Deutsche Geschichte - German stories in film

Documentary and fiction films dealing with an aspect, an era, or historical figures in German history are staples of the Berlinale. They allow a critic to gauge how a domestic audience interacts with controversial or complicated subjects.

The crowd-pleaser Goethe!, directed by Philipp Stolzl and starring Alexander Fehling, a fresh face and rising Teuton star, will have an international distribution under the title Goethe in Love. Unabashedly modern in sensibility and narrative structure, the film is out to emulate the international art-house sucess of Shakespeare in Love. Beautiful people in period costumes (although fashionably dishevelled), the story closely follows the emotional and creative process leading to Goethe's first success, the novella "Werther" about a young writer whose passionate first love is doomed by the lack of economic prospect. Even though no scandalous new ground is broken about this beloved literary figure, the film manges to remain engaging through its Masterpiece Theater approach. (If you are riveted by Downton Abbey recently shown on PBS, Goethe! will be your cup of tea).

The success of Inglourious Basterds was obviously responsible for the green light given to My Best Enemy, an Austrian Nazi-era revenge fantasy, based on a novel by an Holocaust survivor, about a Jewish gallery owner in Vienna who beats the Nazis at their game. Lavishly produced, starring the ubiquitous Moritz Bleibtreu as a dashing Viennese who gets the last laugh, the film does not have the hysterical absurdities and unbearable suspense of the Tarantino opus, but packs a punch or two, especially among those familiar with the 'degenerate art' topic, which gets a funny twist. The caricature of German military efficiency gone awry has its roots in Chaplin, even though here it borders on the cliche.

The origins of the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist group of the 1960s and 70s is approached by filmmaker Andres Veiel from a fresh angle - very different from sound and fury of the 2008 The Baader-Meinhoof Complex. Based on a non-fiction book about the romantic and intellectual entanglements of Gudrun Esslin - one of the founders of the Red Army - with left-wing writer Bernward Vesper, the son of a Nazi writer, If Not Us, Who probes in the personal aspects of their no-strings-attached love affair, leaving the ideological as a looming background. Like the recent French biopic Carlos, by Olivier Assayas, the film is not about left-wing terrorism emerging in a materialistic post-war Europe, as much as a probe into a complicated couple's interpersonal dynamics as they become radicalized and part ways. By concentrating in the early 1960s the film dissects the roots of youthful discontent leading to the revolts later in the decade. Unsentimental and unflinching, If Not Us, Who eschews the hagiography relished by Motorcycle Diaries as well as the frantic pace of Carlos, to place the life of these emblematic self-destructive rebels in light and shadow, without an editorial comment.

The DDR, the acronym for the Communist German Democratic Republic, is the subject of the intriguing and aptly title The Price, directed by Elke Hauck. The story alternates between the present tense and the last days of the DDR, with the sympathy on the side of the characters that understand, and also miss, a country that no longer exists. The Price distills the Ossie perspective, that is the East German view of life and historical experience, minus the virulent ideological component. A subdued drama about three friends in the last year of high school and the different paths they take (one tragic) when Communism imploded, the picture assesses the results of the political changes without the hilarity of Good-bye, Lenin, although inserting a good dose of old-fashioned realism and a touch of irony. The "Preis" of the German title can mean both 'price' and 'prize'. Made twenty years after the German reunification, the film can be taken as a piece of fiction documenting an East German perspective with a distinctive voice.

Such is the case, also, of the fascinating documentary Vaterlandsverrater (Traitor to the Motherland, translated as Enemy of the State), directed by Annekristin Hendel - like Elke Hauck, a filmmaker born and raised in the former DDR. It is centered on a 75-year-old writer, Paul Gratzik, who was a Stasi informer. A fervent Communist and a womanizer with a flair for words, the protagonist puts on a show for the viewer, with the filmmaker probing the armor for weak spots and not findng many. From the onset, asked about how he feels about his decision to inform on colleagues in East Berlin's cultural scene, Gratzik turns the table on the director by aserting with dith-Piaf-defiance that he doesn't regret anything. Without archival footage, and relying solely on interviews, and some exquisite drawings illustrating people and events, the director builds the portrait of a complicated man, and by extension offers a layered view about the symbiotic relationship between the DDR surveillance system and its informers (An excellent complement to this documetary is "The File", the autobiographical account by Timothy Garton Ash about his own Stasi file and those who informed on him in the early 1980s).

In this context, one should argue that The Enemy of the State can be placed squarely opposite The Life of Others (2006), a fictionalized account of a Stasi informer's job by a West German director. Filmmakers from East Germany, like Annekristin Hendel (with whom I had a very interesting one-hour talk, together with my friend and colleague Silvia Kratzer, who filled in my German lacunae), argue that by virtue of having lived the horrors and absurdities of the system, they are in a position to show it in a more accurate and realistic way. These Ossie directors don't favor the polished looks and narratives of the Hollywood-style of cinema (think Run, Lola, Run) but a more truthful look at how life is. This is an ongoing subject of debate, and one to which contribute the many East German filmmakers in the Berlinale every year.

The last film shown in the competition was Unknown, a German-British-French thriller set in present day Berlin about an American, Liam Neeson, who loses his identity as a result of an accident, and wakes up from a coma to discover that he is pursued by ruthless killers. A Hitchcock rip-off (Torn Curtain with a twist) and with a Bourne Identity complex, the film is nevertheless quite entertaining (the Berlin locations are fun to spot). Bruno Ganz steals the show in a few scenes as a man who has had to reinvent himself: formerly a Stasi officer, he is now a detective impeccably positioned to unlock Neeson's dark past. Ganz played the role with over the top gusto, and his last scene had the public roaring with laughter, with its tragicomic overtones.

German history ... always good stuff to work from ...

The Berlinale at 61

There is no better place to meet old friends and make new ones - filmically speaking - than the terrific Berlin film festival. I came here for the first time in 1985, and except for a handful of times, I have been a regular visitor ever since.
For a film professor it's the most efficient - and fun - way to get a grip on the world scene and pursue guilty pleasures that Netflix or VOD services like Mubi cannot fulfill. The electronic library of Alexandria does not exist yet in one virtual place.

The Berlinale - and of course the same holds true for any well-put together festival - opens vistas on the old and the new, and thus becomes a necessary tool to perfect an understanding of the status of cinema and how to teach it better. In the Berlinale I first became acquainted with the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers; with the works of a then unknown Polish director of television and documentaries, Krzystof Kieslowski; here I first enjoyed the hyperkinetic Hong Kong cinema - Johnnie To being one of its most exciting representatives - and learned to appreciate the Bollywood baroque. The imaginative Latin American cinema, whether magical realist, purely political or minimalist always finds a home in Berlin. Attuned to the political, the Berlinale winked a serious eye to filmmakers in the Soviet sphere and featured the cinema of Glasnost - Marina Goldovskaya's ground-breaking documentary Solovki Power, and a flood of works undermining Soviet ideological rigidity were generously showcased by the Berlinale. Often at the Berlinale I see the birth of a critical reputation, or the recognition of a long trajectory in a national cinema - like the fiercely independent Israeli Eran Riklis (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree)and Hayao Miyazaki.

The wares have been so far a delight, a basket of very funny comedies about cultural and linguistic clashes (the French Les femmes du 6eme etage and the German Almanya, where traditional assumptions about host countries are turned upside down by sharp immigrants), mixed with a powerful contemporary reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and the role of warriors outside of the battlefield, directing debut of Ralph Fiennes; and tightly woven thrillers of sorts about meltdowns - the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the Ukranian A Saturday, and Wall Street in 2008, Margin Call, first film by an NYU graduate. How will the jury graciously presided by Isabella Rossellini decide on a winner is anybody's guess. The stars may smile on an Iranian film coming from left field, Nader and Simin, A Separation, the multilayered probe into a couple's impending divorce in present day Tehran, based on a screenplay worth dissection in film school.


Sunday was a day devoted to 3D, as used for the first time by two longtime German auteurs - my 'friends' of so many years and teaching staples in many classes: Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Courtesy of a German newspaper, I post a lovely photo of Wenders and German president Angela Merkel watching in the Berlinale Palast the Pina, the knockout documentary Wenders devoted to the work of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. By analogy, Wenders uses the 3D camera - elegantly, unobstrusively - the way Bausch created her muscular, soul-baring performances, Wenders noted in the press conference that he wanted to show "what the soul tells through our body" (a recurrent Wenders theme, beautifully rendered in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire). The director does not 'film' the company's numbers, he stages them for the camera,in theaters, parks, factories, even public transportation in Wuppertal, where the company is based, exploring the esthetic possibilities allowed by the new technology. Editing and music, combined with finely stylized interviews with dancers and footage of Bausch, who died unexpectedly in 2009 (and forced Wenders to rethink the project) create a fascinating spectacle. Warner Bros will distribute the film in the US; in the meantime, its trailer is available online to give a taste of the riches to come.

Werner Herzog seems to have had the same enthusiasm of Wenders, even though his nature documentary "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" has the limitations of works commissioned by television channels. The subject matter is intriguing: a cave discovered in Southern France n 1994 contains stunning paleolithic paintings. What begins as a run-of-the-mill Discovery Channel type of film interspersing talking heads with scenes dimly lit by flashlight, very quickly becomes something else. As narrated by Herzog, it is not only the record of himself in the filming process (with the 3D technology featured prominently)but also a probe into what makes us human; as one of the anthropologists notes, the link with the Cromagnon man and us, Homo Sapiens, throught history and memory. This is a variation of a recurring Herzog theme, since his features like Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the disturbing documentary Grizzly Man: the relationship between man and nature, and man's proneness to stumble into the abyss pushed by his own folly. The abyss, in this Berlinale offering, is made explicit in the final scene. Not far from the cave, and as a side-effect of a nuclear plant, a man-made cooling swamp is teeming with albino aligators. An extreme close up of an aligator's bloated eye is superimposed on a gracefully painted hand in the cave. Film esthetics is used to capture a collective descent into madness.

There are many other friends waiting for us in the dark - echoes of Norma Desmond - in these next days. First and foremost, a gentleman from Sweden, for whom the Deutsche Kinematek has organized a very complete retrospective. It is supplemented by an exhibit in the adjoining Film Museum. The poster movingly embodies what this gentleman thought of theater and film - his love and his mistresses, as he once famously quipped: a world of enchantment, refected in the eyes of a boy, looking up, outside of the frame. The exhibition is called "Bergman, truth and lies".

The dreams of a Costa Rican family

“Being in two places at once … like walking in between …” A US documentary observes the dreams of a Costa Rican family.

Not Here, Not There [Ni aquí, ni allá] (2009) written, directed and produced by Betsy Haley Hershey 63 minutos

Like many recent films on the subject, Betsy Haley Hershey’s debut documentary feature Not Here, Not There succeeds in painting the large picture of Latin American illegal immigration to the United States through a small-scale family story. The director met them in rural Costa Rica several years ago in an exchange program. Making a meager living in a coffee plantation, four of the six siblings trekked to the US and landed restaurant jobs in the East Coast, where other people from their small mountain village had settled. The parents stayed behind with the two youngest, a boy and a girl, Salomé. It is a middle class family, aspiring to higher education and understanding the realities of an interconnected world.

Between 2006 and 2008, the director observed how the family dynamics was shaped by two geographical locations, two languages and wildly contrasting cultures - split between the “here” and “there” of the title. Half-way through the shooting, the family is struck by tragedy. Astutely, the filmmaker combined the techniques of direct cinema – requiring long hours of shooting and remarkable editing skills – with the abundant visual materials supplied by the family members themselves: home videos, photographs and letters.

What emerges in Not Here, Not There is a beautiful and poignant family portrait built as a counterpoint between life in the United States – access to material goods but the looming threat of deportation– and the rural scenes of a emotionally fulfilling Costa Rican home, where progress is limited. This pendulum is at first somewhat disconcerting to the audience; we are lost about the exact physical and psychological whereabouts of the six siblings and their parents, since there is no objective narrator or chronological timeline to explain the sequence of events. It is a crosscutting technique, however, that will pay good dividends: it not only provides the pendular structure of the documentary, but also reflects its very meaning, nicely encapsulated in the title. “Your body is in one place, your heart in another”, the Costa Rican wife of the older brother explains to the director, thus providing a rationale to the open-ended story unfolding on the screen.

Who can be familiar with the many documentaries exploring the immigration conundrum with ethnographic zeal? So Ms. Hershey may not know that her film, much like Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1989), by renowned documentarian Jorge Preloran, ends ups giving the subjects of her picture a strong directorial role. Many years in the making, the Los Angeles-based Argentine filmmaker and UCLA professor documented with his anthropologist wife Mabel, the process of uprooting undergone by a young Otavalo Indian from Ecuador, who came to live with them in Los Angeles. Such was the involvement of Zulay Saravino in the filmic recording of her cultural and emotional changes – including a strong presence in the editing choices – that Preloran gave her a directing credit. A similar process seems to be at work in Not Here, Not There: the documentary is firmly held by the candid narration provided by Salomé, a naturally eloquent young voice, and the home movies supplied by her older brothers.

Also, like the heart-warming, heart-wrenching and equally open-ended Mexican feature by Patricia Riggen, La misma luna (Under the Same Moon, 2007), Not Here, Not There cannot have a resolution. For the illegal immigrants of this family, struggling in the “Here” of the United States, the American Dream is intangible; from the “There” of Costa Rica, the American Dream becomes a Rorschach inkblot into which they see their many aspirations. The film chooses to end with two of the brothers retracing the steps of their dangerous first journey from Costa Rica to the United States. Where is their home …?

What will captivate the viewers of this topnotch documentary is the delicate touch with which Ms. Hershey reveals the all too human and universal longings of a family like us.


Not Here, Not There has been seen in a few festivals and collected several awards over the past year. More information is available at http://www.notherenotthere.com/
I hope the documentary receives the exposure and recognition it deserves.

Flor silvestre - The Hollywood style in Revolutionary Mexico

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, a cultural organization sponsoring the screening of classic and contemporary Latin American cinema since the late 1990s, will be doing one of their programs as part of the Los Angeles Conservancy long-standing series “Last Remaining Seats”. On June 23, 2010, it will screen Flor silvestre (Wild Flower, 1943) in the lovingly restored Million Dollar Theatre.

This is the deluxe theater where Sid Grauman launched his Los Angeles operations in 1918. Designed by Albert C. Martin and adorned with sculptures by Joseph Mora, the building’s ornamentation is Churrigueresque, Spain’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Baroque style. The theater’s pièce de résistence is the auditorium designed by William Woollett, with a beautiful coffered dome and ornate organ grilles. From 1950 until the late 1980s, the theater presented Spanish-language films and variety performances, or “variedades”, imported from Mexico. After renovations and upgrades, the theater reopened in 2008.

I have been writing some of Cinemateca bilingual program notes for these events since 2005. Michael Díaz, the founder and motor behind this lovely institution, asked me to prepare some comments on their summer screening, Flor silvestre.

I transcribe below the short text I wrote – more academic than conversational, as a blog would require. It is, however, a good point of entry to ponder the influence of the Hollywood visual and directing style on a team that formed the style and content of Mexican cinema, national and patriotic, for over two decades.

A period melodrama set during the 1910 Revolution, Flor silvestre is considered a classic work of Mexico’s Golden Era. This intimate yet universal love story fatefully shaped by the turmoil of social and political change resonates today.

The plot is anchored in the class and ideological divisions boiling under the surface of the iron stability brought by the Porfirio Díaz regime: A young peasant, Esperanza (Dolores del Río), marries José Luis Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), the son of the region’s powerful landowner. His parents coldly reject Esmeralda: “We all occupy a place in life, and those at the bottom (“los de abajo”), no matter how much they dream, will always remain below”, warns his mother. Soon the winds of the Revolution – in which José Luis participates – sweep over the valley, a tumultuous mix of idealists, reformers, opportunists and thieves. The murder of the patriarch by bandits pretending to be revolutionaries forces José Luis – now the father of a newborn – to honor an ancestral code of revenge, with tragic results. The story unfolds as a flashback, recounted by Esperanza to her now adult son, reflecting that modern Mexico has been built on its past, the land and the dead.

Flor silvestre made beautiful Dolores del Río a star of the Mexican cinema. She was already in her late thirties, and this was her first Spanish-language production. Her Hollywood career in the 20s and 30s playing exotic women had petered out. Paradoxically, the opportunity offered by Emilio Fernández, a director working in the classic studio style, to play a young naive character (the reverse of her Hollywood persona) became the first of their many notable collaborations, most famously María Candelaria (1944).

It also marked the first time Gabriel Figueroa, a cinematographer trained by Gregg Toland in ground-breaking photographic techniques and powerfully influenced by the Mexican muralists, European painting and Sergei Eisenstein, worked with Fernández. Screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno was brought on board, for the first also of many projects together. Established star Pedro Armendáriz would be paired again with Dolores del Río in María Candelaria and other Mexican classics.

In Flor silvestre Fernández and Figueroa began to develop a highly pictorial visual style, including a type of narrative and characters that defined Mexican cinema and “Mexicanness” in the 1940s. These films were lyrical and patriotic, and they celebrated not only the country’s geographical beauty but also idealized its indigenous population, showcasing them as archetypal figures steeped in tragedy and fatalism. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz are the first of many ill-fated couples: in Flor silvestre they embody the tragedy of lovers destroyed by social prejudice and incomprehension.

The film is a visual delight. The audience will appreciate the beautiful way Figueroa’s camera sculpts the human figures and a landscape of clouds and maguey using chiaroscuro techniques and curvilinear perspective with expressionistic effects. Many scenes come to mind: the murdered father’s wake, staged like the painting El requiem by Orozco; the singers on horseback playing their guitars, their song commenting on the story; the agitated crows in the climax of the film.

The handling of Dolores del Río is also very interesting: while her delicate features are enhanced by classic Hollywood lighting, the director guides her performance in a way that keeps her sensuality but obliterates the exoticism of her American career. The strong inner beauty the actress showed in Flor silvestre would become part of her screen persona from then on. (A case in point, Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), where the actress is the feminine and resilient Kiowa mother of a brown-skinned Elvis Presley).

Oscars ephemera

A quick e-mail yesterday from the web commentary editor of the New York Times led to a 300-word piece on the connection between artistry and the Academy Awards.

Los Angeles has been buzzing these past days – print, radio, television – with Oscar talk. Everybody has an opinion … democracy at work, as the said NYT forum shows.

Since I jotted down a few comments about international cinema and the Oscars, the editor titled my paragraphs … "Kurosawa in Hollywood".

Below is what I wrote.

French writer and cultural minister André Malraux once noted that cinema is an industry that sometimes disguises itself as art. The paradox at the heart of film — an object manufactured for mass consumption as well as a thing of beauty capturing the human experience — is also one embedded in the Academy itself.

The Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with foreign cinema.
It is after all a trade organization founded in 1927 to counter the notion that Hollywood was a purely business proposition.

There is no mathematical formula to gauge the economic impact of an Oscar nomination or win on a given film. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that the Academy Awards promote artistry and experimentation, since there are so many other factors at play when a member casts his vote.


In the case of foreign cinema, the Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with films and directors embraced by critics — Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel and an illustrious list of contemporary artists. If anything, Oscars for foreign films show that Hollywood is not provincial.

Foreign film winners tend to show a balance between the tried-and-true approach and the innovative, both in subject matter and style. And this becomes evident if you quickly peruse the list of winners since the category began in 1947.

However, who can predict if on Sunday the more “standard” Argentine nominee, El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), a TV-style crime narrative with a twist, will win over two visually innovative, stark dramas laced with social and political commentary — Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) and Un Prophète(The Prophet) — which are artistic nuts more difficult to crack?

Maria Elena de las Carreras, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, is a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles and Cal State Northridge. She is a regular collaborator of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.



The link for the NYT Room for Debate forum:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/do-the-oscars-undermine-artistry/

The UCLA connection

The six degrees of separation work in unexpected, whimsical ways. What do two beautifully crafted Japanese films – Ototo and Kyoto Story, by veteran Yoji Yamada – have in common with Zona Sur, the no-holds barred metaphorical critique of upper class Bolivians, directed by US-trained Juan Carlos Valdivia? Nothing at all, if one looks at how film technique, storytelling and human emotions are handled. There is no connection either between a filmmaker in his eighties, who looks at people and cities with affection and nostalgia, and a young director from Latin America with a knack for casting and an ax to grind at his social milieu. To use a quick film history shortcut, both are as far apart as John Ford and Luis Buñuel.

However, a connection, both geographical and academic can be established, when one realizes that Ichiro Yamamoto, the producer of the Japanese films, and Zona Sur cinematographer Paul de Lumen coincided at the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media between 2006 and 2007. They probably never met, but both certainly benefited from the talents and possibilities offered by our film school and the UCLA infrastructure.


A veteran producer at Shochiku – one of the major Japanese studios, already a hundred years old, and the home of Yazujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, among others – Mr. Yamamoto came to Los Angeles in 2006 on a sabbatical of sorts to learn in situ about the workings of contemporary Hollywood and imbibe the history of American cinema through classes and screenings – moving around the city by bus. Friendly to professors and students, and enthusiastic about the possibility to learn, he also had much to give. I invited him to talk about the state of Japanese production to my students in a class on the history of Asian, African and Latin American cinema in the summer of 2007. He used as an example Yamada’s Love and Honor (2006), which he co-wrote and produced. Ichiro expanded on the connections between Ozu, Kurosawa and Yamada, and their links to Shochiku studios. For one hour, the masters came to life and Japanese culture and values – as embodied in these directors – were lovingly discussed.

Mr. Yamada is in Berlin to showcase the latest work by Yamada: Ototo is the closing film of the Berlinale, and Kyoto Story was selected for the Forum. In a visual style reminiscent of Ozu and broaching a similar subject matter – six decades later – the films are delicate explorations of family and social relations, among ordinary people caught in situations of change and upheaval. They celebrate traditional values, much in the John Ford style, with a scent of nostalgia and a love for goodness. Paul Schrader might look at these pictures of Yamada as examples of ‘transcendental style. These two films, as well as the samurai trilogy preceding them – The Twilight Samurai (2002), The Hidden Blade (2004) and Love and Honor (2006) – would be a programming coup for the Billy Wilder Theater.

I had read about the successful career of Zona Sur – recent awards at Sundance for writing and directing, and the cinematography prize at Huelva, a Spanish festival devoted to Hispanic cinemas. Shown to a packed audience at the Berlinale – unfortunately minus the director and other cast and crew members, who had already left the city – the film is an impressive work, by itself and also as an example of social critique in the grand Latin American tradition.

Zona Sur is centered on a patrician and seemingly wealthy family of La Paz, headed by an elegant and tough matriarch. Not unlike Y tu mamá también in its portrait of a self-centered privileged milieu, the film subtly becomes a metaphor for Bolivia’s contemporary social and political dynamics. It avoids the trite left-wing clichés of established Latin American political cinema – and even the magical realism attached to it in the 1980s and 90s – to provide a ferocious critique of present day Bolivia, where both the Spanish-descent ruling class and the Indian masses in the Evo Morales era are reassessing themselves. This state of turmoil is stunningly captured by the sophisticated use of the camera: 360-degree pan shots, mostly of interior scenes in a beautiful home perched on the hills. At first, one wonders about this bravura camera work until it becomes evident that the meaning of Zona Sur is visually embedded in this graceful but implacable movement: the family, and by extension, the Bolivian upper echelon, is trapped in a circle of false appearances and hypocrisy. Only at the end, the camera leaves ground and literally flies unbound into the sky. In the last scene, it returns to its graceful movement to present a sweetly ironic portrait of (wishful) racial and social harmony.

Carl Laemmle – “Der Pionier von Hollywood” - at the UFA Fabrik
The UFA Fabrik is a vast cultural and ecological center in Tempelhof, a neighborhood in southern Berlin. Its oldest buildings date from the 1920s, and they were used by the UFA studio after it moved to suburban Potsdam as its post-production center. Its state-of-the art theater at the time, is still in use today. There, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, received a lovely homage, on the occasion of the centennial of his first feature film Hiawatha – recently shown at the Academy as part of its 1909 program. The print came from the UCLA Archive, and before its screening, Dr. Udo Bayer, director of the Laupheim Museum, in Laemmle’s hometown, gave a short talk about the pioneer’s early years in southern Germany and his life in the US, illustrated by photos.

UCLA was greatly thanked for loaning the print – that looked lovely in that historical theater – and its charming director Siegrid Niemer and associates hoped that this would be the beginning of a steady collaboration in film programming.

The UFA Fabrik has an informative website, in German and English, found at www.ufafabrik.de, with interesting historical facts and a detailed account of its multiple activities.

The Return of History

The Berlinale is a natural fit for documentaries and fiction films dealing with German history and politics. And every year the festival presents intriguing or polemical works shedding light on a still painful 20th century. Two documentaries in the Panorama section brought to the forefront aspects of that perennial staple, the Third Reich: German filmmaker Ilona Ziok’s Fritz Bauer – Death by Instalments, and young Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished.

The remarkable historical documentaries of Ms. Ziok deserve wider circulation and are certainly inspirational to those interested in the craft of writing history with visual materials: Kurt Gerrons Karusell, The Sounds of Silents, The Count and the Comrade. German art and politics are interwoven in a complex tapestry where the individuals at the heart of these stories become emblematic of their times – a German Jewish actor of the Weimar cinema era, a pianist of silent cinema in Berlin, an aristocrat and a communist whose paths cross in a concentration camp and symbolize post-war Germany. In her brand-new documentary, the director examines the career of Fritz Bauer, a no-nonsense German Jewish lawyer who became the chief prosecutor of Nazi crimes. A finely tuned piece of non-chronological editing, the documentary has as its linchpin an extended interview with Bauer made for German television of the 1960s. In the guise of a conversation with young people, Bauer summarizes the legal and moral implications of these crimes, less than a generation away, and urges the country to proceed with the prosecution of those responsible. Interspersed with interviews to family members, friends and colleagues, the documentary recurs to archival materials, including newsreel footage of my hometown of Buenos Aires at the time of the capture of Eichmann by Israeli intelligence forces, acting on information provided by Bauer. By the 1960s the prosecutor had despaired that the German legal system would bring this and other criminals to justice.

Today, Fritz Bauer seems to be largely under the historical radar, as the questions from the all-German audience at the screening I attended seemed to reflect. I remembered that the prosecutor in The Reader is patterned after Bauer; the film, like this documentary, ends up being not only about the responsibility of individual Germans in the commission of crimes during the war, but also about the price paid by a society as a whole. Without being didactic or preachy, the documentary succeeds in making this courageous tough-as-nails prosecutor embody the voice of moral clarity in post-war Germany. The fateful end of Bauer (quickly ruled as a ‘suicide’, in spite of evidence to the contrary at the times) brings an element of suspense to the biography. The choice of music by composer Manuel Göttsching combines Gorecki’s Third Symphony, a work of mourning for the victims of the he Holocaust, with Frank Sinatra singing ‘I did it my way’ when the credits roll. These are one of several bold choices.

The profound impact of A Film Unfinished lies in the intelligent handling of the subject matter: footage of the Warsaw Ghetto taken in 1942 for use in a German propaganda film surfaced in a GDR archive in the late 1980s. A Film Unfinished is the historical investigation of how this roughly edited hour-long material was shot. What emerges is a detective’s account of an unfinished propaganda project, with its emotional punch provided by survivors of this horrific episode of WWII, who watch the footage unfold and provide an eye witness account of how it got made. The use of diaries, German reports and even the words of one of the cameramen (in a reenactment) create a polyphonic if disturbing effect. The unadulterated use of the footage – as found in four cans, without soundtrack, listed as “Ghetto, 1942” – would have made this descent into the horror unbearable, as the filmmaker wisely noted after the screening. What the documentary brings, however, is another dimension to the horror: by uncovering the ‘staged’ the reality of the images themselves (hunger and death don’t even begin to paint the picture of the physical and spiritual indignities), A Film Unfinished gives this very ‘staginess’ a ‘documentary’ reality. In this sense, when the director decides to stage the interview with the cameraman who died a few years before (and whose words come verbatim from a legal document, she pointed out), she is doing the exact same thing the original material did, the ‘manipulation’ of reality. Hersonki is, in fact, not only showing the footage as shot but also commenting on its nature. Not quite a first person narrative – even though the director is the voiceover narrator – the documentary begins and ends in a deeply symbolic manner: the camera tracks slowly through a corridor to find the shelf where the cans are kept – it is the filmmaker’s journey into a heart of darkness.

The screening of the German competition entry Jud Süss, the Rise and Fall could have provided an interesting complement to these two documentaries, as a biopic-style account of how the historical novel by the German Jewish writer Feuchtwanger became an anti-Semitic Nazi film. Barely rising above the level of a TV movie, melodramatic and shallow, it makes one fondly recall Tarantino’s witty take on German propaganda films in Inglorious Basterds …

These notes are far from light and conversational in tone, as would befit the Blog Café … Perhaps next time I should dwell on two lovely Bollywood films, that use of the genre’s conventions to explore serious social and political issues … singing and dancing: My Name is Khan and Peepli Live … But now it’s off to the movies again …