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In eleven feature films across two decades, Christian Petzold has established himself as the most critically celebrated director in contemporary Germany. The best-known and most influential member of the Berlin School, Petzold's career reflects the trajectory of German film from 1970s New German Cinema to more popular fare in the 1990s and back again to critically engaged and politically committed filmmaking. His combination of critical celebration and popular success underscores Petzold's singular cinematic achievement: the deliberate and shrewd negotiation of art cinema and popular Hollywood genre.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Artykuł jest próbą przedstawienia historii i istoty zjawiska artystycznego, które pojawiło się w kinie niemieckim w połowie lat 90., a które niedługo potem krytycy filmowi okrzyknęli mianem „szkoły berlińskiej”. Działający w duchu odnowy niemieckiego filmu autorskiego reżyserzy, wśród których znajdziemy tak znane dziś nazwiska, jak Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann), Valeska Grisebach (Western) czy Christian Petzold (Barbara), nie stworzyli wprawdzie nigdy żadnego sformalizowanego ruchu, jednak ich twórczość pozwala się analizować jako pewna całość oparta na określonym porządku ideologiczno-estetycznym, dotyczącym zarówno samych fabuł, ich formalnej konstrukcji, jak i działań okołofilmowych – produkcji, dystrybucji i recepcji. Charakteryzujące się audiowizualną surowością, narracyjną skromnością i realistyczną wymową utwory „szkoły berlińskiej”, realizowane najpierw jako niszowe produkcje telewizyjne, w pierwszej dekadzie nowego wieku wyróżniane podczas kolejnych edycji festiwalu w Cannes, z czasem stały się częścią europejskiego kina głównego nurtu, trafiając do świadomości szerokiej widowni.

The concept of intertextuality often remains a catchphrase for many different phenomena, but it is really a crucially important concept involving all narrative processes from the past to the present. What writer would not borrow from a plethora of sources, whether s/he does it deliberately or unconsciously? In fact, we could identify literature as an infinite fabric of narrative threads, and the more closely we examine a literary work, and the denser its composition, the more we can recognize the essential weave it is composed of. This can be powerfully illustrated in the case of the many different narratives involving the water nixie Undine (or Melusine), who was already popular in the Middle Ages, then was discussed in the sixteenth century, subsequently entered the fantasy of Romantic writers, and has most recently become the subject of a major modern movie. The cultural-historical arc from the past to the present powerfully demonstrates the fundamental working of intertextuality on both the vertical and horizontal axes. Writing, whether creative or factual, constantly operates within a web of narrative exchanges. On this basis, we are on firm ground when we claim that ancient or medieval literature is just as important for us today as nineteenth- or twentieth-century literature as a source of inspiration and influence, shaping both our worldview and value system and this through an intertextual chain of narratives. Of course, we move (hopefully) forward in our own time, but many of the analytic tools available to us are historically grounded.

This essay explores Christian Petzold's 2018 film Transit through the lens of waiting. In many ways a condition of our historical present, waiting is frequently perceived and conceptualized by contemporary theorists as an exercise of utter emptiness, entrapment, and submission. A portrait of German refugees in transit in Marseille during World War Two and based on Anna Seghers's 1942 novel by the same name, Transit is attuned to the experience of flight and exile in both the past and the present. But instead of simply offering an experience of transit and waiting fraught with despair and suffering, Petzold's film opens itself up to a reading in line with Siegfried Kracauer's sustained aesthetic conceptualization of waiting and the space of “the anteroom.” This space of the anteroom conceptually resonates with Petzold's own notion of the “transit‐zone” present throughout his films. Kracauer provides the frame to contemplate the wonderous beauty and possibility to be found in the formal elements of Transit, despite the fact that it is effectively a film about the precarity of waiting that can lead to violence and death. Close analyses of the film's mise‐en‐scène, cinematography, and sound give us access to these affirmative, even utopian, qualities of waiting and show us another side of things.

This article positions Christian Petzold's feature Undine (2020) in relation to German Romanticism. It considers the film as a turning point in Petzold's oeuvre, offering a way out of alienation: love engenders a comportment that is radically different from the rules of existence dictated by capitalism, the schedules and demands that mold life into a rigid form. The fluidity of water, I argue, is an analogy for a different mode of life--a floating that mirrors his own desired mode of creativity and contemplation, described by him as \"a state of hovering\" and by others as \"abeyance.\" But who can float above the neoliberal city, and who must go on kicking to keep from drowning? Through this question, a different kind of romanticism can be glimpsed, one that is less resolved than Undine might suggest.

[...]he takes it all in: the conductor from Prague struggling to get a full set of transit papers in time to take a post at the Caracas Spa Orchestra; the woman who, after getting denied a visa, spends all her travel money \"devouring countless oysters\" in a café; the husband, arrested during an attempt to free his imprisoned wife, who has to plead his case in handcuffs to a \"yawning\" functionary \"with oily, slicked-down hair\"; and the port city itself, \"bleak and dreary\" in its new role as a gathering place for fugitives and exiles. When the agonized talk about transit visas at a café irritates him, he reimagines it as the \"ancient harbor twaddle that's existed as long as there's been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip.\" No one has cell phones and some writers still use typewriters-but those are contemporary posters, music, and street signs in Marseille, contemporary clothes on the city's pedestrians, and contemporary, militarized police ripping terrified fugitives out of their beds. Petzold tends to avoid wide establishing shots, as Fisher notes, in favor of ones that show a setting from a specific, restricted position within it: the trees the Transit protagonist watches flit by through the narrow window of the train car in which he's hidden, for instance, or the swaying leaves Yella sees when she first wakes up on the shore.

La imagen habitual que se tiene de las ondinas es la de seres malvados, idea que se extendió en el siglo XIX especialmente. En cambio, los orígenes de este personaje mitológico presentan una doble cara, ya que también se pueden encontrar elementos positivos. Ondina de Christian Petzold, inspirada en el relato de Fouqué, crea una nueva significación para la figura de la ondina basada en dicha ambigüedad y la muestra en dos aspectos principales: la ciudad de Berlín (de la que se destaca su urbanismo) y las relaciones amorosas (donde el egoísmo ocupa un lugar central).

Through an analysis of Christian Petzold's films, this essay argues that there is an ethical dimension to images. The cinema of Christian Petzold is an important instance of the ethical function of images because it constantly negotiates and renegotiates the ethical intelligibility of the image and the ethical claims that images make on us. The essay's argument is developed in three stages: first, it outlines the theoretical concept of an image-ethics of dilemma, centering on the essential ambiguity of images; second, it briefly considers the function of particular multistable images in Petzold's cinema and their role in ordering representation in his films; and, finally, it offers a close analysis of Petzold's recent film Barbara (2012).