Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction: So This Was Germany—A Preliminary Account of the Berlin School
- I The First Wave
- II The Second Wave
- 4 Revolver Cinema and Électrons Libres: Cinema Must Be Dangerous
- 5 Christoph Hochhäusler: Intensifying Life
- 6 Benjamin Heisenberg: Filming Simply as Resistance
- 7 Valeska Grisebach: A Sharpening of Our Regard
- 8 Maren Ade: Filming between Sincerity and Irony
- 9 Ulrich Köhler: The Politics of Refusal
- Conclusion: A Counter-Cinema
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Ulrich Köhler: The Politics of Refusal
from II - The Second Wave
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction: So This Was Germany—A Preliminary Account of the Berlin School
- I The First Wave
- II The Second Wave
- 4 Revolver Cinema and Électrons Libres: Cinema Must Be Dangerous
- 5 Christoph Hochhäusler: Intensifying Life
- 6 Benjamin Heisenberg: Filming Simply as Resistance
- 7 Valeska Grisebach: A Sharpening of Our Regard
- 8 Maren Ade: Filming between Sincerity and Irony
- 9 Ulrich Köhler: The Politics of Refusal
- Conclusion: A Counter-Cinema
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If art is political, it is political exactly in this sense: It refuses to be exploited by the daily routine of political and social concerns. Its strength lies in its autonomy.
—Ulrich Köhler, “Why I Don't Make Political Films”Absolute Refusal
In this penultimate chapter, I want to organize my discussion around a few select sequences from each of Ulrich Köhler's three features to date: Bungalow, which focuses on Paul (Lennie Burmeister), a young man who out of the blue “decides” not to rejoin his military comrades and instead heads back home to the empty bungalow of his parents, located in the rolling hills by Marburg, where he subsequently bides his time without a clear sense of purpose; Montag kommen die Fenster, which centers on Nina (Isabelle Menke), who one day “decides” to abandon temporarily her husband and preschool daughter and to roam the woods surrounding Kassel, another provincial city; and Schlafkrankheit, which loosely revolves around Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma), a German medical doctor working in Cameroon who “decides” not to follow his wife back to Wetzlar, Germany, to live together with their teenage daughter (from whom they have been separated for a number of years).
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- Information
- The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School , pp. 274 - 296Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013