Affectless Economies: The Berlin

School and Neoliberalism

Hester Baer

The Berlin School is a loosely affiliated group of contemporary

German filmmakers whose work can be said to constitute a new
countercinema. Emerging in the 1990s, when first-generation
Berlin School filmmakers Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, and
Christian Petzold released their first features, the group has gained
increasing recognition over the past decade for a growing body of
films that pay renewed attention to film form and aesthetics, turn-
ing their lens on life in Germany and Europe during the era of late
capitalism and globalization.1 Much interest in German cinema
during recent years has focused on big-budget high-profile mov-
ies, which are Oscar-friendly (in fact, they are sometimes produced
by Hollywood companies) and capitalize on audience familiarity
with German history, especially the Nazi or East German past. By
contrast, Berlin School films are typically set in the present day.
Conveying a strong sense of contemporaneity, they represent not
Germanys turbulent twentieth-century history but rather its less
sensational aftermath. In particular, these films experiment with
narrative time and the representation of space, shifting focus away
from dramatic historical events and onto the everyday lives of their
characters. These average Germans have lived through the dissolu-
tion of their national borders, radical alterations to the spaces of
their cities and towns, and an acceleration of time and a decrease

Discourse, 35.1, Winter 2013, pp. 72100.

Copyright 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
Affectless Economies 73

in spatial distances due to technological developments as well as a

host of other changes brought about by German unification, the
expansion of the European Union, the impact of globalization,
and the hegemony of the free-market economy. Berlin School films
examine the effects of these transformations in an understated
way, exploring their impact on social structures, on family and love
relationships, and on the struggle to overcome alienation and find
happiness.
Berlin School films have been the subject of public debate
about the role of cinema in contemporary Germany and Europe,
not least because, like the New German Cinema films of the 1970s,
they have received a warmer critical reception on the festival cir-
cuit and abroad than at home. Critics and scholars have tended
to focus on the rigorous aesthetics of the films, viewing them as
attempts to redeem a European tradition of realism in the face of
the predominant transnational style of commercial filmmaking. At
the same time, a number of vocal detractors of the Berlin School
have decried the fact that films with so little commercial appeal
have generated so much discussion.2
Accounts of the place of cinema in the contemporary world,
especially those that emphasize production and finance, have been
relatively united in their assessment of present-day art cinema as a
nostalgic throwback to the twentieth century. According to such
accounts, the rise of digital technologies means that cinema has
become a residual form of visual culture, an analog relic that art
cinema attempts to resuscitate. More significantly, in the era of
neoliberal media regimes, the strategies of art cinemadefamiliar-
ization techniques, distantiation, contemplative aesthetics, self-ref-
erentiality, and subversion, among othershave been thoroughly
recuperated for mainstream cinema, draining art cinema of its
oppositional value.
In his discussion of emblematic postcinematic works from the
early twenty-first century, for example, Steven Shaviro dismisses
the current vogue for contemplative cinema as nostalgic recy-
cling with no political basis.3 Shaviro privileges video and film pro-
ductions that map the present moment by pushing contemporary
multimedia aesthetics to an extreme, thereby up[ping] the ante
on our very complicity with the technologies and social arrange-
ments that oppress us. In an era when it is impossible to imagine
alternatives to capitalism, Shaviro argues, postcinematic media
perform a valuable function of cognitive and affective mapping
of the present moment: They help and train us to endureand
perhaps also to negotiatethe complexity of cyberspace and mul-
tinational capital.4
74 Hester Baer

From a different perspective, Randall Halles discussion of

German film after Germany attends to the commercial, transna-
tional mode of production that emerged in Europe in the 1980s
and 1990s, after the dismantling of film subvention schemes to pro-
mote national cinema, in a new market-driven era that mandated
self-sustainable, profitable filmmaking. Despite the aesthetic con-
ventionalism and consensus-driven politics of such filmmaking,
Halle suggests that the transnational production model charac-
teristic of contemporary commercial cinema heightens sensitivity
to cultural specificity, represents new conceptions of space and
community, and offers a new and enriched visual language for
the contemporary moment. Not only do the new transnational
films reach an audience far wider than did postwar European art
cinema (not least because they are entertaining), but they also
speak to an entirely new function of film: transnationalism orga-
nizes and mediates public spheres; it offers new imaginings of
community.5
Halle makes the case that the profitability and self-sustainabil-
ity of the audiovisual industry serve to secure the stability of critical
and experimental Cultural production alongside big-budget pop-
ular entertainment fare. Nonetheless, he cautions against a nos-
talgic attachment to art cinema as political cinema and sees little
point in the project of a renewed contemporary art film. Like Sha-
viro, Halle points out that the strategies of art cinema have been
co-opted. Halle also makes the case that films are reflective rather
than constitutive of social conditions: Films are only as revolution-
ary as the eras out of which they emerge.6
Yet the question of whether films can create images of the
present moment has as much to do with modes of production as
with representational choices.7 In both regards, the films of the
Berlin School present a challenge to the contemporary tendency
to reject art cinema as a nostalgic enterprise that reflects an out-
dated production scheme, and one whose strategies of engaging
spectators are anodyne relics without political currency. In an era
when film production in Germany has been largely concentrated
in the hands of a very few media conglomerates, the Berlin School
has created a successful independent production model. Relying
like most German film productions on a combination of funding
through regional film boards, private investment, and television
financing, these low-budget films (costing on average little more
than one million euros) have mostly played in cinemas only in lim-
ited release, where they have rarely drawn many viewers, not least
due to low advertising budgets. However, on television they have
done exceedingly well, often topping the charts for their time slots
Affectless Economies 75

and drawing large market shares (815 percent, indicating well

over a million and sometimes as many as several million viewers).8
Berlin School productions are virtually all shot on 35mm film, and
they are not made for television in terms of their formal style or
content.9 Nonetheless, television exhibition and reception under-
pin the films production model and expand their viewership.
Thus, Berlin School films reflect a transnational, postcinematic
mode of production and reception, and they are firmly embedded
in (and also place on display) the same neoliberal mediascape as
the big-budget star vehicles discussed by Shaviro or the commercial
blockbusters lauded by Halle.10
Yet in contrast to those mostly affirmative hits, the Berlin
Schools largely noncommercial films work to disorganize con-
temporary reality by adopting an affectless aesthetic, as seen in
their use of dialogue, acting styles, and refusal of closure as well
as their technique of representing emotions without emotional-
izing.11 This affectless aesthetic is a central vector not only of the
films mode of production (using lay actors and a minimalist style
reduces production costs) but also of their representation of every-
day life and ambivalent appeal to the spectator.
Critics have struggled to discern the precise nature of the politi-
cal or oppositional value embodied by Berlin School films, perhaps
because they seem to fit so easily into the received dichotomies (of
high/low, cinema/media, art/commercial, intellectual/popular,
international/national) that continue to inform our apprehension
of contemporary culture. Thus, the critical tendency has been to
view Berlin School films as a kind of redemption of art cinema or
even of the medium of cinema itself. My reading, by contrast, sug-
gests that the films resignify cinematic legacies under the sign of
postcinema and that they do so by engaging the central trope of
disorganization (as opposed to distanciation) in mapping contem-
porary reality. Focusing on two paradigmatic Berlin School films
from 2001, Arslans Der schne Tag (A Fine Day) and Schanelecs
Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer), I examine in particular the
films resignification of art cinematic conventions of representing
young female protagonists within the cityscape and the way this
resignification contributes to a disorganized view of everyday life
in neoliberal capitalism.
In contrast to theories about how capitalism orders the
everyday, Lauren Berlant has suggested an approach to the
overwhelming ordinary that is disorganized by it, and many other
forces besides.12 Her emphasis on insecurity and precarity as
the dominant contemporary structures of experience connect to
Volker Woltersdorffs discussion of precarious sexualities; that
76 Hester Baer

is, of the erosion (but not disappearance) of gender and sexual

norms in neoliberalism. As Woltersdorff argues, neoliberalism is
characterized by a paradoxical ambivalence between destabiliz-
ing and strengthening heteronormativity: It is merely the site
of femininity and masculinity that has become increasingly pre-
carious, for the neo-liberal flexibilization of gender and sexual
identities allows traditional and flexible gender roles to coexist.13
As Woltersdorff suggests, the neoliberal discourse of mobility and
deregulation appears to open up spaces for nonnormative gender
identifications, sexual practices, and affective ties, but the institu-
tional sex-gender system is still an imperative, creating a situation
of permanent insecurity. In this context, I argue that A Fine Day
and Passing Summer present a disorganized view of statuses such as
race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, statuses that no longer
form the basis for an oppositional politics in the contemporary
context and yet still inform the subjective lives of individuals, their
adjustments to the present, and their ability to survive or be pro-
tected in the world.14
As many critics have pointed out, neoliberalism, though rarely
named, has become increasingly hegemonic, so much so that its
concepts have come to seem like common sense or second nature.15
The imperceptibility of neoliberalism, along with the impossibility
of grasping the abstraction of the transnational financial system,
leads to a situation in which the contemporary world itself appears
incomprehensible and unrepresentable. As affect theorists have
argued, in this situation individuals perceive the present largely via
affective responses; affect becomes a way of tracking adjustments
to transformations in society, politics, and the economy that can
augment or diminish a bodys capacity to act, to engage, and to
connect.16 As machines for generating affect, films are uniquely
poised to construct, perform, or make palpable qualities of the
contemporary moment for spectators.17
The anthropologist Marc Aug has described the contempo-
rary situation thus: We live in a world that we have not yet learned
to look at. Aug argues that in neoliberalism, where there is no
longer an elsewhere, it is both more crucial and more difficult for
art to convey something about the world: [Art] has to be expres-
sive and reflexive if it wants to show us anything we do not see daily
on TV or in the supermarket. Aug thus proposes that artists today
are doomed to seek beauty in non-places, to discover it by resist-
ing the apparent obviousness of current events,18 a proposition
that the Berlin School filmmakers, who often cite Aug, could be
said to have adopted as an aesthetic program for their films.
Affectless Economies 77

Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, and the Berlin School

Born in 1962, the bicultural filmmaker Thomas Arslan grew up

in both Germany and Turkey before studying directing at the
Berlin Film and Television Academy. The writer and director of
seven features and a documentary, he has also coproduced most
of his own films. Arslan came to prominence with his so-called Ber-
lin Trilogy of films about Turkish Germans in that city: Geschwis-
ter (Siblings, 1996), Dealer (1999), and A Fine Day. His subsequent
work has moved away from the Turkish German focus and increas-
ingly toward genre cinema, and his most recent films are a crime
story and a western. All of Arslans filmmaking is characterized by
a unified aesthetic of reduction, featuring static tableaux, slow
narrative exposition underpinned by minimal editing, and a neu-
tral documentary-like camera.19 Focusing on the politics of every-
day life and emphasizing the trope of mobility as both possibility
and limit, especially for Turkish Germans, Arslans Berlin Trilogy
unreels in the nonplaces of the metropolis.
Angela Schanelec, also born in 1962, was a successful theater
actress before quitting the stage to study directing at the Berlin
Film and Television Academy in 1990. She is the director of six
feature films and also wrote, produced, and sometimes edited and
acted in each of these films. A central figure in the Berlin School,
Schanelec has said that what interests her about filmmaking is form
rather than stories. Her films are united by a very specific authorial
style deriving especially from her choice to edit in the camera,
filming one paragraph of the script at a time. This typically means
using extremely lengthy shots (it is not uncommon for more than
a minute to elapse before a cut), and it doesnt allow for shooting
multiple takes or different angles. Despite her professed resistance
to stories, almost all of Schanelecs films present narratives about
the precarity and contingency of contemporary life, set in the non-
places of French and German cities, and they specifically focus on
female characters who are figuring out how to build a life amid the
changed expectations of the neoliberal present.
As auteur directors, Arslan and Schanelec share a commitment
to creating an open-ended, polysemic cinema that demands the
spectators participation. This polysemic quality is produced not
least by their shared aesthetic of affectlessness, which drains emo-
tion both from the filmic text itself (through affectless acting styles,
fragmentary narratives, a refusal of closure, and so on) and from
the address to the spectator (by disorganizing the viewing process,
foreclosing processes of identification, and resisting emotionaliza-
tion). Notably, they do not describe the spectators participation as
78 Hester Baer

a process of making meaning from their films. Rather, Arslan and

Schanelec leave open to the spectator possibilities for sensing the
scenarios of contemporary life they display.
Shaviro has described recent works of postcinema as expressive:
that is to say, . . . they give voice (or better, give sounds and images)
to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our
society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in par-
ticular. By the term expressive, I mean both symptomatic and produc-
tive. Like other examples of postcinema, Arslans and Schanelecs
films can also be viewed as symptomatic, in Shaviros sense of
providing indices for complex social processes, and productive,
insofar as they do not so much represent these social processes as
participate in constituting them.20 Yet in contrast to Shaviros exam-
ples (which employ both genre normativity and clichd represen-
tations of race and gender, elements that he argues help to expose
neoliberal ideologies), Arslans and Schanelecs films disorganize
such normative representations, suggesting a different framework
for interpretation.
Crucial here is the way that both Arslan and Schanelec resignify
elements of European art cinema, including New Wave, feminist,
and minority countercinemas, in their disorganization of ethnic,
gender, and sexual binaries. Both Arslan and Schanelec cite Rob-
ert Bresson as a primary influence (Arslans production company
is called Pickpocket, after Bressons masterpiece), and they adapt
elements of his work, including using lay actors and emphasizing
a parity between aesthetic form and plot or story. Films of Jean-
Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, and Eric Rohmer are also significant
intertexts.
Arslans films overlap in a number of ways with the indepen-
dent transnational film genre identified by Hamid Naficy, which
mobilizes the intersections between transnational subjectivity in
general and specific migrant (auto)biographies in particular. Inde-
pendent transnational films are produced by diasporic filmmakers
who, like Arslan, not only inhabit interstitial spaces of the host
society but also work on the margins of the mainstream film indus-
try.21 In terms of form, Naficys discussion of the independent
transnational genre shares something in common with the femi-
nist film project described by Teresa de Lauretis and other feminist
film theorists who argued in the 1970s and 1980s that in order to
achieve a new space of representation, feminist film production
must mobilize precisely the contradictions between woman as
image or sign and women as historical subjects.22
Arslan has described his own oeuvre as an attempt not so much
to break free of received images, clichs, or stereotypes but instead
Affectless Economies 79

to rework them. One way in which he does this is by creating delib-

erate connections across his films so that they can be viewed in
cyclical relation to one another, as in a cycle of poems. Specific
themes and shots reappear across films, allowing viewers to rein-
terpret similar ideas in new ways. Using lay actors and repeatedly
casting the same actors in different roles across his films, Arslan
creates characters whom he describes as empty pagesprojection
screens for the spectator.23 Arslan has made clear that he deliber-
ately deploys particular stereotypes of Turkish Germans and par-
ticular conventions of transnational cinema in order to complicate
them for viewers. In the case of Dealer, for example, he explains
that My task was not to abandon the clichs altogetherbecause
then you cant narrate anything at allbut rather to dissolve them
in the course of the film, in order to make another reality visible.24
In these ways, Arslans filmmaking practice echoes de Lauretiss
description of the aesthetic of reception practiced by feminist
filmmakers such as Helke Sander and Chantal Akerman (also cited
by Arslan as a direct influence on his work), where the spectator
is the films primary concernprimary in the sense that it is there
from the beginning, inscribed in the filmmakers project and even
in the making of the film.25 Similarly, Schanelec invokes the femi-
nist film project when she says that shooting an actor directly from
the front is brutal, an act of violenceI dont want to attack in
that way. Instead, she relies heavily on sound to bind together the
artistic process, asking viewers to trust words and ears rather than
eyes and in this way to develop the imagination.26
In an interview they gave together shortly after the release of
A Fine Day and Passing Summer, Arslan and Schanelec spoke exten-
sively about the way they conceptualize an address to the specta-
tor.27 Describing the choice to restrict his characters affect in order
to open up spaces of reception, Arslan explains: Making a film
always poses the question of how to produce vitality aesthetically.
This artistic process does not work for me by setting up life in all its
intensity in front of the camera, but rather by activating something
comparable in the audience. You have to leave the viewer some lee-
way to participate [Spielraum: literally, room to play]. That doesnt
happen if the actors perform every emotion. Similarly, Schanelec
describes the decoupling of sound and image as a central facet of
her address to the spectator and as a formal device for undoing
affect: For me, the question arises: How can I engage both the
eye and ear of the spectator, without doubling everything I show.28
Both of these strategiesavoiding overtly emotionalized presen-
tations of contemporary life and resignifying the sound/image
correspondencedisorganize conventional modes of viewing and
80 Hester Baer

create a slippage between identification and voyeurism that is often

mirrored at the level of the narrative as well.
The films of Arslan and Schanelec typically leave both char-
acters and viewers wanting to feel something. A common thread of
the many debates about the Berlin School in the German media
is a strongly articulated frustration about filmmakers who have
digested all of film history, who think up one pretentious title after
another, but who are not capable of generating one single authen-
tic feeling, not to mention of representing love in a convincing
way.29 As I wish to suggest, this response is emblematic of the con-
temporary situation where, as critics have argued, subjective emo-
tion has waned.30 By creating an awareness, even frustration, about
dwindling emotions, the films of Arslan and Schanelec make pal-
pable the insecurity and precarity of the present moment.

A Fine Day

A Fine Day follows the protagonist Deniz, an aspiring actress,

through the course of a summer day spent in transit as she cir-
culates through the trains, taxis, subways, public parks, apartment
complexes, cafs, and workplaces of Berlin. In the course of the
movie, Deniz breaks up with her boyfriend Jan, auditions for a film
role, meets with her mother and sister, and pursues an attractive
stranger whom she repeatedly encounters on subways and trains.
In many ways the ideal neoliberal subject, Deniz embodies mobil-
ity and possibility, underscored filmically by the incessant shots of
her moving through public spaces, on foot and on various forms
of urban transport. While Deniz embraces the freedom of choice
and movement promised by neoliberalism, the other women she
encountersher mother, her sister, and even the professor with
whom she discusses the history of love at the end of the filmserve
as potent reminders of the limits of that freedom.
Arslans initial critical reception focused closely on his status as
a minority filmmaker and his contributions to the representation
of migration and the German-Turkish cultural exchange, and his
work has been consistently praised for defying stereotypes of Turk-
ish Germans. For example, Deniz Gktrk has identified Arslans
films as exemplary of a new mode of depicting immigrants and
their hybrid offspring, which departs from the cinema of duty
that characterized the representation of migrants during the 1970s
and 1980s.31 As Joanne Leal and Klaus-Dieter Rossade note, Arslans
films also defy gender stereotypes, often by contrasting a passive
male character with an active female counterpart who appears
Affectless Economies 81

successful in determining her own existence with the help and

support of other women.32 Thus, Arslans films are seen to empha-
size freedom of movement and freedom of choice in the construc-
tion of identities.
Although Arslans filmmaking career closely mirrors that of
the transnational independent filmmaker, his filmsespecially A
Fine Dayengage with gender and space in ways that challenge
Naficys description of the negatively coded phobic spaces that
characterize the transnational independent genre.33 Rather, like
other Berlin School filmmakers, Arslan is chiefly concerned with
the liminal spaces of contemporary society. Unlike the claustropho-
bic spaces inhabited by characters of diasporic cinema (especially
female characters), these nonspaces seem to foster mobility and
transition. They also coincide with an exploration of in-between
timesadolescence, vacation, the breakup of a long-term relation-
shipwhen characters find themselves on the brink of a transition.
Indeed, the formal and aesthetic emphasis on such transitional
nonplaces and times is strongly imbricated with Arslans narra-
tive focus on the search for the good life and the possibilities for
adjustment to the present. While his films focus precisely on the
search as process, reflected in Arslans repeated shots of charac-
ters moving through space and his regular images of crossroads,
they most often end at an impasse. In the world of Arslans films,
traditional structures of extended family, religion, and social wel-
fare are crumbling, replaced by discourses of personal responsibil-
ity and individual self-fashioning. While the absence of traditional
structures undoubtedly releases his characters from conventional
expectations in what could be construed as beneficial ways, on the
other hand, the choices they face are those between irreconcilable
alternatives.
In A Fine Day, several momentous events occur in Denizs life,
including her breakup from a long-term relationship and her
meeting with her sister, whom Deniz learns is pregnant. But Den-
izs affectless demeanor (and the utterly affectless acting style of
Serpil Turhan, who plays Deniz) gives us little clue as to her own
apprehension of or response to these events. Arslan combines this
reductive aesthetic with an expressly reflective discourse on affect
itself (in particular the emotions of happiness and love), elements
that contribute to the films mapping of the cruel optimism that
characterizes the neoliberal present.34
Drawing on formal characteristics of feminist cinema, Arslan
makes Deniz the bearer of the look, and lengthy sequences empha-
size her active gaze, not least at Diego, a man she watches on sub-
way platforms and trains and with whom she initiates contact in the
82 Hester Baer

course of the film. Although Deniz does not express emotions, her
pursuit of desire is the films central trope. As she puts it, You have
to desire something, otherwise theres no point. Berlant describes
how the neoliberal subject desires to view herself as a solitary
agent who can and must live the good life promised by capitalist
culture, a phrase that summarizes Denizs aspirations.35
A Fine Day begins with a series of static establishing shots last-
ing approximately ten seconds each: a long shot of wispy clouds
drifting almost imperceptibly in a bright blue sky; a close-up of
an open door and a white curtain gently floating in the breeze; a
medium shot of a sleeping man, enveloped in a green duvet; and a
countershot of a womans dark profile, backlit by the sun streaming
in the open door. When we first see Deniz in this shot, she looks
steadfastly at Jans sleeping figure before turning slowly around,
180 degrees, to exit his apartment. From now on we see Deniz in
motion, running down the stairs to commence her day. She exits
Jans building and walks purposefully through the quiet, early-
morning city. Aboard the subway, she observes two sleeping lovers
dozing in each others arms. Back in her apartment, Deniz drinks
coffee and studies a script. When her phone rings and the answer-
ing machine picks up a plaintive message from Jan, we watch her
face, which registers nothing. Throughout this sequence, Deniz is
characterized by action, purpose, and distance.
Deniz leaves her apartment and returns to the subway; as she
stands in the empty station, the camera records her gaze as she
looks around and catches sight of a man standing on the oppo-
site platform. A shot/reverse-shot sequence positions Deniz as the
active bearer of the look and Diego as her object, in the first of
three sequences in the film in which Deniz encounters and actively
gazes at this attractive stranger in public spaces before eventually
approaching him in a public park. Standing on the platform in this
initial sequence, Diego eventually realizes that he is being looked
at, and he looks up. Deniz briefly looks away but then fixes him in
her gaze again. A train arrives at the station, blocking Diegos face.
As Deniz continues to stare at him, he boards the train, positioning
himself closer to Denizs look. Diegos face is partially obscured by
the glare on the train window and the darkness of the trains inte-
rior. Far from blocking her view, the inability to see him looking
back further enables Denizs gaze, and she actively watches Diego
as his train departs the station.
In this establishing sequence, gendered conventions of cine-
matic looking are disorganized. Most obviously, the female charac-
ter is the bearer of the look, and the male characters are her object,
in an inversion of Laura Mulveys classic formulation Woman as
Affectless Economies 83

Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.36 But the depiction of Denizs

gaze goes beyond a mere reversal of gender binaries in structures
of looking. In a review of the film, Manfred Hermes describes it as
a cruising gaze, which signals openness for all options, suggesting
both a distinctly sexual connotation to her look and a queer com-
ponent to its representation.37 Denizs affectless demeanor does
not betray her motivations for staring at Diego, leaving open the
question of whether she desires him sexually or perhaps desires
to be him. Certainly, the interplay of gazes between the two char-
acters creates a charged atmosphere as the film progresses, since
they repeatedly encounter and avoid one anothers looks. The sug-
gestiveness of their looks and their ultimate encounter in the Tier-
garten (the central park of Berlin and also a well-known cruising
spot) imply the possibility of a sexual encounter, although this is
never realized in the course of the film. Equally possible is that
Denizs fascination with Diego signals an identification with him.
Dressed in shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes and sporting hair of the
same length, Diego and Deniz resemble one another in stature and
appearance. While it is evident that neither character is ethnically
German, they are also not explicitly raced by the film, underscor-
ing both an affinity of status between them and the nonnormativity
of their representation.
On this day when Deniz has left her boyfriend and is seeking
a better life, it is thus equally plausible that her gaze at Diego sig-
nals heterosexual female voyeurism or a more fluid identification
with the eroticized male body. For the spectator of the film, the
affectless acting of both Diego and especially Deniz, along with
the lack of narrative closure in the film as a whole, facilitates a
slippage between voyeurism and identification, enabling viewing
positions that are multiple, shifting, oscillating, inconsistent and
fluid. Like the queer representations theorized by Caroline Evans
and Lorraine Gamman, Arslans films dont add up to a coherent
whole. They often leave the spectator/viewer questioning.38 The
mobility of and the ambiguity surrounding identity and desire con-
stitute a key feature of A Fine Day and one means by which the film
disorganizes the neoliberal everyday.
In presenting Deniz as the protagonist of A Fine Day, the
opening sequence discussed above recalls elements of both femi-
nist countercinema, through its critique of patriarchal systems of
filmic representation, and New Wave cinema, with its emphasis on
a female character moving through a cityscape. These elements
are made explicit in the films next scene, which commences
with a jump cut to a close-up of a video monitor playing a timed
sequence in which actors speak in French. This is the first of several
84 Hester Baer

key sequences in A Fine Day that establish its explicit intertextual

relationship with French art films, specifically those by second-
generation New Wave auteur directors Eric Rohmer and Maurice
Pialat. Here, we see Deniz working at her job as a dubbing artist,
speaking the role of Margot in the German version of Rohmers
Conte dt (A Summers Tale, 1996). As Deniz and a colleague work in
a dark recording studio, we hear French dialogue and see images
from the film rewound, replayed, and manipulated on the moni-
tor. This intermedial montage is accompanied by Denizs repeated
readingwith different modulationof the line Fr dich sind im
Grunde alle Mdchen austauschbar [for you all girls are basically
exchangeable], a statement that stands in tension with her own
sexual agency. Finally, we view the completed sequence and listen
to Denizs voice emerging from the mouth of the French actress
Amanda Langlet. As a conduit of translation, Denizs (German)
voice is uncoupled from her body, eliding her (Turkish) ethnicity
and underscoring the films central trope of mobility.
In a later sequence, Deniz travels across Berlin to audition
for a film role at a casting call where she is asked to tell a story.
Here again, Arslan employs intermedial dimensions, including a
video monitor on which we see Denizs screen test. She chooses
to narrate the plotline of a movie she saw recently on television;
although she doesnt name the film, she cites events from Pialats
A nos amours (To Our Loves, 1983). Whereas A Summers Tale con-
cerns a man who refuses to choose among his three lovers, To Our
Loves focuses on the serial love affairs of a young girl whose family
worries that she finds all boys exchangeable, a plotline bearing
demonstrable affinity to Denizs story. Arslans citation of Rohm-
ers and Pialats filmsboth of which are realist tales about love
and love relationshipshelps to establish the larger discourse on
love and affect in A Fine Day. Like New Wave filmmakers, Arslan
employs the screen as a discursive space, and his documentary-
like realism, emphasis on the politics of everyday life, and use of
long takes certainly recall New Wave aesthetics. However, rather
than playing with genre (a key facet of New Wave films), he strictly
rejects both the conventions of the love story and its correspond-
ing emotions in favor of an affectless representation of desire and
identification.
The reflexive discourse on affect in A Fine Day reaches its apex
in the penultimate scene of the film, in which Deniz initiates a con-
versation with a history professor she encounters in a caf.39 The
professor, played by the well-known German journalist and writer
Elke Schmitter, is a historian who teaches about the things of daily
life. How we eat, sleep, bury, love. In a series of long takes, the
Affectless Economies 85

professor explains to Deniz that emotions like love are historically

constructed:

deniz: Wasnt love always the same, then or now?

professor: Our ideal of love, our romantic conception of it, is an inven-
tion of the eighteenth century.
deniz: But feelings like love, jealousy, and so on always existed.
professor: Maybe, but they didnt have the same significance as they
do today, because other things mattered more. People didnt have
the time to concern themselves with it. They were thinking about
survival. Values like protection, security, and solidarity were more
important. Today we have far more possibilities for expressing our
feelings and also for realizing them.
deniz: Its strange. It doesnt seem to be working for me. As soon as I get
together with someone, something goes wrong.

As the conversation continues, Deniz tells the professor that Its so

hard to talk about feelings. When I try, it always sounds false some-
how. So banal, as if I were constantly repeating myself. The profes-
sor replies that it is difficult to express feelings in language because
we are surrounded by conceptions of what we are supposed to
feel to such an extent that we no longer know what authentic feel-
ings are. Deniz disputes this idea, placing a metatextual emphasis
on her own affect in A Fine Day: But there are gestures, looks.
They contain something truthful. The professor agrees that these
are perhaps the most immediate affects we have but argues that
avoiding language would only diminish our ability to communi-
cate. As she finally puts it, If we viewed love not as a private feeling
but as a means of communication, we might begin to get some-
where. This exchange between Deniz and the professor provides
an expressive commentary on the films depiction of affective ges-
tures, particularly the cruising gaze, through which Deniz seeks to
establish communication with others in the space of the city in the
course of the day on which she ends her long-term relationship
with Jan. As this conversation suggests, Deniz seeks to transition
from a monogamous relationship in which love has been concep-
tualized as a private feeling to a more flexible, communicative
form of love (visualized by its occurrence in a series of public non-
places), although it is not until her encounter with the professor
that Deniz is able to articulate this transition.
Denizs conversation with the professor highlights the stakes of
her quest for the good life through the promises offered by neo-
liberal discourses of mobility and flexibilization. At the same time,
though, this conversation also points to the limits of this mobility,
86 Hester Baer

such as when the professor points out how the possibilities open
to us today lead to a fundamental insecurity or when she under-
scores the way our focus on romantic love in the private sphere
has eclipsed communitarian values such as protection, security,
and solidarity. The conversation thus emphasizes the paradoxes
of neoliberalism, which creates new forms of precarity just as it
empowers Deniz to pursue sexual, personal, and professional self-
actualization and fulfillment despite her status as a young Turkish
German woman.
The understated representation of Denizs ethnic status in A
Fine Day has perplexed critics, one of whom found it especially
astonishing, since Thomas Arslan . . . is widely considered to be a
narrator of the German-Turkish identity conflict.40 In comparison
to its precursors in the Berlin Trilogy, A Fine Day is much less firmly
emplaced within Turkish German locales, we hear far fewer dia-
logues in Turkish, and the narrative problems faced by the charac-
ters do not relate to specifically minoritarian concerns, such as the
quest of Ahmed in Siblings to navigate a path between the Turkish
subculture of Kreuzberg and the dominant culture represented by
his academic high school or Cans struggle against police harass-
ment in Dealer.
Responding to questions about the way A Fine Day downplays
Denizs ethnic status, Arslan has explained that Deniz has some-
thing else to do aside from constantly focusing on her identity. It
was important to me not to define her according to what is suppos-
edly foreign about her. The much-discussed topic of being torn
between two cultures does not correspond to her life experience.
She moves through the environment in which she lives completely
naturally. She is a person with her own secrets, contradictions and
unique qualities, and these cannot be reduced to her heritage.41
Arslan emphasizes the antiessentializing dimension of his repre-
sentation of Deniz, and it is no accident that with A Fine Day, Arslan
also sought to explicitly distance himself from the status of minor-
ity filmmaker as well.42
In this sense, Arslan and Deniz both appear to function as poster
children for the new multicultural tolerance and nonredistributive
form of equality politics that Lisa Duggan describes as central facets
of neoliberalisms wide-ranging political and cultural projectthe
reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism.43 As Duggan and
other critics have suggested, neoliberalism simultaneously attacks
downwardly redistributive social movements and reconfigures
many of their most potent promises through discourses of notional
equality that interpellate gender, sexual, and ethnic minorities
by empowering them as consumer-citizens, offering them equal
Affectless Economies 87

opportunity in civic life and the professions, and granting them

freedom to choose in many facets of life. Significantly, though, this
equality must be achieved through personal choice and responsi-
bility rather than through social provisions, which the neoliberal
state dismantles. As Angela McRobbie has pointed out, neoliberal-
ism is characterized by a double movement that makes the ideals
of feminism (as well as gay rights and antiracist movements) seem
like second nature or common sense, while the movements them-
selves are dismissed, even reviled.44
In A Fine Day, Denizs sister Leyla explains to Deniz that she
will most likely terminate her pregnancy even though she is in a
relationship with a man she loves and would like to have a child,
because she cannot reconcile parenthood with her job at an archi-
tectural firm, where she regularly works twelve-hour days and on
weekends. As she tells Deniz, I didnt go to university in order
to be a housewife. Leylas dilemma recalls neoliberal discourses
that endow women with responsibility for creating a work-life bal-
ance while dismantling policies that might have made it possible.
As McRobbie argues, while feminism sought to radically change
the division of labor within the home, neoliberal social policies fos-
tering parenthood make participation (especially by men) a matter
of personal choice and good life planning on the part of women:
Having a well-planned life emerges as a social norm of contempo-
rary femininity.45
Although she is confronted repeatedly with evidence to the
contrary, Deniz pursues the hope that one can find happiness
through self-determination and love. Throughout the Berlin Tril-
ogy, Arslans female protagonists attempt to craft good lives for
themselves, often by challenging conventional domestic arrange-
ments. In Siblings, the sole sister (also played by Serpil Turhan,
the same actress who plays Deniz) plans to move in with her girl-
friend to escape her parents household and especially her Turkish
fathers expectations of her as a girl. In Dealer, Jale leaves her part-
ner, the eponymous drug dealer Can, taking her daughter with her
to found an alternative household with her girlfriend. A Fine Day
begins with Deniz leaving Jans apartment; later she breaks up with
him and spends the day exploring her options and desires.
Denizs mother advises her not to wait her whole life for true
love, since partnerships grow from mutual respect, responsibil-
ity, and rational behavior rather than from passion and ardor. As
her mother puts it, Happiness isnt cheerful and exciting. Yet
as Deniz points out, without desire, theres no point. In Arslans
films, simply articulating the possibility of desire represents a step
beyond the world of obligation that characterized both the lives
88 Hester Baer

of the previous generation of Turkish Germans and the cinema

of duty that represented them. Yet for many of his characters,
desirefor the good life, for love as redemptionconflicts with
everyday life experiences defined by precarity. Ultimately, Arslans
characters challenge conventional roles but founder when it comes
to fashioning new selves. What remains in his films is the way they
engage the viewer in a representation of neoliberal subjectivities
that envisions contemporary life as a dilemma.

Passing Summer

Schanelecs Passing Summer follows the intertwined stories of a

group of acquaintances over the course of a summer and autumn in
Berlin. The film is loosely organized around the character Valerie
(played by Ursina Lardi), a graduate student who is finishing her
architectural degree. Valerie shares an apartment with Marie and
Alexander, a couple experiencing marriage problems, and their
nine-year-old daughter Clara. Another plotline revolves around
Claras babysitter Maria, a twenty-one-year-old who gets married
at the end of the film. Much like Deniz in A Fine Day, we see Val-
erie (who bears a striking resemblance to Jean Seberg in Godards
Breathless) passing summer in the nonplaces of the city, includ-
ing cafs, parks, and apartment blocks, where she meets friends,
engages in conversations, and works on her thesis. Several transi-
tional events occur in Valeries life over the course of the summer.
Her father falls ill, and she leaves Berlin to visit him in southern
Germany before he dies. Valerie submits her thesis to her adviser
and also begins dating Maries brother Thomas, a recently divorced
man who is the father of a young son. Like A Fine Day, Passing Sum-
mer represents these significant events in a wholly affectless fashion,
mirroring the largely affectless demeanor of Valerie herself.
Passing Summer shares many characteristics in common with A
Fine Day, including its central focus on a young female character
experiencing a transitional moment in the liminal places of Ber-
lin, its affectless aesthetic, and its formal and narrative attention to
the precarity of the present. However, whereas Arslan focuses on
horizontal relationships of amorous love, sex, and partnership as
the key realms through which to pursue happiness and the good
life, Schanelec emphasizes vertical relationships, exploring the pos-
sibilities for filial love and family life in a period dominated by the
collapse of the public and private spheres. The films thematic focus
on possibilities for achieving the good life is introduced explicitly
in an early sequence when Marie, Alexander, Thomas, and Valerie
Affectless Economies 89

are having dinner together at a caf. The group discusses the merits
of vacation, culminating in Alexanders comment that one doesnt
need to take vacation if one lives well in everyday life. Thomas
inquires of Valerie, Do you live well? Valerie replies, Now, at this
precise moment, its fine. Valeries hesitation is accentuated when
Marie castigates Thomas and tells him to leave Valerie alone. The
fundamental uncertainty introduced by this scene will be confirmed
by the events that befall Valerie in the course of the film. Like Deniz,
Valerie is positioned as a solitary agent pursuing the neoliberal
promise of the good life, whose precarity the film visualizes.
On a formal level, Schanelecs portrayal of precarity is achieved
through her highly disorganized representation of time and space.
Arslans A Fine Day transpires over the course of one single day,
which is narrated through a conventional depiction of chronolog-
ical time. The film takes place entirely within the city of Berlin,
which Arslan portrays with a great deal of attention to the accuracy
of contiguous space. By contrast, Passing Summer is characterized by
abrupt leaps in time and space, signaled by long shots (long in both
distance and duration) that are conjoined with jump cuts. These
jump cuts may bypass a period of a few days or months, and it is
only in hindsight that the viewer can approximately patch together
a basic chronology of the films story. Similarly, jump cuts connect
scenes in Berlin and Paris, with only subtle visual and linguistic cues
within the mise-en-scne to let us know that we have traveled to
another country. In this way, Schanelecs formal language in Pass-
ing Summer makes visible the time-space compression that David
Harvey describes as a central characteristic of neoliberalism.46
Like time and space, both amorous and filial relationships in
Passing Summer are precarious, and Schanelec explores the way they
are imbricated with and often subordinated to one another. The
characters in the film are all searching for ways to navigate relation-
ships and find meaning in them at a moment characterized by the
erosion of traditional family structures and gender roles. In inter-
views, Schanelec cites Godards maxim that it is impossible to film
a kiss in order to explain how formal concerns drive her choice
not to display sexual contact onscreen.47 She rigorously abides by
this choice in Passing Summer, even in scenes depicting a husband
and wife conceiving a baby, a couple going to bed together for the
first time, and a wedding. Moreover, Schanelec has suggested that
in her films, the opposition is less between men and women than
between the generations.48 As in A Fine Day, the thirtysomething
male and female characters in Passing Summer all seem to resemble
one another, including cross-gender resemblances, contributing to
the films representation of the mobility and ambiguity of gender,
90 Hester Baer

sexuality, and desire. However, in Schanelecs film, the limit of this

mobility and ambiguity is found in the family.
As Passing Summer ultimately suggests, it is in cross-generational
filial relationships (more so than in horizontal love relationships)
that we find possibilities for realizing the good life, defined as a
meaningful set of connections and affective responses, although
filial relationships certainly offer no guarantees. As Berlant
remarks, children have long functioned as the reason to have opti-
mism.49 Yet in neoliberalism, individuals are granted the choice to
reproduce or not (along with the obligation of bearing personal
responsibility for that choice without a social safety net to sup-
port it). Passing Summer explores the uncertainty experienced by
individuals in the face of this choice, along with the precarity that
derives from eroding social and familial structures, such that famil-
ial relationships are paradoxically experienced as both extremely
precarious and as the solution to precarity.
This situation is perfectly illustrated by an early scene in Pass-
ing Summer when Valerie and Thomas encounter his friend Linda
in a public park, where she is sitting alone on a park bench. Linda
launches into a diatribe about her family: her sister recently
returned from Africa with her new husband, and they are staying
in Lindas apartment while they find a place of their own. Linda
finds the erosion of her private sphere utterly overwhelming, as
her tirade makes clear: I have to work. I want to work. I want to be
alone. Thomas suggests that she should just throw them out, but
Linda, increasingly embarrassed by having expressed something
that shouldnt be spoken, replies, Thats not the problem. The
problem is, that Im noticing what Im like, and I dont want to be
that way. I want to be fun! . . . [Were] a bunch of egotists, and Im
the worst one of all. Thomas objects, but Linda counters with You
have it good. When you have children, you know what you ought
to be doing! Am I right? I would like to have children soon myself.
I would really like to have a different life. Here, Linda expresses
contradictory ideasshe wants to preserve the private space of
her apartment for work and solitude, but she also wants to have
children, which she depicts as the only path to the good lifean
ambivalence that once more makes visible the paradoxes of neolib-
eralism, recalling Angela McRobbies discussion of contemporary
femininities as sites of self-management and good planning, where
conversely the absence of such styles of self-organization becomes
an indicator of pathology, a signal of failure, or a symptom of some
other personal difficulties.50
Linda covers her face with her hands and begins to weep but
then abruptly stands up, says good-bye to Valerie and Thomas, and
Affectless Economies 91

exits the frame. Valerie and Thomas remain behind on the park
bench and watch Linda depart without responding in any way to
her plight. Throughout Passing Summer we see a number of charac-
ters express affective responses in connection to filial relationships:
Valerie cries when she learns that her father is likely to die, Alexan-
der expresses anger when he learns that his wife is pregnant, and
Marias father gives a beautiful speech expressing his love for her
during her wedding. By contrast, these characters respond to hori-
zontal relationships with an utterly affectless demeanor.
The Linda sequence, which lasts approximately four minutes,
consists of only three shots. The scene commences with a close-up
of Lindas face as she responds to someone approaching, whom
she greets, kisses, and begins speaking to (this is Thomas). We see
only Lindas face, since the camera doesnt move when Thomas
enters the space of the frame. His figure darkens Lindas face, but
we only see him from behind and in shadows. Since we have never
seen Linda before and cant see Thomas, we are without bearings
in approaching the scene, which requires us to watch and listen
very closely. A cut to a reverse medium shot reveals Valerie standing
at some distance away, and we watch her as we continue to listen to
Lindas diatribe. Finally a reverse shot shows Linda sitting on the
bench, and in time both Valerie and Thomas enter the frame and
sit down next to her.
This final shot, during which Linda describes how children
give life meaning, lasts for more than three minutes without any
camera movement or editing. The predominant aspect of this shot
is Lindas voice, speaking loudly and quickly and hardly letting her
companions talk. This emphasis on voice is very characteristic of
Schanelecs filmmaking practice in general, which she describes
as a decoupling of sound from image in order to avoid doubling
the information for the eye and the ear in the space of reception.
As she explains, The image is framed so that what is offscreen is
always perceptible, in that I always try to make [the viewer] aware
that we are only seeing one possible framing. The decisive thing
is that its only one possible framing. There are the borders and
whats outside of them. And often whats really happening takes
place there, in order to make [the viewer] more aware of it.51
Decoupling sound and image is a strategy of both New Wave and
feminist cinema in that it challenges conventional codes by denatu-
ralizing the voice-body alignment and specifically resists the imper-
ative of aligning women with specularity.52 Schanelec resignifies
this strategy in her address to the spectator, which calls attention to
the limits of cinematic representation. In the sequence discussed
above, Lindas voice takes over the static image, and her story takes
92 Hester Baer

on a status of its own, its message becoming applicable to any of the

films characters and indeed to the viewers themselves. Moreover,
the affectlessness with which Valerie and Thomas hear Lindas nar-
rative further opens up spaces of reception: Some things have
to be left out, in order to leave them to the imagination of the
viewer.53
This key sequence is bookended by scenes that underscore the
two different possibilities articulated by Linda for pursuing what
she calls a different life, understood to be a better life: work and
family. In the scene that follows, we see a lingering shot of Valerie
writing at her desk in quiet solitude, suggesting the work life that
Linda aspires to. And in the previous scene, Valeries roommate
Alexander gazes lovingly at his sleeping daughter Clara. Framed in
a doorway, Alexander stands so still that the image looks like a pho-
tograph. Then we see him climb in next to Clara and lie down with
her in bed. Later, Alexander joins his wife Marie in the kitchen.
Again Alexander, together with Marie, is framed in a doorway; the
doorframe subdivides the shot so that we see Alexander and Marie
on the extreme left of the screen, while an opaque window takes
up two-thirds of the frame. The dialogue between Alexander and
Marie accentuates the ambivalence of the shot composition: Does
it signal claustrophobia or a feeling of comfort in this domestic
space? Early on in the film, we learn that Marie has lived in the
same apartment for many years and hopes never to leave it. Now
she informs Alexander that the landlord is selling, offering them
the opportunity to buy the apartment:

alexander: Then you could do an even better job of nesting in like a

hedgehog.
marie: Hedgehogs, yes, I love hedgehogs. Theyre cute. Shall we sleep
together?
alexander: Yes, sure.
marie: Right here would be best. How?
alexander: Maybe standing first. Then well see.

The dialogue between Marie and Alexander, through its abrupt,

affectless nature, accentuates the precarity of both their domestic
space and their marital relationship and suggests the transactional
quality of their sex life. Later we find out that Marie has become
pregnant, and her pregnancy escalates the crisis in her relationship
with Alexander. In the films final scene, we learn that Marie has
had an abortion because she didnt want anything to change, only
to find out that Alexander had been having an extramarital affair
all along. In this scene, Marie converses with her brother Thomas
Affectless Economies 93

as they walk through the Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin, where

they have just celebrated Marias wedding. In an extreme long
shot, we see tiny figures dressed in blackthe scene looks more
like a funeral than a weddingand we only know that it is Marie
and Thomas because we hear their voices. This scene highlights
the limitations of precarious sexualities, such as the polyamorous
relationships that the film at times seems to celebrate, pointing
to the way that they are imbricated with statuses. As in A Fine Day,
Marie experiences pregnancy as a conflict that highlights her gen-
der status and stands in tension with her desire for the good life
in the form of a safe and protected familial structure. As Wolters-
dorff writes, Not having children, or the privilege of being able to
outsource support and caretaking, are not necessary conditions,
but they certainly represent enormous advantages for non-monog-
amous lifestyles. In neoliberalism, the state increasingly promotes
nonmonogamy as a way of delegating to new kinds of alliances
support and caretaking formerly provided by social welfare. While
this brings the advantages of sexual mobility and choice as well as
the possibility of new social formations and domestic partnerships,
Social lack of solidarity proves to be a historical condition for the
recognition and normalization of non-marital lifestyles and moves
within the neo-liberal constellation of gains in industrialization
and risk growth.54
If precarity defines all relationships in Passing Summer, work
seems to offer an alternative, such as in the sequence where we
watch Valerie quietly writing her thesis or when we see her brother
Ben working at his business manufacturing handmade sails. Yet
ultimately, work is also contingent (not least on its reception by oth-
ers), as we see in a scene toward the end of the film when Valerie
visits her adviser to discuss her thesis. This scene strongly parallels
Denizs discussion with the professor at the end of A Fine Day in the
way it offers a metacommentary on Schanelecs filmmaking pro-
ject. The professor first expresses approval for Valeries work before
articulating a multipronged attack on her style: Rather nice, when
you let yourself go . . . when youre not trying to express too much
through style alone. . . . Too much freedom in the style and the
result is only a matter of taste. Well, age too, maybe. But it reaches
a point where this demand to be understood becomes childish.
Im exaggerating . . . but, reading it, you start wishing for some-
thing more normal. Dont you? Here, the professor echoes a criti-
cal commonplace in reviews of Schanelecs films, which accuse her
of obfuscation through an excess of form. When Valerie defends
herself, insisting that she wants people to understand her work, the
professor replies, First of all, you want people to understand you.
94 Hester Baer

The subject is just a means to an end. You mainly want to arouse

interest in you, not in the subject. Conflating her work with her
subjectivitya typical way of reading the work of female artists
the professor ultimately ends the conversation by telling Valerie
that You have to start letting go of these father figures. In one
of the few close-ups of Valeries face throughout the entire film,
we witness her affective response to the professors offensive com-
ments, which not only demean her as a scholar but also express
insensitivity in the wake of her fathers death. This scene makes vis-
ible the way that Valeries status as a young woman affects her abil-
ity to succeed in a profession still dominated by father figures, such
as the sexist professor. Even in close-up, it is difficult to distinguish
whether Valerie is laughing, crying, or guffawing. This unintelligi-
bility of affect once more accentuates the polysemic openness of
Passing Summer, contributing to its disorganized representation of
contemporary reality.
Schanelecs films have been compared not only to the films
of Rohmer, because of their emphasis on dialogue, but also to
the experimental films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet,
whose use of original sound, long takes, static mise-en-scne, and
framing Schanelec resignifies.55 Yet while it retains close connec-
tions to European art cinema, Schanelecs filmmaking practice
clearly connects to elements of contemporary postcinema as well.
Critics have emphasized her focus on thirtysomething protagonists
and generational discourse, both conventions of German film and
television since 1989. More significantly, her films employ music
and dancing in ways that resemble the audiovisual passage dis-
cussed by Shaviro as a central vector of postcinematic affect: A
familiar pop song is played in its entirety; its excessive insistence
within the film addresses, and affects, the viewer/listener directly,
demanding an immediate emotional response. Interpellated in
this way, the viewer/listener cannot understand the song just as
an expression of the protagonists sensibility. The music overflows
the diegetic situation in which it arises, and to which it ostensibly
refers.56 In Passing Summer, several of these audiovisual passages
appear. Very early in the film, Clara and her babysitter Maria listen
to the Schubert Lied rendition of Goethes poem Der Erlknig,
the dramatic narrative of a fathers attempt to save his sick child
from death. Clara asks Maria to dance to the song, and despite
her initial objections, Maria appears to oblige. However, in the
extremely long, static shot that comprises this audiovisual passage,
we see only Clara. Later after their father has died, Valerie and her
brother Ben dance together to an old pop song in a small-town
disco in another extremely long sequence. In both instances, the
Affectless Economies 95

characters themselves remain utterly affectless, but the duration

of the sequence and its excessive insistence on the song demand
that the viewer acknowledge and contemplate the precarity of filial
relationships.
Thomas Shick has written that With the help of their specific
aesthetic strategies, their formal radicality, the [films of Arslan and
Schanelec] can bring the viewer closer to social problems (without
portraying simplistic suggestions for resolving them) and can offer
them a look behind the images through which the contradictions
and ambivalences of life in the modern world become more clearly
recognizable.57 Schicks notion of a look behind the images
helps to conceptualize the way that Berlin School films make vis-
ible the neoliberal present. It is not that they point to an outside,
but neither do they simply occupy a post-ideological position, as
Cristina Nord has argued in claiming that they present no alter-
native to neoliberalization, to the economization of work and life
[that] has begun to emerge.58 Rather, by disorganizing conven-
tional modes of representing statusesincluding race, ethnicity,
gender, and sexualityand by simultaneously refusing and taking
part in commercial modes of postcinematic representation, A Fine
Day and Passing Summer create a critical space of reception that
emphasizes both affective and intellectual responses to the hege-
mony of the neoliberal present. As Volker Woltersdorff has writ-
ten in a different context, while both participation and refusal may
lead into affirmation and ambivalence, Fortunately, the process of
critically dealing with these ambivalences . . . is not without its own
pleasures.59

Notes
1.
The term Berlin School derives from three connections to the city. Beginning
in the 1980s, many affiliated directors as well as technical personnel were educated at
the Berlin Film and Television Academy, a film school with a long-standing reputation
for training politically minded filmmakers; their work coincides with the period since
Berlin became the capital of unified Germany (sometimes referred to as the Berlin
Republic); and many of the films are set in the vicinity of Berlin, although they
tend to take place in largely exurban, peripheral spaces rather than in the heart of
the metropolis, only one of many reasons why critics have sought to problematize
the term Berlin School as a misnomer. On the Berlin School, see Marco Abel,
Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the Berlin School, Cineaste 33, no. 4 (2008),
www.cineaste.com/articles/the-berlin-school.htm; Marco Abel, The Counter-Cinema
of the Berlin School, in Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria, edited
by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, 2452 (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier
University Press, 2012); David Clarke, Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies:
The Berlin School, in A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg and
96 Hester Baer

Andrea Mensch, 13454 (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Kristin Kopp, Chris-
toph Hochhuslers This Very Moment: The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial
Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands, in The Collapse of the Conventional:
German Film and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jaimey Fisher
and Brad Prager, 285308 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); and Matthew
D. Miller, Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzolds Yella and
Jerichow in Comparison, German Quarterly 85, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 55.
2.
These include the film producer Gnter Rohrbach as well as directors Oskar
Roehler and Dominik Graf. See Rohrbach, Das Schmollen der Autisten: Hat die
deutsche Filmkritik ausgedient?, Der Spiegel (January 22, 2007): 15657; Rdiger
Suchsland, Man macht sich was vor, und das ist auch gut so . . .: Oskar Roehler
unplugged, Artechock, October 24, 2004, www.artechock.de/film/text/interview/r/
roehler_2004.htm; and Graf, Unerlebte Filme, Filmschnitt 43, no. 3 (2006): 6265,
cited by Clarke, Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies, 135.
3.
The term contemporary contemplative cinema was coined by Harry Tuttle,
whose website has popularized the mode as an emergent genre by labeling and
cataloging numerous examples of it drawn from global art cinema. See Unspoken
Cinema, http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com.
4.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: O-Books, 2010), 116, 137.
5.
Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 86, 28.
6.
Ibid., 187, 192.
7.
Georg Seelen makes this point in Die Anti-Erzhlmaschine, Der Freitag,
September 14, 2007, www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/die-anti-erzahlmaschine.
8.
See Susanne Gupta, Berliner Schule: Nouvelle Vague Allemande, fluter:
Mazagin der Bundeszentrale fr politische Bildung, August 31, 2005, http://film.
fluter.de/de/122/film/4219/.
9.
The two films I will discuss here, Thomas Arslans A Fine Day and Angela
Schanelecs Passing Summer, both debuted on the public television channel ZDF as part
of Das kleine Fernsehspiel series, a rubric that has been on the air since 1963 and has
played a crucial role in bringing independent and experimental film to audiences in
Germany, not least through its own production wing. Arslans and Schanelecs films
were both coproduced by ZDF and ran in a series titled Berlin. Echtzeit (Berlin.
Real Time), which included ZDF productions filmed in Berlin dating back to the
1970s, among them Helke Sanders feminist film REDUPERS: Die allseitig reduzierte
Persnlichkeit (Redupers, 1977). The films airing within this series does suggest at
least some formal and narrative connections to other milestones of German cinema/
television financed by this avant-garde of the ZDF. See Christian Buss, Sorgenvoller
Haupstadt-Sommer, die tageszeitung, April 8, 2002, 17.
10.
Despite the aesthetic differences between the reductive films of the Ber-
lin School and commercial works of transnational postcinema, both Arslans and
Schanelecs films are distinctively transnational. Arslans Berlin Trilogy films, includ-
ing A Fine Day, were all shot in German and Turkish, and they all feature Turkish
German actors playing characters of various ethnicities. While the trilogy was shot
exclusively in Berlin and financed primarily through German entities (including
subventions from the Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg and funding through the
German public television station ZDF), Arslans more recent films have increasingly
reflected a more explicitly transnational production model via transnational financing
Affectless Economies 97

and distribution schemes (including television rights) and international shooting

locations. Nearly all of Schanelecs films have reflected a transnational production
model, with international locations and financing. Passing Summer included shooting
locations in Germany, France, and Switzerland and a plotline involving Italy, while
other films (Marseilles) were shot almost wholly abroad, were financed transnationally
(Orly), and included international casts and multiple languages.
11.
Anke Leweke, Gehen und reden, Tip, February 14, 2001, n.p.
12.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
13.
Volker Woltersdorff, Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities, Cultural Studies
25, no. 2 (2011): 173.
14.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 9.
15.
See, for example, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005); Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural
Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Brett Levinson, Market
and Thought: Meditations on the Political and Biopolitical (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2004); and Raewyn Connell, Understanding Neoliberalism, in Neoliberalism
and Everyday Life, edited by Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton (Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press, 2010), 2236.
16.
Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing
the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
17.
Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 2.
18.
Marc Aug, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd English ed.,
translated by John Howe (London: Verso, 2008), 29, 21, 22. Aug does not use the
word neoliberalism, but his description of the contemporary world of what he calls
supermodernity, in which he emphasizes the gulf between wealth and poverty as a
central characteristic, certainly resonates with critiques of neoliberalism. Consider,
for example, his discussion of the global system: The world that surrounds the artist
and the period in which he lives reach him only as mediated forms that are themselves
effects, aspects and driving forces of the global system. That system serves as its own
ideology; it functions like a set of instructions for use; it quite literally screens the reality
for which it is substituting itself or rather whose place it is taking (18).
19.
The term aesthetics of reduction is a standard designation for films associ-
ated with the Berlin School. See, for example, Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the
Berlin School, 30. On the particular use of this aesthetic by Thomas Arslan and
Angela Schanelec, see Thomas Schick, Stillstand in Bewegung: Raum, Zeit, und
die Freiheit des Zuschauers in Thomas Arslans Der schne Tag and Angela Schanelecs
Mein langsames Leben, in Kino in Bewegung: Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms,
edited by Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011), 79104.
20.
Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 2.
21.
Hamid Naficy, Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational
Film Genre, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited
by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996),
125.
22.
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: MacMil-
lan, 1984).
98 Hester Baer

23.
Interview with Thomas Arslan, DVD extra, Ferien (2007), directed by Thomas
Arslan (Berlin: Filmgalerie 451, 2007).
24.
Gudrun Holz, Kein Zugang zum Glck (interview with Thomas Arslan),
Die tageszeitung, March 22, 1999, n.p.
25.
Teresa de Lauretis, Rethinking Womens Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist
Theory, in Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 141.
26.
Das Kino von Angela Schanelec, directed by Geremia Carrara and Gisella
Gaspari, DVD extra, Nachmittag (2007), directed by Angela Schanelec (Berlin:
Filmgalerie 451, 2007).
27.
Arslan and Schanelec were classmates at the Berlin Film and Television Acad-
emy and have occasionally worked together. Schanelec served as assistant director
on an early student film by Arslan, Im Sommer (Die sichtbare Welt) (In Summer [The
Visible World], 1992), which inspired her own film Ich bin den Sommer ber in Berlin
geblieben (I Spent the Summer in Berlin, 1992), all in some ways precursors of Passing
Summer. Schanelec also has a cameo role in Arslans Dealer. Arslan and Schanelec did
not actually collaborate on either A Fine Day or Passing Summer, but the films bear
such a great resemblance in terms of narrative, form, and setting that many critics
discussed both films in the same review, and Arslan and Schanelec granted the mutual
interview to Berlins main daily newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel.
28.
Julian Hanich, Ein Recht auf Liebe gibt es nicht (interview with Thomas
Arslan and Angela Schanelec), Tagesspiegel, February 13, 2007, n.p.
29.
This emblematic quote comes from a recent blog posting by film director
Dietrich Brggeman that has generated a flurry of public discussion in Germany.
The posting responds to Thomas Arslans newest film Gold, which debuted at the
2013 Berlin Film Festival. See Fahr zur Hlle, Berliner Schule, D-Trick, February
11, 2013, http://d-trick.de/blog/fahr-zur-holle-berliner-schule/.
30.
See, for example, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
31.
Deniz Gktrk, Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure
in Transnational German Cinema, in Spaces in European Cinema, edited by Myrto
Konstantarakos (Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2000), 65. The term cinema of
duty describes the obligation often felt by migrant filmmakers (in order to receive
funding for their projects) to make films that represent migration as a social problem
and depict their culture and people in terms of commonly held stereotypes. On the
cinema of duty, see Gktrk, ibid., 67, and Sarita Malik, Beyond The Cinema of
Duty? The Pleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s, in
Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, edited by Andrew Higson (London:
Cassell, 1996), 20215.
32.
Joanne Leal and Klaus-Dieter Rossade, Negotiating Gender, Sexuality, and
Ethnicity in Fatih Akins and Thomas Arslans Urban Spaces, GFL: German as a
Foreign Language 3 (2008): 77.
33.
Naficy, Coded Spaces.
34.
Berlant (Cruel Optimism, 24) defines cruel optimism, a characteristic affect
of neoliberalism, as occurring when something you desire is an obstacle to your
flourishing.
35.
Ibid., 278.
Affectless Economies 99

36.
This formulation comes from Mulveys discussion of the gendered structure
of the gaze in dominant cinema in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema, reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989), 1426.
37.
Manfred Hermes, Der Einfluss des Augenblicks (review of Der schne Tag),
Die tageszeitung, November 1, 2001, 15.
38.
Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing
Queer Viewing, in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture, edited by
Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 45, 47.
39.
In interviews, Arslan has stated that the dialogue in this scene is based on a
radio interview with the theorist Friedrich Kittler that Arslan stumbled upon while
writing the screenplay for A Fine Day.
40.
Hermes, Der Einfluss des Augenblicks, 15.
41.
Gabriela Seidel, interview with Thomas Arslan, January 14, 2001, press booklet
for Der schne Tag, Schriftgutarchiv, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.
42.
Arslan emphasized repeatedly in interviews that after two films about male
protagonists, he wanted to focus on a female protagonist in the third installment of
his Berlin Trilogy. It is certainly no accident that Arslans representation of a young
woman led him to move away from a more narrowly defined focus on ethnicity as well.
43.
Duggan, The Twilight of Equality, xi.
44.
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change
(Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2009), 6.
45.
Ibid., 77. In the case of Germany, women continue to face particularly strong
obstacles to achieving parity in the workplace and combining family and professional
life. Women in Germany earn 23 percent less than men working similar hours, are 47
percent more likely to be working part-time rather than full-time, and only occupy
2 percent of executive positions in business. Only 14 percent of women with one
child and only 6 percent of women with two or more children hold full-time jobs.
46.
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 4.
47.
Antonia Ganz, Interview: Angela Schanelec, Revolver, March 8, 2001, www.
revolver-film.de/Inhalte/Rev5/html/Schanelec.html.
48.
Erika Richter, Lust erwecken auf eine Suche nach etwas Wahrheit: Ein
Gesprch mit Angela Schanelec ber ihren neuen Film, Peripher Filmverleih,
December 22, 2000, www.peripherfilm.de/meinlangsamesleben/interview.htm.
49.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, chapter 5.
50.
McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 77.
51.
Ganz, Interview: Angela Schanelec.
52.
See, for example, Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psy-
choanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), esp. chap. 5.
53.
Ganz, Interview: Angela Schanelec.
54.
Woltersdorff, Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities, 177.
55.
See, for example, Cristina Nord, Notes on the Berlin School, in A German
100 Hester Baer

CinemaIndie Lisboa 2007: 4th International Independent Film Festival, edited by Olaf
Mller and Nuno Sena (Lisbon: Associao Cultural, 2007), 25.
56.
Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 174n58.
57.
Schick, Stillstand in Bewegung, 101.
58.
Nord, Notes on the Berlin School, 24.
59.
Woltersdorff, Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities, 179.
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