Screwball

Screwball comedies are commonly associated with rapid-fire dialogue and physical slapstick, eccentric supporting characters, absurd coincidences, and the playful reversal of gender and class dynamics. The film series Screwball – The Art of Conflict, a collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as part of its annual theme “Resolving Conflicts!”, understands screwball comedy as a cinematic conflict resolution machine in which conflicts are not escalated toward a goal, but are continuously generated, shifted, transformed, and redistributed.
“Resolving Conflicts!” deals with historical and contemporary forms and practices of conflict resolution. It asks how conflicts are negotiated in science, art, and society, what strategies have been developed to resolve them, and how different media are used to reflect on conflicts productively. As part of the public program of the annual theme, the film series focuses on a comedic genre that emerged in the early 1930s during the Great Depression in the United States and became one of the most influential narrative forms of classic Hollywood cinema.
While romantic comedies tend to follow a relatively straightforward path from the first encounter between two characters to a harmonious happy ending, screwball comedies draw their energy from everything that happens in between. Misunderstandings and power games, embarrassing scandals and ludicrous revelations, false identities and social masquerades are not merely obstacles on the path to reconciliation, but rather what breathes life into the cinematic world. The conflict is not carefully constructed in order to be overcome, but rather excessively exhausted—until it wears itself out, dissipates, or transforms.
It is precisely in this that screwball comedy offers a different perspective on conflict resolution. Sometimes the central conflict recedes into the background or is temporarily forgotten, sometimes it dissolves because the initial situation is fundamentally reevaluated, and sometimes it finds a temporary resolution. Solutions do not appear as definitive assertions of success, but as provisional arrangements. Accordingly, many screwball films do not end with a grand gesture of reconciliation, but with a tongue-in-cheek happy ending that is aware of its own makeshift nature.
“Resolve conflicts!” Last but not least, the screwball comedy takes the exclamation mark in the title of the annual theme seriously. In screwball comedy, conflict is not primarily a big question mark—the one problem that needs to be overcome—but rather a cascade of exclamation marks: a constant impetus to speak, to act, to move forward. 
The series Screwball – The Art of Conflict, curated by Till Kadritzke, brings together four classic screwball comedies from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as an update from the 1970s. In their different approaches to conflict, the films shift the focus from the outcome to the process – and show that “resolving conflicts” can also mean thinking about conflicts differently. (Till Kadritzke)

On May 26, 2026, an additional film screening will take place at our partner institution, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 
To Be or Not to Be (USA 1942, dir. Ernst Lubitsch) · Original version with subtitles. 
Admission is free. More information & registration.