Director's Portrait:

In the spring of 2001, Christian Petzold succeeded - with The State I Am In - in making the breakthrough, as far as both audiences and critics were concerned, from a little-known, private tip to a new hope in quality German cinema. The film tells the story of a small family which has lived underground for years, "in a kind of historical silence". When the daughter reaches puberty and begins to voice some claims of her own, the inner structure, the micro-politics of this family begin to lose their equilibrium. The daughter's attempts to liberate herself turn against the family's "inner security": "The film is all about this complex constellation within the family. That has to be absolutely realistic, in the sense that the inner communication is no longer directed towards an imaginary audience. Instead, on the contrary, we observe a family at work on its economy of guilt and its symbolism."

Looked at superficially, the film appears to have been much helped by a coincidence quite effective for publicity, but if one is aware of Petzold's way of working and knows his previous films, it becomes clear that this is not actually a coincidence - far more, it is the result of an extremely fortuitous combination of historical-political interests, an ability for precise observation, aesthetic sensitivity and a principle disquiet regarding the social status quo in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). When a film like The State I Am In meets with an audience aroused by current discussion on the radical biographies of those bearing political responsibility today, and - almost without meaning to - it becomes a kind of intervention in the debate, this confirms, first and foremost, Petzold's assessment that the "Red Army Faction phantom" has not lost its virulence since the autumn of 1977. However, it also indicates that this material requires a different story, a different adaptation in order to be able to remind people of it, work it out and make it productive from a different perspective and under altered experimental conditions; perhaps by means of a highly original combination of family story, political history and vampire motif as in this case. The State I Am In therefore abstains quite consciously from radical jargon, scraps of which usually characterize the language of left-wing radical activists in film, so illustrating the political dimension of the figures. The State I Am In relates quite normal episodes from the everyday life of an extreme family: "The theft of clothing in order to be able to plunge into a certain normality means becoming human for the daughter, but for the parents it may perhaps mean death."

In praise of dialectics! Christian Petzold's films tell simple and at the same time highly complex stories about damaged lives, the loss of utopias, the longing for a suburban family happiness which remains unfulfilled because the people within this system are not equal to the realization of their dreams. At the same time, the films are dense (and this is their true art), psycho-social experimental models and unsentimental, hard FRG-noirs. On the one hand, it is possible to sum up the action of the individual films in a few sentences, on the other hand there is sufficient psychological motivation in their depth of structure to concern oneself with them for a long time and plumb the depths of all the implicit and explicit dialectical turns in the plot.

In Petzold's films, the Federal Republic stubbornly remains a foreign country, an ethnographic terrain whose rules of play must be examined precisely (which may teach us a great deal, but ultimately does not help the characters much!). Sometimes the films begin outside of the FRG, in Morocco or on the Portuguese coast, sometimes the figures have just returned to the FRG, and usually the characters dream of a life outside of the FRG: of a flat of their own in Paris, of a life in Bora-Bora, of a new identity in Brazil. Moments of happiness and security only arise during the long car journeys through the countryside. Moments of mobility liberate the characters from the pressure to consider their options to act: these are moments of happiness in a purely antisocial sense, but unfortunately (of course!) they do not present a general solution to German miseries.

Die Beischlafdiebin - the title of the last-but-one film by Christian Petzold and the German term for women who lure men to bed then rob them - explicitly borrows a motif from Alexander Kluge, whose way of thinking inspired him: "Kluge has made a very considerable impression on me since I read his Lebensläufe at the end of the 70s. In this work I found something which demonstrated the cracks in this gruesome suburban reality of the FRG, revealing horrifying tragedies and opera material behind them."

Petzold's films recount the "gruesome suburban reality", the edges of the Federal Republic's middle classes, showing the everyday life, the dreams and the failures of cosmetics saleswomen, "Beischlafdiebinnen", dropouts, ex-political activists in the underground, department store announcers. In fact, they are all quite modest; they only want a fair share of the cake, but they are not granted even that, because they don't know all the rules.

Is it possible to learn these rules, these strategies for happiness? A reduction - as a result of experience - in the number of mistakes we make in the field of social activity calls for a second chance in order to try out what has been learned in practice. Petzold's films are full of training opportunities, of repetitions, variations and reflections, they are also full of learning processes. The characters attempt to gain control over their lives by training, hoping to reduce contingency. In the process, they underestimate the extent to which projections hamper their perception, and also forget that life itself - that is, the conditions of the experiment - is always changing. The learning processes which Petzold has revealed up until now have usually remained "fatal learning processes" - his films demand this measure of materialistic realism from the viewer, especially as they are often crime stories (the sociological content of a coherent crime story should never be underestimated: Petzold is a fan of Charles Willeford). Should, however, non-lethal learning processes take place amongst the audience, this is entirely in the spirit of the narrator.