Art, Accidents, and Sex On-screen: A Conversation with Christian Petzold

ONE OF THE MOST fêted European directors today, Christian Petzold is known for making films with intense dramatic stakes, brimming with historic relevance, capping off with a climax bordering on baroque. In Barbara (2012), a doctor of that name (Nina Hoss) plans to escape East Germany in 1980, only to fall in love with the chief surgeon of her department. In Phoenix (2014), a Jewish woman named Nelly (also Hoss) returns to Berlin from a death camp, only to learn that her husband was the one who had turned her in to the Nazis. In Transit (2018), a refugee named Georg (Franz Rogowski) attempts to flee a fascist regime in dystopian Paris.

While Petzold’s stories on their own can feel outsized, they are tempered by a patent lack of spectacular affect: the desires and anguish of his characters are conveyed through subtle acting cues, rather than effusive monologues in close-up; a heavy musical score is swapped for moments of devastating silence. All of this is of a piece with the Berlin School of filmmaking, of which Petzold has been at the forefront, alongside Angela Schanelec, Maren Ade, Thomas Arslan, and others. While the movement lacks any firm manifesto and covers divergent subject matter, Berlin School filmmakers tend to prioritize realism while honoring the fraught nature of Germany’s present and past. Critics and scholars tout its thoughtful treatments of life under neoliberalism; opponents call the films “recalcitrant and stern.”

Compared to Petzold’s depiction of the Holocaust or the Stasi, his latest venture, Afire, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize this year, can seem almost breezy. The story is contemporary, more mellow than melodramatic, and, unlike his earlier films, based on an original script rather than adapted from a literary source. Set in a bucolic cottage near the Baltic Sea, Afire follows Leon (Thomas Schubert), an anxious novelist sharing a work holiday with his freewheeling photographer friend Felix (Langston Uibel). Upon arrival, the unlikely duo are surprised that their vacation house is already occupied—by Nadja (Paula Beer), a whimsical stranger whose boisterous boinking can be heard through the walls, keeping Leon up at night. “I have to work” is Leon’s frosty response whenever invited to partake in social activities with his cohabitants. Toss in a bisexual “rescue swimmer” who guards the local shore (Enno Trebs), and what promises to be an offbeat romantic comedy about frisky twentysomethings erupts into flames in its final act. When I saw the movie at Tribeca in early June, the Manhattan sidewalks smelled like smoke—due to the Canada wildfires, and yet strangely apropos given the film’s incendiary finale. As I exited the theater and pulled out a mask, the fragility, and folly, of the human condition could not have been more pungent.

“All movies have to start with an accident,” the director tells me a few days before the film’s US release in July. Zooming from the New York office of the Criterion Collection (at this point, the air quality and skyline are less apocalyptic), the filmmaker sits beneath a Giulietta Masina poster, next to a smiling interpreter named Margaret (whom, it turns out, he does not consult even once during our conversation).

Sometimes it’s small, like a car accident, or a man betraying his wife. Sometimes the accident is big, like the last days of the German Democratic Republic, or the first days after the World War. Most of the stories you can tell at this time are love stories, because people try to reorganize their love life to [create an] island. The first sentence in Afire is “Something is wrong,” because the engine of Felix’s car is broken.

A droll, voluble, self-deprecating man who peppers his responses with frequent interrogative yeahs, Petzold is not the somber, self-serious auteur I expected—he keeps, rather, with the lighter tenor of Afire’s first two acts. “Cinema has something to do with fever, with dreams,” Petzold further explains, recounting how he conceived of the film’s story while bedridden with COVID-19.

The Lumière brothers started cinema the same year that Sigmund Freud found out how dreams work. Because I was reading a Chekhov novel about summer love and Richard Ford’s Wildlife, about a forest fire, I started thinking about summer stories. What is happening to our climate? What is happening to our world? Perhaps there aren’t a thousand new summer stories anymore, because we have destroyed the environment.

While the story of Afire is wholly original, Petzold’s indebtedness to the literary realm is on full display, with Leon’s novelistic perspective of his story taking over, via voiceover, by film’s end. “I’m not a big fan of films about films, or literature about literature,” Petzold confesses. “I’ve never had artists in my movies before. I asked myself, ‘Why is there a writer and photographer in this film?’ and I did not want to answer.” While Afire is certainly not 8 ½, it does shift into meta gear on more than one occasion. Creatively, Leon envies—and patronizes—Felix, who can somehow “work” on his photography thesis while also enjoying a day by the sea, snapping pics from beachgoers’ perspectives as they wistfully appraise the horizon (commentary, perhaps, on the power of the gaze itself). “I had an easy, happy time writing the script,” Petzold reflects. “Sometimes I could write 10 pages of a scene at once. I wrote it in three weeks; it was writing itself. When you are Protestant, if you don’t have to put any effort in, you think, ‘This is not good.’ Protestants have to suffer.”

Petzold then compares himself to his main protagonist, a bearish misanthrope who condescends to everyone except Helmut, his literary agent (Matthias Brandt). “Leon’s trying to be someone who suffers, but he’s a lazy man,” he explains.

Everybody else is working—repairing the roof, cooking, doing dishes—but Leon keeps saying he needs to work. During our rehearsals, the actors were laughing, like in a comedy, and I thought, “This movie isn’t any good. It doesn’t cost me sweat and blood. My movies are about crying and suffering, never laughing. I have destroyed my career!”

The cast was crucial in shaping the tone of the film, Petzold emphasizes: “All of them are very intelligent and I got to know them very well. On the set, they started interrogating me, asking me about my career, my Protestantism. This was the first time in my life I was the victim of such questioning.” Smiley as ever, he recounts being cornered. The director couldn’t resemble Leon less, however much he sees the film as art reflecting life: “From answer to answer, I had to [tell them that] I’m a part of the script. I’m a part of Leon. I didn’t know it when I wrote it, but the film is a comedy about myself. Realizing this, it totally relieved me.”

Some of the film’s most comical, and believable, moments occur in scenes surrounding fluid sexual identities and casual promiscuity, reminding me of the chamber play The Girl and the Spider (2021), set in modern-day Berlin, by millennial filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher. Like Petzold, the Swiss brothers attended Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin and were highly influenced by his generation of Berlin School directors. When I comment that Afire departs from Petzold’s typical preoccupation with traditional, hetero romance, the director fumbles and detours a bit. “I have always had difficulty with sexuality in films. In my private life, perhaps too, but that’s not our story here,” he laughs. “Often when you see movies by older male directors, they try to restart their life with young bodies—female and male bodies. In one of the last movies by Bertolucci, when he’s filming young bodies, it’s like he has [drool] coming out of his mouth. I don’t like it.”

I’m reminded of how layered and nuanced Petzold’s female protagonists have always been, girding my long-held belief that the 62-year-old is unwittingly a very feminist filmmaker. The notable lack of objectification might also have to do with his overall aversion to visual sex on-screen. “When you see scenes of two people having sex in the movies, 99 percent of the time, it doesn’t make any sense,” he emphasizes.

You need someone [on-screen] who’s seducing, someone who has desire. You don’t need to see two half-naked or naked bodies. Mostly it’s women on [top of] the men. Their faces are distanced so they can have dialogue and you can do shot/countershot. The light is always on, so you can see everything. I feel embarrassed when I see this. It’s like my parents could be talking there.

Petzold is, evidently, not on Twitter, such that the Sex Scene Discourse of 2023—with all its competing virtue-mongering—does not seem at all on his radar.

Then again, this digital feud has always been embarrassingly American to begin with. It’s not that Petzold is a Prussian Prude, or has any moral issue with depicting his young characters’ lusty romps (to wit, the scene of Nadja’s lifeguard paramour leaving the cottage naked is Full Frontal Funny), it’s that he seeks to do so in a less contrived, more honest way. “My children, for example, they have shame [about sexuality], and they are free at the same moment,” he explains.

They have sex, but they don’t want to talk about it. They are against the pornographic world—all these tits and asses and everything—but they’re also free. So I talked with the actors about this. And they [proposed] a homosexual initiation at the end of one character telling another a story. I liked this! You think you’re a cis or hetero guy, and you’re kissed by a man, and from this moment, you think, “Yes, this could be.”

Part of what makes Afire both hot and natural is how so much sex is conveyed through subtle visual gesture and offscreen sound. “It’s very intimate to hear two people having sex with each other,” Petzold continues.

Usually, actors have to fuck in front of the camera, but to make sounds for a microphone is much harder. The microphone knows if you’re lying. You can betray the camera, but you can’t betray the microphone. When I cast my characters, I always do it with closed eyes. You can hear if someone is a good actor or not.

However tragic Afire’s last act, the film ends on a hopeful note: Leon smiles for the very first time, encountering Nadja outside the hospital where Helmut is enduring chemotherapy. When asked whether he wanted viewers to imagine Leon and Nadja romantically pairing, Petzold waxes vaguely philosophical, citing both Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and HBO’s The Sopranos:

I love how, in cinema, during final scenes, you have the feeling that, from this moment on, when [the screen] goes dark, the rest of the story belongs to the characters. [At the end of Afire], when she’s laughing at him and he’s laughing at her, it’s a new story that belongs to them. It’s not scripted anymore.

For Petzold, relinquishing control over the story seems a crucial part of both making and watching movies, demanding a level of humility for director and audience. “It’s a question of morality,” he concludes. “They are free, and we, the audience, are free too. This gives me a feeling of a happy ending. They can live on and I can live on too.”

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Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to The Baffler, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, The Hopkins Review, and Reverse Shot, among other publications.