TRIAL ON THE ROAD (Aleksei Gherman, 1971)

By far, the best of the three films by Aleksei Gherman (or Guerman, or German) that I have now seen is the earliest: Proverka na dorogakh, which is based on his father Yuri’s experiences. Steeped in wintry snow, it is a ravishing vision of German-occupied Russia in 1942 during the Second World War. As sardonic as Andrzej Munk’s Eroica (1957), Gherman’s intermittently brilliant black-and-white film was suppressed by Soviet authorities for more than a decade.
     Indeed, the film’s opening movement—its episodism correlates to the random, discontinuous nature of war—massacres the Stalinist-era myth that rural peasants unanimously supported patriots, that is, anti-Nazi partisans; rather, exhausted by hunger and fear, many simply wanted the war to end, whatever the outcome. When artillery fire frightens off his prized cow and he tries to retrieve it, a partisan is shot dead, possibly by one of these peasants. Throughout the film, ambiguity attaches itself to various murders; is the culprit a Soviet or a Nazi? Moreover, there are impersonations of Germans by Soviets, reminding one of the impersonation of Nazis by Poles in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).
     The central ambiguity attaches itself to Sergeant Alexander “Sasha” Ivanovich Lazarev, a defector whose loyalty is below suspicion once he turns himself in to a Soviet contingent. He confesses to having killed on German orders in order to save his own life; now he is required to risk his life on a mission that might set his loyalty above suspicion. But isn’t the Soviet side manipulating him as the Germans had done? What does this ultimately prove?
     I am baffled by one reviewer’s application of the term chiaroscuro to this film’s gorgeous, expressive appearance; lower-contrast black-and-white photography than that contributed by B. Aleksandrovsky, Lev Kolganov and Yakov Sklyansky, presumably at Gherman’s specific direction, would be hard to imagine. Visually, the film is a gigantic blur of diffuse light gray and blinding snowy white. That at least is what I see in the DVD transference with which I must make do; and, of course, this makes perfect sense, given the moral and psychological ambiguities that the film addresses.
     German’s film culminates in Lazarev’s final mission: an explosively exciting passage that yields with a sharp cut to a withering scene of the triumphal march through town of Soviet soldiers, including the noncommissioned officer who set Lazarev to his loyalty-task. Hail the conquering hero!

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WORLD ON A WIRE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

Made for West German television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 3½-hour Welt am Draht is based on American novelist Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 Simulacron-3. Resembling Edward Albee’s astounding play Tiny Alice, which was first produced the same year as Galouye’s novel was published, Fassbinder’s legendary science-fiction masterpiece revolves around Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch, convincing and compelling), technical director at the Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology, who comandeers Simulacron-3, a state-sponsored computer project aimed at creating a “miniature artificial reality,” ostensibly to predict various trends in society, such as in consumerism and transportation. However, the question arises, once some headway has been made, which is the original dimension and which is the copy, which the “reality” and which the “replica.” To put the question differently, is “virtual reality” an invention or a discovery? Strange things, let me tell you, have been going on at the Institute, where Stiller’s predecessor—well, who is to say what happened to him? He dematerialized—disappeared.
     Leaning, stylistically, beautifully (although less romantically) on Jean-Luc Godard’s immemorial Alphaville (1965), and on colorless color rather than gorgeous, haunting black and white, Fassbinder never takes a false or cheesy step; we aren’t in the trash-land here of The Matrix or Avatar. This ride is engrossing, immeasurable fun, sparked by brilliant mise-en-scène that plays visual jazz with mirror-images, for instance, beginning in the “reflection” and withdrawing the camera to reveal that what we might have thought was “substance” isn’t. Indeed, Fassbinder repeated his labyrinthine, evocative mirror-imaging, as well as his propensity here to shoot through glass, in his Despair (1978), from Nabokov. Receding multiple reflections in Welt am Draht pay sparkling homage to the Hall of Mirrors in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).
     Are we mere “identity units” in a computerized “reality”? Stay tuned.

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STRANGE ILLUSION (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

A strange Hamlet with a postmodern twist, Strange Illusion presumes that Paul, a pre-law student whose father, California’s former lieutenant governor, recently mysteriously died, is all too familiar with Shakespeare’s most brilliant tragedy. Indeed, the play, which is nowhere mentioned, is the “elephant in the room” in every room of the film. As with Prince Hamlet, Paul has been having bad dreams; they disclose that his father was murdered and that the murderer, Brett Curtis, who has been operating at the behest of an evil psychiatrist, Dr. Calig—er, Muhlbach, has marital designs on the dead man’s widow and her inheritance, that is, when he isn’t leching after the woman’s daughter, Paul’s sister, Dorothy. Written without bluah by Adele Comandini, from an original story by Fritz Rotter, this creepy, suspenseful thriller was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer between two other remarkable low-budget works, Bluebeard (1944), which informs Curtis’s backstory, and Detour (1945), the circularity of whose ironical narrative informs the structure of Strange Illiusion, which may be unfolding, in its entirety, in Paul’s mad-as-a-hatter, incestuous dream.
     Insanely, the lost soul who contributed the film’s “plot summary” to the IMDb gets nearly everything wrong by failing to take into account that the boy is mentally unhinged and, by the end, very likely on his way to death. Curtis and Muhlbach may be no more than figments of Paul’s imagination, for at the last there’s a hint that Mom’s romantic feelings, which are such a source of distress for Paul, have been invested in kindly Dr. Vincent, who according to the script that Paul’s dream follows helps Paul uncover “the truth” about Curtis and Muhlbach while Paul is presumably playing at being the only “guest” at Muhlbach’s rural sanitarium.
     Jimmy Lydon is hysterical trying to escape.

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OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR (Richard Attenborough, 1969)

This elephantine, star-studded production, based on Joan Littlewood’s theatrical series of satirical antiwar sketches, was actor Richard Attenborough’s official directorial debut. Despite its best film Golden Globe, Oh! What a Lovely War is sufficiently shallow and obtuse that Littlewood had her name removed from the credits. It is a soulless, insufferable, bloated thing.
     A lavish, decorative period piece, it is set during the outbreak and the course of the First World War, but actually takes aim at the Vietnam War, in which Britain was currently involved. The governing metaphor is war as a gigantic game at an amusement park, which Everyfamily—the Smiths—journeys through. Throughout, (now) nostalgic songs arise, culminating in a wide-angle shot of a vast Christian graveyard accompanied by an unseen immemorial chorus: “ . . . and when they ask us how wonderful it was,/ they’ll never believe us,/ they’ll never believe us . . .”
     There is no reason why such material should not have yielded an admirable result; but Attenborough’s infantile compulsion to inflate everything squeezes out all trace of feeling except the bogus affect of sentimentality. Attenborough was Spielberg before Spielberg was Spielberg.
     The British Academy awarded a gratifying prize to Gerry Turpin for his limpid, lovely color cinematography—and a perplexing one to Laurence Olivier for a cameo he might have been tossing off in his sleep. Perhaps Vanessa Redgrave comes off best, fleetingly, as a spirited feminist.

PINA (Wim Wenders, 2011)

“She saw everything, even with closed eyes.”

I wish I had seen Pina in 3-D, Wim Wenders’ use of which has been described by critic Noel Murray as “visionary.” Regardless, this magnificent work by Wenders eulogizing German dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch dazzles, moves and wistfully haunts. Wenders had hoped to be collaborating with Bausch on a different kind of documentary, but Bausch’s unexpected death almost immediately after shooting had begun, following decades of uncertainty on Wenders’ part as to how to use film to convey the spirit of Bausch’s achievement in modern dance, required taking another tack.
     Bausch’s choreography typically involves a confrontation—a dialectic, some might say—between her dancers and interposed “obstacles” they must overcome in order to unleash wit, startling fluidity, even the appearance of weightlessness; for instance, water—whether a splashed-into body of water or water squirted by mouth between floor-reclining dancers—is recruited into the concept of the piece. But something else unifies the scraps and glimpses of Bausch’s art that Wenders showcases—something akin to these “obstacles”: a simultaneity of push and pull, strength and delicacy, aggression and passivity. Since every single bit of Bausch’s choreography shown to us in this film exemplifies this dynamic tendency, a few examples may serve to suggest the thematic pattern into which everything else the film comprises falls. We see a dancer pulling up her own head by the hair; another dancer steps solidly and aggressively toward the camera onboard a bus that is ultimately determining the course of her body in the opposite direction; a Furies-like (although male) “gang” of dancers storms a solitary female dancer, thwarting the self-determination of her body’s movement; a dancer recalls Bausch having told her, “Your fragility is your greatest strength”—a dictum that we then see her dancing illustrate. (Throughout, Wenders transfers to the outdoors some of the dances, all of which were originally intended for the stage.) Such instances, and many others, demonstrate a way of perceiving the mechanism of life’s experience.
     Now let me suggest something extraordinary: Wenders’ masterpieces, including Pina, are driven by the same way of looking at things: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971), Wrong Move (1975), In the Course of Time (1976), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987).
     The choreographic work of Pina Bausch has left Wenders with their eternal kinship (is it a German thing?), for which this gorgeous, shimmering film must remain a mortal marker.
     Best Documentary: European Film Awards, German Film Awards, German Film Critics Association.

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