Christian Petzold: A Dossier

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...

While most filmmakers use movement as their primary currency, Christian Petzold seems to favors stasis. In Petzold scholarship, movement has received a fair amount of attention. One undertheorized aspect is thi...

The essay discloses Petzold's interest in the ways in which the planned obsolescence integral to regimes of neoliberal production and consumption is inscribed onto the function of the female body within a heter...

Christian. A popular name for people of his generation. The competitive ambition to make a name for himself is a defining feature. He has curly hair, black Medusa-snakes for which, as someone who has rather blo...

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...

This essay examines Christian Petzold’s lesser-known, early films of the 90s in their depiction of the German economy’s impact on individuals’ image-perception and then takes up his better-known film Die innere...

The source for Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) is generally taken to be Hermann Broch’s novella Barbara (1936), with which it indeed shares some similarities, yet the film’s plot and themes closely parallel ...

Translated by Jaimey Fisher This conversation among writer/director Christian Petzold, senior programmer Robert Fischer, and Prof. Jaimey Fisher of University of California, Davis was part of the “Filmmaker Li...

The essay examines how Petzold evokes an embodied mode of spectatorship as part of a strategy to counter the approach to history taken by von Donnersmarck. Critics have observed that Petzold’s first historical ...

The Benjaminian Writings on the Wall and Petzold’s Archaeology of Genre In an early scene in Christian Petzold’s 2015 Phoenix, protagonist Nelly Lenz lies in a hospital bed as her friend Lene Winter lists fami...