Katalin Varga (Romania/UK/Hungary 2009)

Katalin and Orbán in the Carpathians

I wish that I’d seen this film when I was more alert and less pre-occupied. I think that I saw something astonishing, but I’m sure I missed some nuances.

The story is very simple, but begins with a flashforward – or possibly it begins ‘now’ and then proceeds as a flashback for half the film’s short (82 mins) running time. Katalin Varga is the mother of a ten year-old boy in Transylvania – the district in the Carpathians that was once part of the Hungarian empire but since 1918 has been part of Romania. Most of the actors in the film are ethnic Hungarians living in Romania. With an English writer-director and Sovaks as well as Romanians and Hungarians, eventually produced by Libra Films from Romania and distributed by a French company Memento, this is a co-operative enterprise – even if some malicious parties have criticised director Peter Strickland for stirring up enmities between Romanians and Hungarians.

When the ’secret’ behind Katalin’s son’s birth eventually emerges via gossip, her husband throws her out of the house and she takes her son Orbán, telling him that they are going to visit his grandmother. They travel by horse and cart into the mountains and Katalin becomes an ‘avenging angel’ as she seeks out those responsible for her current predicament.

Beautifully shot on 16mm in stunning landscapes, the film is a visual treat. I was reminded at times of the beauty of the Turkish film Times and Winds but the real link is to the fabulous films of Miklós Jancsó, who is himself from Transylvania. I’ve only seen a couple of his famous 1960s films – both in black and white – but the images of flower meadows, valleys, plains and rivers has stayed with me. The visual splendour of the landscapes in Katalin Varga is complemented by an extraordinary soundtrack which mixes Hungarian and Romanian folksongs with avant-garde electronic music by Steven Stapleton and his group Nurse with Wound and Geoff Cox. The effect is quite startling and at times like a horror or science fiction film. I haven’t seen most of Tarkovsky’s later films and I wonder if there is any similarity?

Hilda Péter as Katalin

The performances are very good, especially Hilda Péter as Katalin. A theatre actor with no previous film experience, she has a striking face – strong and attractive but not conventionally beautiful. I think she is going to be a star. Tibor Pálffy as the man Katalin is seeking also has a remarkable presence.

I guess this can only be described as an art film, but I hope that this doesn’t put people off. Get into the right mood and it will entrance you, though I wouldn’t recommend it as a Friday night date movie. It’s a traditional form – a revenge tale that ultimately leads to the angel consumed by her quest and becoming bad. It takes place in a world that seems to have changed little since medieval times. The occasional interruption by a mobile ‘phone ringtone and a couple of modern teenagers who warn Katalin that she is ‘taking the road to hell’ stand out as modern intrusions into an ancient tale. I recommend the film highly.

Nominated for the Golden Bear, Berlin 2009, Silver Bear Winner for Sound Design.

Cineuropa Film Focus (including interview with the director, Peter Strickland)

Press Pack from Memento (in English).

Similar Press Pack from Artificial Eye.

The Artificial Eye trailer:

Import/Export (Austria 2007)

Industrial Europe: individual or commodity?

After nearly two and a half hours, I think I heard something like a collective sigh of relief. But, even though you could guess that you’d find the words ‘unrelenting’ and ‘bleak’ in the standard review (I saw them in The Week), I don’t think that the audience’s response meant that the film had disappointed all of them. (Although a comment nearby was a philosophical:  ‘Well, you pay’s your money . . .’)

Seidl’s Import/Export, is a film that can shock/challenge/horrify you. It characterises a modern Europe where, across the borders of East and West, people regard themselves, and others, as commodities to sell.  It follows two story strands – of Olga (Import) and Paul/Pauli (Export) – disconnected stories that only link thematically. Some of the elements recall the stereotypical story of those forced to prostitute their lives to economic need. Frears’ Dirty, Pretty Things, for example, examines the lengths that those forced down into lowest economic rung will go to. Seidl’s film is similarly uncompromising  – without using the one, central ‘shock’ of black market organ trading. It does include elements that are melodramatic – and when you might be tempted to challenge him on some of the extremes, you believe that he would answer that it goes on – and his film makes you believe that it does go on.

This is a film that could alienate, but it doesn’t, because it makes its melodrama credible. In my limited view, it works because it punctuates scenes of interminable flatness with moments of high drama that appear ‘real’ – in the way our daily lives are routine punctuated by ‘events’. When the hospital nurse attacks Olga, it is ridiculous.  Seidl tells us he knows that by putting them in fancy-dress costume. However, emotionally, we know exactly why she does it, because we’ve observed all those small moments of frustration and resentment growing in the disconnected scenes.

As interesting, in a less conventional narrative, is Paul’s story. Seidl is masterful in moving our revulsion/dislike of this violent and inadequate man into real sympathy, perhaps even empathy by the end of the film. Everyone’s doing what they have to/need to do. Unlike Dirty, Pretty Things the plot device is not so melodramatic. Seidl’s characters are not ennobled by their entrapment – they are people – their hopes, their ideals mixed in completely with their selfishness. And they are rendered with very little judgement or typical narrative developments. You lived with them for the 2 plus hours – and I knew before the film had ended that Seidl would have ‘tricked’ me into thinking about what happened (I mean ‘could happen’) to them next!

One affective scene is where Olga regards the dead body of an elderly in-patient, a potential suitor, who she might have used to gain citizenship in Austria. Try to read her emotion in that moment – Seidl and Ekateryna Rak (who plays Olga) have judged a perfect mix of variant emotions – disappointment, realism, a faint grief at his loss.

This might be the ultimate cinema of brutal realism, but the cinematography is highly expressionistic.  Edward Lachman, who has credits from Soderbergh to Todd Solondz to Todd Haynes (including I’m Not There) and Wolfgang Thaler were joint collaborators here. Shots use depth of field to prevent the worlds of his characters becoming flat, disengaging. Without poeticising the landscapes, every location uses colour and composition to make us look – deep – into that world, because of the layered presentation. The use of colour filters and lighting signifies the anaemic, antiseptic worlds of work – green, sickly light illuminates the inhabitants. We are initially ‘caught out’ by some beautiful snowscape compositions – deep focus into the distance. However, our perspective is changed – since these are just the setting for the characters’ walk to work, to find work or where a high rise monstrosity house the very poorest, the snow falling on the trash surrounding their ‘home’. Look at the people – not the landscape – both the episodic narrative and the visual style seem to be teaching us to look more closely and pay attention. No doubt Seidl is didactic, always in charge of what he determines we should look at, but because there is such humanism in the way he (along with his actors and his filmmaking collaborators, including writer Veronika Franz)) presents these stories – I find I struggle with agreeing to the idea of ‘bleakness’ in this film.

24 Frames: books on regional cinemas (1)

The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed), Wallflower Press, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-9056-7410-7

‘24 Frames’ is a very welcome series from Wallflower Press that over the last few years has begun to introduce new audiences to films from ‘national and regional cinemas’ around the world. These are scholarly collections with 24 articles on individual films in each collection. The definition of a ‘regional cinema’ is always going to be arbitrary and the introduction to this collection by the editor turns the arbitrariness to the advantage of the book. On the one hand, the definition here of ‘North Africa and the Middle East’ includes three major film-producing countries, each of which deserves its own volume. On the other, there are good reasons, historical, political, cultural etc., why it is useful to group these cinemas. Commercially, the ‘region’ represents only a small part of the international film market, even though there are sizable local audiences and the potential for wider distribution. To illustrate the problem of definitions, the annual ‘World Film Market Trends’ publication, Focus (from the European Audio-Visual Observatory) includes all of Africa and the Middle East, but not Turkey. In this collection, Turkey is included, but not sub-Saharan Africa.

The Middle East is a highly problematic term that has arguably increased in usage with its importance as a concept in American foreign policy. The term was first popularised during the European colonial/imperial period, but then it referred primarily to Iraq and Persia/Iran. As a child, I remember the term the ‘Near East’. For the British, the ‘East’ began at Suez and the ‘Far East’ began at Singapore. India and Burma were the Raj. These are my memories of terms that lingered on after the Empire went. These terms at least had a (Eurocentric) logic that isn’t there in current usage. As Gönül Dönmez-Colin points out, the term ‘West Asia’ is sometimes used by Indian scholars and it does make more sense. Egypt and Turkey then conveniently straddle Asia and Africa/Europe respectively.

The region does not have a single language culture. Although Arabic, English and French are used extensively, Turkish, Hebrew and Farsi are distinctive language cultures. Religion and ethnicity are also mixed, especially in the littoral that the French used to call the Levant, with Lebanon and Beirut in particular celebrating diversity. This cultural mixing has contributed to several distinctive modes of film culture, both in production and in distribution/exhibition. The latter means that whilst some films from the region have been widely available in European and American specialised cinema circuits, others (generally those more popular with local audiences) have struggled to be seen outside parts of the region. There is now the beginnings of a Turkish popular cinema in limited distribution in Germany and other parts of Europe for the Turkish diaspora and also the possibility of Arabic-language films on satellite, but again these are unlikely to be seen by ‘Western’ audiences.

The difficulties of distribution mean that I have only seen three of the 24 films discussed in the book (although I have access to a couple more that I will get to eventually). It’s difficult therefore to evaluate the coverage of the diversity of material presented here. I can’t criticise a book because I haven’t seen the films, but the availability of films is an issue in opening up study. You can just imagine the headache the editor must have had trying to commission authors and titles, trying to represent an historical perspective and a spread across national cinemas, popular cinema and specialised cinema. For the record, the book has entries on four films each from Egypt, Turkey and Iran, four from the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) and seven from what was the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine – several involving co-productions, often with France) with the last entry about an Iraqi film, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection, produced from Switzerland and Germany. The only films made before 1970 are Ghazal Al-Banat (Candy Floss) and Bab El-Hadid (Cairo Station), both from Egypt in 1949 and 1958 respectively, the first representing the Egyptian studio system, the second Egypt’s principal auteur, Youssef Chahine.

I have seen two of the films in the last couple of years, Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994) and Uzak (Distant, Turkey, 2002), so I’ll focus on the analyses of these two. Viola Shafik’s essay (10 pp with references) on Silences of the Palace proved invaluable in working on the film for a recent course. The film did very well on the festival circuit winning prizes and it received distribution in Europe. It tells the story of a young woman growing up in the ‘women’s quarters’ in a Bey’s house (Beys were the aristocratic rulers in Tunisia, granted privileges by the French colonial administrators) in the 1950s. The story is told in flashback by the central character who has become a cabaret singer by the 1960s. Shafik begins with a commentary on the film’s critical reputation and she points out that although revered in the West as an ‘art film’, partly because it deals with the position of women in Islamic society, it is in fact a skilful re-interpretation of a classical melodrama. Shafik then notes that in 1995, the film was distributed widely in the West but, apart from within Tunisia itself, it was not sold to distributors elsewhere in the Arab world (i.e. unlike popular Egyptian melodramas). She goes on to explore the complex set of theoretical issues around ‘popular’ and ‘art cinema’, the denigration of Egyptian melodramas, the subtle transformation of the genre in Silences, the ‘moment’ of liberation from colonial rule as represented in national cinemas etc. By providing useful specific cultural knowledge as well as contextualising insights, Shafik makes possible a much richer reading of the film.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has ‘arrived’ in Europe and North America as an auteur, introduced outside the festival circuit by Uzak. In 2007, his position was firmly established by the critical reception to Iklimler. Uzak deals with the arrival in snowy Istanbul of a man from the rural hinterland. He comes to the apartment of his cousin, a photographer and very much the ‘metropolitan man’. The cousins have a very ‘distant’ relationship, exploration of which is the focus of the film. (The photographer is a typical character partly based on Ceylan himself.) S. Ruken Ozturk’s essay is just eight pages. Again, like Viola Shafik, she provides contextualising information about Ceylan’s earlier career, about the differences between Ceylan’s work and those of diaspora filmmakers such as Fatih Akin. She emphasises that Distant has been seen by far more cinemagoers in France (150,000) than in Turkey (60,000). What follows is again a rich reading of the film in terms of allegory and metaphor (Istanbul is a ‘distant place’ of 10 million souls caught somewhere between Turkey and Europe, the tale of the two cousins is played out in three scenes using a mousetrap – linked to the fable of the town mouse and country mouse) as well as in terms of a discourse of masculinity. I would have found this very useful after I’d first seen the film and again when I was teaching Iklimler.

If the rest of the entries are up to these two, I think that this will prove to be a valuable book. It has certainly encouraged me to think about hunting down more of these films on imported DVDs.

24 Frames: The Cinema of Central Europe, Peter Hames (ed), Wallflower, London 2004, ISBN 1-904764-20-7

The ‘naming’ of regions is also an issue in this collection. For far too long, the four countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been viewed as generally ‘East European’ and up until 1989 as part of an Eastern bloc dominated by Soviet Communism. As a result, the films have been viewed through a prism of ideological awareness – judged by the extent to which they have confirmed or resisted Soviet hegemony. But before 1939 ‘Central Europe’ was something of a powerhouse of artistic achievement deriving in part from the nationalist struggles of artists within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the new nation states that followed the break-up of the Empire after 1918. In this conception, I would expect to include aspects of German and Austrian Cinema, but I’m sure they will be part of another volume (and in any case will have different kinds of concerns).

Peter Hames’ collection of essays covers the four countries and the films range from the 1930s to the mid 1990s with a perhaps understandable focus on the mid 1960s (the period of the Czechoslovak New Wave). Apart from some of the earliest films, most of the titles have been distributed in the UK and several are now available on DVD. These include films by well-known European auteurs such as Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958 and Man of Marble, 1977) and Krzyzstof Kieslowski (Dekalog, 1988).

In this case, I have seen many of the films discussed and I have used material in the book on an evening class covering Central European Cinema. I found it extremely useful and I’d recommend it.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile, Romania, 2007)

Otilia interrogates our gaze at the end of the film

This film succeeds on a number oflevels: as a portrayal of Romania in 1987; as a shocking, and gripping, narrative; as an exercise in directorial style (the camera is often static and not necessarily positioned in the ‘best’ place). The focuses on how Otilia deals with her frustrating friend and her loving boyfriend; they, however, fail to take full responsibility for their actions and she has to carry them.

The directorial style reminded me of Miklos Jansco (The Red and White) where the camera’s unwavering gaze ‘misses’ some of the action as it goes off screen. This technique draws attention to our voyeurism; as does the film’s final shot – see image above. It’s interesting that such an uncompromising film should attract such accolades from imdb audiences; a sign of arthouse cinema’s health. This won last year’s Palme d’Or.

Solaris (USSR 1972)

Kris and his wife (or is she?) on Solaris

Solaris is one of the films offered for critical study on the WJEC A Level Film Studies course. The notes below were written for a course on ‘Speculative Fiction’ in 2001.

The novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was published in 1961 and as such stands as a much more sophisticated narrative than most Western science fiction could manage at the time. Lem wrote as a Pole and although familiar with Western SF also drew on the ‘philosophical writers’ of Eastern Europe such as Franz Kafka. The first English language translation of the novel appeared in 1970. The Russian film version followed in 1972 and as such was taken to be a riposte to Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey, even though it drew upon a novel already ten years old.

According to some sources, director Andrei Tarkovsky did not involve Lem in the screenplay of the film. The screenplay adds sequences that refer directly to Earth and the origins of the protagonist Kris Kelvin and his family home, a familiar image from other Soviet directors such as Dovzhenko. The novel is set completely in space.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86)
Tarkovsky was one of the few post Second World War Soviet directors to gain international recognition. His first three features after leaving film school (he had previously studied Arabic and worked as a geologist, unusual experiences for a filmmaker) all gained major international prizes. Solaris was his third film, but the first to get a UK release. It was followed into release by his second film Andrei Roublev, the story of a legendary icon painter which had difficulty in obtaining an export licence.
Tarkovsky went on to make The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979) (also a science fiction influenced narrative) in the Soviet Union before moving abroad for three more films before his death from cancer aged 54.
Tarkovsky’s method tended to eschew ‘montage’ and to use relatively slowly paced long takes in a process of ‘sculpting time’. This became more pronounced in his later films which tended to attract small, but very enthusiastic audiences. In his later career Tarkovsky became synonymous with the popular view of the arthouse director, but Solaris represents a more accessible work.

The film and the book

Lem’s book is a classic of science fiction and Tarkovsky stays fairly close to the narrative of events aboard the space station. The main difference between the two narratives is the concentration in the novel on a satire of academic research – Kris refers to a series of theoretical ideas about the planet Solaris. Tarkovsky is more interested in the impact of the planet and its ‘living ocean’ on Kris himself. Although obviously taken with Lem’s story, Tarkovsky wanted to use the visual and aural power of cinema to the full. Even so, he maintains the central focus of the novel – the metaphysical questions about science and conscience – rather than developing the narrative into a mystery or a thriller. In this sense, Solaris represents a genuine attempt to create an ‘sf’ film.

The novel is currently in print and a ‘study guide’ can be found on the website at: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/solaris.html

Alien contact

Solaris, both as novel and film, belongs to one of the major narrative groups of science fiction – stories about the first contact between human beings and aliens. Such stories can be divided into two groups. The ‘alien invasion’ group sees Earth visited by aliens, who are usually portrayed as aggressive and are ultimately defeated through the application of specifically ‘human’ knowledge and personal qualities. These stories were introduced by H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The second group, common since Flash Gordon battled Ming the Merciless, sees humans meeting aliens in space.
In both groups of stories the emphasis is on the humans’ response to an alien ‘threat’ (although occasionally the aliens are benign). It has been argued that the difference in Solaris is that more time is spent on the question of how both human and alien intelligence feel and then react to the meeting. How does the alien intelligence react to encounters with humans? How can human cultural activity explore such issues? Tarkovsky links this question to that of the ‘second chance’ – having your time again.

The following extract from the detailed website operated by ‘Underman’ (I have no idea who s/he is, but the site is well worth exploring) summarises Tarkovsky’s approach:

In 1973, the year after the completion of Solaris, Tarkovsky spoke about the film with a Russian interviewer, Z. Podguzhets. The text appears in Kitty Hunter-Blair’s book, named in the footnote to this section. This is my summary of part of the text. Please note, I use “man” here in a generic, not gender, sense.

As Tarkovsky read it, the key to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris was not the technological sophistication represented by space travel, but “the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience”. The spiritual implications of technology were more important to Tarkovsky than the technology itself. He described two opposing forces influencing man: one, a yearning for complete moral freedom; two, the search for meaning in his own existence. The inevitable result was a deep inner conflict and a battle with conscience, which Lem expressed through the relationship between Kelvin and his wife, Rheya, summoned back to physical form in station Solaris. Surrounded as he is by the ultimate products of technological achievement, with which he pursues his urge to explore the universe, Kelvin can do nothing to avoid coming face to face with the implications of his own past actions.

Kelvin can never distance himself from the forces that shaped his own development. However far he journeys, he will ultimately be drawn back to his own roots. Even at the limits of human endurance, Kelvin is a creature of the earth and the people who gave him existence. The dream of returning home and eradicating the mistakes of his past lies at the core of Kelvin’s being, but it takes an alien intelligence to perceive the dream.

Yet that alien intelligence, too, is subject to whatever laws may govern the universe. The inescapable fate bestowed by a spiritual, moral existence is to live with the conscience that arises from the actions a person takes, with no prospect of a second chance. Kelvin’s ultimate destiny is to return to the place where he was born. He can go nowhere else.

http://www.underview.com/2001/solaris.html (Unfortunately, this link is no longer valid – does anyone know if the text is available elsewhere?)

Time Within Time – The Diaries 1970-1986, Andrey Tarkovsky, translator Kitty Hunter- Blair, Faber and Faber, London, 1994.

Tarkovsky and the film critics

Film critics generally, and certainly in 1972 when Solaris was released, are often dismissive of science fiction. In Sight and Sound Spring 1973, the veteran film scholar Ivor Montagu celebrates the arrival of Tarkovsky’s films in the UK, but sees Solaris as the weakest, partly because it fails to represent scientists or science and instead concentrates on the personal. Tony Rayns in Monthly Film Bulletin of June 1973 refers to ‘kindergarten psychology’ and dismisses the film. Rayns suggests that 2001 was ‘totalitarian’ and Solaris is ‘humanist’, but where Kubrick was at least ‘visionary’, Tarkovsky is ‘merely reactionary’. However, Philip Strick, one of the few film critics with a detailed knowledge of science fiction claims that Solaris is:

“… the nearest the cinema has come to capturing the complexities of modern science fiction, with its intermingling of time and memory, acute uneasiness, and emphasis on elegance and style.” (Strick, Sight and Sound Winter 1972/3)

Solaris provides us with a chance to discuss what kinds of questions science fiction can ask when it is not being ‘predictive’. These may indeed turn out to be philosophical, and even spiritual, rather than ‘scientific’.

Roy Stafford 29 October 2001

I Served the King of England (Czech Republic/Slovakia 2006)

Ivan Barnev and Julia Jentsch as the odd couple in I Served the King of England

I approached this screening with some trepidation, especially after seeing the trailer. Having recently watched Jiri Menzel’s earlier film Closely Observed Trains (1966), which I first saw 40 years ago, I was both excited at the possibility of seeing something similar (both films coming from novels by Bohumil Hrabal, something of a Czech literary hero) and worried that the film’s approach would be stuck in a kind of 1960s timewarp.

At the end of two hours I was surprised at how easily the time had passed but also somewhat disturbed by the lack of any clear response I had to the film. It’s beautifully made with excellent performances and it looks wonderful. But it starts with an ‘iris-in’ and ends with an ‘iris out’ and this indicates its old-fashioned appeal. Not that this doesn’t have its charms and its nice to see so many older and less beautiful people having a good time. On the other hand, it is nearly always elderly men and nubile young women. I’m trying hard to think of any woman over 30 in the film at all. The women are beautiful and they are beautifully photographed (a kind of tasteful leer perhaps). The exception is the film’s star name, Julia Jentsch, here playing a Sudeten German and Hitler fraulein. She is rendered as almost a frump – a tribute to her acting skill and star presence.

The main problem I have with the film concerns the central section dealing with the Nazi period. The plot concerns a man of limited stature, literally ‘John Child’, who we see making his way in the world from the 1930s onwards – the story is told in flashback by the older John/Jan in the early 1960s. The young man has two desires – to become a millionaire and to be surrounded by beautiful women. He will achieve both these desires and then be imprisoned by the Communist state after 1948. As several reviewers have pointed out, there is a ‘Good Soldier Schweik’ feel to the story – emphasised by the award of a medal to John by a diminutive Hailie Selassie (an extremely disturbing sequence!). To use a cliché, this aspect of the story is very ‘Central European’. I was reminded of the recent Svankmajer film Lunacy – later I realised that the same actor, Martin Huba, has important roles in both films. I thought too about recent Polish comedies that I’ve seen (which often weren’t funny, even if I could see that they were meant to be funny) and at one point I thought of Roman Polanski, playing the sidekick of a vampire hunter in his 1967 film Dance of the Vampires. In these other films, however, I think it was clear what was being satirised. I was less sure about I Served the King of England.

The title refers to the maitre d’ of the posh hotel in which Jan works. This man is rather pompous, but he is patriotic and meets his fate at the hands of the Nazis. Jan is the everyman figure buffeted by the flow of historical events, but never engaged. I didn’t warm at all to the young Jan. I found him quite irritating, even more so than the hapless young man at the centre of Closely Observed Trains.

There is nothing wrong with making a period film as such and it seems that there is a desire to do this in several European countries in respect of 1930-1950. Black Books has been mentioned as a Dutch WW2 film that shares some elements with this film (though not its comedy style) and several Holocaust films (The Pianist, Fateless) have also appeared recently. I also recognise that Czechoslovakia in this period responded to the Nazi takeover in ways which still need working over (there is a kind of meta text about ‘Empire’ and German identity in Bohemia running throughout the film – the older Jan spends his years after imprisonment in exile in the mountain villages where German Bohemians fled after 1945). Closely Observed Trains does involve the resistance movement, but in this film Jan sees and feels very little. There are limited occasions when the impact of the Nazi Occupation takes centre stage. Perhaps this is more ‘truthful’ about the Czech experience? I don’t know and this film isn’t going to help me. So, this probably isn’t the best film to show to students to encourage them to explore East European Cinema – although it would help to dispel the image of Prague as a destination for British weekenders looking for a cheap drinking hole. The hotels are truly ’splendid’. Overall, I think this is entertaining but disappointing. But along with Lunacy, it does represent another high profile Czech film in distribution (albeit somewhat late after its launch at Berlin in 2007).

Since the screening I’ve read a number of interviews with Jiri Menzel in the Guardian and on Kinoblog and I’ve had the chance to revise my views. I can see Menzel’s argument that the recent film is an advance on the 1966 version with a hero who is more ‘truthful’, but I can’t get over my distaste for him (and the fact that at times he looks like a strange cross between Neville Chamberlain and a blond Hitler). This isn’t a slight on the Bulgarian actor Ivan Barnev, rather the context for the character. I’m never really interested in people who want to be millionaires, which I guess is my problem. However, it does occur to me that the concept of a male character who is unheroic and to an extent deceitful, but still very attractive to women is shared with Jacques Audiard’s wonderful film Un héros très discret (1996) starring Mathieu Kassovitz. That film seems to me to be a more successful attempt to explore how, in this case French, history has represented the German Occupation. The use of a certain kind of comedy is the difference between the films.

Sehnsucht (Longing, Germany 2006)

Markus (Andreas Mueller) and his wife, Ella (Ilka Welz)

(These notes were written for a screening of the film on a course on the Cinema of Central Europe.)

Sehnsucht tells the story of an ordinary man, in ordinary circumstances, who through a chance meeting propels himself, his wife and another woman towards tragic circumstances. The story is distinctive – not in the content, because it is a tale that we could feel is familiar, almost banal. However, the combination of what is being told with the way it is being told demonstrates several features that are unusual. The story is often told through juxtapositions, there is little exposition of character through extended scenes of dialogue. Markus, our protagonist, is quiet, unassuming and inexpressive of the internal drives that force him to act as he does. There is an implication that Markus little comprehends why he does what he does. In fact, the episodic style of the film and the refusal to explain, make this grown up filmmaking for grown-up film audiences.

Writer-director Valeska Grisebach’s work has been identified as being part of a New Wave of German cinema, in particular part of a ‘Berliner Schüle’. In fact, to be exact, she has been talked of as part of ‘the next generation’ of this new group, following on from the likes of Christian Petzold and sharing a platform with Christoph Hochäusler and Maria Speth (Madonnas (2006)). To outsiders, the variety of work being produced is striking and a sense of a joined-up movement is not obvious. However, there is much discussion of a move away from macro-politics to the micro-politics of the family, and there is evidence in the coverage given to these filmmakers of their impact in Germany and abroad, albeit on the festival circuit more than in the multiplexes. Grisebach’s work has featured on the festival circuit: Sehnsucht was included in competition at 2006 Berlinale (under Dieter Kosslick’s positive curation) and won the Special Jury Award in Buenos Aires.

Grisebach, like Petzold, made her first big impact with her graduation film Mein Stern (2000), in which she established a working style we can see perpetuated in Sehnsucht. Her casting procedure was painstakingly to interview potential actors, as part of the casting process but also as a way of collating experiences to include in the film. Both films used amateur actors, to achieve a naturalism that would convince audiences further about the drama being played out. Grisebach says of Sehnsucht, that using unknowns enhances the belief that any person has the potential to be a ‘melodramatic hero’. Her preparatory interviews asked people about their hopes for themselves as children, and how far they believed that these hopes had been realised. Grisebach comments that her research demonstrated that much of people’s hopes and longings centred around romantic, love stories, that it was there that we could become a “dramatic character, showing one’s true face”. I think it is possible to see this at play in Markus, of having the chance to be a new character in a new set of scenes that dramatise his banal existence and make his behaviour become addictive and irrational. The reserved cinematography commentates on his self-delusion, and the impossibility of escaping banality in either situation, an interpretation that is reinforced by the coda and its unusual style that creates a detachment from the story. Called Bressonian by some (after Robert Bresson), this reminds us that these choices of cinematography can have a political or moral undertone. Do we need, always, the commentary of editing, music and performance to be able to read the melodrama that exists in the most ordinary people’s lives?

Grisebach is one of the directors who has established an association of her work with Berlin and the state of Brandenburg, not least because it has the collision of Old West and Old East that she finds exciting. Place seems vital to these new German directors, many operating out of Berlin, who have been dubbed the ‘Nouvelle Vague Allemande’, even whilst it does not features in the films in the same way as, for example, the Berlin of Wenders’ Wings of Desire. However, the films do share something of the intention of Wenders’ contemplative piece about the state of Berlin. Grisebach is aware of examining a world altering post unification, with Brandenburg returning to a more mystic place “a fairy-tale forest” as the people disappear from its small villages through migration. Her comment on Berlin as having a ‘gruff quality’ but also a ‘damaged psyche’, could equally apply to these smaller places her characters inhabit and the emptiness that pervades their lives.

When watching the film, it’s easy to be reminded of Dogme and the style of these new directors can produce an alienation from the characters and the story that is quite deliberate. The landscapes are drawn from a real, post heavy-industrial landscape that have led to comparisons with the work of the Dardennes brothers in Belgium. However, Grisebach’s people are not born in marginalised, and therefore dramatic circumstances. Interestingly, despite her specific inspiration from her home city and its surroundings, her dramas have a universality since they come from within, born out of those disappointments and frustrations that are universally shared. However, unlike the earlier existential dramas of New German Cinema, there is no existential angst (in their own dialogue at least) for people who act rather than contemplate.

Grisebach cites a true story, told to her as an anecdote, as forming a particular inspiration for Sehnsucht. The central character became, for her, a romantic hero, through his experience very much like Markus’s. One interesting question to follow up may be to consider how this turn to the personal and this idea of heroism sits with the other films dealing with the macro-politics of Central Europe.

Full credits and a synopsis (with spoiler) is available here.

Jewish identity in Hungary

I’m looking forward to our discussion of Fateless. I don’t know what to expect, but I got the impression that most people were moved by the film. I’m still mulling over what writer and director Imre Kertész and Lajos Koltai were saying about Jewish identity in a Hungarian context. I discovered this passage in an interesting web account of an American filmmaker’s fascination with Hungarian Cinema:

History, the staple of Hungarian cinema, now presents an obstacle. Director Diana Groo (26) explains that today’s filmmakers are searching for new topics and new stories and that they are not allowed to retell the stories of the past. “We are the third generation after World War II. Our parent’s generation could talk about communism and they were closer to their parents war experience. For us to talk about the past is very unusual. As a result, our generation is not just searching for money, but also for an identity and topics that will appeal to a broad audience. We no longer have a common landscape. Everybody is searching to express him or herself. The style of a 1990s director has to be completely different from Szabo, Makk, Jancso, Elek or Rozsa.”

What sets Diana apart from many of her colleagues is the fact that she is Jewish and that her heritage still carries plenty of baggage in Hungary. “The Prime Minister,” Diana recalls “recently said that only those who follow the Christian-Hungarian tradition and are proud of the states foundation are Hungarian.” As a result of this continued conflict, Diana aspires to continue the socially relevant trend of Hungarian filmmaking. History must indeed answer to man. Diana sees her heritage as an asset, an inner conflict that translates to story. When the iron curtain came down, she along with many young Jewish Hungarians immigrated to Israel but there, Diana felt too comfortable. “To be Jewish in Israel is different. It’s like, I’m here – it’s okay. I don’t have a conflict any longer. I started to miss the conflict. It was my identity. To be Jewish in Budapest is much more interesting because you have to fight.” It’s no surprise that Diana chose this struggle as the topic for her stories. She recently came to New York with a documentary on the former Jewish Ghetto in Budapest and she is currently working on a documentary about the young Hungarian Jews who emigrated to Israel only to return to Hungary. For her feature, Ms. Groo is developing a love story about a chance encounter between a Jewish girl from Budapest and a Jewish man from New York. The film will compare the bonds of heritage via New York and Budapest. (Laurent Rejto on http://www.farmhousefilms.net/hungarian_cinema.htm)

“I started to miss the conflict . . .” reminds me of the two occasions in Fateless when György tells us that his favourite time of day in the camp was that hour between the return from the factory and the evening meal. I take this to be a reference to the sense that the the contrast between hard labour and relaxation was so important because being in the camp became part of his identity. Only if this was the case could the relaxation be enjoyed. Without the camp there would be no magic hour.