Author Marco Abel

To begin, then, with Hamlet: to be or not to be, this seems to be the question these days for the city of Berlin when it comes to its longstanding status as – and claim to being – Germany’s cinema capital. Do t...

Christoph Hochhäusler’s noirish Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) premiered on the final day of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, capping a Competition that showcased an unusually hi...

Dominik Graf is one of Germany’s most important – and prolific – filmmakers of the last half century. Since his debut, the short film Carlas Briefe (Carla’s Letters, 1975), and his first feature, Der kostbare G...

And there he is: perhaps not entirely unlike those famous bespectacled eyes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz-age novel The Great Gatsby (1925) that stare hauntingly down at passers-by from a massive billboard, beh...

“Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), laconically declares to screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), as he shrugs off the outraged respons...

Late in one of the greatest filmic encounters with what scholars have started to conceptualise as the “long 1968,” we listen to a voiceover (VO) calmly narrating the gradual disappearance of one of the film’s p...

The 68th Berlin International Film Festival took place underneath two significant clouds that did not have anything to do with the films as such. First, in the post-Harvey Weinstein era, the #MeToo movement sti...

6 September 1977. I was not yet eight years old. Helicopters in the air; police cars everywhere. On the way to school, the display of the box with the local newspaper you could buy for a few cents showed an ima...

Who is Petzold? If one were to pose this eponymous question – a self-evident one at the start of this Dossier on the German director Christian Petzold – the year 2016 might help bring an answer into notably sh...

Harun (Farocki’s) premise was the insight that we do not even have any new images of capitalism yet. Sure, we have these airport boarding zones, where we see modern people with laptops, reading high-gloss magaz...

Towards the end of the 67th iteration of the Berlin International Film Festival, one of Germany’s best contemporary directors, Dominik Graf, showcased his latest essay film, Offene Wunde deutscher Film (Open Wo...

I think every film ought to be an experiment, without predetermined results. In the fall of 2013, in short succession four books were published on the so-called “Berlin School” of contemporary German cine...

On the evidence of this absorbing and articulate interview alone, Dominik Graf is worthy of being better know outside the borders of the German speaking world. He not only offers insights into his own filmmaking practice and aesthetic, but also a range of fascinating observations covering the last forty or so years of German cinema and cultural history.

Dresen has directed eight feature films and, as Abel reveals, “Is one of the rare successful contemporary German directors who was born and raised in the GDR [former East Germany] and has managed to adjust to the market-driven rules of filmmaking characteristic of reunified Germany.”

French critics coined the term Nouvelle Vague Allemande in response to the rise of a new wave of filmmaking in Germany. In this wide-ranging interview, the filmmaker and co-editor of the magazine Revolver discusses the current state of German cinema in the light of its history, and the cultural and æsthetic ideas that impact on his films and thinking.

February 10–20, 2006 Last year, I took the opportunity to write for this journal on the state of affairs of contemporary German cinema in the form of a festival report on the 55th Berlin Film Festival. At th...

February 10–20, 2005 One of the remarkable aspects of the state of contemporary film discourse on world cinema is that one of its traditional pillars – that of German cinema – has almost completely fallen of...