NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Äkerman, 1977)

Belgium’s greatest filmmaker ever is a Jewish woman and (as some of her films make explicit) a lesbian. This is Chantal Äkerman, whose masterpiece, D’Est (1993), I named the ninth best film of all time in my 100 Greatest Films List.
     For a spell, Äkerman lived in New York City, where she made, at a hotel inhabited by elderly persons, the haunting documentary Hotel Monterey (1972). She returned to the city to make News from Home, about her relationship with her mother during the time of her first stay away from home. The New York she documents along the way isn’t Woody Allen’s elegant haunt scored to Gershwin (Manhattan, 1979) but a teeming, colorful metropolis correlative to the explosion of possibilities in her (then) young life.
     The film counterpoints soft, vibrant city images with her mother’s lonely letters from Brussels, which in effect the images drown out, their “voice”—Äkerman herself reads the letters aloud—trailing to an inaudible whisper to suggest the normal separation from family of a grown offspring and her passage into an irresistible life of her own. Her mother’s gingerly expressed pleas for companionship, to maintain the security of their familiar bond, the film doesn’t caricature as manipulative stratagem, nor are we likely to mistake daughter’s neglect of parent for abandonment. Rather, the film records a life-process whose enveloping warm irony is the fact that Äkerman, now independent, through this film of hers, shares with her mother her own “news from home,” thus making possible between them a new, more appropriate, no less loving relationship. (Äkerman’s mother would appear in her daughter’s next film.)
     Two of the hallmarks of Äkerman’s great art are her humanity and minimalism, both in evidence in News from Home. Although stylistically elliptical, the film is emotionally direct—and immensely satisfying.

HOTEL MONTEREY (Chantal Äkerman, 1972)

Shot in a New York City hotel, Belgian minimalist Chantal Äkerman’s Hotel Monterey coolly, compassionately observes in perfect silence. Until the documentary’s final movement, the shots are static and close to claustrophobic. The hotel’s residents are half a century older than Äkerman, whose camera captures solitary existences whose most social occasion appears to occur when residents enter or exit one of the pair of adjacent elevators.
     The lens-like circular window on the heavily closing and opening elevator doors seems to observe the residents, their comings and goings. This engrossed “eye” becomes a surrogate for Äkerman’s and our own. We see it at a distance across the lobby and up closer, from inside the elevator cab, which here has stopped and there is in motion. Is this a witty reference to the “eye” of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)? There, the computer is paranoid, a self-interested observer of those onboard the space vessel. Instead, Äkerman’s “eye” is at once objective and deeply, humanely engaged—a complexity that (for me) illumines the paradoxical nature of art.
     The film’s final movement is phenomenal. It is peopleless. Now the camera several times proceeds down and, reversing direction, withdraws up dark, empty lower, nonresidential corridors. (The camera’s uneven motion reminds us of the human presence and effort involved in moving the camera.) Two earlier shots upstairs helped prepare us for this: a long-held shot of one resident’s sink, tub and toilet; a shot blocked in a way so that only the toilet is visible. The invisibility of residents suits their anonymity and muteness, and their aimlessness and loneliness the worn contours and faded corridors seem to have absorbed over time.
     At the last the camera moves outside to observe from the roof the traffic-dotted city below.

BERLIN (Yuli Raizman, 1945)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Yuli Raizman’s celebrated World War II documentary is about the capture and defeat of Berlin by the Red Army after British and U.S. aerial bombardment had reduced the city to rubble. Most U.S. highschoolers apparently believe that their nation fought the Soviet Union in the Second World War. There may be some poetic justice here, if one recalls the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s. But how about schools at least showing these kids Berlin?
     This would also teach these students something about cinema. In one scene in the film, as the sound of bombing proceeds on the soundtrack, a Soviet soldier helps an infirm German across the street. Well, perhaps; for a trick of editing may have combined bombing from another time with the no-less-kind act. Sterling fellow that soldier, but not necessarily heroic.
     The most oft-quoted documentary of all time contains bits and passages that are still being recycled, such as an aerial traveling shot of the ruined city. (The VHS box: “Over 40 Byelorussian and Ukrainian 1st Army cameramen contributed footage.”) But perhaps what is most remarkable is Raizman’s (and co-editor Yelizaveta Svilova’s) correlation of Berlin-present and Berlin-past. Germany’s official unconditional surrender is prefigured by a shot of white flags outside city window after city window. The next shot is a flashback showing the swastika-adorned flags that the white ones have replaced.
     Some details are grisly—such as the scene of the charred corpse of Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, after his suicide. Yet this is followed by an incredible visual idea: the radio tower that no longer is broadcasting his propaganda. It is an “Ozymandius”-touch, but within a scheme of collapsed rather than extensive time, an ironical reflection on the sudden bankruptcy of German aspiration and phallic dreams of domination.

BORDER STREET (Aleksander Ford, 1948)

Generically and stylistically complex, Border Street (Ulica Graniczna) is a great film about resistance, and total German reprisal, in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was made by Aleksander Ford, the premier Polish filmmaker prior to Andrzej Wajda, and it shouldn’t work at all, given how much it does and the numerous and contradictory ways in which it does what it does. Beginning in 1939 in a neorealist style, the film depicts the German invasion and occupation. However, there is a quadruple focus on neighborhood children, an impoverished Jewish family, including a young boy, David, a well-heeled Aryan one, and a more conventional Aryan family. The first introduces notes of youthful joy about to be tempered and crushed; the second, notes of pathos; and the third, melodrama, as the family head, a doctor, hides the truth that he also is Jewish. As a result of the revelation of this fact, his young daughter, Jadzia, is rebuffed by her Aryan boyfriend, whose father, a Polish military officer, on the run from the invaders, escapes only because the elderly Jewish tailor, despite torture, refuses to denounce him—a fact that the fugitive, heretofore anti-Jewish, relays to his son. The weary, hopeless march into the Ghetto, among the most trenchant passages in postwar cinema, has what some will identify as an impossible grandeur to it. Melodrama rears its head again as the doctor is blackmailed by a neighbor, who has learned the truth, into giving up his fancy apartment and joining other Jews in the Ghetto, which he does only after arranging for his daughter’s safety. But the daughter returns once she has learned her father’s fate, and when, neorealism reasserting itself, partisans are rounded up and mass executed, including the Aryan boy’s father, she regains the loyalty of her boyfriend, now purged of his anti-Semitism. Eventually three more themes crop up: the Germans’ constant attempts to round up children who have slipped out of the Ghetto and murder them; the transformation of a dog trained to hunt down and rip apart Jews into Jadzia’s protector after she cares for it following its accidental shooting, and now coming to her rescue, even against its previous master, on enough occasions to defeat even Walt Disney’s belief; and the heroic armed resistance of Jews in the Ghetto, led by David’s uncle, and the German response, as David and Jadzia attempt to flee the Germans who are hunting them through one of Warsaw’s sewers—a mini-adventure film encased in the wider stirring/brutal epic. And just when you are beginning to feel that all the suspense being generated over the fates of two children is facile and just a bit unseemly, given the imminent fates of so many other children, David, witnessing resistance fighters heading toward the Ghetto, heads back himself, to rejoin his uncle and grandfather, pausing to wave goodbye forever to Jadzia (and us), thus ending the film on a note of haunting tragedy. What a grab-bag that by all rights should have turned out a mess; yet the film is riveting from start to finish, quick enough to be at any given point believable, and ultimately heartrending, devastating. It is, in fact, Ford’s masterpiece—this, despite (so many despites here!) the springboard of its propagandistic aim, to stir up hearts in the direction of postwar reconciliation between Jews and Poles, a point that Garbicz and Klinowski note in their excellent entry on the film in Cinema: The Magic Vehicle.

Its opening is perhaps the finest in all of Polish cinema: a montage of silent establishing shots of the city. (Alas, in the U.S. an English prologue, presuming American historical ignorance, is recited over these images!) Indeed, in many ways Border Street—the “border” is between bourgeois and poor, and not between Aryan and Jewish—is a silent film that happens to have sound in it. As a result, there is a poetic sadness to the film, as though we have been transported back in time and can perhaps witness history take a different course than it did—only, of course, it won’t. Strangely, we don’t hear things that we should; at certain points, there is silence where we see things happen that would generate sound; and many shots are purely silent, as human faces register everything we need to know. Ford at times applies an overly refined aesthetic, but in the main he captures reality’s rough textures to a brilliant extent, and not even Roman Polanski in The Pianist (2002) creates a more vivid, oppressive and terrifying sense of what life was like in the Ghetto.

Sometimes, though, Ford cannot leave well enough alone, such as at the end, when a narrator pops up out of nowhere to tell us that David cannot die because such courage as he shows confers immortality. Regrettably, it sinks in just why the little boy’s name is David—as crude a touch as an earlier wave goodbye at a train depot with an armband, here substituting for a handkerchief in hand, with a Star of David visible on it.

The film is rich in symbolism, which is very Polish, and it accumulates a spiritual air, which is also very Polish. The script is by Ford, Jean Forge and Ludwik Starski. The actors are all competent, but Jurek Zlotnicki is especially good as David Libermann, and Wladyslaw Godik is wonderful as David’s devout grandfather—a man deep in prayer as the Germans burn him alive.