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1 - Thomas Arslan: Realism beyond Identity

from I - The First Wave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

Marco Abel
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Summary

A small subject can provide the pretext for many profound combinations. Avoid subjects that are too vast or too remote, in which nothing warns you when you are going astray. Or else take from them only what can be mingled with your life and belongs to your experience.

—Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

Arslan makes films about Germany that reveal how we are. … Films about “problems” start with the assumption that in the end the system in which they take place is in the right. Cinema as made by Arslan knows the hope that there is still something else.

—Olaf Möller, “Der Traum vom anständigen Leben”

Beginnings

Let us begin our exploration of the cinema of the Berlin School by turning to a filmmaker of the group's first wave—a director who by virtue of his ethnic background is cast as being concerned with the representation of (ethnic) identity: Thomas Arslan. Arslan, born in 1962 in the north-central German city of Braunschweig, spent most of his formative years in the heavy-industry city of Essen but lived between 1967 and 1971 in Ankara, Turkey, where he attended elementary school. His parents arrived in West Germany as part of the first generation of Turkish immigrants who came to the country as a result of the Anwerbevereinbarung (recruitment agreement) West Germany had signed with Turkey in 1961 (following the signing of similar treaties with Italy and Greece in 1955 and Spain in 1960).

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The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School , pp. 31 - 68
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

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