Ruins of the Third Reich at the Berlinale

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 28 February 2010 16:29

Written by David D’Arcy

A trip to the Berlinale always involves something more than cinema. Most years it’s also a journey into archaeology. And what better place for it than this tomb for Nazis and so much that they represented? It used to be easier to see the ruins of the Third Reich in Berlin.

They were inescapable, if not too distinguished. Now, with the rebuilding of the center of the city that’s been a work in progress since reunification, there are construction sites where there were once the shells of buildings. Still, every year, films at the Berlinale take you back to the darkest days under Hitler.

Not Just Riefenstahl

This time in the Berlin competition that journey into the past came in a new German-Austrian epic melodrama about a film, Jud Suess: Filme Ohne Gewissen / The Jew Suess: Film Without a Conscience, a feature about a movie that was made by the director Veit Harlan under the Nazis. It is banned today in Austria and Germany, except for "scientific" purposes.

20 million Germans saw Jud Suess after its release in 1940, and 20 million more elsewhere in Europe watched the film. The numbers reflect director Harlan’s feel for popular entertainment. He was not the filmmaker that Leni Riefenstahl was, but he did better at the box office.

The Nazi Jud Suess project was executive-produced by Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda (overplayed with disturbing gusto in the new feature by the German star Moritz Bleibtreu). Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, ordered his troops to watch it.

The 1940 Jud Suess was sentimental Nazi anti-Jewish melodrama, yet It was far from the most venal of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films. You need only look at newsreel from the time to see far worse. But Jud Suess may have been among the most effective.

It'’s the story of a 18th-century Jewish financier, who gains the confidence of the king of Baden-Wurttemburg, and is later tried and executed to the delight of a frenzied crowd after he's been intimate with a Christian girl. In the original film, she submits to him in order to end the torture of an opponent of the financier, who is screaming in a cell nearby. In his defense, Judd Suess tells the court that he was only acting on orders from a ruler whom he served. Sound familiar? Just add some flourishes of unintentional humor that would make Mel Brooks wince.

The melodrama worked then, provided it was shown to a willing audience. It doesn't work now, unless Nazi-stalgia kitsch is your thing, even though director Oskar Roehler has ramped up the sex and taken us through the defeat of the Nazis and the judgment of history on those who served them, like the actor Ferdinand Marian, who played Jew Suess. 

A screen Casanova before Goebbel's reinvented him as  screen Jew, Marian was married to a Jewish actress (played by Martina Gedeck, from The Lives of Others) whom he abandoned. I won't give away details of their absurdly improbable encounter once the war begins, but she ends up dying in the camps.

The new feature shows you how hard it is to return to that spirit of melodrama. It also makes you wonder what the point would be to try.

It's all the more preposterous that the filmmakers seem to have meant well. Try to see this disaster to watch how the actor Tobias Moretti plays the Nazi Era actor Ferdinand Marian to the letter, and beyond. Marian was so persuasive as Jew Suess in the 1940 film, we're led to believe, that he was sought out by women who wanted the adventure of sex with "a Jew." See it also for Moretti as Goebbels, just as over the top as Christoph Waltz’s performance in Inglorious Basterds. Does gestural sadism make screen Nazis fun to watch, and therefore OK?

Yet seeing Jud Suess anywhere will be a problem. Although the press packed into the Berlinale Palast for a screening, later crowding the press conference and forcing a crowd to watch it on a huge screen outside, the Germans who saw it weren’t seduced by the heavy breathing, heavy soundtrack and heavy guilt. Watch for it late at night on the History Channel, it at all.
 
For the making of he original Jud Suess, Jews were brought in from the ghettoes of Poland to give the film authenticity. They were sent back after shooting, and most perished in the death camps.

Ghetto as Potemkin Village

The Warsaw Ghetto, and its cinematic exploitation by the Nazis, is the subject of A Film Unfinished, by Yael Hersonski, which was also at Berlin.

A film about the ghetto was commissioned by the Nazis – since it was never finished and never made public, we don't know what the Nazis wanted to do with it. One soldier-cameraman, Willi Wist, was found by the filmmakers. Wist talks about filming in the streets and staging most of what was shot. We do see is the ghetto from more than one viewpoint, a Jewish village of rich, poor and all between. The Nazis were apprehensive allowing the outside world to see their treatment of Jews and East Europeans. This might have been a version of the Red Cross tours to the camps.

If there are images of starving Jews, some of them children, which seem intended to make the captives look inhuman, we also see footage of Jews in the ghetto living what appear to be bourgeois lives of comfort. The goal here seems to ne to convince viewers that this life of contentment was a reflection of the richness of a diverse community.

Narration from survivors, witnesses (read by actors) and the cameraman himself take us behind the lens, to the organization of scenes that were commanded and acted out on German orders, and repeated if necessary.

You feel as if you're inside a Nazi propaganda film, watching religious Jews pray, or groups of men and women remove their clothes and walk into what is meant to be a ritual bath. There is even a circumcision performed under orders on a new-born baby. Death was also part of the charade, as elaborate Jewish funerals were organized to show that the captive race had its own dignified death.
 
Seeing Hersonski's documentary now, there’s an eeriness to the rehearsed ceremonies, especially in the disrobing under duress before entering the bath. The same people would be going into showers a few months later. Mass graves were filmed as workers filled with them with bodies of those who starved to death in the ghetto. The graves look so much like those shown in films about Auschwitz and the other death camps that the footage seems generic.

"These impression in Warsaw had a profound impact on me," said the cameraman Willi Wist, echoing what that silent footage of mass graves is telling us, "although later I got to see quite a lot." You can only guess what he meant.

The Nuremberg Trial: Banned in Boston

Then there were the other films that weren’t seen. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, was commissioned by the US government after World War II. Director Stuart Schulberg mixed trial footage with a chronicle of the war and the Holocaust. Schulberg rescued Nazi footage from burning.

The Nazis were eager to cover or destroy their tracks. The job of identifying Nazi leaders on that footage was aided by none other than Leni Riefenstahl, after Bud Schulberg (Stuart's brother) brought her to Germany from hiding in Austria as a material witness.

There was more than enough material for the Schulbergs to turn out two other documentaries  for the courtroom – The Nazi Plan, four hours on Hitler’s rise and reign; and Nazi Concentration Camps, a gruesome hour-long compilation of scenes from the liberation of the camps by Allied troops.

The documentaries were shown to the judges and defendants at Nuremberg. After the verdicts, in April 1947, Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen eyed a larger audience for the film about the trial itself: "The very way in which the Trial was set up and conducted and the evidence which it produced constitute an historical document that should be of use, not only in motion picture theaters, but in schools and universities for many years to come."

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was released in Germany in 1948. Yet the film was never shown in the United States. By that time, America’s enemy was the Soviet Union, whose officers are shown cooperating in the trial of Nazi leaders. Fearful that a film exposing German crimes would imperil the Marshall Plan, the government decided not to distribute Schulberg's film in the US, and refused to sell it to Pare Lorentz, who was preparing the English-language version for an American release. 

While US officials fretted about fueling anti-German feelings (an odd concern, given than veterans had plenty of their own firsthand reasons to hold such sentiments), a Soviet film about Nuremberg, Sud Narodov (Judgment of the People) , played Times Square. It wasn't until 1961 that the American  melodrama, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, opened in the US, but that was a commercial project that needed no government approval.

Also Censored: The Good German

The Nuremberg Trial: Its Lesson for Today played for a largely American audience in a section called Berlinale Spezial. In the same section, a once-censored film played for a largely German audience in the International cinema, the official jewel of East German movie theaters.

The film was Der Aufenthalt, The Turning Point, a postwar story written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase and directed by Frank Beyer about a young German soldier who’s imprisoned by the Polish military after a woman wrongly accuses him of murdering her daughter.

East German authorities pulled the film from the 1983 Berlinale, because East German authorities thought their Polish neighbors in the military might find it offensive. Bear in mind that in 1983, when martial law was in effect in Warsaw, most Poles were more offended by the prospect of German and Russian troops coming across the border to impose order.)

The Turning Point was shown at the festival for the first time since then this year. Beyer, who died in 2006, didn't live to see it at the festival, but Kohlhaase was there, introduced with respect by Andreas Dresen, the gifted director from the former East Germany.

It’s the classic tale of a wrongly jailed innocent man. The context is what’s unusual here – a Nazis soldier presented as a victim in German film. The soldier, played by Sylvester Groth, is an end-of-war conscript isn’t old enough to have done much damage, but let’s not forget that the Germans slaughtered about 20% of the Polish population, the highest of all the countries the Nazis invaded. Given the circumstances, you would have had trouble finding anyone in Poland who thought there was such a thing as an innocent German.

Most of The Turning Point, adapted from a novel by Hermann Kant, takes place in prison. The scenes in the cells with ensembles of Polish and German prisoners play like theater. You get the claustrophobia of enclosed prison spaces, but also the vicious battles among Poles and Germans after a war has been won and lost. It's a film that any respectable country would be proud of, yet respectable isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of East Germany in the 1980s.

There's a self-pity here for a persecuted German that will be as unusual for Americans as it will be hard to stomach, but it's no less self-pitying than Das Boot, Wolfgang Peterson's 1981 nationalistic hit about the sailors in a U-Boat under depth-charge attack from a British ship.  The Turning Point won’t be coming the US anytime soon, unless it plays as a restored classic in a museum. See it if you can.

For other Berlin stories go to: http://filmfestivaltraveler.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=533:what-to-do-in-berlin&catid=105:travel-feature&Itemid=107

Roy Andersson's Swedish Love Story

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 10:23

Written by marion d s dreyfus

Over the weekend several films by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson were showcased at The Museum of Modern Art as part of a retrospective of the veteran Swedish director's work (from Sept. 10-18). The hard-to-categorize moviemaker was there to introduce a number of his screenings, which helped settle many of the questions that had unsettled this writer in the viewings.
 
Andersson not only spoke about his craft and goals with those who flocked around him (standing room only, for this relatively obscure auteur) but also generously took questions after the screenings.

His films are layered, hard to describe, except as a sort of Swedish Woody Allen. Ironic humor shoots through sad, absurd, lacerating and painful cut-outs of Swedish sentiment and living. Women tell their lovers to get lost. Customers are treated with short-shrift irritation by put-upon barbers. Dinner guests who don't know anyone at the table, or their hosts, pull the tablecloth out from under priceless crockery--to predictably disastrous results. Dreams are given realer life than "life" is given. People shout (something that in life, from personal experience, Swedes rarely if ever do) and become violent.

People casually display SS tattoos on well-weathered arms. Swastikas adorn the polished mahogany top surfaces of wealthy and presumably middle-class burghers. People have sex where one party is completely obsessed with his failing business, as his paramour is Oohing and Ahhing obliviously above him. Elderly people stand on chairs in Germanic-seeming solidarity.
 
Andersson answered this very question on this matter in the lilting low-country-accented English made famous by many Swedish actors in the '60s and '70s Scandinavian film heyday: "The Swedes, and Europeans in general, were secretly hoping that hitler would win WWII. It was only when the battle of Stalingrad occurred that people uneasily began to shift to the Allies. But throughout Europe, people still feel some sort of kinship with the Nazis and Hitler. That is why I have these symbols in my films--they are still angry, unresolved, still partially committed to the 'loser' of that war." He grinned, “They think wearing these symbols makes them strong and frightening.”
 
If you are not aware of this intriguing filmmaker, who has been working for the past 40 years, albeit not always in commercial film, then check out this MoMA retrospective. Both You the Living" and "A Swedish Love Story," were screened among a program of his key works. Andersson also mentioned that his film was originally titled just "A Love Story," but he was advised that by adding the word "Swedish" it would boost its commercial value considerably. While we laughed, it is arguably true.
 
Some of what he showed--and how he answered questions--suggested a country unresolved in its feelings since WWII, still in some ways pretending to be happy with the status quo. There was a cameo role of a clearly immigrant Muslim, but one who, because these immigrants have been in Malmo and elsewhere for nigh on 20 years, speaks fluent, flawless Swedish. Two decades ago, such an unremarked-upon auslander would not have appeared in the filmography.
 
Europe is changing, and these films reflect that, consciously or otherwise. Andersson merits a look-see, as many reviewers have already noted.

Roy Andersson’s work is presented by
the Museum of Modern Art
from September 10 – 18, 2009

(c) marion d s dreyfus 2009

Rendez-vous With French Cinema 2009 Reviewed

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 September 2009 18:58

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented its annual "Rendezvous with French Cinema." French cinema produces enough interesting films yearly to justify an annual series, something that seems less likely to be true of, say, Spanish or even Italian cinema, both of which are also showcased in a yearly series at the Walter Reade.

The annual series devoted to French cinema stirred considerable interest several years ago when it was presented in collaboration with the flagship French journal, Cahiers du Cinèma. This relationship, having ended, changed the programming which took on a more aggressively commercial cast--an outcome which would be unobjectionable if the commercial French cinema of today were aesthetically comparable, say, to the Hollywood cinema of the 1950s, which, unfortunately, has not been the case.

[photo above: “The Girl on the Train”}

 In previous years, there have been sometimes no more than three films by directors of international stature in a slate of at least a dozen films. Yet, needless to say, this series is probably the most consistently popular of the year at the Walter Reade. Past Rendez-Vous with French Cinema premieres have included Olivier Dahan’s Oscar-winning “La Vie en Rose,” Guillaume Canet’s “Tell No One,” Laurent Cantet’s “Heading South,” Christophe Honoré’s “Love Songs,” Cédric Klapisch’s “Paris,” Claude Lelouch’s “Roman de Gare,” Claude Miller’s “A Secret,” and Danielle Thompson’s “Avenue Montaigne.”
 
This year, however, that appeal should be well-deserved. To my amazement, the series boasted, by my count, new films by seven significant directors, including one world-class master, Claude Chabrol (who is having a North American premiere for "Bellamy" on March 12th).

Also within the series are new works by the following filmmakers:

Claire Denis, who, in recent years, has moved from strength to strength has a U.S. premiere (on March 13th) for "Five Shots of Rum" ("35 Rhums").

Agnès Varda, "the godmother of the New Wave", whose new film "The Beaches of Agnès" ("Les Plages d’Agnès" which is having its NY debut (on March 7th), is an autobiographical essay.

Costa-Gavras, whose work in more than one recent film has earned him a renewed interest by his shift to less ambitious material (or is it a less ambitious approach?) since his more political heyday in the '70s and '80s, will have a North American premiere (on March 9th) for "Eden Is West" ("Eden à l’ouest").

André Téchiné, who, at the very least, has consistently maintained a high level of craftsmanship within his prolific output, will see the world premiere of his social drama (on March 10th) “The Girl on the Train” ("La Fille du RER").

Jean-François Richet, who would be notable for his cinematically brilliant remake of "Assault on Precinct 13" alone, will have the U.S. premiere (on March 10th and 11th) of his ambitious two-part film, "Mesrine" Part 1 ("Mesrine, L’instinct de mort") and Part 2 ("Mesrine, L’ennemi public n° 1").

Benoît Jacquot, who has not ceased to produce challenging works in his, by now, long career is having a North American premiere for "Villa Amalia" (on March 13th).

Also of potential interest may be two films: "Versailles," a NY debut by first-time director Pierre Schoeller, the screenwriter of the excellent, "A Dreamlife of Angels" (March 6th); and "The Apprentice" (L’apprenti"), which received the Louis Delluc prize, is having a North American premiere (March 11th)—a film on the boundary of fiction and documentary by Samuel Collardey.

Considering that other New York venues with inferior projection capacities have presented extraordinary retrospectives of such major artists as Mikio Naruse, Manoël de Oliveira, Raoul Walsh, Luis Buñuel, Roberto Rossellini, and others, cinephiles have reason to disparage the current programming philosophy of the Film Society which appears to be more interested in pursuing fashionable trends than continuing to be the custodians of the great legacy of film art—something it has been throughout its history.

 Here follows are select reviews:

The Beaches of Agnès
directed by Agnès Varda
Varda's first feature predated "Le Beau Serge" by several years and this earned her the sobriquet, "godmother of the New Wave". Associated with the Left Bank of the Nouvelle Vague, she has pursued an experimental path with a sustained interest in the political. Her new autobiographical essay, "The Beaches of Agnès", pursues a mode of often whimsical free-association similar to that in several of her other documentaries. Here Varda playfully revisits the highlights of her life and career, interspersing clips from her films and other old footage. She traces the path from her childhood during the German occupation through her early filmmaking forays, her marriage to Jacques Demy, the birth of her two children, the death of her husband, up to the present. Varda, through her physical presence and her humorous commentary, is charming but one misseshere the depth and ambition of several of  films such as "Vagabond" or the breezy kineticism of "Cleo from 5 to 7" or the intellectual penetration of her fellow Left Bank essay-filmmaker, Chris Marker. "The Beaches of Agnès" is mostly (or entirely) shot on video and it is especially disappointing to see it transferred to 35-millimeter with a consequent degradation of image-texture.

The Apprentice
directed by Samuel Collardey
Collardey's film tells the story of a teenage boy sent to apprentice on a farm in the French provinces. The first-time director employs with sensitivity a quasi-neorealist approach to a pastoral setting, presumably working with (excellent) non-professional actors who memorably portray the heartbreak to be found within a cultural milieu where both quiet desperation and rustic beauty intersect to provide the frame for the moments of tenderness and boredom which punctuate these touching lives; this poignancy is, however, affirmatively balanced by humanistic intimations that this provincial world has escaped some of the ravages of the brutalizing spiritual corruption unfolding amidst a here-unseen urban modernity.

The film's texture seems compromised by either being shot in a video format or through recourse to a digital intermediate--one acutely feels the loss of sensuality which could have been secured by reliance on a direct deployment of the resources 35-millimeter; the thematic inflections of the landscape would have then been conveyed with stronger effect.

35 Shots of Rum
directed by Claire Denis
starring Alex Descas, Gregoire Colin
After assisting several notable filmmakers, such as Wim Wenders, Denis made her name with her promising, semi-autobiographical first feature, "Chocolat", introducing her abiding interest in Africa -- and in the European encounter with "otherness", generally. Since her first film, Denis has grown in stature as a director and has revealed herself as an exquisite formalist and sensualist with a highly refined mastery of film editing. "35 Shots of Rum" impressively continues Claire Denis's multicultural exploration of proletarian displacement, exploiting the presence of a brilliant cast headlined by stalwarts Alex Descas and Gregoire Colin. Descas is not so much an actor as an extraordinary presence, here playing a Parisian train driver whose relationship with his daughter subtly alters as the drama unfolds.

The extraordinary cinematographer Agnès Godard returns here as the camera-eye for Denis's exploratory style--the vehicle for an approach to narrative that seems to poeticize realism.

Bellamy
directed by Claude Chabrol
starring Gérard Depardieu
The legendary and prolific Chabrol ("Les bonnes femmes", "The Champagne Murders") has hewn most closely, among the Young Turks of the French New Wave, to the Hollywood genre film, having perfected a classical style which could accommodate his creative experimentalism. Chabrol has almost obsessively produced crime films and thrillers, thus engaging with his cinematic masters, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. In "Bellamy", he pays homage also to author Georges Simenon in another tale of bourgeois disquiet. Here Chabrol employs the iconic actor Gérard Depardieu for an immensely subtle--and creative-- performance as a police inspector possessed by a cool curiosity.

The film is, unfortunately, also diminished by a reliance on video and would have been better presented in a video format. Chabrol, one of the greatest living filmmakers, remains a consummate craftsman.

Eden is West
directed by Costa-Gavras
starring Riccardo Scarmarcio
After a few underrated commercial films, director Costa-Gavras became famous for a series of leftist political films which, although aesthetically conservative and intellectually shallow, were distinguished by a modicum of craft, especially with regard to rhythmic editing. In "Eden is West", Costa-Gavras falls back upon a classical showmanship of fluid takes, gracefully brisk construction, and forward motion to present a socially conscious story of the travails of an illegal immigrant from an unknown country who through an arduous series of adventures steals into France in order to reach Paris.

The Italian actor, Riccardo Scarmarcio, sensitively conveys the constantly shifting vagaries of his character's anonymity, alienation, and distress. "Eden is West" is finally a triumph of style -- the film does not escape a certain impression of superficiality but one cannot but admire the energetic skill with which Costa-Gavras orchestrates the narrative.

Mesrine
directed by Jean-François Richet
starring Vincent Cassel, Gérard Depardieu
This remake of "Assault on Precinct 13" was one of the most exciting films of 2005. Richet has a definite affinity for the action genre and this ability serves him well in his ambitious, two-part historical film, "Mesrine", featuring a bravura performance by Vincent Cassel as the protagonist of the title. Mesrine became a notorious career criminal who, beginning as a local gangster, acquired quasi-political pretensions as a rebel against the French state itself.

The first half was especially satisfying but, in the second half, my impression was that Richet lost control of the material. Gérard Depardieu is outstanding in a character part.