“I See Dead People”: Neoliberalism as Purgatory in Christian Petzold’s 'Yella'

Vasco Baptista Marques

The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by team member Vasco Baptista Marques, who will talk about “'I See Dead People': Neoliberalism as Purgatory in Christian Petzold’s Yella". The session will be held on Feb. 25, 2026, at 15:00 WEST in room B201 of NOVA FCSH (Av. de Berna, 26 C).

ABSTRACT At least up to Barbara (2012), all the feature-length films that Christian Petzold directed for both cinema and television – from Pilots (1995) to Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (2011) – take place within an invariable historical-political context: that of a unified Germany, born after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). Over this territory hovers a ghost: a bodiless force which, though most often anchored in the background of representation, conditions on the surface the actions, dreams, and nightmares of the characters who move through it. In all the films belonging to the first phase of Petzold’s cinema, this specter can be identified with the very system that has governed us since the late 1970s: neoliberalism. Yet in none of them is this identification as explicit as in Yella (2007), where neoliberalism is conceived in the image and likeness of purgatory – as a regime that condemns us to remain in an intermediate state between life and death. The analysis of the film’s narrative motifs and formal strategies will form the core of my presentation, throughout which I will also seek to show how Petzold’s cinema relates to the so-called “Berlin School”, and how Yella seems to engage – even if involuntarily – with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of death, as articulated in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976).

* Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. https://filmdeath.fcsh.unl.pt/