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November 27, 2010

Lights, Camera, Revolution!

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Review | Tags: Carlos, Carlos film review, Carlos movie review, Carlos review, Carlos the Jackal, Edgar Ramirez, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, Olivier Assayas, OPEC, terrorism in films, The Baader Meinhof Complex |
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Of Girls and Guns
(Image Courtesy: DVDTalk)

Olivier Assayas’ ambitious five-and-a-half hour biopic Carlos (2010) is obsessed with movement. For one, it attempts to chronicle at length the activities and philosophy of those radical counterculture movements of Europe in the 60s and the 70s. It is also keen on charting the movement of history in relation to its central figure – an aspect that is perhaps the most fundamental part of the film’s text. Then there is its endless preoccupation with physical movement: of people and of goods. Some commentators might point out that Carlos plays out as a good history lesson. Actually, it makes for a better geography course. From South America to Europe, from Africa to Asia, Carlos is always on the move. One could say that, like the shark, he will perish the moment he stops moving. (In this respect, the picture’s last line, after Carlos is captured by French feds, is terribly befitting). He is almost entirely defined by his location and his political orientation at any given point in time can be deduced if the country he lives in is known, which is why Assayas’ film is as much a travelogue as it is a biography. For Carlos, men are no different from the countries they represent – a mentality that eventually turns against him for good. Carlos is always on the move too, with its syntax infested with zooms, pans, tilts and dollies, as though it’s breathlessly trying to catch up with its subject. That’s why the film’s most telling shot is almost purely photographic: a very gradual zoom-out shot of a plane standing still at the Tripoli airport after it has been denied permission to land. Following the juggernaut that the film hitherto was, this decidedly incongruent shot leaves the viewer gasping for air. This is probably how Carlos feels at that moment as well, for he stands on the brink of a massive failure. Till this point, the film’s heady trajectory and Carlos’ cardiograph would have looked exactly the same.

Now, all this talk about Carlos in the present tense might sound nonsensical given that the real Carlos is an old man serving life sentence in northeastern France. But one must also keep in mind that Assayas’ Carlos is purely a fictional character built upon the filmmaker’s vision and based only partially on the real Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, as is noted in a clear-worded disclaimer flashed at the beginning of each of the three segments of the movie. This deviation is what saves the film from becoming an insipid reportage like The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2009), another genre film that tried to tap into the zeitgeist of the age. (In fact, the first section of Assayas’ film is no better than Edel’s, with the director spending hours together reconstructing what could have been dispensed with an intertitle or a newsreel; but narrative telescoping is not even remotely a part of the agenda). Shot on 35 mm (although I bet at least a few shots were done on video) and spanning about 25 years, Carlos religiously charts the rise and fall of the eponymous terrorist/revolutionary, played by fellow Venezuelan Edgar Ramirez, in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Painstaking production design that pays attention to period, geographical and cultural details – no mean job for a picture that spans numerous years and countries – and a nearly-anachronistic soundtrack which is almost always used in contrast to the imagery mark the major deviations from the genre. And Assayas’ camera is more than willing to parade these details, in addition to Ramirez’s seemingly malleable physique, and the result is a film with myriad empty, connecting shots.

To a large extent, Assayas’ film views Carlos as a chronic narcissistic turned on by weapons and women. “Weapons are an extension of my body” he tells a woman before thrusting a grenade under her skirt. He caresses firearms as if they were his lovers and kicks around women as though they were his handguns. Throughout, Carlos’ physical prowess and virility are equated with his military power. Scenes depicting his military exploits are interspersed with his conquests in bed. His political career in the film is bracketed by shots of him standing stark naked in front of a mirror and admiring well-built body and him lying on a stretcher clutching his private parts under the paunch. All this sounds awfully contrived on paper, but the fact that Assayas derives these metaphors from undisputed biographical details helps turn such tepid arthouse tricks into a clever piece of artistry. However, all this is made evident an hour into the film and Carlos remains more or less an unchanging protagonist for the rest of the film. Like Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos is the fixed centre of the film around which the universe rearranges itself, in turn redefining and reshaping him. (In retrospect, the last line of Fincher’s film describes him to a T). Does he hypocritically change sides despite his apparently unchanging cause or is it the volatile course of events that have remapped his loyalties? Is the world too dynamic for an old timer like him to catch up or is he a mere mercenary – a selfish, two-bit petit-bourgeois, as his friend puts it – afraid of death? It is probably the latter, although he would like to think not.

Curtained and distorted by wisps of cigarette smoke, Carlos is an amorphous figure, with ever changing identities, loyalties and worldviews, and a master of disguises (like Assayas himself, who seems to be hopping genres and feeding on them). Like your typical movie star, he appears to be always conscious of what he’s wearing and not half as much about what he is speaking or doing. As a matter of fact, the film illustrates, he is more a performer than a revolutionary or a terrorist. Throughout, Carlos revels in theatricality. Like Edgar Ramirez, he is a polyglot and before one thinks that he might not know a particular language, he delights himself with a mini-performance delivered in that very language. Fifteen minutes into the film, in its first explosive conversation, we get a sneak peek into the five-hour play that is to come. Carlos’ friend points out to him that he is only craving for applause. He tells her, “You’ll be hearing my name a lot”, and asks her to look at him when he’s talking. During the OPEC raid, he models himself after Che Guevara, complete with the beard and the beret (an actor playing a half-actor-half-revolutionary playing a revolutionary), and introduces himself as “My name is Carlos. You may have heard of me”. The conference room itself resembles a theatre, where he directs his seated audience-actors and performs before them from the end of the hall, Elsewhere, regularly, he shouts, he throws tantrums and he flips, occasionally spouting hyperbole without apparently understanding them a la actor extraordinaire Jules Winnfield.

[Carlos (2010) Trailer]

“Without newspapers you don’t exist”, says one interviewer to him – a day before he finds a bullet in his medulla – winning a half-affirmative smile from Carlos. And why not? It is, after all, of his doing. He is the writer, director, the actor and the PR man of his life. He is, also, his own audience. Carlos lives outside himself. If his inner life comes across as something enigmatic to us in the film, it must be the same to him as well. Assayas does not push hard on the psychological front and is concerned more with the “what” of the story than the speculative “why”. It is not a human character, but the totality of events involving Carlos that is the hero of his film. He does not try to delve into the psyche of the man, or some such thing, to make his point. Instead, he lets Carlos’ actions reveal how self-contradictory a person he is. (Ramirez’s non-Method portrayal itself comes across as all surface and no center, as if he’s playing a mummy that’s been totally hollowed out) One might wonder whether he really believes in all those flowery platitudes that he mouths off now and then. (After all, he respects the truth value of clichés). It doesn’t really matter, suggests Assayas’ film, for his actions turn out to be far removed from the directives of these rhetorical remarks. He announces that he is a man of peace and that he loves life while he is more than happy to lodge an extra bullet or two into a man who only tried to resist him. He tells the interviewer that he studied dialectics in Moscow but also insists that no one tell him what to do. He speaks to the Saudi Arabian oil minister in fatalistic terms while, elsewhere, he comments that he is entirely responsible for his men. Possibly the greatest irony that marks Carlos’ life, which one federal agent notes towards that end, is that, for all his anti-capitalistic, anti-American baloney, he really had no criminal records against America.

In fact, this whole enterprise that Carlos sets up and develops is more symptomatic of corporate capitalism than anti-capitalistic revolution. Missions are throttled and determined by the inflowing funds rather than their agenda. A delayed assassination plan allows for competition to seal the deal. We witness countries nourishing anti-state organizations for political gains in the exact manner that corporations fund parties for fiscal benefits. The world is a market and revolution, a business. Pretty much like modern economics, Carlos illustrates how the numerous political maneuvers in different parts of the world are linked intricately to each other and often in contradicting ways (which reminds one of Godard’s observation regarding Jews, Hollywood, cinema halls and Mecca in his last). The film, itself, is directed and edited like a corporate thriller full of roundtable discussions and cutthroat business strategies. Moreover, Carlos is ostensibly a “gangster movie” as well, with its detailed account of the rise of an underdog, his notoriety and his disgraceful fall (in addition to its multiple nods to The Godfather (1972)). But then, there’s only a little difference between the two genres anyway. Mike Wayne notes in his book Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema that the gangster figure – a man who steals from the rich and keeps it for himself – in popular cinema is emblematic of the dark side of capitalism while the bandit – the Robin Hood variant – represents a subversive if temporary threat to the same system. One could take this further and observe that the revolutionary goes one better than the bandit in that he is interested in not merely providing temporary monetary relief for the poor, but in toppling the establishment that creates a need for bandits. The tragedy about Carlos (and many of his cohorts) is that he fails to recognize if he is being the revolutionary that he wants, an ineffective bandit out of touch with the masses or a parasitic gangster running a reign of terror.

Placing Carlos’ example in a broader context, Assayas’ film makes a strong if not the ideal case against armed struggle. It probes, as does Bellocchio’s masterful Vincere (2009) (although Assayas’ ideological investment is relatively insubstantial), into a hermetic passage in history and opens it up for present day-analysis. Like Edel’s film, but with a far more focus and detachment, Carlos examines how an armed movement with an urgent, uncompromising objective is bound to foster authoritarianism and how a revolution is deemed to go against itself when its operative hierarchy branches out from a single spearhead – the father, if you will. Make no mistake, whatever organizations Carlos was associated with, they were, thanks to their pigheaded adherence to a shallow and monolithic view of the world, undemocratic (“soldiers must fear their leader” goes the rule of thumb), racist (anti-Zionism easily mutates into anti-Semitism), sexist (especially when radicalism is uncritically married to certain religions, one of which Carlos is reportedly a proponent of), imperial (a pro-Palestine stance, it seems, reads as an anti-Kurdish one), bourgeois (by forming a bohemian clique far removed from the lumpenproletariat, the group it pretends to champion) and downright fascist. All these symptoms are even more relevant in the post-9/11 world where the resistance to occupation has translated into such a blanket rejection of western traditions that movements often lose sight of what is genuinely progressive and what is not.

Rating:

August 1, 2010

Flashback #81

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of Germany, Flashback | Tags: Andrey Stakhanov, Duisburg-Meiderich Steelworks, globalization in films, Mao, Michael Glawogger, The Blood of the Beasts, Workingman’s Death, Workingman’s Death film review, Workingman’s Death movie review, Workingman’s Death review |
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Workingman’s Death (2005)
Michael Glawogger
Pashtu/Yoruba/German/English/Ibo/Indonesian/Mandarin/Russian

“We imitate the figures and pose like the soldiers and our ancestors up there. We think these poses look really funny and avant-garde.”

Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death (2005) is the kind of film that helps illustrate why an authorial viewpoint is so important in documentary filmmaking. More than anything, Glawogger’s film suffers from the absence of a voiceover. This occasional pseudo-neutrality and non-involvement of the filmmaker is troubling precisely because it runs the risk of alienating the subject from the filmmaker. When you set out to make a documentary on the lives of the oppressed and unprivileged, there are only two ways you can take. One, you film their situation from at a considerable distance, clinically analyzing the causes of their misery and, preferably, pointing out a way out of it. Or two, you go up, close and personal, empathize with them, understand them and document their condition as you would your own, always being critical of what they are going through. Merely gawking at their wretchedness, in the name of neutral observation, amounts to nothing more than crowding near a man run over by a car. Filmmakers such as Pedro Costa have tried to resolve the deadlock between the imperative to avoid exploitation of one’s subjects and the need to document their living condition by, as Michael Sicinski sharply notes, making them active participants in the creative process, by fictionalizing the documentary with the consent of its participants. What this effectively does is that it gives a voice to the subjects, as if they are expressing themselves through the film incidentally organized by the director. Additionally, other filmmakers like Werner Herzog (who has done some atrocious things as well) continually (and, some might say, overbearingly) intrude on their subject’s space – interrupting them, commenting upon them and essentially reducing what they’ve shot to the level of found footage – and hence display a deep personal commitment towards the topic at hand.

What is interesting about Workingman’s Death is that it assumes all the above attitudes in turn. There are phases in the film that are simply brilliant, some interesting, some insipid and some plainly worthy of contempt. There is nothing you learn from the film that’s not summed up in its title. What one expects from it, then, is to study the politico-historical reasons for the eponymous demise of the worker and what it means to the proletariat today. And the film starts on the right note. As the title credits play, we are shown a collage of news reels and archival footage, all depicting workers doing various strenuous activities, cut at a rapid pace reminiscent of the early Soviet films. Likewise, the soundtrack is a patchwork of drilling noise and ominous percussion-heavy music. This prelude ends with a clip depicting a pair of bubbling Soviet workers pledging that they will mine an amount of coal that is much more than is expected from them in a single year. They are filmed with the camera pointing upwards towards them. Following this, Glawogger cuts to the present, to the image of a tired worker, whose face is covered with coal dust, posing for the camera. An on-screen quote from Faulkner reads: “You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy”. The contrast that the subsequent image – a wintry, deserted townscape – provides to the preceding montage is jarring and drives home the point right away. That the town is in Ukraine – an erstwhile member of the Soviet Union – only reinforces the central idea, which is the failure of the Utopian socialist dream of the omnipotent worker.

‘Heroes’, this ironically titled and finely directed first part of the film, is set in Donbass, Ukraine, a former mining hub of Soviet Russia, and follows the working routine of a bunch of freelance miners who gather the last pieces of coal left in the mountains. We are told that the government-run mining industry has been shut down and these workers have been left with no choice other than to form small groups, dig out whatever coal they can, sell them and share the profits. Glawogger intercuts these snippets of interviews with a piece of propaganda that details Andrey Stakhanov’s record-breaking stint at the same mine in 1935 when his team collected 102 tons in a single shift, virtually triggering off the Stakhanovite movement. The image of charged workers carrying their drills over their shoulders like rifles and marching forward, heaving their chests and singing under the open sky stands in stark opposition to these handful of miners crawling in a mineshaft that is hardy a couple of feet high and which could collapse on the slightest of errors. We realize how the image of the worker as envisioned (and perhaps constructed) by the Stalinists became more of a self-deceiving prison than a liberating guide for the common worker (an idea that was superbly explored in Makavejev’s Man Is Not A Bird (1965)). Glawogger enters the mine along with the workers, crawling about just like them, to document them (It is an achievement that the movie is shot in film and not in video, which would have been logistically easier). It’s a Herzogian moment no doubt, but to bring in an auteurist dimension would be to undermine the vision of the film, which is nearly what Glawogger himself ends up doing later in the film.

We are also shown the women in the area, who, too, make money by mining and whose camaraderie reflects the men’s. They are more cynical about education and believe that they would have ended up at the same position even if they had gone to college. They laugh at the idea that a faith in God might save them. Perhaps this gender equality is all that remains of the socialist dream. The workers are no more the all-powerful beings in control of the machinery they operate and the nature they exploit. They are now gleaners squeezing every ounce of coal they can out the nearly exhausted mines. The 102 tons of coal that Stakhanov mined in a single shift has become the stuff of legends, much like Stakhanov himself. They are less like Stakhanov and more like Sisyphus – mining to live and living to mine – with seemingly no way out of this wearing circle. Much like the mythological hero, these people seem to have come to terms with their condition. Glawogger, too, ends the section on a note that isn’t much different from how Camus concludes his essay: “…one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. For the first time in the film, we see something that’s really cheerful – a wedding. The couple and their friends celebrate near the Stakhanov statue at the centre of the town. They have bonfires. They leave. Lest it should become a gesture of complacence, Glawogger signs off with the image of the Stakhanov statue standing alone in the wintry night, with the bride’s headwear hanging from his left arm – the answer to a question that will be asked at the end of the film.

‘Ghosts’ is shot in Kawahljen, Indonesia, where we see a group of workers chip away large chunks of Sulphur from a valley and carry them all the way to a factory where they get paid. Although the section stands in contrast to the claustrophobic undergrounds of the previous segment, it is equally suffocating to see these workers gagging themselves to avoid getting poisoned while mining these pieces of Sulphur. Glawogger directs the segment with traces of fiction, including what appear like rehearsed conversations and with dynamic camera movements which are simply too beautiful for their own good. There is even a thread consisting of what seems like a gay couple, which is clearly ridiculed by the other workers, that throws light upon the hierarchies of marginalization. We are also shown tourists who visit this breathtaking valley and have themselves photographed along with these workers or temporarily assuming their roles. These tourists humour the workers, treating them condescendingly. One of the workers even talks about a French woman who wanted to kiss him. Evidently, Glawogger is criticizing these middle-class folks for their hypocrisy and for glamorizing what is essentially a life of ordeals. The irony here is that Glawogger does the same thing later in the film. However, there is one sequence which shows one worker selling a improvised Sulphur curio to the tourists at exorbitant prices. For a moment the film attains remarkable density where, for once, the basic human elements of the film are not overshadowed by class-level analysis. However, the political context in this segment is weaker as compared to the previous segment. For one, there is no reason why the film must be set in Indonesia. The only reason for this deadly routine of these workers that we can think of is globalization. But unlike in ‘Heroes’, that connection is not stressed upon one bit (apart from the fact that one worker is wearing a football jersey!).

But it is in the third and fourth segments that the film really plummets. The middle section, ‘Lions’, takes place in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and inside a slaughter-ground where hundreds of cattle are sacrificed, skinned and processed every day. Glawogger shows us all the killings in fine detail, without any restraint, spending considerable time chronicling the process of slaying, skinning and roasting the animals and lesser time talking to the people who do that. Of course, the reference point here is Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949, from which shots are borrowed by Glawogger for the title sequence), where the director took us through a graphic tour of Parisian slaughterhouses, revealing the opaqueness of our morality, among other things. But the subtle difference between the stylistics of Glawogger and of Franju reveals a world’s difference between the attitudes of both the filmmakers towards the killings. While Franju assembled the clips and provided a voice over that built on the material, Glawogger seems to treat the footage of the slaughter as an end in itself. As a result, Franju’s film became an analysis that based itself on the everyday work at the abattoirs whereas Glawogger’s film seems as if it merely wants to record workplace details (and possibly pass itself off as a “mature” film). The shots of animals being slit become the only destination for Glawogger here since his relationship between the people who carry out this task remains tenuous, at best, in this segment. The workers at the slaughter grounds mark the severed heads of the cattle they’ve slain so that they can reclaim them later. They ward off each other so that their share is not taken away. As indicated by the title of the segment and by its visual scheme where the workers appear nearly buried beneath the chunks of meat, Glawogger is actually comparing them with a pack of lions fiercely holding on to what they’ve hunted – quite a reproachable comparison I’d say.

The fourth part of the film, titled ‘Brothers’, sees the film shift base from Africa back to Asia, this time to a shipyard in Gaddani, Pakistan. We witness workers dismantling large ships, piece by piece, where one false move could result in death (In fact, all the workers shown in the film stand on the verge of death. They risk their lives in order to survive). The group consists of a large number of native and immigrant workers – perhaps from Afghanistan – who help and motivate each other at the workplace. They pine for their beloveds, whom they get to see only during the year ends. We also get to see one photographer who visits the shipyard, offering people a chance to get photographed with a rifle for ten rupees. Are we supposed to pity these workers that they are misguidedly revering terrorists? Or are we supposed to see how deep the Islamic resistance to westernization goes? Glawogger doesn’t answer, and perhaps rightly so. The problem in this section, however, lies in its aesthetics. Glawogger shoots the dismantling work from various angles and distances, creating a symphony of destruction. He uses ultra slow motion and lets us see every speck of dust that rises as the pieces fall. The sense of awe near completely undoes the drudgery that we are witnessing. That Workingman’s Death is shot in film makes it all the more beautiful and hence very objectionable. But that is not the biggest flaw of this segment.

There is no apparent reason why both ‘Lions’ and ‘Brothers’ should be shot where they have been. The slogging that we witness at both the shipyard and the slaughter house is neither geopolitically specific nor a result of global politics. As Michael Atkinson says, there is no reason to believe that it the condition of these workers would have been much better during some other century (the film is subtitled “5 Portraits of Work in the 21st Century”) or if they were in some other country with similar political climate (one worker in Nigeria says that they would be better off if their country allowed them to export meat – a statement that called for further examination, even if it seems shortsighted). Perhaps Glawogger’s exploration is metaphysical rather than political, but the fact that he sets the film entirely in socialist or third world countries throws that argument into question (I guess it would have done the film some good had there been a segment chronicling workers living in developed countries). Moreover, three of the five segments document certain religious practices of the workers, two of which involve animal sacrifice. In all the three segments, the workers have a deep faith in God, deterministically accepting what God has preordained for them. The suffering is taken as a given and some of them are even proud of what they do. Perhaps they find solace and meaning in religion. That all the three countries are Islamic is somewhat troubling (the film was made in 2005 – a time when the demonizing of Muslims was at its peak), especially given that Glawogger could have chosen any three countries for his purpose since there is nothing very specific about Nigeria, Pakistan or Indonesia that he underscores.

However, the film comes right back on track (or should I say, west of the track?!) in the final segment – the shortest and the best – of the film, “Future”, set in Liaoning, an industrial town in northeastern China. The segment opens with a bunch of men writing text on a platform at the town centre, moving backwards (Mandarin is written vertically), with what looks like volatile ink. The soundtrack plays the voice of chairman Mao extolling industrial workers. The point is clearly made: everything that we see and hear is transitory and is a relic of the past. This phenomenon of getting trapped in failed visions and unfulfilled promises of the past is what forms the central theme of ‘Future’ (in contrast to the disillusionment of ‘Heroes’). The focus soon shifts to the workers in the smelting factories of the township. The workers who are interviewed seem to have deep faith in their country and what it is doing for (and to) them. They acknowledge that times have changed, but retain that by equipping the factories with newer technologies, the nation could be back on the path of progress. These interview snippets are followed by a short conversation with a couple of youngsters standing near a people’s monument, located in the town, depicting workers enthusiastically toiling around a giant statue of Mao. The youngsters tell us that they like coming to this place and getting themselves photographed while assuming the poses of their ancestors. Of course, this attitude seems indicative of the workers as well, who insist on repeating rhetoric of the past even when the nation has moved into a market economy like the west.

There is also an epilog to the film, set in Duisburg-Nord Country Park, Germany – once the Duisburg-Meiderich Steelworks. The factory is evidently in a deplorable condition. We sense that only the phantom of the smelting plant remains. Kids have infested the rusted factory premises, hurling water balloons at each other. As night falls, we see teenagers making out. A narrator gives us the history of the smelting factory and what became of it later: “Then came the last shift. But not the end; rather a new beginning. The smelting plant was transformed into a unique leisure park. When night falls in Duisburg, the blast furnaces flare up. In neon green and fantastic colors. ARTificial light in the truest sense.” We realize that the factory was closed down, but we wonder what happened to the workers. Glawogger, meanwhile, seems to be wondering what happened to “the worker”. May be that’s what he was trying to ask – however objectionably, however inconsistently – throughout the film. As the attractions at the park wind down, as the teenagers and kids move out, as the neon lights fade to black, the manager at the theme park asks a question (which also happens to be the final line in the film), in the public announcement system, whose answer was already given by the image of the solitary statue of Andrey Stakhanov standing in the snow in the first segment: “Have we left anyone sitting in the dark?”

July 31, 2010

The Eagle Has Landed

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of the UK, Cinema of the USSR
[6] Comments

Triumph of the Will (1935)

The Fall of Berlin (1949)

The Ghost Writer (2010)

January 19, 2010

The Berlin School

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany | Tags: Angela Schanalec, Berlin School, Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan |
[2] Comments

Last month, the Goethe Institut – Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore, India organized a film workshop on the “New German Film Wave” (also known as the “Berlin School”) conducted by film scholar Dr. Peter Zimmermann (profile here) that took a look at the films (and directors) that are classified under this hip banner by world critics. Spread over two days, the workshop presented films and film excerpts, with runtimes ranging from half hour to 45 minutes, and attempted to discuss the stylistics of their directors in relation to the other German contemporaries like Fatih Akin, Tom Tykwer and Wolfgang Becker, who have had a more conventional approach compared to these “Berlin School” directors. Led by the trio of Christian Petzold, Angela Schanalec and Thomas Arslan who, apparently, studied at the Berlin Film School together in the 90s, the “New German Wave” seems to be characterized primarily by filmmaking techniques that deviate starkly from existing classicist forms. The workshop kicked off with small clips from Run Lola Run (1998), The Downfall (2004), Goodbye Lenin! (2003) and Head-On (2004) in order to establish what exactly the German New Wave is antithetic to. The following section attempts to take a broad look at this new movement based on a film each by its three major helmsmen and then a number of excerpts from other films. Although this may be a gross under-sampling, I was assured that these films are generally accepted to be the quintessential works of the movement so far.

Dr. Zimmermann clarified that “New German Film Wave” and the “Berlin School” are merely terms coined by world critics and are not bodies consciously founded by a set of filmmakers. However, it is also apparent that these set of films do have much in common, stylistically and thematically, and can well be placed under the same label of Berlin School, even if they do not stem from a clear-cut movement with well-defined agendas and motives. The most interesting aspect of these films is the fact that most of these are collaboratively produced by TV stations and film companies. Dr. Zimmerman pointed out that the TV stations, specifically their screenplay departments that fund these films, allow the first three films of new directors to be telecasted late night, in order to supplement theatrical releases which get little or no attention. The TV stations, surprisingly, give complete freedom to these directors, even to the extent of allowing the film to be experimental, and as a result the films, although whose scripts resemble TV dramas, are presented in a completely new film language that just can’t go unnoticed.

Let me present some of the general characteristics of all the films that had been screened at the workshop. For an initial approximation, one can describe the approach of the Berlin School as “cinema vérité minus the intimacy”. It is as if all the “new waves” have a tendency to negate their country’s legacy, to turn inside out the world’s perception of their cinema. If the French Wave attacked psychological realism, the New American cinema declared the studios to be dead and the new Russian cinema discarded montage for truth, the Berlin School seems to be directly going against the stylistics of the Expressionists. These films thrive on ultra-realism wherein the images are desensitized, possessing only a bland colour palette. Serene yet ordinary suburban or countryside locations with a startling absence of civilization often form the backdrop, thus making the characters the only beings in this deserted zoo. The soundtracks resemble ones from Tarr movies and accentuate natural sounds to such unreal levels that, beyond a point, images start accompanying sounds, instead of the usual way. These films have little or no non-diegetic music and predominantly present sounds from objects and characters present off-screen. The cinematography is sober, eternally static, almost always presenting detail in tightly-framed medium, long and extremely long shots, usually with a shallow focus that allows us to observe only one character at a time (much detail would be lost during pan and scan). Traditional dramaturgy is sacrificed for loyalty to reality of space and time and the films assume a plotless nature, content with merely observing the characters over a time interval. We are constantly reminded of the limits of the film screen and that a world lies beyond its four edges using shots in which characters are either cut off physically or leave the frame long before a scene ends. This technique is also used for the purpose of denying emotional identification with the characters who, in turn, flourish on repressed emotions. The films could be seen as a chunk of cinematic reality in four dimensions with no contrived starting and ending points. The typical themes seem to be emotional isolation and a felling of pointlessness in a sparse and cruel world and the inability to get a grip on life despite incessant attempts. Usually downbeat in presentation, these films almost always have an open ending.

The workshop, which began with an introduction to popular German cinema influenced by the likes of Hollywood, was succeeded by a screening of Thomas Arslan’s Holidays (Ferien, 2007). Strikingly similar to Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), Holidays presents us a struggling translator Anna (Angela Winkler) and her husband Paul (Uwe Bohm) who travel to the countryside to visit her parents. We soon learn about Anna’s extra-marital affair that results in the breaking up of the couple. Holidays is shot in an idyllic countryside where nature is at its prettiest and its sounds, the most dominant. As if indifferent to the petty tribulations of these individuals, this nature, with its majestic stance, reminds us of the transitory nature of their dreams and hopes. The soundtrack is stylized with hyper-real sounds of gusts of wind and ripples of water from the pond located near the villa where the characters stay. Low on plot and with conventional writing tricks, Holidays contains some fine performances with understated emotions but the film still cannot transcend the limitations of a middle-brow drama that has too few words to provide meaning to the silences between them. As a result characters come across as perennial whiners who have only themselves to blame.

Almost same is the case with Angela Schanelec’s Afternoon (Nachmittag, 2007), which discards even basic plot requirements to capture of-the-moment experiences of its characters. Taking place, again, in a serene suburb where an actress Irene (played by the director herself) has arrived to meet her son Konstantin (Jirka Zett) – an unsuccessful writer who lives and tends to his uncle Alex (Fritz Schediwy). Irene is disheartened to see her son in such a state and tries to help in vain. The highly idiosyncratic cinematography of the film restricts the film frame to a very small space and lets the action evolve irrespective of the character positions with respect to the camera. Shot-Reverse Shot techniques are eschewed in conversations and a Kiarostami-like approach is taken up. With barely fifty shots in the movie, naturally, a lot of pressure is placed on the actors’ shoulders and they do a convincing job. Characters are written in such a way that they complement, mirror or negate each other in a fashion that isn’t entirely unseen before. One big blow for the film is its choice to be a explorative narrative film. If only Afternoon chose to be a non-narrative contemplative cinema that never worried about what the characters felt, it could have effectively made us “feel” the titular afternoon that forms the backbone the movie.

Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007) is perhaps the most renowned of all the films of this collective and rightly so. Richly layered and completely low-key in execution, this typical Berlin School product follows Yella (Nina Hoss) – a young woman whose professional and personal life seems to have come to a stalemate. With the hope of starting anew, she leaves for West Germany after selling off her company. There, she finds herself as an assistant to the flamboyant Philipp (Devid Striesow), getting involved in large-scale business deals and witnessing corruption, back-stabbing and forgery all the way. But that does not seem to be much of a bother compared to the ghosts of her past, which she attempts to renounce, that haunt her. At heart, Yella is an acknowledgement to the fact that no one – neither an individual nor a country – can completely escape the past. Mildly nostalgic about the life and times in East Germany, Yella boasts of remarkable production design, wherein images from East Germany are laden with lush greenery and vast open spaces, as if providing people with spiritual freedom and prosperity if not economic, while those from West Germany are endowed with rigid, geometrically precise furniture with icy cold blue colour and claustrophobic, corporate buildings dominating the frame. Carefully treading the line between being instructive and being neutral, Yella could well claim to be, aesthetically and contextually, the most triumphant of the New German Film Wave.

Now, there are some very big complaints that I have with this so-called Berlin School. All the films of this movement that I have seen deal with the age-old theme of urban loneliness, empty living and emotional alienation. I really don’t have a problem with this redundancy as long as the approach taken offers a fresh perspective to these phenomena. But with Berlin School, these serious issues come across as mere notions waiting to be illustrated cinematically. There is no political, cultural or social exploration whatsoever in any of these movies. It is as if the directors assume emotional isolation to be an isolated phenomenon by itself, devoid of historical and political connotations. None of these films seem to want to engage us in a socio-political discussion within the fabric of the family drama that is unfolding on screen (Only Petzold’s Yella provides a historical dimension if not examination). Even when situations and characters are written to serve as microcosms of the German society, the statements made are too broad and general to have any contextual weight (There is barely a statement which concretely locates the film in time and geography – a move that seems only too simplistic). Also, none of these films seem to be personal in nature, for avenues to exploration of the cause of tumult is sacrificed for unwarranted recording of consequences. One is only reminded of the egg that Pedro throws at the camera in Los Olvidados (1950)!

Furthermore, the aesthetics of this collective seems to be extremely genre-limited. It is difficult to imagine how the school can think of venturing into other genres or deal with other themes or even dig deeper from where they stand now without having to relinquish, in part or completely, their style which relies on a rigid, academic mise en scène, inflexible camera work and protracted shots. The more dangerous issue is that the school’s aesthetics runs the risk of being compromised by the shallowness of the scripts. The general approach of these directors invites us for a detached rumination about the life of the characters, but the scripts contradict that intention by not having any depth of examination, instead calling for emotional engagement. As a result, the movement comes across less as a prism for evaluation of contemporary Berlin than as a bag of stylistic eccentricities that serves no purpose other than to call attention to itself. Additionally, these films rely too much on “dead times” and silences to evoke empathy, in vain. They seem to equate mundanity of the script to that of the characters’ lives and, hence, provide little insight in these stretches of time. One needn’t look any beyond than the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to understand what the power of these seemingly banal passages of time are. Even in a completely plotless and clinically mundane film such as Beware of the Holy Whore (1971), Fassbinder scathingly and self-reflexively reveals political, social and sexual power games at work in the city. Well, one shouldn’t complain. Not every director is a Fassbinder. And not every film movement is a Nouvelle Vague.

[Originally published in Indian Auteur]

November 29, 2009

Children Of Men

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of Germany, Review | Tags: Burghart Klaußner, children in film, Christian Friedel, Das weisse Band, Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, Das weisse Band film review, Das weisse Band movie review, Das weisse Band review, fascism and film, Le Corbeau, Leonie Benesch, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Michael Haneke, Palm D’Or 2009, Palm D’Or winners, Rainer Bock, The Conformist, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon, The White Ribbon film review, The White Ribbon movie review, The White Ribbon review, Ulrich Tukur, Un Prophete, Ursina Lardi |
[22] Comments

At Loose Ends
(Image courtesy: Empire Online)

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon had to fight it out with quite a few heavyweights this year at Cannes for the Golden Palm including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Jim Jarmusch, Jane Campion, Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino. It has also been selected, but not without some controversy, as Germany’s official entry for the Oscars. All I can say is that Austria must be happy. Since the end of the Second World War, fascism has been studied and dissected on film many times over with varying degrees of success. With a veteran such as Haneke at the helm, writing an original script for the movie, I did expect more than what The White Ribbon presents here. Some reviewers have pointed out that being familiar to Haneke’s body of work will help one appreciate this film more. I had only seen his The Piano Teacher (2001) before this one and felt that The White Ribbon does not really succeed because Haneke undoes everything that he did right in the former film. Even his subtle, cerebral and gently commenting mise en scène is not able to heal the film from the blows dealt to it by its script. Sure, it is an ambitious film that many directors would not have been able to pull off, but it falls way too short of standard for a director who has established himself as one of the most important directors working.

The White Ribbon brings to us a chain of mysterious and violent events that occur in a village in Germany prior to the First World War as narrated by a teacher (Christian Friedel) who worked in that village during that period. We are presented with a host of characters from various walks of life – the Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and his wife (Ursina Lardi) who provide employment to majority of the village, the Fender family of peasants who have just lost the lady of the house in an accident at the Baron’s workplace, the village doctor (Rainer Bock), who has recently had an accident riding a horse, and his mistress and the midwife of the village (Maria-Victoria Dragus), the village priest (Burghart Klaußner) and his family and the narrators own love interest – the new nanny at the Baron’s – the seventeen year old Eva (Leonie Benesch). We are made privy to the happenings of each household and the dirty underbelly hiding behind the flawless exterior of the quiet and secluded village. Mishaps pile up one after the other, progressively violent, and suspicion soars in the village as the culprit is nowhere to be found. All these characters and events are held together on a single clothesline that consists of the children of the village. They are the witnesses and victims of the events that unfold. They are also the documents that would define the course of history – of the village, of the country and of the world – that is to come.

Primarily, Haneke’s film proposes political, social, religious and sexual repressions exhibited on a young generation by its predecessors as the roots of fascism and places this argument in the context of pre-war Germany. Although these forms of repressions have been studied individually and in considerable detail in many other films of the past, The White Ribbon attempts to integrate all these influences into a monolithic attitude that defines the course of a society. As observed by many reviewers, The White Ribbon bears remarkable resemblance to Clouzot’s wartime classic The Raven (1943), which scathingly exposes the changes in mentality of a collective during uncertain times and the hypocrisy and hate that such a political climate brings to surface, in its study of a group as a whole wherein disparaging threads eventually converge to draw out a single, coherent portrait of the group at a particular time. The class system is tangible, with the aristocracy, intelligentsia, the middle class and the peasantry being represented with clear demarcation. The Baron and his wife – the upper class – have only their personal relationship and their property to worry about. The bourgeoisie is content in sticking to a set of middle-brow principles (there is way too much formality going on in the film) and maintaining status quo. The peasants can only worry about everyday survival. The apolitical intelligentsia – typified by the doctor and the teacher – is busy with its own romantic encounters and perversions. Cinematographed by Christian Berger, this isolation of the clerisy is summed up in two stunning shots in the film – one during the dance at the village fest (reminiscent of Ophüls’ magical Madame De… (1953)) and one on a horse carriage (reminiscent of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), one of the best explorations of fascism on film) – in which the teacher and his love interest Eva are alienated from the village events. And whenever a member of any class tries to digress from these functions, they are berated and made to return to their position by either the class divide or the generation divide.

The White Ribbon presents us a seemingly pacific society which thrives on domestic bureaucracy for survival and maintains hierarchies to perpetuate that status. Haneke presents these power games not as a ping-pong rally, as we have seen in so many films, but as a chain of dominoes. In his world, there is no such thing as retaliation. Everybody has to conform to and perform specific roles in society – willingly or otherwise. The elder Fender has to play the role of a helpless farmer whereas his son, the radial, has to play the part of an obedient child irrespective of him being an adult. There is an obligation placed on everyone in the hierarchy by ones above them to conform to certain rules and to get punished upon transgressing those boundaries. The priest ties a white ribbon – another stereotype which symbolizes innocence (as defined by Protestant morals) – on his adolescent son’s arm to remind him of his duty to ward off worldly temptations and lays down an unwarranted responsibility upon him to play the role of a moral Christian. This seems to be the plight of every child and young adult in the village who can’t seem to counter their “masters” and are forced to channelize their reactionary violence through other means. Like Estike (Erica Bók) in Satan’s Tango (1994) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria) in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), both of whose forced passivity and oppression translates into graphic violence on powerless creatures (I can imagine a restless Chris Marker tossing around in his seat), these children, too, exercise their power on those lower down the hierarchy (The White Ribbon could also be titled “The slap fest” for domestic violence in the film is commonplace).

[The White Ribbon trailer]

Moreover, this kind of contrived passivity that we observe within the village is reflected in the larger picture of Germany. The White Ribbon is set in a time just before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that triggered the Great War. History stands witness to the fact that Germany also went through such cycles of passivity followed by misguided violence like the children in the movie (the film is subtitled “A German Children’s Story”). If Germany’s army was curtailed after the first war and Alsace and Lorraine confiscated, it would give birth to a patriotic movement that would go on to mutate into a fascist force. If the second war resulted in a greater chastisement and imposition of eternal guilt on its citizens by the western world, it would explode into a misdirected “terrorist” movement – the RAF (“…punishing the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations” reads a note dropped at the scene of one of the crimes). Although Haneke shoots in black and white and has the narrator recite the story in the past tense, his film resonates in the contemporary world too. At one point in the film, the priest tells the doctor’s son, who asks his permission to shelter an injured bird, that the bird in his room is used to captivity while the one in the kid’s hand is used to freedom. The upper class in The White Ribbon flourishes by keeping the rest of the village engaged in the economic clockwork that it has setup and by ensuring that any subversion will only result in despair and struggle for livelihood for the insurgents. The elder Fender, although aware that the Baron is responsible for his wife’s death, cannot do anything about it for any action on his part will put the future of his kids in question. This situation isn’t much unlike those in today’s capitalistic societies which have a strong religious backbone.

Evidently, the film’s scope is large. Haneke attempts to study and integrate the very many factors responsible for the rise of fascist movements by actually having many threads in the narrative to illustrate each of these factors. And this seems to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the film. Haneke has way too many characters to have depth in each of them. What begins as an incisive study of a few characters goes on to become a document of the society at large, in which individual characters are sacrificed to drive forth Haneke’s idea. His work here turns out to be a film that is built on a set of judgments made by the writer-director rather than a keen exploration of issues. Compare it to the film that it pipped at Cannes this year for the Golden Palm – Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2009). Audiard’s film, which I think is one of the few brilliant films of the year, is sufficiently ambiguous and presents us with sketches from the protagonist’s life. Audiard does not give us an “idea” or a “message”. He lets us form any possible meaning out of the film’s observations. Haneke, on the other hand, sacrifices truth for meaning. He cuts from one vignette to another in a deterministic fashion to serve a set of preconceived ideas. His hop-step-and-jump approach works wonders in the initial part of the movie, when we find ourselves struggling to sort out an overarching theme, but it goes on to over-determine the central idea of the film, just falling short of being didactic. Eric Hynes’ review sums up with ease my complaints about the movie. It is true that the film, to a good extent, explores fascism as a phenomenon of the masses rather than that of a single evil soul, but Haneke dwells a bit too much on kindred events to remove any scope for thematic enrichment.

I do not intend to say that Haneke bites off much more than he can chew, but just that the way he goes about chewing seems inefficient. It seems to me that the film would have been better off had Haneke pruned down many of its narrative elements in order to provide depth instead of attempting to crystallize a meaning. By pruning down, I do not mean simplification of its themes or trivializing of the issues at hand, but that the number of characters could have been held at a bare minimum. One fatal blow for The White Ribbon is that, although there is a narrator who provides the basic “facts” about the film before Haneke illustrates the in-between events visually, the film lacks a constant perspective using which all the disparaging ideas could be integrated. It is true that Haneke denies emotional identification in the movie, but the problem is that he does not even provide a reference against which the audience can interpret the events. Haneke’s script, in essence, is a consolidation of the themes Bertolucci explored in detail in individual films. The White Ribbon shares with The Conformist (1970) the idea that sexual repression and social conformism may be the prime instigators of fascist drive. More importantly, the depiction of fascism as being perpetuated by religion and its minion unit – the family – is also that of the masterful The Last Tango in Paris (1972). And the master-slave relationship between the Baron and the Fenders is but a miniature version of 1900 (1976) – an ambitious film that strays off and moves into self-parody. In all the above cases, Bertolucci provides us with a constant perspective, even if he has multiple protagonists, so that we are able to clearly assimilate and make judgment. On the other hand, The White Ribbon lacks a single coherent perspective (or has only one perspective – Haneke’s) and individual scenes, although possessing enough ambiguity of their own to be called virtuoso, exist only to conform to Haneke’s meaning and judgment.

Because of this over-emphasis on the central theme, The White Ribbon eats up many of the other possibilities which the first half of the film puts forth. Even at the end of the film, we do not know who commits these atrocities. It could well be some of the repressed members of one of the social classes and there are enough evidences to actually find a one-to-one matching. Haneke does not implicate them and finishes the movie with an open ending (“open” as far as the genre is concerned). Sure, it makes it clear that it is the whole society that is to blame. But Haneke’s writing prefers to lean towards and to underscore endlessly the idea of a repressed childhood and forced conformism to such an extent that it almost obscures the other dimensions of the movie. The film begins with the narrator confessing that many of the elements in the story he is gong to narrate are hearsay, preparing us for the narrative ambiguity in the film, but the film promptly repudiates that statement and removes any thematic ambiguity the first half may have offered. Scenes like the violent outbreak of one of the village boys on the Baron’s son and the priest’s daughter ripping apart her father’s pet bird are inserted into the narrative in a contrived and unsubtle fashion to be regarded as worthy. So are the scenes of the parents’ behaviour towards their children that end up seeming only like filler materials which aid to fatten a shallow analysis based on a single new idea. But even with a wafer-thin idea on text, the director has enough freedom to explore it cinematically. Bertolucci did it in The Conformist with its dynamic mise en scène, which took over the job of providing meaning and emphasizing the central idea, however simplistic it was on paper, unlike Haneke who relies here on his script to do that. That does not mean that Haneke’s film is technically unsound. Right from the first shot, where a peaceful horse ride in a serene countryside is suddenly interrupted by a jolting moment, Haneke announces the soberness of his gaze. He keeps alienating us from the movie with his choice of B&W, the detached distance of the largely stationery camera, the painting-like stasis of the images and his restrictive framing (his indebtedness to Bertolt Brecht is discussed in detail here). Sure, he does very effectively disengage us from the narrative to make us reflect on the events rather than identify emotionally, but he also goes to the extent of denying omnipresence to the narrator for this purpose. And that hurts the film.

Verdict:

April 5, 2009

Red Army Faction 101

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Review | Tags: Andreas Baader, Black September, Brumo Ganz, Cinema of Germany, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex film review, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex movie review, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex review, Gomorra, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Irmgard Möller, Oscar nominee 2009 for best foreign language film, RAF, Red Army Faction, The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Baader-Meinhof Complex film review, The Baader-Meinhof Complex movie review, The Baader-Meinhof Complex review, The Baader-Meinhof Gang, The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, The Munich massacre, Uli Edel, Ulrike Meinhof |
[5] Comments

A History For Violence

I hear that the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” refers to something that you keep coming across at an alarming frequency after your first encounter with it. This might sound contrived but unfortunately, that is exactly how I felt when watching Germany’s official entry to the Oscars, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008). If you’ve watched the first couple of scenes, you’ve probably seen the whole film. Deservedly the least successful of the five nominees, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an exercise in futility that seems to have wasted great raw material for historical, political and cinematic analysis. And looking back to see that this one overtook Gomorra (2008) is only shocking. Don’t worry, I am not going to give you plot details here. This link gives you all the necessary (and more than that) details about the script of the film!

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an out and out political film as opposed to personal films with political subtexts. Its course has already been defined by the passage of time. Now, the only creative latitude that the director has in these kind of films is in providing dimensions, motives and moral conflicts to his characters in order to understand them. The director inherits the responsibility to explore the subject, analyze it and provide insights into the events from an arbitrary perspective. Take the case of a film that shares some of the content with this one – Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005). Having got heavily panned for his handling of history in Schindler’s List (1993), Spielberg returns in style correcting all the errors that might have been committed in the latter film. He quite successfully delves into the psyche of a troubled man on whom a national mentality is forced, managing never to be speculative. All the “data” associated with the film – the Munich Olympic massacre, the initiation of the Wrath of God by Mossad and the statistics that would invariably arise with it – take a back seat with minuscule runtime.

Coming back to The Baader-Meinhof Complex. See what plot details Mr. Uli Edel chooses. Activities carried out by the gang, courtroom transcripts, initiation of major figures into the group, counter-terrorist measures of the police team and the members’ trip across the Middle East – stuff that any text book about the period can provide. The only scope of innovation, now, can come in the indoor sequences that actually merge these disparate events. There, too, Mr. Edel does an interpolating job by gathering the consequences of the preceding events and providing the obligatory kick off to the forthcoming ones. Now, a case may be made for the film to be considered as plain “time-pass” or tea-time entertainment, but its own runtime betrays it. One hundred and forty minutes can not be considered a time-pass, especially if the content can be wrapped up in ten.

I’m absolutely OK with on-screen violence if it is used for a purpose – as a motif or as a tool to illustrate additional meaning or at least to imply the futility of it all. In The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the violence is an experiment with the ways a bullet can go through a person. There are probably over a dozen extensively “choreographed” sequences of heavy gunfire and massacre in the film that serve no purpose than to pass (historical) time and to provide some cheap thrills. You can actually predict the routine as in our own mainstream films. SMGs and AKs hog the limelight once the perfunctory events that lead to it are established. It’s almost mathematical in the way the pattern evolves and destinations reveal themselves. You quickly realize how the RAF is, in fact, a shoddy wrapper to the laughable WW2 films from Hollywood, minus the one-dimensional portrayal of the two armies. Yes, credit has to be given to Mr. Edel for at least depicting both sides of the revolution with equal affinity, if not with a reason.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a film with fine cinematography, fine editing, fine casting and fine performances but one without a direction. Rather, it is a film with a direction that is already decided by history. As a result, Mr. Edel comes across more as the author of a sensational and often sleazy detailer of events than as a film director with skill or ambition. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a film without a soul, if you please. If at all Mr. Edel is attempting to say something of his own, it must be that the revolutionaries were as directionless and authoritative as the very system they were opposing. That it was more because of the hip-factor associated with it than the vision of real revolutionaries that anti-establishmentarianism became as widespread as it did. But, except for the last scene that actually salvages the film to a minor extent, these sporadic observations fail to come within the grasp of the film and die off within minutes of birth.

Consider one of the better scenes in the film where the car that Baader steals gets stolen from him immediately after he challenges one of his comrades to flick a purse. There was scope for great analysis following this. In Herzog’s spectacular Cobra Verde (1987), the Kinski character overthrows an existing regime with the help of the slaves of the country only to become its chancellor and indulge in slave trade. A while later, when an associate asks him who the arrested people in the cellar are, he says “Our future murderers”. Here too, a similar situation evolves. It is inevitable that revolution begets revolution. Successful revolutionaries will one day be overthrown by similar kinds. Snatchers will be snatched from. Anarchists will eventually become the system. But the film never capitalizes upon the ephemeral idea. Or the intriguing moment when an officer asks Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz) what perpetuates the evolution of terrorist groups. He replies “A myth”. It sets us ruminating. What myth is he referring to? The Raskolnikovian myth bordering foolishness? The Guevara-esque romanticism? Sadly, the film remains completely oblivious to it.

Verdict:

March 30, 2009

Flashback #49

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Flashback | Tags: 1968 feature film, Becker, Best films of Werner Herzog, German Cinema, German film review, Lebenszeichen, Meinhard, Signs of Life, Stroszek, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog's first feature film |
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Lebenszeichen (1968) (aka Signs Of Life)
Werner Herzog
German

“Dammit! This place is full of roaches. They’re not harmful. They are the most repulsive things on earth. They don’t even bite.”

Signs Of Life

German master Werner Herzog has made more than 50 feature films and he is as intriguing as ever. His films, though he has requested people not to read too much into them, have made us raise so many questions about the world we live in. His first feature film Signs Of Life(1967) holds as many questions for us as does his recent Oscar nominated documentary Encounters At The End Of The World. Herzog’s natural affinity for documentary filmmaking shows as he presents the film in a cinema vérité style employing low-lying camera angles and without a soundtrack for most part of the film.

Signs of Life, at first glance, seems like an extension of his short film, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz (1967), which also followed a group of soldiers trying to take down a bunch of non-extant enemies. Here, Herzog presents us a soldier, Stroszek, who has been injured in war and has been relocated to a quieter place in Greece’s countryside for recuperation. He is put in charge of the defense of an isolated fortress housing 50 tons of ammunition along his Greek wife Nora and two other soldiers Becker andMeinhard. He spends the nights guarding the fort against nothing and the day time lazing around.

This radically new environment has variegated effects on the psychology of the three people who are used to bloodshed and constant unrest in the battle fields.Meinhard seems to rip apart every critter that comes his way and conjures up contraptions and techniques to eradicate the lesser creatures. Stroszek is petrified as he desperately looks for signs of life. He tries to invite a passing gypsy into the fort but is stopped by the probable-misanthrope Meinhard. He looks at Meinhard’s “victims” with childlike curiosity and even goes on to mentally animate the wooden owl that the gypsy presents him. And between these two people is the well-read Becker who tries to adapt himself to the milieu and stay flexible unlike the other two.

In the short film, the soldiers mention that it is an obligation for the enemy to attack and a defensive stance is equated to cowardice and desertion. They say that a state of passivity is just an illusion of peace and a delusory cover for barbarism that is to be unleashed. The soldiers in Signs of Life find themselves in a similar state of mind. They are supposed to guard an arsenal that they cannot use. The town that surrounds them is either made of toddlers or old men. The animals in vicinity are passive insects and lazy pets. Even the landscape is pacific yet carries a sense of foreboding with it. The walls of the fortress they defend are decorated with artifacts resembling human body parts (which may have been real human parts, considering what Becker tells us about the ancient Greeks). It seems like almost an insult to the soldiers that they have to defend the fort against dead partisans and a peasant crowd. And Herzog’s B&W cinematography adds to the barrenness of it all.

Why Signs of Life is all the more surprising is that the themes that would haunt the director and his works in the decades to come not only show their roots in this film but establish themselves with as much conviction as their descendants.Herzog translates his cynical view of Mother Nature and the inherent savagery that it conceals with its beauty using the landscape of the environment and of his characters’ mind that manifests itself through the bizarre acts they perform. We regularly see flora and fauna obstructing our view of the characters as if devouring them. There are bugs flying around he household irritating the soldiers.

It seems like Herzog is suggesting that humans and perhaps even the whole of nature is self-destructive to the core and would perish if not controlled by a higher order. Like the “cannibalistic” chicken in Even Dwarves Started Small(1970), Stroszek seems to be celebrating self-mutilation as he tries to hold explosives in his hand while they go off. This rage for self-destruction escalates to the point where he threatens to blow up the whole town with the stack of explosives under his control. This pervasive need to constantly expose oneself to danger may perhaps be the reason he opens fire at random in the first place. Now, once Stroszek is rendered a threat for the greater part of the human community, it is up to higher establishments of the society – Law and Science – to bring him down and save the town. Is Herzog suggesting that slavery is the only way of survival? Are we all subconsciously Darwinian in the way we tend to trivialize the lives of lesser beings? I don’t know, but Herzog sure does know the knack of both entertaining us and making us think.

March 25, 2009

Book Nook: Werner Herzog

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of Germany | Tags: Aguirre, Bangalore, Beat Presser, Cobra Verde, coffee-table books on cinema, film books, Fitzcarraldo, Goethe Institute, Herbert Achternbusch, Invincible, Lena Herzog, My Best Fiend, Peter Berling, Stroszek, The Starving Students Movers, Werner Herzog |
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Werner Herzog
Beat Presser
JOVIS/ARTE Edition, 2002

Last month, the Goethe Institute – Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore organized their biggest film event since the Michael Ballhaus/Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective in June last year. This one was a photo exhibition titled “Werner Herzog: film has to be physical” followed by a ten film retrospective of Werner Herzog (eventually pruned to nine). Jovis Publication’s book Werner Herzog serves more or less as a collection of these photographs and as an excellent coffee-table book if you are planning to start a cinema themed restaurant. With translations in both German and French placed alongside the English text, the book cleverly positions itself to cater the home crowd, the “cinema people” and the rest of the world.

The book is completely photographed and edited by Beat Presser, who has collaborated with Herzog on multiple films as a still photographer. The book (and the exhibition) predominantly presents photos from three of Herzog’s films in which Presser worked – Invincible (2001), Cobra Verde (1987) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) – though there are quite a few snapshots from some of his other films too. With almost an equal number of monochromatic and colour photos (some spanning two sides too), the collection is a visual treat that not only takes us back to the experience of watching the director’s films but one that enhances the mystery that surrounds Herzog and his work.

Interestingly, the photo-exhibition at the Goethe Institute, Bangalore was the same one that Herzog himself visits in his documentary My Best Fiend (1999) as he chats away with Presser. And the book retains most of these photos in good resolution. Unfortunately, the best few photographs of the exhibition (including one from Stroszek (1977) that clearly stands out among the pictures in the collection) that oozed brilliance with their eye for the dynamic and static components of the photographic image are left out. But not all the photographs grab your attention. There are some seemingly offhand pictures – dull and unimaginative to say the least – that seem like fillers alone. But barring those, the photographs in the book clearly indicate the physical energy that Herzog summons upon his set during the shoot (Herzog himself is captured holding mining and trekking tools many times).

It is common knowledge that Herzog believes that film making is the stuff of brawns and not brains. That an atmosphere, an event or a visual force has to be personally experienced before it can be filmed. With a perspective of cinema (and life) that straddles probable lunacy and profound wisdom, Herzog’s working methods and ideas have often been elusive. What remains clear is his unassailable belief on the physical over the metaphysical and his support for the experiential over the theoretical. This book (and the exhibition at the Embassy) attempts to elaborate upon this principle of Herzog using the photographs. In these pictures that alternate between spontaneous and posed, we see Herzog himself performing the very many physical acts that occur in the three movies that the book covers. Be it the lifting of beer barrels like Zishe of Invincible or the running around during the shoot of Cobra Verde or even the interaction with his actors, one can easily see how this conviction in the physical realm is very important for Herzog when he films something.

The Arte Edition intersperses these photographs with prose and anecdotes written by people who have lived and worked with Herzog. There is Lena Herzog’s short yet fantastic section “Werner” that tells about the minor incident that sprang up (two years after Fitzcarraldo hit the screens) when the couple were shifting houses. Apparently, the guys from the moving company – The Starving Students Movers – upon seeing the couple’s names on the front door asked if they had to move a boat! Then there is playwright Herbert Achternbusch’s bizarre write-up “In the Beginning was the Word” about his reverence for Herzog for the way his life has shaped up. And then there is Peter Berling’s articulate section “Memories of Working with Werner Herzog” that recapitulates his experience during the shoot of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). But all these essays play second fiddle to the paradisiacal images that occur regularly in the book.

This is the only photo-book I’ve read – based on cinema or otherwise. So I can’t exactly say how this one fares in comparison to similar books based on other celebrities. If you really want to know about the director and his methods, this is clearly not the book for you. However, if you want to program a cinema event of sorts based on Herzog’s films or to be the ultimate fanboy of the director or just to decorate your film library, this one might be a very good option. Oh, I haven’t given you the killer yet. This coffee-table book is generally priced at $35. In view of the exhibition and the subsequent retrospective, the Embassy offered the book for $3. Now that’s what I call a steal!

Verdict:

P.S: Thumbnails of some of the pictures here at Kinski’s site.

March 21, 2009

Flashback #48

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Flashback | Tags: Aguirre, Burden of Dreams, Fitzcarraldo, Klaus Kinski, Les Blank, Moving a ship, Peter Berling, Thomas Mauch, Werner Herzog |
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Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Werner Herzog
German

“It’s only the dreamers who ever move mountains”

If the judgment criteria for a film included the way it was made and the circumstances under which it was pulled off, Fitzcarraldo (1982) perhaps would rate as the best movie ever made. The Reason? Take a look at the outstanding documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo – Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982) – and see if you can believe it. Watching the making of Fitzcarraldo is like watching Picasso paint in Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) as we practically witness the work of art take shape through an array of improvisations and brainwaves and burst out into its moment of glory. One begins to wonder if the final product alone is sufficient while assessing an artist or if the tools and means of its creation should be considered too.

I may sound like appreciating the making of the film more than the film itself. But that in no way takes the credit away from Fitzcarraldo as a standalone piece. Some consider it as Herzog’s best film. Clearly, it is up there with the likes of Stroszek (1977), Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and a few others. Fitzcarraldo follows the titular character’s larger-than-life quest to harvest rubber from a practically isolated plantation in order to make money to build an opera house. The central activity involves the towing of a gigantic ship from one Amazonian tributary onto another with the help of the supposedly savage natives. The story and the one behind it are legends by themselves and I would like to just add whatever we see on-screen is indubitably autobiographical – not in the physical sense, but the emotions underneath.

Fitzcarraldo is clear evidence that Herzog has this natural inclination to stage operas. Even though he would argue against bringing ideas of opera into cinema and vice-versa, Fitzcarraldo comes out as a grandly staged opera with its own exhilarating crescendos and chilling decrescendos. Herzog direction percolates into as far as his locales that seem to have taken a demonic life of their own. The ever-shocking Kinski in tandem with that element of Herzogian mystery are sure to haunt you long after the film has ended.

March 11, 2009

Flashback #47

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Flashback | Tags: Cinema of Germany, documentary about Indian culture, Indian folk arts, Jag Mandir, Maharana of Udaipur, mcdonaldization, Werner Herzog |
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Jag Mandir: Das Exzentrische Privattheater Des Maharadscha Von Udaipur (1991) (aka Jag Mandir)
Werner Herzog
German

“Culture in India is a basic life-sustaining force “

Jag Mandir is a quiet and often overlooked film in the vast oeuvre of Werner Herzog. Apparently, 20 hours of footage was shot that covered the whole fest and the film hardly presents us a twentieth of that. A native walking into the film in between may well fail to immediately realize that it is his country that is being shown and these are figures from the mythology of various sections of his nation. You might take if for a scene from a procession in Thailand or a sketch from festival from Africa or even a snapshot from the gala celebrations in Brazil. Such is the diversity it presents that it reminds us of those clichés about Indian culture.

Werner Herzog’s Jag Mandir begins with an extended take of André Heller giving an introduction to the project (on which the film is based). He recollects his experiences organizing the folk-art festival called for by the Maharana of Udaipur, who the wishes that the succeeding prince sees the artistic diversity of the country before it succumbs to “mcdonaldization”. This is a mesmerizing section and Heller’s monologue contains observations that will leave you ruminating for a long long time. Being a native, I am always skeptic of westerners’ cursory probing of the country and the life-changing-experience it seems to give many. But Heller’s piece, though romanticized, gives everyone something to think about the way we live. The speech lasts for well over seven minutes and dissolves into the titles. Herzog then takes us back to the actual events which unfold without any demarcations between reality and fiction, as always with the director, The greater part of the film presents us footage of performances that run the gamut.

You have classical dancers in unison, street players wielding everything from swords to artificial horses, a man who lifts weights with his eyelids, a woman who balances a kid standing on a ten foot pole on her chin, a little girl who swings blazing torches with nonchalance and what not. It is highly likely the average Indian today hasn’t seen any of these folk art forms. The saddest and the most surprising part is that it looks like many of these art forms and skill sets aren’t seen around in the country today and may even have gone into oblivion without a trace. May be the Maharana’s nightmares have indeed come true.

P.S: Call it an obsession with a man obsessed with obsessions, but you’re going to be seeing more of Werner Herzog’s name on this blog. Trolls beware.

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