BAMAKO (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)

Deleting one of the former entries to make room for it, here is an entry I have newly added to my 100 Greatest Films from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean list:

They take our money; they take our minds, too.
     Mali’s Abderrahmane Sissako’s masterpiece begins at dawn; the village of Bamako is waking up. Among intercut actions: daily activities; an impoverished couple quarrel as their ill daughter sleeps; a man scrounges a living videographing weddings and funerals; a trial in a courtyard, where the West’s financial and economic forces bleeding Africa—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, the G8—face charges in absentia.
     A western film-within-the-film encapsulates African frustration, anger—for many, repressed feelings. “The trial’s becoming annoying,” one villager opines.
     It fascinates us, however. “Pay or die,” an attorney for the plaintiff, black Africa, declares. “That’s the West’s lesson.”
     Africa finds itself trapped in a “vicious circle” of debt, owed to the World Bank and the IMF; while 10% of a nation’s annual budget may be directed to social services, education, infrastructure, etc., at least 40% goes to debt repayment—because of interest, an infinite amount. The borrowed money, we learn, wasn’t invested in creating jobs. The world is “open” for whites, not African blacks, who are sent back home when they try emigrating to find work. Barely living under “imposed destitution” (life expectancy is 46), they find multinational corporations seizing whatever a nation needs to be sovereign. Colonialism “took everything away”; this new form of colonialism keeps taking. The World Bank threatened to withdraw financial support if the transport system wasn’t privatized. Victims of “unchained capitalism,” people have had their public institutions and social services sold off. While two-thirds of their children are illiterate, now they must pay for education.
     Hilariously, the judges settle uneasily into their robes. A dog that earlier appeared dead may have sprung back to life, but only to sniff at the corpse of a suicide.

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THE BLUE ANGEL (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

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 complex German personality, with its susceptibility to authoritarianism and idolatry, and its courting of humiliation and defeat: this is the theme of The Blue Angel, which Josef von Sternberg, Viennese-born but who grew up in the Bronx, made in Berlin before returning to Hollywood. Its drama, effortlessly revelatory of the social psychology that helps explain the rise of fascism in Germany, covers the years 1925-1929.
     Immanuel Rath teaches at a college in a small provincial town. He bullies his students, inviting them into his shabby living quarters for special chastisements, but harbors a sentimental streak; the one recipient of his affection, a pet bird that stopped singing long ago, has just died. An itinerant troupe of entertainers is at the club called The Blue Angel, and its star attraction, a sexy singer billed as Lola Lola, the professor feels, has been corrupting his students. He confronts her, having descended the corkscrew staircase from the club’s stage to Lola Lola’s temporary boudoir/dressing room, and, like a schoolboy, falls in love. Silently, the troupe’s clown repeatedly taunts him, in full make-up, with forlorn and almost pitying looks. Professor Rath marries Lola Lola, forsaking the dignity of his profession to join the troupe. His wife proves unfaithful, and he replaces the troupe’s painted clown.
     The village sets, with their Caligari-like distortions, key us into the film’s psychological nature. Equally discordantly non-realistic are the shifts between chaotic noise and sheer silence at The Blue Angel whenever the door to Lola Lola’s quarters opens or closes. Highly expressive, Sternberg’s aim is psychological realism.
     As Rath, Emil Jannings is superb, and her phenomenal performance as impudent Lola Lola, which made Marlene Dietrich a star, grows richer and more ambiguous and provocative with each fresh viewing.

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WESTFRONT 1918 (G. W. Pabst, 1930)

François Truffaut once remarked even pacifist war films turn out pro-war because the battle scenes invariably prove the most exciting, undoing the intended message. He may have had in mind Lewis Milestone’s stilted, poetical All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which comes to life only in its spectacular tracking shots of combat, with rows of soldiers being mowed down—scenes whose aestheticism robs them of any sense of lost human lives. But had Truffaut seen G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918?
     Based on Ernst Johannsen’s novel Four from the Infantry, this account of four World War I soldiers, all of whom are eventually killed, is gray, unremitting, naturalistic, disturbing. The visual, aural and emotional tonalities of Pabst’s first sound film coincide: dirt, artillery fire and explosions, claustrophobic trenches, monotony, madness, sudden death. At the original showing, patrons fainted at the sights and sounds of such realism on screen in portraying war. No conventional battle “excitement,” sentimentality or aestheticism allowed the film to loosen its grip.
     Pabst’s long penultimate movement is in battle. At least twice Pabst fixes the camera and keeps it fixed, making us more eyewitnesses than film viewers. In one of these remarkable shots, a soldier falls to his death early on in the foreground while combatants rush across a field in the background, competing for our attention with only intermittent success. Stuck on the original anonymous corpse, we are frozen in horror.
     The final passage is in a field hospital, a makeshift place of surgeries and insanity as soldiers bemoan the loss of sight, the loss of limbs; and, before our very eyes, one of the boys we’ve been following turns into a corpse, his mouth and the hollows of his eyes overtaken by darkness as in a grave: Pabst’s single, brilliant stroke of expressionism.

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NIEMANSDLAND (Viktor Trivas, 1931)

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

Perhaps the most celebrated pacifist film of all time, Niemandsland doesn’t quite exist, Adolf Hitler having destroyed it. A DVD, though, has been made from an American print containing English-language voiceover. The film is very moving, very powerful.
     It is launched, though, by a bit of rhetoric: a title naming chauvinism as the cause of wars. A prologue introduces us to five men who will meet on a First World War battlefield; they are British, French, German, American and probably Russian. The last, from “somewhere in Europe,” is Jewish, and his lack of specific national identity reminds us of the rootlessness of a people caused by the bigotry that has historically targeted them. The American is also displaced, entertaining in a French cabaret. He is a black emigré from white American racial prejudice. War has been declared, and men are leaving home.
     Actually, the five meet underground, their hole providing a respite from the artillery fire, bombs and death unfolding above. They choose not to kill one another; instead, they reach across language and cultural barriers to help one another and to explore their commonality. They are triumphant in their growing humanity.
     But their haven is referred to as “Niemandsland.” War, alas, is the world of men, and the title gives a “What if . . .” quality to what we most want to be real: warriors setting down guns and relating peaceably with one another.
     There is almost no plot to the film, which is superbly written and directed by Viktor Trivas. (Leonhard Frank helped with the script.) Teasing the whatifness is the documentary realism Trivas applies to the film’s visual form, which he punctuates with haunting poetry derived from Soviet cinema: low, upwardly tilted shots showing vast sky—at once, humanity’s vast ache for peace and war’s eternal graveyard.

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M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

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

Giving birth to the police procedural, Fritz Lang’s M, though talky, retains a grim fascination. It is about two city-wide hunts for the same man—one by the police, the other by the underworld, which hopes to put a stop to the police search of which their criminal business is running afoul. The hunted man is a pedophile and serial killer of little girls. When they wrongly suspect someone on the street of being the killer, people become an enraged mob and assault him, taking the law into their own hands, just as the criminals are doing. Moreover, they reflect something of the compulsive killer’s own inability to control himself. Primarily, the film identifies the two investigating groups: police and criminals. Eventually, the latter group captures and tries the killer, occasioning a stunning pan shot of the massive “jury,” and satirically pricking the modern concept of justice—trial by peers.
     M is a pitiless film except regarding the mother of one of the victims, who waits for her child to come home for dinner, and the hunted man, whose sickness draws Lang’s full measure of pity. Even children are casually monstrous. The film opens starkly, with an angled overhead shot of girls in a circle and one in the middle, who recites a gruesome variation on “eeny meeny miney moe” to determine which child is “it”: something to do with a man in black who is coming to chop up whoever is chosen.
     Humanity is often portrayed at a haunting remove: men are gesticulating shadows on a wall; the unseen killer is the tune he whistles from Grieg’s Peer Gynt whenever he is about to strike. Indeed, this is how he is identified by the balloon seller, who is blind.
     Young Peter Lorre is brilliant as the hunted man.

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