Richardson’s paper, entitled “Escape from Freedom: Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room,” examined Köhler’s film in the context of his earlier works, focusing on how Köhler’s film explores both the desirability and ultimate possibility of escape from social strictures, asking whether the culture and institutions that shape and constrain identity persist in one’s internal identity even after their material disappearance. The paper analyzed the film’s formal structure, its use of narrative and visual ellipses, its avoidance of psychologization, and its subversions of the tropes of the postapocalyptic film, arguing that the film can be viewed as a reflection and refiguration of Köhler's earlier aesthetic approach, one that simultaneously engages with and reflects upon the reception of his films and that of other films belonging to the Berlin School.
This paper was part of a series of panels (“The Berlin School at and around 20”) devoted to the legacy of the Berlin School, a group of loosely-affiliated directors who have been active in German cinema for the last twenty years. The panels featured papers devoted to recent films from Berlin School directors such as Ulrich Köhler, Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, Valeska Grisebach, Thomas Arslan, and Maren Ade, utilizing this moment and those films as an occasion for revisiting the Berlin School as a group/discourse/phenomenon/intervention and think through what has happened to the filmmakers as well as the broader cinematic and cultural landscape.