How Christian Petzold became the most important director you’ve never heard of
In the last few years, Hollywood has grown much more comfortable with non-English-language films, thanks in large partto the Academy’s panicked efforts to finally diversify themselves beyond the insular world of the ageing Los Angeles elite. This has yielded several notable achievements, including movies like Parasite winning ‘Best Picture,’ and Oscar categories being crammed with the likes of All Quiet on the Western Front, Anatomy of a Fall, and The Zone of Interest. But lest the Academy grow too pleased with itself, there are still a great deal of filmmakers whose work flies under the radar.
Directors like Annie Baker, Alice Rohrwacher, and Kleber Mendonça Filho all make the list, though that may be due to either shorter filmographies or more experimental work. One of the most bizarrely underrated directors (at least when it comes to widespread commercial recognition) is German filmmaker Christian Petzold. One of the reasons that his relative obscurity is so baffling is that his track record has been remarkably consistent since the 1990s, and his movies cover universal territory through familiar genres.
Petzold is a founding member of the unofficial cinematic movement known as the Berlin School, which is ascribed to a wave of filmmakers from Germany whose work emerged at the beginning of the 2000s. His films blend classic genres like espionage thrillers, melodrama, and film noir to tell modern stories that are often haunted by the past. Steeped in political commentary, they eschew preachiness and exude the textures and colours of the greatest cinematic artists.
His first movie to gain international attention was 2008’s Jerichow, which loosely reimagined the 1940s film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. This time, however, the love triangle centres on a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, a Turkish-German businessman, and his wife. Petzold’s greatest strength as a filmmaker is shearing off the fantasy of familiar genres and rooting them in the inconveniently complex world of the present, and Jerichow deftly accomplishes this without overplaying its thesis.
In 2012’s Barbara and 2014’s Phoenix, Petzold returned to Germany’s fraught recent history. But instead of rehashing familiar stories of guilt and atrocity, he created intricate narratives of interpersonal conflict and life under various states of tyranny.
His most recent film, Afire, digs into the climate crisis, depicting a group of friends who go on holiday to a remote cottage, only to find the forest around them consumed by a wildfire. Instead of making it a disaster movie or a thriller, however, Petzold centres the story on a self-absorbed, self-loathing author struggling through writing a novel. It might be partially autobiographical, but the character’s all-consuming focus on himself provides a sharp critique of the way in which those who can afford to ignore the ravages of climate change will do so until it burns down the walls around them.
For a director with such a lengthy and varied filmography, Petzold is conspicuously absent from showy awards seasons and buzzy international release schedules. But as audiences grow more comfortable with what Bong Joon-ho has described as “the one-inch-high barrier” of subtitles, it’s high time that more people dug into his work.
