In the beginning, there is fog and there is thunder. The Gods are enraged. It is a struggle to see the mountains and their trees. After some time, darkness comes; a night that would render the two figures in the landscape almost imperceptible if it weren’t for their cries. As dawn arrives, a man in red emerges, clambering up a steep incline. So far, so arduous—and seemingly doomed. Then, in the fourth shot of Angela Schanelec’s Music (2023), an ambulance and a car drive with relative ease down roads that wind through the mountains, now plain to see under the bright Grecian sun. Music continues to play out in that radiance; the fog does not return.
However luminous the images in Schanelec’s cinema, the fragmented, supple narratives that thread those images together often result in the films being described as opaque. Now that the German filmmaker is a sexagenarian with ten films and two Silver Bears to her name, this combination of the beautiful and the difficult no longer culminates in accusations of emptiness and pretention, but rather in admissions of wonder. Whether the past or present reviewer is in awe, bewildered or frustrated, however, Schanelec’s films seem always to pose the same problem for spectators, scholars and critics alike: ‘a problem for us,’ in the words of Marco Abel, scholar of the Berlin School. ‘How do we talk or write about her films?… How do we watch them?’1 Every word is tired. How exhausted “luminous” feels. How do we approach and articulate something that is altogether new?
I like it when this happens, when a limit is reached. In Schanelec’s films, familiar forms of verbal and visual comprehension are found to be ineffective and we are asked to begin again, to find a path among—and not apart from—these ruins of understanding. What could be more beautiful and more difficult than this?
*
Disorientation often begins at home in Schanelec’s films, as fathers, archetypal figures of authority, recede from the frame. Take as an example one scene from My Sister’s Good Fortune (Das Glück meiner Schwester, 1995). A father exits a flat. A son remains and eats with his mother and her guest. Served a kind of pancake called a Kaiserschmarren—often translated as “Emperor’s Mess”—he asks his mother why it has that name. ‘I don’t know’ is a frequent reply in Schanelec’s films and it is said here too, followed by a half-hearted explanation for the curious child: the Kaiserschmarren, his mother says, is ‘for emperors only.’
‘Why do you eat it then?’
‘Because there are no more emperors.’
‘Kings?’
‘Neither.’
‘What then?’
‘Nobody relevant.’
In the absence of patriarchs, mothers might be in the next line for their vacant thrones. Yet when it comes to the women of the Berlin School, a gendered refusal of the neoliberal demand for self-optimisation is more common.2 Although she distances herself from this organising label, Schanelec is no exception in this respect. Her mothers retreat from possible positions of power, would prefer a self-effacing title—no-one important—to anything grandiose and laden with duty. In both The Dreamed Path (Der traumhafte Weg, 2016) and I Was at Home, But… (Ich war zuhause, aber…, 2019), mothers to children whose fathers are deceased, or otherwise departed, end up burned out. Ariane in the former film and Astrid in the more recent are played by Maren Eggert, who is perhaps as close as it comes to something like the actrice-fétiche of Schanelec’s films. In name, each character connotes superlative divinity. Ariane is one letter removed from the labyrinthine princess of Greek mythology, Ariadne, and Astrid comes from the Norse áss + friðr, the “beautiful god”. But Ariane and Astrid are reticent, reluctant rulers, with Eggert falling to the floor or turning from the gaze. Towards the end of The Dreamed Path, Ariane tells someone that she had always imagined being someone else—but no-one in particular.
In these three films, then, the notion of the sovereign—the one with power who presides over and who knows—is dethroned: fathers abscond or die, exhausted or grieving mothers are unable to stand, and Maren Eggert, one recurrent, recognisable star in the filmmaker’s work, withdraws from us. All of those lights that guide us, that help us to read, go out one after another. How do we see enough in this darkness and disorientation to be able to write? Who will wear a crown? Without a regal head to cap, crowns in diminished form circulate between children. One daughter in The Dreamed Path is adorned with a miniature metallic crown made of paper or plastic; as worthless in sentimental value as in material and symbolic value, it is there in one scene and gone in the next. In I Was at Home, But… a crumpled golden crown lies discarded among dead, dried leaves; although a girl stumbles across it, she abstains from wearing it. Nothing majestic comes of a crown.
Little surprise, then, that Schanelec has made a film that is ‘freely inspired’ by the Oedipus myth. Who knows better than Oedipus that a crown is a curse? In both Euripides’ and Sophocles’ versions of the myth, Oedipus grows up to be king after he kills a man called Laius, who turns out to be his biological father, and marries a woman called Jocasta, who turns out to be his biological mother. In Sophocles’ version, the revelation of this messy, incestuous history drives Jocasta to suicide and Oedipus to blind himself. Distraught and sightless, Oedipus abdicates the throne at Thebes, beseeches his daughters to forsake the royal city, and wanders from its walls himself. All apt territory for Schanelec—filmmaker of demission, dispersal and drift.
Music transports this story from the fifth century BC to the recent past. It begins in Greece, with an Oedipus analogue called Jon (Aliocha Schneider), a Laius character by the name of Lucian (Theodore Vrachas) and a Jocasta character by the name of Iro (Agathe Bonitzer). Just as Oedipus did, Jon kills his father and bears a child with his mother; their daughter is Phoebe (played by one girl at age six and another at age fourteen). After realising who Jon is, what he has done and what she has done, Iro follows in the suicidal steps of Jocasta, walking off a cliff. And here we might go back to the problem of knowledge in Schanelec’s films: in Music, as in myth, both not knowing enough and knowing too much are sources of tragedy—which is surely an instructive way to conceive of knowledge more generally. Absolute ignorance is like incest: it takes us involuted circles away from the world. On the other hand, dredging up details of the past into the present can confuse and suffocate something that is altogether new—in need of new words, new kinds of thinking. This is the tightrope we walk when we watch and write about Schanelec’s films. How much knowledge is enough? Too little and the critic throws her hands in the air and writes “ineffable” again. Too much and the critic rubs his hands together and writes “Bressonian” again. Is either one adequate? I would venture that “ineffable” gets us nowhere at all and “Bressonian” only to the same place we have been before. This would be no great disaster (if a little underwhelming), were it not for the fact that Schanelec’s are so much about movement, and movement towards what is new.
Jon does not learn anything of his messy, incestuous history in Music; Iro takes it to the grave and the eternal return ceases there. As the film moves from Greece to Berlin, it departs from further repetition of an ancient cycle. Free from the burden of knowing too much, Jon neither gouges out his eyes in anguish nor distances himself from Phoebe in shame. One tragedy is enough. Jon does lose his vision, but he is compensated with the gift of song. Another death happens—an anonymous businessman is found collapsed on the corner of Potsdamer Platz and Potsdamer Strasse with his head bludgeoned—but there will be no more misery in the family, no more thunder and no more fog.
Music is more affirmative, more jubilant than anything else in Schanelec’s cinema so far. Previously, emotional relief from a statuesque performance style might be found in intimate close-ups of generous hands (often giving, offering) and tired feet, or in interludes of swimming and song. Music adds to those tender close-ups: there are Jon’s bloodied, bathed and bandaged Oedipal feet; there are the hands that caress those of a lover under a gentle stream of running water. And the film reprises swimming and song too—expanding the latter so joyously as to fill most of the second half of the film. I also cannot shake (or make much sense of) an arresting, if fleeting, image from the Greek half of the film, in which a young woman stands tall in the Mediterranean sunlight, almost addressing the camera from the centre of the frame. Where did the tentative girls of Schanelec’s cinema go? What happened to all the wearied and meandering women?
Schanelec’s cinema up until now had expressed a hesitant optimism about changing domestic situations, both in the sense of the decline of the nuclear family and, I would hazard, in the sense of Germany’s borders within an evolving Europe. Itinerancy is essential to Schanelec’s films—in 1998, a teenage girl drifts between Berlin and Paris; in 2001, a woman leaves Berlin for six months in Rome; in 2006, another Berliner stays in Marseille for ten days, then returns to Berlin, then returns to Marseille—but this itinerancy becomes more pronounced in The Dreamed Path, as Schanelec moves cut by cut across images of disparate people, decades and countries. Britain and Germany are among those countries, and the film opens with a pro-Europe demonstration in Greece sometime in the early 1980s, when the country joined the European Union. Released the year after Angela Merkel announced an open-door immigration policy and the same year Britain voted to leave the EU, The Dreamed Path feels—in line with the Bundestag and against the Vote Leave campaign—like a cinematic homage to freedom of movement, or an exploration of its implications. When the borders of home and nation open up, what becomes possible in the world and in a film?
Ariane of The Dreamed Path imagines what it would be like to be someone else, and the film ends with her daughter alone in the frame, practicing football on an autumnal night. Astrid of I Was at Home, But… curls up on a cold, hard rock, and ends with her son and her daughter also alone in the frame, her son carrying her daughter on his back, walking barefoot through a brook. Hope for the future is shouldered silently in both films by the young, who head towards horizons unknown to us. Among its affirmation and its jubilance, Music finds more than a vague faith in children flickering in the ashes of broken families. At the end of the film, Jon and Phoebe come together with two of his friends, fellow musicians. They swim and row on a peaceful lake. They rest, contented, beneath the trees. In a new formation, the four dance and sing together, weaving a new path through the woods. What the film arrives at here might be, to quote Edward Saïd’s ‘Secular Criticism’ (1983), ‘the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that […] provides men and women with a new form of relationship.’3 In some ways, Music feels like a realisation of what Saïd calls affiliation, a new form of relationship between people that resists filiation’s ‘procreative, generational urge’.4 In line with Saïd’s examples of twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalysis and modernist literature, Schanelec’s films had previously pointed to the failure of filiation but not yet started to envision affiliation, a new community, to come in its place.
For the reader who would prefer a text about Schanelec that maintains something of the ineffable throughout it, I am in all likelihood moving towards too much knowledge of a certain sort—so let me circle back to the films themselves. In an oft–quoted scene from I Stayed in Berlin All Summer (Ich bin den Sommer über in Berlin geblieben, 1994), Schanelec herself acts as a writer who expresses a wish for her stories to be remembered like music. Sometimes you have a melody in your head but you forget how to hum it. While you remember everything else—who was around when it was playing, the moment and the feeling—the tune escapes you. Then someone comes along and sings it, she says, and everything falls into place. This is the kind of knowledge that Music embraces: the sort that asks us to lose some things, to make space for someone else to come out of the blue—someone, strangely, who can make us feel at home again in the world.
[1] Marco Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 124. Recent examples of this include Jessica Kiang’s review of Music in Variety: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about Music … feels like a similarly doomed proposition.’ [21 February 2023, https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/music-review-angela-schanelec-1235520635/.]
[2] See Hester Baer, ‘The Berlin School and Women’s Cinema’ in The Berlin School and its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema, ed. Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 50.
[3] Edward Saïd, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 19.
[4] ibid., 20.
Laura Staab is a writer based in London.