Uneasy Riders: Christian Petzold’s Postindustrialist Road Movies

You once said that you make movies “in the cemetery of genre cinema,” and Jerichow, like all of your films, manages to address a range of sociopolitical issues covertly, under the surface of a genre story, much like the Hollywood film noirs of the ’40s and ’50s.

For me, it was a problem when I was a film student at the [German Film] Academy. All of the students loved genre movies, but they just used them to make retro films. You’d see a blonde girl getting out of a taxi cab and a man in the rain with a cigarette and whisky or something like that. And I hate those kinds of movies; they are like caricatures of the noir movies. I grew up with the New Hollywood movies of the ’70s, and all the New Hollywood movies used the old genres and they deconstructed and reconstructed them a little bit. When you see a movie like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye — a really fantastic movie — it’s modern but it’s also not a parody.

Capitalism is also a driving force in these stories. The main characters in Jerichoware both prisoners of debt. The family in The State I Am Inis trying to put together the money it needs to start a new life. Everything — people especially — has a price.

What I like in American movies is the moment where the bank robbers have robbed the bank and now they have the money and they’re in a motel near the highway, and in this moment they don’t know what to do, they make mistakes, and the police are coming. When you receive the money, it’s like the red-light district in the morning, when the daylight shows, you see the skin of all the people who are living there, and the skin is very gray and very old. Money is a little bit like this in my movies — people desire money but they don’t know what to do with it, and if they get money, they never get the things they have dreamed of with the money. For me, this is capitalism.

You are often mentioned alongside such filmmakers as Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec as a member of the “Berlin School” — a wave of new filmmakers whose films are expressly concerned with life in present-day Germany, as opposed to the many recent, popular German films that have offered very authorized versions of important events in German history.

All those movies, like The Lives of Others and Downfall, they are exploitation movies, and we are trying a little bit to make a new neorealistic movie. That doesn’t mean that we want to put the camera on our shoulders and film in the streets. It has something to do with what is happening here and now, and we want to make movies that, if you look at them in 25 years, you will experience how we laughed here, how we kissed here, and how we walked, how we thought in our contemporary times. The directors of movies like The Lives of Others, they just want to make one movie, and after they have made the movie, they close the door. And a really good neorealistic movie is opening a door for many other points of view, for many new sights.