Like many of his colleagues, Christoph Hochhäusler, born in 1972 in Munich, came to filmmaking only after he had immersed himself in a different art form. Before studying filmmaking at the HFF München (1996–2004), he studied architecture at the Technische Universität (TU) in Berlin (1993–95). This interest in architecture—that is, space, geometry, façades, lines, angles, and how buildings organize social space, affect subjects by creating subject positions, as well as move people—has clearly left its trace on almost every frame in his filmmaking practice. If Arslan's cinema is attuned to teasing out the extraordinary in the mundane, rather than tourist, parts of urban spaces; if Petzold's cinema repeatedly returns to Heimat-building as a force that affects his German subjects' lives; and if Schanelec's cinema is primarily intrigued by the role Sprache plays in her characters' existence—then Hochhäusler's can be said to be a cinema of the Blick (gaze) rather than the image: whereas the latter emerges out of the pictorial tradition defined by its two-dimensionality, a Blick expresses a geometric, architectural, three-dimensional sense that affects our relationship to what we see (and hear) on screen. A Blick, then, is an intensification of an image: the transformation of a two-dimensional object (and the affects that emanate from it) into a three-dimensional space (and the affects that circulate through it).