Last Thursday the 26th in the morning, the Filmoteca de Catalunya filled with film students eager to hear what Christian Petzold would discuss during his more than two-hour masterclass. The German quickly took over the auditorium, without hesitation: “I used to be terrified of public speaking—now I could go on for hours and hours.”
Petzold did not deliver a conventional theoretical lecture and was openly reluctant to answer questions about himself or his work: “I want us to talk about cinema, not about me.” And that is precisely what he did, unfolding a constellation of fragmented references that revealed the small yet significant obsessions shaping his temperament and cinephile gaze.
One of the session’s central threads was desire and its representation (or rather, its concealment), with an indirect lesson drawn from François Truffaut. The openings of films—the way they introduce us to each character’s particular world—also took up much of the seminar, including a self-reference when he screened the opening of his own Barbara (2012). Like its protagonist, who flees, the class concluded with a moral and aesthetic reflection on chase sequences, almost as a foundational genre of cinema (“everyone’s dreams are full of chases”).
For the eternal students of cinema (all of us!), for those of you who have devoured the entire Focus, here is the playlist, the carte blanche, the essentials of Christian Petzold:
- La Peau douce (François Truffaut, 1964)
- The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
- Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
- The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
Don’t miss out our interview with Christian Petzold!
