Resemblances: Between German Film Studies and History

Can one concentrate on the historical features in films without sacrificing the vital affirmation of art's autonomy and the pleasures of immanent reading? In this regard, Christian Petzold's Ghosts (2005), a watershed among Germany's newest new wave, is noteworthy. It abounds with extraordinary technique, and it would seem like a crime to write about it without noting the sound and image montage near its beginning in which a Bach cantata can be heard-playing, possibly diegetically, over a car stereo-while the driver navigates urban expressways. The camera, and with it our gaze, are positioned like St. Christopher, impartially looking out from atop the dashboard onto the road ahead. The music is then interwoven with the sound of a voice coming from a French-speaking global positioning system. Owing to its technique, the brief sequence poses questions concerning who is in control of this story, of its telling, and not least the literal question of whether we are in control of our own cars. Petzold's film is saturated from start to finish with stoplight reds and sylvan greens; its protagonists seem to be the only pedestrians leftin a strangely abandoned world. The film's intercut surveillance images inspire an inquiry into the difference between the director's seemingly objective gaze and that of his film's cinematic narrative voice. In these and other ways Ghosts is undoubtedly literary; how do we characterize its position vis-à-vis its characters, and does the camera know as little as it claims to? Not parsing Petzold's technique would be regrettable, yet it is a crime of similar proportions not to contemplate the film's settings, including Berlin's Tiergarten, close to the city's commercial and political center, and the under-construction nonplaces that line the periphery of the highly modern Potsdamer Platz-locations where the Wall once ran. These areas carry all manner of connotations as sites of historical drama, which are now presented from the margins as the dwellings of Petzold's barely visible phantoms. His characters inhabit modern spaces no one would describe as home. Here, technique and material are thoroughly bound together, and owing to the carefully selected streets where the action is set, history creeps into the work of a filmmaker who often evacuates his images, fighting against the preeminence of matter.10 To think seriously about the film is to dispense with the dichotomy; reading exclusively for the formal framework or for the film's his