TY - BOOK AU - Abel,Marco TI - Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School T2 - Screen Cultures: German Film and the Vis SN - 9781571139412 PY - 2015/// CY - New York PB - Camden House KW - Motion pictures KW - Germany KW - History KW - 21st century KW - Class of Fall 2019 KW - Dirk Ippen Fellow KW - Fellow N2 - The contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitute the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because their films mark the emergence of a new film language. The Berlin School filmmakers, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent of the directors of the New German Autorenkino and of French cinéma des auteurs of the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of the Berlin School in any language. Its central thesis - that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" - is built around the unusual style of realism employed in its films, a realism that presents images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political: they are political notbecause they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" - a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways ofdoing and making, saying and seeing. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln ER -