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
7 - Valeska Grisebach: A Sharpening of Our Regard
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
Realism represents the attempt to establish contact with reality in some manner, to consider reality valuable enough to narrate it. … An attempt to make visible the everyday, to remember it. Even if one does not understand it. A sharpening of our regard, as it were.
—Valeska Grisebach, “Von hier aus”Unique among the Berlin School directors, Valeska Grisebach, born in 1968 in the Northern German city-state of Bremen, actually grew up in Berlin. After studying philosophy and Germanistik in Berlin and Munich, she enrolled at the film academy in Vienna. Counting Austrian directors Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl among her teachers, she also befriended key members of new Austrian cinema, including Barbara Albert and Jessica Hausner; the latter, according to Grisebach, continues to be one of her main interlocutors. The importance of Grisebach's Austrian connection for her work has not gone unnoticed. In his insightful essay on her second feature, Sehnsucht, Robert Weixelbaumer suggests that her work combines “the clear consciousness of form and the intellectual sternness of the Berlin School with the cultural-sociological interest in exploring the petit-bourgeois milieus of Austria, which fueled the films by Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl and eventually also the filmmakers associated with the production company coop 99.” Yet, in contrast to the tendency of her Austrian colleagues, Grisebach's interest, Weixelbaumer argues, “does not lie with the multifaceted proof of some theses but, in contrast, with her cinematic world's ability to offer resistance against preformatted thoughts, including one's own.”
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- The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School , pp. 230 - 248Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013