the viewer, not through narrative slowness or an over minimalist aesthetic design, but a structured aesthetic of slow that teaches us to watch the film as it presents itself to us, to perceive the world as it presents itself to us, affected and transformed.
Bibliography
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