THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM (Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, 1975)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Brilliantly written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead is an assault on the contemporary West German yellow press, showing the dire, even fatal consequences for innocent lives wrought by tabloid smears. From Heinrich Böll’s novel, it reflects the author’s own run-ins with Bild Zeitung.
     Katharina Blum, a young maid who is completely apolitical, spends the night with a man she meets at a party. He is an anarchist. The police storm into her apartment the next morning and, in the absence of their main target, arrest her instead. A tabloid, The Paper, does the rest, smearing her as a politically motivated slut. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff intriguingly connect the police and the press, showing how the latter’s inapt democratic claims of “freedom of the press” distract from the former’s fascistic tactics and their own deutsche mark-chasing opportunism. Here, in the States, we speak of the media’s “feeding frenzy,” its steamrolling appetite for more and more “news” to keep a “story” current, which is to say, solvent. However, the monstrous activity this film portrays, however frenzied it may appear in the aggregate, is too calculatedly cruel and vicious to justify the term. Blum herself remarks that her ordeal, to which the authorities and the press contributed, robbed her of her honor. She ends up in a frame of mind that her existence previous to the ordeal could not have predicted.
     Angela Winkler is wonderful in the lead role, especially when Katharina’s mother pays the ultimate price for her daughter’s misfortunes. Indeed, the entire cast, which includes a superb Heinz Bennent as a sympathetic lawyer, is flawless.

IN THE COURSE OF TIME (Wim Wenders, 1976)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Apart from Herzog’s Aguirre, the most magnificent West German film of the 1970s is In the Course of Time, Wim Wenders’s nearly three-hour road movie about an itinerant film projectionist, Bruno, who, along the West-East German border, visits expiring cinemas in small villages—a reflection of a culture evaporating as a result of changes wrought by time, current collusive film distribution practices, and American popular culture influence. Along the way, Bruno gives a ride to Robert, a pediatrician whose marriage and own vehicle have collapsed. They encounter a suicide’s widower, precipitating certain decisions of their own and eventually contributing to the dissolution of their growing bond. Like Federico Fellini’s great road movie, La strada (1954), Wenders’ signature epic is about will-o’-the-wisps, uprooted and rootless humanity amidst a mesmerizing landscape under an illimitable sky that, especially at night, sparkles with an omnipresent sense of eternity. Misleadingly, in the States and Britain the film is called Kings of the Road.
     Wenders’s film is imbued with two dual senses: the frailty and infinite worth of human lives; aimlessness or restlessness, and mission or purpose—improvisation amid the playing-out of individual destinies. One episode that crystallizes both these dual senses finds Bruno and Robert conjuring a clown act for raucous schoolchildren eagerly anticipating their annual movie.
     Few films more beautifully captivate with a tragic sense of the passage of time. The film’s deceptively leisurely pace conveys the weight of humanity’s persistent mortal awareness. Time is the “king” of this road, and everything that happens happens in the course of time.
     Wenders’s most important collaborators for his most heartfelt and inexhaustible ride are his black-and-white cinematographer, Robby Müller, and his lead actor, his patient Everyman, Rüdiger Vogler, who plays Bruno.

THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN (Peter Handkë, 1977)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

We all think we know why Nora leaves husband, home and children, even though Henrik Ibsen’s remark that she shouldn’t have done this in his 1879 A Doll’s House contradicts the feminist readings of the play currently in vogue. Based on his novel, Peter Handkë’s The Left-Handed Woman gives us even less ground to stand on. In Paris, the woman quits her spouse for no apparent reason, giving no explanation. And, mind you, the nice man she is married to even looks like Bruno Ganz!
     What Handkë has cryptically written and austerely, beautifully directed makes no claim to interiority. It shows, among other things, the unfathomability of motivation and the soul’s perpetual desire for solitude, especially now, in the modern era, when the falling-away of religion as a guiding institution no longer shields us from this desire and the necessity, somehow, to confront the void of human existence. If only the woman had been right-handed! As it is, she is left to her own devices—as are we, who are intent on grasping her.
     The film doesn’t end, as does Ibsen’s play, with the protagonist’s leave-taking; her solitary journey, whatever it amounts to, accounts for the principal action. It draws us—where? Not in, but out, so that, in the darkened theater as we watch the film, we also confront what the woman does. It is the miraculous nature of Handkë’s achievement that this point of reluctant identification by us is enrobed in layers of distancing, fixing each of us in our separate solitude rather than admitting us into the woman’s. As nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold put it, “We mortal millions live alone.”
     Handkë’s two great collaborators are color cinematographer Robby Müller and actress Edith Clever, whose performance as the woman is among cinema’s most brilliant.

OUR HITLER (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1978)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 7½-hour Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland bombards eye and mind with a staggering vision of Nazism. The non-narrative film fuses Wagnerian opera, political cabaret, wax figures, German film references and fairy-tale mythology (“the World Ice Spirit . . . rebirth . . . master race”), starry heavenly vistas, paintings, speeches, songs, lectures, voiceover, assorted set-pieces to penetrate the fascist German psyche.
     Imagined interviews of “men in the street”—those who “elected” Hitler—collapse time and blur the line between history and imagination, finding Hitler at their crossroads. Hitler filled a need for faith in one’s discredited, demoralized nation; he loomed as a god demanding self-sacrifice that appealed to the German appetite for self-debasement.
     One remarkable segment: Does it correspond to actuality by dint of metaphor or historical accuracy? What revelation either way! Dressed as Caligari (1919), an actor lectures us, describing the schools for boys that the Nazis instituted. Hitler loved birds, he tells us, and, because cats eat birds, as part of their “education” schoolboys gouged out the eyes of cats. Darwin’s Nature is thus translated into politics “red in tooth and claw,” and self-pity and cruelty, both monstrously enlarged, become indistinguishable. Syberberg’s Caligari proceeds to draw the Nazi identification of Jews with rats.
     Another segment draws upon past German cinema: Syberberg redoes the scene in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in which Peter Lorre’s child-rapist/killer breaks down, explaining to the court that he cannot help doing what he does, that he is in the grip of a compulsion beyond his means to resist. In the new version, the man is a Nazi protesting his inability to resist his own politics! On second thought, though, we may wonder whether this constitutes a reimagined M or a critical analysis of M. What revelation either way!

WAYS IN THE NIGHT (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1979)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The year before making his masterpiece at home, The Constant Factor, Poland’s most brilliant filmmaker, Krzysztof Zanussi, wrote and directed Ways in the Night for West German television.
     During World War II, a German officer falls in love with a Polish baroness whose castle his unit is occupying. The woman remains scornfully nonresponsive until she begins manipulating the young man toward her own ends. In truth, they are both occupied—she, literally, as a Pole at the mercy of German invaders; he, by the Nazi programme he represents, however much it grates against his decency.
     Zanussi, who would go to Monument Valley to conclude his Year of the Quiet Sun (1984), reveres his John Ford, whose The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) provides the structural model for Ways in the Night. A contemporary narrative frame encases the wartime material, each in a sense occupying the other, each releasing into the other a store of import and feeling. The flashback correlates to the memory of none of the characters; it is objective and historical, and yet it projects all the turbulence of war, invasion, occupation and thwarted love. On the other hand, both abstracting (that is, generalizing) and sharpening the irony of a German’s loving a Pole who cannot help but despise him, the present-day frame shows a future generation, while resolute in its indifference to the past, sleepwalking in the might-have-been couple’s shadow: the war is not over.
     The rich, spectral darkness of the nighttime images in the extended flashback, with their prussian and other deep blues, creates a double sense familiar to Fordians: a haunted past now populated by ghosts and the past haunting the present.
     Despite Zanussi regular Maja Komorowska’s bravura performance as the baroness, Zanussi’s preeminent collaborator is his phenomenal color cinematographer, Witold Sobocinski.