The Beauty and Violence ofHorror Vacui: Waiting in Christian Petzold'sTransit(2018)

Abstract

This essay explores Christian Petzold's 2018 filmTransitthrough 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,Transitis 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 ofTransit, 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.