The Morphology of Being Stuck
The article sheds light on the body of work of the leading director of the Berlin film school Christian Petzold. By drawing an analogy with Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, we analyse the paradigmatic repetition of a certain framework of film narrative that is not connected to genre conventions and thus try to find the authorial archetypal scheme of his films. This scheme places heroes-ghosts into transit spaces, into a state of being stuck, from which they cannot move. We understand the state of being stuck as an implicit political critique that reveals the idea of European mobility, physical as well as economical, as a lie.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!