Angela Schanelec x5: Circling reality
German filmmaker Angela Schanelec is associated with the Berlin School, a name perhaps too rhetorical for what it really is: a handful of young directors, including Christian Petzold, Valeska Grisebach, Thomas Arslan, schooled by Harun Farocki, who in the early 2000s were trying uneasy narrative forms at the opposite end of mainstream cinema. Unlike the New Romanian Wave, which coagulated around the aesthetics proposed by Cristi Puiu, the Berlin School doesn't come with a unitary narrative-stylistic agenda - the easy argument that it would consist of films about neoliberalism and urban alienation would be easy to contradict. The film that would have determined the name of the movement (invented actually by the German critic Merten Worthmann), Passing Summer (2001), by Angela Schanelec, isn't really a portrayal of the “city” of Berlin, but may be taken out of context at any time. Schanelec is less known in the USA, although she has been awarded in Europe multiple times, because her films avoid embellishment or getting too much into the psychology of things, have twisted narratives and present, in fact, a reality obstructed from all sides, where you exactly can't be sure of anything, everything is volatile and prone to change. Just like Puiu's Aurora, Schanelec's films are based on the ambiguities of the relationships between the characters, on the ambiguity of intentions - it's a fiction that leaves the impression of lack of control, of too much life outside the frame. It's a reality that swallows the screen or makes it insignificant before the mundane immensities that cannot be accommodated within its perimeter.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
