Post social democracy Europe afterlife. A movie about moving around dead space on a society on its last breathe. It is very likely the closest a western filmmaker come to make a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie. Hoss is amazing of course in a movie that is very much about how she positions herself in every space and situation she is put in and I'm very impressed by how transparent Petzold's images are, the Carnival of Souls narrative is treated as a given, so he can just focuse in finding a very specific description of a way of non-living.

German capitalism, poor east and rich west, ghosts of the past, loneliness and existentialism... it feels as if Edward Yang was Alfred Hitchcock and if he would have been inspired by a tad of Weerasethakul, a film like this could have been made. But no, it's not Yang, Hitchcock or Weerasethakul but Petzold himself. Again Nina Hoss gives voice to thousands trapped inside their lives which are in half trapped in society. Are these people alive or dead?

I'm pretty much obsessed with Nina Hoss

Go west, to a ghost world, delve in the branches of business, in drowned modernity, find sex amid all the constant anxiety (not as a palliative but as a natural unfolding of this tense structure), and finally live your life in this intermediate state, between Germany's unification and existential ostracism. Petzold's rhythm and framing was rarely as acutely modulated as here, haunted by a grey, crisp light shedding on empty spaces, between Chabrol and Kurosawa, its mood allying a suspenseful thriller and a horror film.

a ghost story with the subtle and ironic touch of a lynchian ride into the subconscience, billed as thriller, but hard to pigeonhole it, offering to grasp it along the way. this beautiful and effective take on capitalism offers many layers and levels and packages it as an oddly harmonious and coherent genre garment, exhilarating in understatement.

ones disappearance in society, represented in empty spaces and extensive landscapes in connection with the ghostly, crumbly and fragile soundscape, stand next to the story dynamics of protagonists being victims and villains at the same time, falling in their self-definition of materialistic values.

genre hybrid and subtle shifter of layers - Petzolds hands down masterpiece was the best german movie of 2007 and the best one of the Berlinale festival of that year.

Bizarro como é um filme objetivo, um filme muito concreto, mas que ao mesmo tempo consegue ir preservando toda uma ambiguidade com o seu meio. Me remeteu muito ao Kiyoshi Kurosawa, essa abordagem sólida mas que sempre consegue se manter aberta. Um filme onde o signo parece que nunca é exatamente uma alegoria, mas parte de um pesadelo material da realidade.

A história da Alemanha, mas também do sistema capitalista. E é isso aí mesmo, Yella conclama sua liberdade frente ao tirano, mas Yella é a própria crise, vive da crise, e ciclicamente volta a abraçar o tirano.

Thought process in watching ‘Yella:’ 

Men are the worst.

Money is the worst. 

Capitalism is the worst. 

Men are the worst. 

Men are the worst. 

.... what if - everything - is the worst? 

Much love to Christian Petzold — he knows how to make a girl feel good.

"It was more than just not being able to hear anything, or make contact with anyone. It was as though - as though for a time, I didn't exist. As though I had no place in the world, no part of the life around me." - Mary; Carnival of Souls, 1962

Oh Yella, what have you done or haven't done? Christian Petzold's magical realism and subconscious cinematic threads spellbind in this often terrifying domestic violence thriller and straight-shooting, cut-throat business acumen romance. Money is on their minds, but to be obtained for an unclear and uncertain future that never feels a tangible reality; driven by both situational stress and greed. Yella tumbles into the water and whether or not she ever emerged is bound by a fate that seems predetermined and out of control. Greed breeds violence, and innocence mutates into evil. Dead or alive makes no difference.

Nina Hoss is an incredible actress. In Christian Petzold’s film Yella, she plays the title character, a woman constantly besieged by toxic men. At the apex of Yella’s (justified) paranoia and fear, the camera shoots her in profile as she sits slumped on a bed. She’s exhausted from being stalked by her ex and subjected to outbursts from other men.

Yella’s head hangs down, but then she turns and looks straight into the camera with that look of terror and exhaustion. It’s the opposite of Giulietta Masina reassuringly looking at the camera with warmth and hope at the end of Nights of Cabiria. There are multiple shots in Yella from the perspective of the stalker, so when she looks straight at the audience, it implicates us as another stalker. I almost felt guilty in the moment!

Christian Petzold Ranked