The female halves of these couples struggle with the seemingly effortless abilities of their counterparts. In Mia Hansen Løve’s Bergman Island (2021), or in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), couples decamp to summer vacation spots to carry out artistic projects. The tension between doers and watchers can also be split across a gendered divide in artmaking couples. Forgoing and unlearning our own resistances and tendencies is, these films partially suggest, a necessary part of artistic development.Ī Summer’s Tale, dir. He is only able to somewhat surmount his creative, romantic and social blocks with the help of adventure-oriented Margot, who works a summer service job having recently completed a PhD. In A Summer’s Tale (1996), for example, isolated musician Gaspard is susceptible to Leon-like indulgent despair – ‘I see everyone but they don’t see me!’ he bemoans. Much of Éric Rohmer’s work (which Petzold claims inspired Afire) is built around constellations of wayward art students, musicians or painters who, during the summertime, reconcile artistic and personal difficulty through intimate contact. Perhaps for this reason, the summer film is a tried-and-tested vehicle for exploring how these conflicts rise to the surface. Often, the friction between them finds its most potent expression in the claustrophobic context of the holiday home, where choices about how to live each day – how to spend one’s time – are placed under a microscope. These oppositional typologies – of embodied action and detached observation, doers versus watchers – might be found in any number of artistic and scholarly groups. At one moment, Felix is compelled to remind Leon – who constantly refers to his novel as a kind of inanimate overlord (‘my work won’t allow it’) – that, as forms of labour, such domestic activities are equally valid alongside artistic pursuits.Īfire, dir. Still, they allow summer’s rare infusion of pleasure to wash over them and the menial tasks they perform. Felix and Devid are equally busy, and bond when fixing the roof of the house together. Nadja (who Leon at first calls ‘the Russian’) is constantly on the move, riding her bicycle towards the city or the sea, working at an ice-cream stand, making dinner for the group, putting groceries away. She organises aid for villagers whose homes have burned down, rallies against local corruption and refuses to live the life of leisure that her family’s money would allow. For hours together I gazed out of the window at the sky, at the birds, at the avenue, read everything that was brought me by post, slept.’ Their neighbour Lidia is a woman of action. ‘Condemned by destiny to perpetual idleness,’ the painter reports, ‘I did absolutely nothing. Chekhov’s short story ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ (1896), which inspired Petzold’s film, centres around a landscape painter who recounts a previous summer when he stayed at a friend’s house for a holiday. It is equally where the artist cultivates a stance of distanced observation. The window is the voyeur’s archetypal perch. One night, Leon wakes up and pulls back the curtain to find the others playing badminton in the backyard with LED-lighted rackets. ‘Are you spying on her?’ Felix asks Leon as he watches Nadja through a window. The two are joined in the house by Nadja (Paula Beer), the daughter of a family friend, and Nadja’s sometime lover, a lifeguard called Devid (Enno Trebs). Wildfires are raging just 30 kilometres away. Leon (Thomas Schubert), a twenty-something neurotic writer finishing his second novel, has left Berlin with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), a budding photographer working on his art school portfolio, for a vacation house near the Baltic Sea where they hope to finish their respective projects. ‘Anything may be out of a window,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1929, ‘a ship – a desert – London.’ For the protagonist of German director Christian Petzold’s Afire ( Rote Himmel, 2023), the world is framed by windows. Christian Petzold’s Afire joins a long lineage of summer films only to demonstrate how the climate crisis may forever alter them
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