Dialog International

Review: Der Baader Meinhof Complex

More than a year after this film was released in Germany it finally became available on NetFlix, so those of us living in the US provinces could finally get the chance to see it.  Der Baader Meinhof Complex is the most important film to come out of Germany since Das Leben der Anderen, and it is fitting that Martina Gedeck, who starred in Das Leben here portrays Ulrike Meinhof, the intellectual leader of the terrorist RAF.  In the film, however, she is upstaged by the l'amour fou relationship of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin (wonderfully portrayed by Moritz Bleibtreu and Johanna Wokalek).  The film does a good job of taking us back to those chaotic and terrible times, cutting to news reports on the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, etc. We see how Ulirike Meinhof is radicalized by a demonstration against the Shah of Iran, where protestors are beaten up by the Shah's thugs with the help of the Berlin police.  The attempt to kill Rudi Dutschke turned out to be the tipping point. We catch a glimpse of Gudrun Ensslin holding her infant son arguing politics with her conservative father - a Lutheran minister.  Baader, however, simply appears on the scene as a force of nature, a born anarchist who revels in terrorist acts more for the adrenaline rush than out of any coherent political conviction.  It is his charisma and sheer energy that seems to hold the group together.

Using the same rapid cutting technique that was so effective in the Jason Bourne movies, Uli Edel is intent on capturing all of the key terrorist acts committed by the group.  This works well until the three protagonists are captured and imprisoned. Their followers go on to perform even more spectacular acts of terror - climaxing with the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer - but there is little understanding of who these people are and what is motivating them.  Edel loses the narrative thread in his effort to squeeze as much history as possible into his film.

What is very effective, howeve, is the running commentary of Horst Herold, the real-life chief of the Federal German police, brilliantly played here by Bruno Ganz.  The Herold character provides some perspective on the "Baader Meinhof Complex", even while he employs - - at the time - revolutionary data mining techniques to tighten the noose on the terrorists.  He also seems to warn against the police state tactics that later became a reality in the "German Autumn" of 1977. 

As a footnote to the movie, Sign and Sight reviews a collection of letters between Gudrun Ensslin and her lover Bernward Vesper, whom she left for Andreas Baader.  The letters are important artifacts of a turbulent lost time.  The two had a son - Felix Ensslin - who wrote a postscript to the letter collection.

Review: Christian Petzold's Jerichow

For most of us, eastern Germany remains something of a mystery. That is one of the interesting aspects of Christian Petzold's recent filmmaking: he takes us into this unknown land.  In Yella he moved relentlessly between east and west, contrasting the brutal capitalism of the west with the bucolic, but also violent, east. In Jerichow, he moves entirely into the east. Here it is the wooded coastal territory of northeastern Germany - nearly devoid of human beings.  And once again we have a plot that is inspired by classic American cinema: whereas Yella was based on the 1960's cult horror classic Carnival of the Souls, Jerichow is a reprise of the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

But the love triangle in Jerichow is the least interesting (and least convincing) aspect of Jerichow.  What is compelling here is rather the mood and the underlying sociology of a economically ruined region.  Thomas (Benno Fürmann) is a taciturn veteran of the Afghanistan mission who was dishonorably discharged from the Bundeswehr.  He returns to Jerichow in the east to reclaim the home of his dead mother and in the process gets into deep water with some local loan sharks. His path crosses that of Laura (Nina Hoss - to my mind, the best film actress in Germany) who has married a Turkish-German entrepreneur because of her personal debts.  Going deep into debt- legitimately or not - seems the only way to survive in this hostile land. The only success story here is Laura's husband Ali (Hilmi Sözer). an entrepreneur who has built up a chain of snack bars.  Ali's employees are all immigrants - Vietnamese or Turkish. 

As in Yella, Petzold excels at showing the nuts and bolts of running a business enterprise - the underbelly of capitalism seems to fascinate him.  Ali - the "foreigner" despite growing up in Germany - is a success, whereas the "Germans" in the film are all abject failures.  Still, Alis despairs: his employees are robbing him blind, he is insanely jealous of his wife, whom he admits he had to "buy". And now his beautiful wife and his driver (Thomas) are conspiring to kill him.

Of the three protagonists in the film, Nina Hoss's character is disappointingly circumscribed and she doesn't have the same opportunity as she did in Yella to display her impressive range as an actress.  It is the Hilmi Sözer character who carries the film.  He is truly a tragic figure and one can sense that Petzold sees in him a tragedy for his nation.  For Ali is representative of the millions of immigrants in Germany who live uneasily between cultures.  They bring vitality into a dead landscape, but in the end are despised as outsiders. They must be eliminated.

Christian Petzold is the most talented filmaker of  the complex realities of post-Wende Germany.

Inglourious Basterds a hit in Germany

More than 1.7 million Germans have seen Quentin Tarantino's riff on Hollywood Holocaust movies, making Inglourious Basterds the director's highest grossing film in Germany by far. 

The reviews in the German press have been mostly positive, but the German right is apoplectic with rage at Tarantino and the German audience for flocking to see the film.  The neo-fascist weekly Junge Freiheit calls the film Rache an Deutschland (Revenge against Germany):

Wie viele Minderwertigkeitskomplexe, wieviel Verdrängung verbergen sich hinter dem Zwangsverhalten, Hitler oder generell Deutsche zum aberhundertsten Mal als immer gleich dämliche Karikaturen verhöhnen zu wollen? [...]Dahinter, den alliierten Kampf als angeblich moralischen Rachefeldzug darzustellen? Dahinter, den „historischen Sieg“ unserer heutigen US-dominierten Gesellschaftsform stets zu rechtfertigen, dessen desaströse kulturelle, soziale und ökologische Folgen aber auszuklammern? (How much inferiority complex, how much repression is found beneath this propensity to mock Hitler and Germans in general with the most shameful caricatures? ... To present the war of the allies as a moral Crusade? To justify our current US-dominated social structure as a "historic victory" while completely ignoring its disastrous cultural, social and ecological conseqeucnes?)

The editors of Junge Freiheit find it scandalous that Germans were involved in the making of Inglourious Basterds.  Their neo-Nazi brethren in the NPD consider this treason against the Vaterland:

Natürlich haben sich für diesen widerwärtigen Schinken auch deutschsprachige Schauspieler zur Verfügung gestellt. Geld stinkt bekanntlich nicht. (Naturally German-speaking actors also took part in this repulsive piece of meat. Money, as they say, doesn't smell. )

The Nazis even request the intervention of the state prosecutor to shut down the film:

Aber darauf dürfen wir lange hoffen. Umso deutlicher muß uns werden, daß wir angesichts der sich überschlagenden deutschfeindlichen Hetze in unserem Land wie Pech und Schwefel zusammenstehen und kämpfen müssen und uns nicht von oft fremdgesteuerten Querulanten und Egomanen auseinandertreiben lassen dürfen, wenn wir in einer absolut bösartigen Umwelt bestehen und erfolgreich sein wollen. (But we can wait forever for that to happen. It is more and more clear that we must stand together and fight this growing hatred of Germany in our country and not allow ourselves to be torn apart by egomaniacs controlled by foreigners if we are to be successful in this absolutely hostile environments.) 

Evidently the NPD comrades decided to take matters in their own hands:  they threatened to bomb a movie theater in Hoyerswerda unless the film was withdrawn.  The theater owners gave into the Nazis.

Review: Christian Petzold's Yella

Finally had the chance to order Yella through NetFlix. Yella is compelling cinema, and Petzold is a talented filmmaker.  Yella, played by the terrific actress Nina Hoss, is trying to escape her life in a small city east of the Elbe. She has been offered a high-powered job in Hannover and returns home to pack her things.  But her violent ex-husband can't let her go.  Driving her to the train station he swerves off a bridge. Somehow she survives and manages to make it to the city west of the Elbe.  In a sterile corporate hotel she encounters a business development executive for a private equity firm who bears an uncanny resemblance to her former husband. Yella discovers she has natural talent as an equity analyst and deal maker, but is still haunted by her past, which eventually catches up to her in a trick ending. 

The movie is quite good until the ending, which I found unnecessarily contrived.  I especially enjoyed the scenes where Yella and her lover were negotiating investment deals with management teams.  The "corporate-speak" and the settings were exact and recognizable to anyone familiar with the business.  Also quite good was the contrast between the old and slow-moving life in the east and the constant motion in the west as the characters drive from one meeting to the next in soulless corporate parks. One thought I had though watching Yella: why are investors - and business  executives in general - always portrayed as corrupt and evil in movies? I guess a competent and ethical business person doesn't offer enough dramtic tension. 

In any case, Christian Petzold has found a fruitful theme in the current national disconnect between eastern and western Germany - a theme he develops further in his newest feature film Jerichow, which has been released in the US with very positive reviews.

UPDATE:  I had the chance to see the creepy 1962 film Carnival of Souls, which provided the inspiration for Yella. I like the way that Petzold took the essential plot elements (the car plunging off the bridge, the disturbed girl) and placed them in a coherent narrative of present day Germany.  The earlier film is a classic American film, since the girl finds herself in a strange small city of stifiling conformity.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Once again a German film is among the five nominees for best foreign films for the Oscars, the highest award in the film industry.  I have not had a chance to see The Baader Meinhof Complex and it will be some time before it comes to any screens in Northern New England.  I am looking for forward to seeing it, since the "Complex" was raging while I was a student in Germany in the 1970s.  Later, I met  Dr. Alfred Herrhausen, Chairman of Deutsche Bank, who was assassinated by the Red Army Faction - a successor group to Baader Meinhof.

Even though The Baader Meinhof Complex has not been widely shown in the US, it is already being used to bash the 1960s anti-war movement in America.  Jeffrey Herf, writing in The New Republic, sees the film as an admirable attempt at German Vergangenheitsbewältigung or "coming to terms with past", something Americans have not done with respect to the anti-war movement:

"Whether or not it wins an Oscar, I hope that American filmmakers take this movie as a long overdue invitation to revisit the uglier side of this country's experience with radicalism during the 1960s--and engage in some Vergangenheitsbewältigung of our own."

The US anti-war movement was a mass movement of non-violence that sought to end a policy of total violence of the United States government that resulted in the death of approximately 3 million Vietnamese - mostly civilians. Even the most extemist groups that broke away from the anti-war movement, such as the Weather Undergound, were involved in the destruction of property, rather than kidnapping and killing, and they mostly succeeded in blowing themselves up.  And, by the way, there is an excellent film about the history of the Weathermen: the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground.

But Jeffrey Herf is correct in one sense: America is in need of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In spite of excellent films such as Platoon and novels such as The Things They Carried, the nation has still not come to terms with starting an unncessary and immoral conflict in Southeast Asia.  Until we do, we are doomed to waging more unnecessary and immoral wars. In 2003, one of the most vocal supporters of the US invasion of Iraq was The New Republic - something the magazine's editors later came to regret.

Film Review: : Valkyrie

There is not too much I have to say about the new Tom Cruise movie except that it is not the complete disaster that had been anticipated. Most Americans know little about the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, so the movie is not a bad introduction to the conspiracy. Director Bryan Singer elected to make this a suspense thriller, and in that context Tom Cruise was probably not miscast. Actually Cruise is more restrained here than usual, although he is clearly upstaged by a team of first-rate British actors, especially Bill Nighy as General Friedrich Olbricht and Tom Wilkinson as General Fromm. Thanks to their performances, the film does manage to build and sustain the suspense, even though we all know the outcome.

Claus von Stauffenberg is a fascinating and contradictory historical figure, and a much better film could have been made about him , one that would have traced his disillusionment with Hitler and his belief, from a young age, in a "sacred Germany".  But that would have required a different screenplay and a better actor than Tom Cruise.

From an American Classroom to the German Screen

One of the hits of this year's Sundance Film Festival was Dennis Gansel's movie Die Welle (The Wave).  Angelika Nguyen has a positive review on Ost:Blog and explains the origin of the film:

"Seit über 20 Jahren ist “Die Welle”, der Kurzroman um ein reales Faschismusexperiment an einer USA-Highschool, ein Klassiker, der auch bei uns an Schulen gelesen wird.
Regisseur Dennis Gansel nahm sich den modellhaften Stoff vor und griff, statt den Roman zu verfilmen, zu den Originalprotokollen. Außerdem verlegte er die Ereignisse von den USA 1967 ins heutige Deutschland."

The "Fascism Experiment" she refers to was a project by a young social studies teacher Ron Jones at the Cubberly High School in Palo Alto.

"What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at       Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference       to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job       in the 1966-67 academic year.  When a social studies student asked       about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich,       Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his       students "basically follow instructions" for a day.

      

But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the       school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social       experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature - and a major       weakness in public education."

What began as a class lesson on Strength through Discipline rapidly grew into a movement that engulfed the whole school, with a salute (the wave) and secret police.  Dissenters were ostracized and even beaten up. The students came to believe that they were part of a national movement of select youth that would rise up and create a new community based on order, national pride and action.

Ron Jones soon realized his "experiment" had gotten out of hand and he called a school assembly to put an end to it:

"There is no Third Wave movement, no leader," he told the       stunned audience.  "You and I are no better or worse than the       citizens of the Third Reich.  We would have worked in the defense       plants.  We will watch our neighbors be taken away, and do       nothing," Jones said, referring to the three skeptics exiled to the       library for the crime of disbelief.  "We're just like those       Germans.  We would give our freedom up for the chance of being       special."

After watching Die Welle Angelika Nguyen is moved to ask:

"Stell dir vor, es ist Faschismus: wie würdest du dich selbst verhalten? Welche Rolle würdest du einnehmen? Wärst du Mitläufer wie Dennis oder Fanatiker wie Tim oder würdest du Widerstand leisten wie Karo oder würde dir die Erkenntnis erst allmählich dämmern wie Marco? Oder hättest du das Zeug zu einer Leitfigur wie Lehrer Wenger?
Dem Film gelingt es, unter konkret zeitlichen Umständen universelle Fragen zu stellen. Das befreit sich vom Provinziellen, das deutsche Filmstoffe manchmal an sich haben und macht sich in aller Welt verständlich." (Just imagine that it is fascism: how would you act?  Which role would you take on? Would you be a fellow traveler like Dennis or a fanatic like Tim; or would you be part of the resistance like Karo, or would the truth only slowly sink in like with Marco?  Or do you have the right stuff to be a leader like the teacher Wenger? The film is successful in posing universal questions in the context of a real situation. So the film is able to move beyond the provincialism of so much German cinema and assert itself in the world.)

I have not had the chance to see Die Welle yet, but I did see Gansel's excellent film NaPolA ( American movie title Before the Fall) which dealt with similar themes.

Uncle Walt and Der Führer

Unfortunately I didn't make it out to the Bay Area in time to see John J. Power's avant-garde play Disney & Deutschland which imagines a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney in 1935 with supporting roles of Leni Riefenstahl (as Hitler's lover!) as well as Josef and Magda Goebbels. The play had a short run and, judging from the reviews, is unlikely to open on Broadway anytime soon.  Still, the drama opens up some interesting ideas, such as the nature of the fascist aesthetic, and Albert Speer as the inspiration for Disneyland. (Anyone who has visited Disney World can attest to a creepy totalitarian aspect to the place at times.)

But what was the true relationship between Walt Disney and Nazi Germany?  It is interesting that the San Francisco Weekly writes of "historically documented 1935 meeting between Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler."  I don't have access to the Disney Archives - perhaps John J. Powers does - but there is no record of a meeting between Walt Disney and Hitler.  What has been documented is an automobile trip in 1935 by Walt Disney and his brother Roy through Germany which included a stop in Munich to meet with the German distributor of Disney's cartoons. But  Mario Dressler writes in a catalog to an exhibition of Disney cartoons in Potsdam (Im Reiche der Micky Maus: Walt Disney in Deutschland 1927-1945) that the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin was aware of the Disney brothers' visit in Munich and flew them to Berlin for meetings.  Whom they met with - if such a special visit even took place - is unfortunately not known.  In view of the detailed records kept by Hitler's Sekretariat, it is unlikely that they met with Der Führer in an undocumented meeting. 

However, after leaving Munich the DIsney brothers did drive on to Rome where they were greeted as cultural heroes by Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. 

What is indisputable is that Hitler was a huge fan of Disney. Goebbels gave him 12 Disney shorts as a Christmas present in 1937, and noted in his diary with satisifaction that  Der Führer "freut sich sehr darüber. Ist ganz glücklich über diesen Schatz." (He is very pleased and very happy about this treasure.") Hitler dreamed about creating a German version of Walt Disney and instructed Goebbels to establish the "Deutsche Zeichentrickfilm GmbH"  in 1942.  But the first production - Armer Hansi - about a canary that longs to be safe in its cage - was a great disappointment and did not come anywhere near to matching the Disney quality.

Did Hitler the artist try to improve the quality of these cartoons himself?  Recently, the director of the war museum in northern Norway claims that he acquired drawings of Disney characters signed A.Hitler at an auction in Germany.  The authenticity, however, cannot be confirmed. 
 

Ken Burns' Mega-Documentary The War Comes to German Television

I have to confess that like most Americans I am a sucker for Ken Burns' films. The soothing voice of the omniscient narrator, the zooming and panning across still photographs with the plaintive piano or violin as the background music - the frank sentimentality of the narrative - lulls me into a sense of shared national heritage. It is a pleasant place to be, even though historians find the absence of context and analysis appalling.  For a nation that suffers from historical amnesia, the non-historian Ken Burns is the closest thing we have to a national historian.

What is good about a Burns film is that he goes to original sources and shows history "from the bottom up".  This was particularly effective in his Civil War documentary, as the narrator read from (remarkably eloquent) letters from soldiers and their families.  What was also admirable about that documentary was the acknowledgment of shared sacrifice on both sides of the conflict: at no point did Burns vilify the Confederacy.

Unfortunately this balance is totally missing from The War, which is a frank celebration of the American triumph of good over evil in the Good War. There is zero analysis of the origin of World War II or how America got into it. Rather, war is presented as something that is an immutable aspect of human behavior.  This from the very first episode: the narrator tells us"The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power".  The first episode is titled "The Necessary War", so everything that comes afterward is legitimized.  The firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - these aspects of the Good War are not questioned: the destructive brutality (and the film does not shirk from showing this, at least) is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of "The Necessary War". 

Still, The War contains some compelling film footage.  I also thought the focus on the war experience from the perspective of four medium-sized American cities - both on the battlefield and the home front - was effective. Ken Burns also does an excellent job on in conveying the terrible price of war, the pervasiveness of death.  This war was fought before PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a known affliction, but it is clear from the letters from the front and the eyewitness accounts of the living survivors that it affected many of the soldiers.

The War will be broadcast on the German TV network ARTE starting this Wednesday for seven consecutive weeks.

I found only one review so far in the German press: Silke Lührman  writes about the  Burns' documentary  in the völkisch weekly Junge Freiheit.  Lührman's tone in her review is predictably sarcastic, but she does have one great line at the end of the piece:

"Geschichte, wie sie Sieger schreiben? Mag sein, aber sicher auch Balsam auf der wunden Seele einer angeschlagenen Supermacht, die demnächst in das sechste Jahr eines unnötigen Krieges geht."(History from the pespective of the victor?  Perhaps, but it (The War) is also a balm for the wounded soul of a beleaguered superpower, which shortly will be entering the sixth year of an unnecessary war.)

You can read my translation of the entire review over at Watching America.

Sexy European Union

Are European films sexier than American ones?  Most definitely yes!  And the dreary bureaucrats in Brussels have created an ad for YouTube to broadcast this cinematic fact to the world.

(Note: Look for the snippet from the German classic Goodbye Lenin!)