What's the Story?

The previous chapters have, I hope, sufficiently introduced and supported my position that in the context of contemporary German cinema, the Berlin School, as an otherwise merely loosely configured assemblage of individual directors, assumes a degree of consistency when considered as a counter-cinema. Such a diagnostic claim in turn makes palatable and, I think, necessitates the use of such a collectivizing label. Yet, by claiming that the Berlin School is a counter-cinema I do not mean to position these filmmakers as belonging to the tradition of avant-garde or “pure cinema.” Although both Arslan's and Petzold's work is at least partially characterized by a tendency to distill the available aesthetic means to their essence, their films are nevertheless still part of the tradition of narrative cinema, as are all of the films made by the directors under consideration in this book. Whereas the filmmakers we commonly associate with the filmic avant-garde such as Maya Deren, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, or Andy Warhol essentially turn their back on narrative, the Berlin School filmmakers belong to a film historical lineage that seeks to problematize narrative without negating it in toto; instead, it intensifies narrative figuration to such a degree that through this process a new sensation emerges in ways analogous to how Deleuze conceptualizes the “affection image,” which “abstracts [the object it images] from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates” (Cinema 1, 96).