Petzold Work

Volume 10 in our Moving Image series will be Screening Work: The Films of Christian Petzold, a monograph jointly written by Stephan Hilpert and Andrew J. Webber, and including interviews with the director himself.

There are two Christian Petzolds, but the other one was a Dresden church organist who features prominently in Wikipedia's "Compositions spuriously attributed to J. S. Bach" category. Christian Petzold the film director, born three hundred years later, is a Berliner, but something they have in common is international acclaim, both men having been fêted across Europe.

Christian Petzold the younger, perhaps the leading German filmmaker of our times, is a frequent collaborator with the actress Nina Hoss, who works mainly in German cinema but will immediately be recognised by fans of the American TV series Homeland. (That's her with her arms folded on the book cover.) Petzold has over the last decade made a remarkable series of movies: Yella, Jerichow, Barbara, and Phoenix, which are at one level thrillers about hidden identity, and at another, meditations on living and working in societies messed up by global politics.