Hand-Picked by Christian Petzold

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the next year Germany was reunified after 41 years of social and political partition. It was at this time that a young filmmaker named Christian Petzold was learning his trade in Berlin, at the German Film and Television Academy. The transformational societal shifts he saw around him would leave their mark on his cinema for decades to come. Now one of Germany’s most acclaimed living filmmakers, Petzold’s enigmatic and elegantly restrained films survey a nation striving toward progress but stalked by its irrepressible past. Haunted not only by national phantoms, but by the ghosts of his cinematic influences too, Petzold’s films rewrite timeworn Hollywood genres in unexpected and sometimes mysterious ways. Drawing on thrillers, ghost stories, fairy tales, and melodramas, his work is at once unplaceably familiar and remarkably out of the ordinary, wrought with riddlelike ambiguity and understated grace.

The six films selected by Petzold demonstrate a fascinating range of influence, and his comments reveal a filmgoer able to wring unanticipated insights from the most unassuming details. I spoke to the director during preproduction for his next project, a TV movie described by Petzold as a crime story: “I love making TV movies. When you make a film for cinema, you are like an architect who’s building a museum or an opera hall. But when you’re working for television, you’re building a house that people have to live in. Sometimes, I don’t want to make museums anymore.”

“I didn’t want to watch my selections again before this interview. I prefer to think about my memory of movies rather than the movies themselves, about the traps they have left in my mind. When I had my first cup of coffee this morning, I thought about Ida and the ugliness of Poland in that film. I thought about the totally destroyed common places: the bars, the streets. And the relationships between the people in the film are as destroyed as the buildings—not only destroyed by German fascism and bombs, but destroyed by guilt. 

I like movies where the architecture is also a mental architecture. You have mental architecture in Antonioni movies, in Rossellini movies. This connects to my own movie Undine [2020], which is about Berlin and how the city doesn’t have a reflection of itself, doesn’t know what it is. In the film, Paula Beer’s character, Undine, works at a museum that has these architectural models showing the many different versions of the city across its history. Berlin is built on dried-out marshes. When you dry a swamp out, all of the life that was there is destroyed—frogs, for example. And Undine is dried out by society. She’s talking about her own history when she’s talking about Berlin; she is part of Berlin. This is what I mean by mental architecture.” 

“I love this movie so much. It is a film about young people being lost. Godard said it is ‘a movie about children who are playacting Carmen [George Bizet’s 1875 opera].’ These young people are playacting something they are missing; they are looking for a way to narrate their lives. They’re looking for a story, for a future. But they’re surrounded by the ruins left to them by old people; they can’t find their place in the world. The movie is searching too. I like that it feels like the rushes of a movie, not one that has been edited or finished. Time doesn’t work anymore; history is gone. It’s a post-history movie. 

People accuse this film of being a bit cold, a bit cynical, but it’s not at all. There’s a scene at the end of the film where Carmen is lying on the ground, dying. A waiter passes her and she says to him, ‘Hey waiter, I have a question: What’s the name for the moment when the innocent are on one side and the guilty are on the other side?’ You think the waiter will say it’s the biblical Last Judgment, but he says, ‘Madame, it’s the dawn.’ So at the end of the film, the emptiness is filled, and something new starts. 

I think all movies by Godard are about love and about love being destroyed. For example, Made in USA [1966] is about Godard’s love of American cinema, but it’s also about him reckoning with that love. First Name: Carmen is a movie which says that young people don’t have any ideas, that they are obsessed with money, that they are conventional. But it’s also a movie about how young people aren’t interested in the ideas of Godard [who plays a filmmaker in the film] or the older generation. It’s one of the most important movies in my life. When I’m shooting with Paula Beer and other young people, I’m always thinking about First Name: Carmen.”

“There are rumors that Lars von Trier’s fear of flying is the reason he didn’t film this in America. I love that it is set in the USA, but actually filmed for the most part in Sweden. The colors are not Technicolor; it’s not Singin’ in the Rain [1952], it’s not The Wizard of Oz [1939]. It’s an ugly film: the train, the factory, the dull colors of the digital cameras. But the music and Björk’s performance are made even more fantastic by this ugliness. 

I always remember the last ten minutes. Björk is lying in jail, and they come to take her to be executed. You don’t see her face, you just see one of her hands, and two or three of her fingers start moving. The expressiveness of hands has disappeared in cinema. Since sound was introduced and films started to have dialogue, filmmakers forgot how expressive hands can be. We have so many faces. ‘The eyes are the window to the soul’—so much of this. But at the end of Dancer in the Dark, we enter into the scene through Björk’s hands, and the music and dancing grow out of the rhythm of her fingers. Not her face. And then she can finally go to her death because of the music. This sequence impressed me so much. 

Catherine Deneuve is also in the movie, and she’s crucial to this scene. Deneuve is one of the best actors I have seen in my life because she has no vanity. There’s nothing between her and her performance. I love Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort [1967]. Demy made another musical called A Room in Town [1982], but the music isn’t very good so it doesn’t work. My dream is to make a musical. The problem is I’m not good with music, so I have no chance to make a good one.”

“We talked about mental landscapes; this is another film about mental landscapes. This movie is set in Georgia, in summer, during the World Cup. I like movies set in the dead time of high summer—July, August—when a city feels exhausted. Éric Rohmer’s first feature The Sign of the Leo [1962] is like this; in it, everyone seems to have left Paris. In Koberidze’s movie, some people are watching football, some are drinking, some are just sitting on benches, meeting up, playing football. Nothing really dramatic is happening, or if it is, it’s happening wherever the World Cup is. In summer, a city can feel a bit like an incomplete society, a ruined society. I don’t remember the story so much but I remember this atmosphere.

I have always wanted to curate a program of movies in which the stories are happening on the fringes of a big event: the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the World Cup. I think it’s interesting to think about the smaller stories that are happening on the outskirts of big events, about the things that happen on the peripheries when people are gathered together to witness something important.”

“When some directors make period movies, they try to convince the audience that they have actually traveled to the past. I don’t like this approach. I remember reading a discussion between François Truffaut and Jean Renoir about [Renoir’s 1952 film] The Golden Coach. Truffaut says that when you make a period movie, you have to make it in a studio otherwise the winds of nowadays, of the contemporary, infiltrate the film. And Renoir replies: ‘This is exactly what I want, I want to find the tracks of history within the contemporary.’ I am very sympathetic to this idea. In Miguel’s movies, I always feel like I’m reading a graphic novel. He is not trying to recreate the real world; he is making images of it. There is no ‘real world’ in his films. I love this concept: It is very simple but very complicated at the same time. In Grand Tour he is making pictures of the past, he is not trying to recreate it.” 

“For me, 21st-century cinema starts with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive [2001] and continues with Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. It totally knocked me off my feet when I saw it in the cinema. We spoke about First Name: Carmen, and how that is a film about young people who are searching for something in the world. This is also a movie about young people searching for a purpose, trying to build something against the world around them, trying to live in a world wrecked by older generations. 

There’s one scene I always think about which takes place near the North Korean border, at a ruined farm owned by the protagonist’s father. You can hear the loudspeakers blasting North Korean propaganda into the South; there’s a Miles Davis song from Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows [1958] playing. The young protagonists are smoking marijuana, and the girl is dancing. In this moment, these three young people—even though they are surrounded by the conflict between North and South, surrounded by the ruins of their parents—are momentarily free. It’s very rare that a movie finds a moment like this, when you are freed from the world around you, just briefly. It’s a fantastic moment.”