Neoliberalism and Border Crossings in Recent German Cinema

This thesis explores the actual impact of neoliberal or free market policies on the real lives of people in Europe from the 1980s onwards as refracted in cinema. The critical framework in Chapter One will summarise the debates about the impact of neoliberalism on Europe and especially German society and cinema. I first discuss two notable views of neo-Marxist critics: the European Union as a neoliberal project and the EU as a counterweight to the free market (and a site of potential social solidarity). I then turn to the Hartz IV Laws – the ‘modernisation’ of social welfare regulations – which have been and remain a crucial plank in German neoliberal restructuring. The opening framework ultimately finds that under neoliberalism and globalisation there is a splintering in society. By analysing a body of recent German films this thesis aims to answer the following questions: Do the economic and political imperatives of the new economy compel the characters in the films selected here to cross borders (geographical, legal, economic and moral) or do they have a choice? Is there resistance to the dominance of media, or a refusal to comply with the corporate/economic structures? Do the characters find periodic escape? I will be dealing with a corpus of six audiovisual texts: Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (2003); Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (2003); Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004); Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007); Christian Schwochow’s Novemberkind (2008); and Dominik Graf’s television mini-series Im Angesicht des Verbrechens (2010). The subjects in these films face a choice between crossing borders and falling out of mainstream society. The filmmakers in my study offer only highly ambivalent or qualified possibilities for resistance or alternative human subjectivity. A final quality which these filmmakers have in common is their commitment to the serious portrayal of ordinary people, and it is this scrutiny which both restores dignity to the protagonists and diverges from neoliberal ideology