TRANSIT & The Petzold Gaze

German filmmaker Christian Petzold cut his teeth making films that exist somewhere between taut thriller and muted melodrama, seemingly drawn out of simple story abstracts that flourish through the imbued soulfulness of his taciturn protagonists. In 2012, Sam Adams called it “melodrama viewed through the wrong end of a telescope,” referring to the lack of music and “portentous dialogue to drive every development home.” His new film, Transit, finds him on the same end of the telescope, but looking through a more sophisticated, evolved tool with a wider view of the medium.

The film is adapted from Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, a book that was given to Petzold by fellow countryman, filmmaker and collaborator Harun Farocki, whom the film is dedicated to (he passed away in 2014). Petzold told Film Comment that the two read the book together every year, and that, in some ways, acted as the architecture for all of the films they wrote together (The State I Am In, Barbara and Phoenix).

It’s the story of a refugee who, under the identity of a recently deceased author, avoids Nazis by fleeing to Marseille, where he spends his time meeting fellow refugees (including the wife of the man he’s posing as), all looking for a passage west.

A Vertical Space

He’s now done a trio of period pieces, this one following Barbara and Phoenix, all set during specific times of national tumult — Petzold refers to this as a trilogy titled “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems.” Barbara was set in 1980 East Germany, the titular character monitored by the Stasi; Phoenix resides in Berlin, immediately following World War II; but Transit’s place on the calendar is a trickier nut to crack. Though it’s taken from a 1940s story of Nazi rule, it melds that time with a modern day Marseille, making for a strange visual space that disoriented me on initial viewing.

In his Film Comment interview, the filmmaker described it this way:

“The transit space that is described by Anna Seghers in her book is a horizontal space, it is a geographical space, it is the space between Europe and the United States. They are in the port city, and thus the space between the land where we are and the sea we want to travel over. So this is the horizontal transit space. But I think that there is also a vertical kind of transit space, and that is time, and the stories that develop over time. And so we not just find ourselves between the United States and Europe, or between land and water, but we also find ourselves trapped in yesterday’s time and today. And so I thought, has anyone ever told something like this in cinema without turning it into a joke?”

He goes on to name Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Chantal Akerman’s A Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels because “both tell their stories in today’s world with characters that are basically from the past.” I would throw Blue Velvet (1986), Cabin Boy (1994) and Marie Antoinette (2006) on the heap of films that similarly embed anachronisms into their fabric to explore how our history invokes itself today, or conversely, what our present means to yesterday.

During his coverage of TIFF 2018, Film Inquiry’s Tomas Trussow tackled Transit’s “vertical space” as follows:

“What Petzold does is to move on from literal Nazis and turn Seghers’ tale into a melodramatic parable for our present moment, where not only Middle Eastern families have to flee from untold horror, but Caucasian Europeans, as well. Everyone is jostling for position in a perpetual waiting game, no longer people with solid identities, but ghosts whose names can change in an instant.”

Interestingly, Petzold also mentions “ghosts” to Film Comment when asked about transposing time periods, saying, “[W]e’ve got the resurfacing of those ghosts of the past that we thought had disappeared, like nationalism, and xenophobia, and people starting to define what their own identity is and who cannot belong to that and who should be ostracized and marginalized because of that.”

While there are obvious parallels between the 1940s and our present historical moment, as Trussow notes, Petzold’s cinema, which has dedicated the past two decades to stories of displacement, attest to a more universal application of a story like Transit, where, as the filmmaker says, identities come and go as the state dictates where you should and shouldn’t be able to live.

The most touching moment of Transit, and perhaps any of the director’s films, finds Georg softly crooning to a mother and child a song from his childhood. The song is a list of different animals all making their way home, and its simple comfort resonates over Petzold’s rolodex of characters across decades, all trying to make their way home or start a new one someplace else.

The Petzold Gaze

Walking out of Transit, then my third film of Petzold’s catalogue, I kept returning to the importance of glances. So much of Transit is told in interpersonal ellipses and pregnant pauses — looks that tell fellow refugees I’m lost, I need comfort, I’m happy to see you — and general looks of fear and paranoia. That moment of song is a perfect example. While Georg sings, Petzold takes care to show us the faces of the mother and child and their gazes amongst each other and upon Georg — faces that expressed the comfort of shared experiences and desires, of finding someone in the same position as yourself.

Going through the rest of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, I found an incredibly consistent through-line of the face and its gaze privileged above all — it’s his primary tool for pathos and general information. His two early films with Julia Hammer (The State I Am In and Ghosts), for instance, welcome us into their world with the actress glancing over her shoulder, revealing characters that feel like they’re always being watched.

His work with actress Nina Hoss, starting with 2003’s Wolfsburg and continuing through 2014’s Phoenix, further developed a cinema reliant on longing gazes — between lovers, loners and outsiders. But (what I’ll refer to as) the Petzold Gaze is more specifically characterized and embodied by a stifled existence — characters not given the space or time to articulate their desires, and whom recognizably bottle up their anger, fear and angst as a means of survival.

In his Boston Globe review of Barbara, Wesley Morris gets at the root of why these characters are stuck gazing instead of speaking: “[T]he suffocation of the Stasi surveillance apparatus imposes a kind of severity upon every look, conversation, and urge … Life under constant inspection and surveillance [means] the suppression of expression.” Each of Petzold’s theatrical films have a central surveillant — every character is being watched, in one way or another, and their life is driven by what they can and can’t do under such inspection. Often, it’s the state (or agencies of the state) that keep ubiquitous eye on Petzold’s players, as in Transit, Phoenix, Barbara and Ghosts. Other times, it’s lovers or family, like the husband in Yella and Jerichow or the parents in The State I Am In (who themselves are also being watched).

Surveillance

In Wolfsburg, Ghosts and Yella, Petzold even goes so far as to literalize surveillance by momentarily watching his characters through store CCTV cams. It’s worth noting that these moments aren’t used, as we might be accustomed in mainstream cinema use, to show people during acts of theft or violence. Here, the filmmaker uses them as if another camera angle, acknowledging a pervasive, often inescapable system of examination.

Transit also finds Petzold employing the CCTV footage right as Georg enters Marseille — the first explicit use of modern day technology in Georg’s yesteryear existence. The film also reprises the openings of The State I Am In and Ghosts, transposing Franz Rogowski over Hammer, who looks over his shoulder as sirens pass his cafe, revealing an immediate sense of paranoia and surveillance, which is obviously put in place by Nazi rule.

However, the Petzold Gaze in Transit mostly manifests itself in exchanges between Georg and Marie (Paula Beer), the woman in search of her husband, whose identity Georg has assumed. Their first interaction, a series of looks that call to mind the first ganders between Hoss and Benno Furmann, and later Johnny Lenz, is well detailed by our narrator (a startling new development in Petzold’s oeuvre). Similar transactions occur many times before they get to know each other better and are able to communicate in private dialogue.

Midway through Transit, we’re offered further articulation of the muted glances between Petzold’s characters. A hotel hallway full of refugees look at each other after watching a screaming woman dragged by officers from her room. “Their gazes met … before averting their eyes,” the narrator tells us. “And he knew what was making everyone so still and hushed: it was shame.” This is something that Nina Hoss so beautifully internalizes on screen in films like Jerichow and Phoenix: the shame of not belonging, being tossed off or caged in, unable to help yourself or those around you. And Beer capably continues in Transit the silent personification of the same calculated hesitance.

More than one critic has mentioned the striking similarities between Beer and Hoss, noting that the latter’s work hangs over the former’s performance, because they are so similarly styled. When talking with MUBI, Petzold makes a good point regarding Hoss’ replacement, saying that through their collaborations, the actress now has much more of an on-screen identity than when they starting working together (Hoss was 24-years-old then). Transit being a film about liquid, ungraspable identities is surely more serviced by a lesser known like Beer — especially for German audiences, I’m sure.

Transit: Conclusion

Barbara and Phoenix both ended with Nina Hoss staring at another man, her countenance perfectly articulating a complex sense of wear and relief. Transit, too, ends with a gaze that hints at the possibility of relief. But what’s important about Transit’s ending, compared to the similar ending of its two predecessors, is the ambiguity that Petzold allows. This distinction, among many others (like narration), is evidence that the filmmaker is refurbishing his long-held preoccupations to a new and exciting form.

In a contemporary review of Wolfsburg, critic Neil Young was frustrated with Petzold’s insistently minor tone from film to film, saying, “At this stage in his career … Petzold needs to deliver rather more if he’s to make his long-overdue breakthrough to the next level of international renown.” Flash-forward 15 years and, though I know Phoenix was canonized by the folks at Criterion, perhaps the filmmaker has finally, with the film explicitly based on the source he claims to have been implicitly adapting since the beginning, made the movie that will make its director an art household name. It would make sense as Transit finds Petzold stepping away from his sparse stories — a mold he has continually made compelling, but perhaps has also exhausted — to create an open and complex work that no longer strangles viewers to a definitive conclusion, but invites them to imagine its possibilities.

The filmmaker, who told Film Comment he likes to think of his work in sets, said he will follow these last three films with a trilogy of fairy tales, suggesting we can only expect his future work to further indulge and draw on the playfulness of Transit. Based on his success with this film, I very much welcome this next chapter, and wonder how, or if, the suppressed Petzold Gaze will be developed within it.

This film was viewed at the 2018 Milwaukee Film Fest and currently has no U.S. release date.