Germany Year Zero - Most Definitely Not a Zero

Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero is a fantastic work and a perfect example of what the Italian Neo-Realist movement was. Despite being an Italian director, Rossellini was able to perfectly capture the mood of post-war Germany and strongly portray the struggles, both internal and external that many Germans were going through at this time.

The plot of Germany Year Zero is based around a young boy who is helping his family survive in post-war Germany. Despite being the youngest, he seems to be most mature but it is easy to see that his situation has forced him to take on the major responsibilities in the family. His sister stays at home to care for their sick father and his brother is so suffocated by the guilt of being a former Nazi soldier that he refuses to leave the house and help his family.

Like De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rossellini used real people and not actors to portray the characters in the film. This is impressive because while these people were experiencing a difficult life, it is often difficult for those same people to portray real emotion, in character, on film. Even some professional actors have a difficult time portraying a real person (see Hayden Christensen, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith). So the fact that Rossellini was able to find totally inexperienced people to play these roles as well as some of the top professional actors of the time is remarkable.

Also remarkable is the sets. This film was shot in the ruins of Berlin. Consequently, you can feel the depression and terror that lies within the characters because their surroundings are authentic.

Throughout the film you are able to understand the stress the main character, Edmund is going through. Rather than see his father suffer more and waste precious resources keeping him alive, Edmund decides to go behind everyone's backs and secretly poison him. While he thinks this will make everyone breathe a sigh of relief that he has passed, his former teacher (who originally jokes about Edmund doing something like this) calls him insane. Consequently, Edmund believes he cannot do anything right. In the end the pressures of his reality force him to jump from a building to his death.

As a result, this film does not have a happy ending. But that is necessary because this is an Italian neo-realist film and consequently needs to portray the reality of the German people's situations. It took years for Germany to recover and decades for East Germany to start seeing major results. The German’s people government (the Third Reich) failed them utterly.

As the textbook says, Rossellini, “willingly sacrificed polish for authenticity, sets for real locations, fiction for life” (Mast, 377). His was willing to take a risk by shooting this film in Berlin and using real Berliners as actors. He wasn't in it for the money and while there are some scenes where the video and audio quality is lacking, it only adds to the dire mood.

Rossellini was brilliant in capturing the mood of this difficult period so perfectly. Without films like these it would be easy to forget the horrific events of the past. These realist films are completely necessary and are perfect tools for future generations to use to better understand the past. We must learn from our past to move towards a brighter future. Normally, I usually like to include some humor in my writings but there just isn’t any to be found here. This was a serious time and a serious tone is necessary.

Germany Year Zero most definitely is not a ‘zero.’ It gets a 10/10. Below is a link to the end of the film. I believe it perfectly shows the talents of the young actor, the bombed out Berlin and the struggles of the period.

Final Scene of Germany Year Zero

PERSONA: As far as Bergman could go

"Don't you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war -- what you are with others and who you really are. A feeling of vertigo and a constant hunger to finally be exposed. To be seen through, cut down, even obliterated."

Such is said of the protagonist in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, yet it may also be said of the film itself. For while Bergman had been considered a “serious” filmmaker since his pair of 1957 classics The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, those films were still entirely accessible. Allegorical, yes, but still fairly tidy.

It wasn’t until Persona that Bergman fully satisfied the “hunger to be exposed.” That is, to expose cinema in a self-reflexive way. He saw through it, cut it down, obliterated it. And as Bergman himself wrote in his book Images, “Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers – I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." (Brody)

The film follows actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), who has gone blank on stage during a performance of Elektra and has refused to speak since (the audacity of Bergman to have a silent protagonist!). She’s admitted to a mental hospital and assigned to the care of a pretty nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), who takes her to a remote, sea-side home to study her. As Alma holds a series of one-sided conversations, she begins confessing the most personal of information. It isn’t long before we realize that it’s actually Elisabeth who’s the one doing the studying and Alma who’s undergoing to the psycho-analysis. Through heated exchanges ranging from sexual to violent, we’re left to ponder whether the two women are in fact the same person, and what that says about the nature of identity. Is one the alter-ego of the other? And if “persona” is another word for “mask” and “Alma” another for "soul,” one has to wonder whether we’re really watching a woman grappling with her own conscience.

Bergman continually comes up with new visual ways to express the similarities of the two women. In many shots, Elisabeth and Alma are so tightly framed that it looks like a limb from one (i.e. an arm holding a cigarette) belongs to the face of the other. At other times, they embrace in such a way that their necks appear to wrap around each other, as if two heads from the same body. Most obvious is the famous close-up of the two women lying side by side, as Alma says, "Is it possible to be one and the same person at the same time?"

Perhaps most revolutionary in this regard is a sequence where Bergman essentially plays the same scene twice -- a confession of Alma to Elisabeth – shot from two different points of view. The first time, we see the scene from Alma's POV, looking constantly at Elisabeth, who wears a black sweater and black headband. With a sequence of four shots and a series of dissolves, we slowly move closer to Elisabeth's face. Suddenly, Bergman starts the scene over, except now from Elisabeth's POV, looking constantly at Alma, who wears an identical black sweater and headband. The dissolves happen again, on exactly the same dialogue cues.

Note also that in each instance, as Alma’s confession grows darker, their half-lit faces grow darker. The two halves increasingly seem to complement each other, until finally Bergman blends them together to create a single face. As Gerald Mast writes, this is the classic formula of thesis (Elisabeth's face), antithesis (Alma's face) and synthesis (both faces combined into a single identity). (Mast) What's more, both scenes start with a close-up of the women’s hands on top of each other – a callback to Alma's earlier line: "It's bad luck to compare hands."

Still, the "persona" that most concerns Bergman may be his own as author of the film. As such, he takes every opportunity to call attention to the film medium at his disposal. Persona opens with the spark of a projector illuminating a film screen, a film reel turning, a projectionist selecting film clips and a countdown before the film begins. Mid-way through Persona, the film literally stops, creases and burns up in the projector, throwing the audio for a loop. It ends with the film slipping out of the projection gate, the movie screen going blank and the arc light burning out (Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop also ends with film burning up in the projector, no doubt inspired by Persona).

Adding to the reflexivity is the occasional intercutting of bizarre film clips, including an animated cartoon, slapstick comedy, nails being driven into Christ-like hands, a crawling spider (a symbol of God in Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly), a blood sacrifice, a fitting clip from Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929), even a shot of a penis (foreshadowing Fincher’s Fight Club). It’s as if Bergman is reminding us that a film, when watched in a theater, is ultimately at the mercy of the editor, and later the projectionist, who can splice in whatever images he or she wants.

Why call attention to the projection process? Mast says it’s to remind viewers that what they are witnessing is fiction, an illusion: "The audience has entered the world of art and chimera, of magic and theatre, not of nature and reality." It’s also to ask whether the world of nature is any more real than the one of artistic illusion. (Mast) And what type of art is it? The answer may lie in Bergman’s cut from a giant face sculpture outside the beach house to a close-up of Elisabeth’s face on stage. We’ve been led to believe she is acting in a theater performance, until suddenly, a film camera swoops into frame, suggesting a sound stage. Here, sculpting has evolved into theater and ultimately into cinema – art’s purest expression.

Nothing breaks down the “illusion” of film more, though, than his use of direct address. The first instance (and creepiest) comes during a disturbing sequence of bodies lying on an autopsy slab. Suddenly, their eyes open, staring straight at us, and a young boy (who we thought was dead) turns restlessly under his sheet, like he can’t sleep (a moment of artistic inspiration?). He winds up putting on his glasses, pulling out a book and turning to stare right at us. It’s here that he reaches out and caresses the screen, as if he’s trying to understand the apparatus between him and us. When Bergman cuts to the reverse angle, we see that the boy is inspecting a large, blurry image of a woman's face, which slowly comes into focus to start the narrative.

Even within the narrative, the direct address continues. Early on, there’s a single take where Elisabeth stares directly at us for an uncomfortable period of time. Day turns to night, yet her eyes never blink. Her face remains expressionless and she holds her breath. Finally, she exhales and looks away, worn out by the ordeal. In a later scene, we get an empty wide shot of a beach, only for Alma to rise into the frame with a camera and take a picture of us (Wes Anderson has Owen Wilson do this in The Royal Tenenbaums). In all of these instances, Bergman has not only broken the fourth wall, he's taken a wrecking ball to it, cleared the rubble and built anew.

So what new structure has been left in Bergman’s wake? How about the argument that structure need not always exist. Unfortunately, the art of experimentation seems lost in most movies. But that doesn’t mean Bergman’s masterpiece hasn’t inspired some of our greatest filmmakers: from Woody Allen, who spoofs Persona in both Love and Death (1975) and Stardust Memories (1980) to Robert Altman, who has Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek shift roles in 3 Women (1977); from David Lynch, who merges female identities and gives a visual nod in Mulholland Dr. (2001); to the aforementioned references from David Fincher (Fight Club) and Wes Anderson (Tenenbaums).

It should be no surprise then that the 2002 Sight & Sound directors’ poll ranked Bergman the #8 greatest director of all time, while ranking Persona the #41 greatest film of all time. When it came to the Sight & Sound critics’ poll, however, the film curiously dropped from the Top 10 in 1972 to a three-vote honorable mention in 2002, where critics shifted favor to Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Fanny & Alexander. Either way, my hat is tipped to you, Mr. Bergman. “Too many masterpieces” is a great problem to have.

Citations

Brody, Richard. “DVD of the Week: Persona.” The New Yorker. 5 August 2008. Web.

<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/08/persona.html>

Mast, Gerald. Kawin, Bruce. “Ingmar Bergman.” A Brief History of the Movies. Ninth Edition. Pearson Education, Inc. 2006. P. 440-449.

Fanny and Alexander: Bergman's soul on screen

Whenever I begin to talk or write about Ingmar Bergman’s work there is always a feeling that I can’t do him justice. When I read what others, way more eloquent than myself, have written about his work, the same thought haunts me. Then I begin to question why is this? One explanation keeps resurfacing – his films are to feel, not to talk about. Take for example, Fanny and Alexander (1982). It seems impossible (to me at least) to accurately describe melancholic feeling I get while I’ve been drawn into Bergman’s delicate memories.

When expressionless Alexander (Bertil Guve) is watching a statue move from underneath the table, at the beginning of the film, I can say - yes that’s young Bergman I’m looking at. But when it comes to expressing how and why I instantly have tender feelings toward that child-actor, I’m at loss with words. The same goes for the Christmas celebration sequence. Bergman carefully designed the set of his grandmother’s house on the Christmas Eve. Christmas trees, fancy dresses, and too much food on silver plates combined with children running around Victorian-style furniture radiate warmth and happiness. Still, behind each camera movement and cut I could feel Bergman’s presence.

Fanny and Alexander thoroughly follow Bergman’s life – both professional and spiritual. The first sequence in the film, aforementioned Christmas celebration, marks his childhood spent at his grandmother’s house in Uppsala, and his happy years directing theatre plays. The second sequence examines young Ingmar’s troubled years spent with his conservative and abusive father, a Lutheran minister. Bergman often admitted that his father’s teaching methods, like locking him in a closet as a punishment, left deep scars on his soul. In Fanny and Alexander, the children’s mother marries a conservative minister after sudden death of her husband, who was a theater actor. Even though no such thing happened to Bergman, he wanted to show clear distinction between his spiritual father (theater) and real father, who represented church (reality). The dark ages spent in the cold house with his stepfather also represent Bergman’s noir black and white films of the 1960s. Finally, the third sequence of the film is return to the magical, and breaking away with the rational constraints imposed on him by the world. Young Alexander and his sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) are magically saved from the house of their stepfather by Isak Jakobi (Erland Josephson). Isak is a Jewish curiosity dealer, who also happens to be their grandmother’s lover. Once they are safe in Isak’s oddity shop, far from reality, Alexander and his new friend Ismail imagine how Bishop will die, which in reality is exactly how Alexander’s stepfather dies.

Fanny and Alexander left many open questions – what did Alexander have to do with his stepfather’s death, or did the statue at the beginning really move? Rather than explaining further, Bergman ends the movie with words from A Dream Play by Strindberg, “… time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.”

To fully grasp Ingmar Bergman’s poetic soul, one must sit and watch his films. Reading about them is as silly as trying to smell a painting of a rose.

Hiroshima mon amour: Shattering Time

Hiroshima mon amor was not the first film to use archive footage in combination with narrative footage. However, the way in which Alain Resnais confronts the audience with the B-roll sets the tone at the beginning of the film that drives the destruction and brokenness that both characters feel.

Although I did not particularly care for the film, I can appreciate the powerful technique of separation Resnais employs throughout using the archive footage along with his narrative. As Kent Jones states in his essay Hiroshima mon amor: Time Indefinite, "it's the anguish of past, present, and future: the need to understand exactly who and where we are in time, a need that goes perpetually unsatisfied."

Resnais takes the audience through the emotional roller coaster of a young french women as she deals with the resurfacing of buried feelings of her first love. Ironically, the young woman is an actress who is working on a film about peace in Hiroshima, yet she is unable to find peace within her own life. The film weaves its way between the present of the characters, the past of the young woman, and post A-Bomb footage.

Reminiscent of Eisenstein, Resnais systematically uses the visuals

of documentary footage to showcase the pain and destruction of not only people during that time but that it continues to have on generations. As Resnais clearly points out, Hiroshima can not be rebuilt in a year or two and go back to the way things were before the dropping of the bomb. The bomb devastated families for many years to come and will have a lasting impact on japanese culture.

Resnais's slow, drawn-out narrative does not captivate me. Instead, the magic of his film making is found in his use combining documentary footage with narrative. This was the second time I have seen the film and I must say, it was easier to take than the first time I saw it. Maybe as I age his narrative style will grow on me and I will be able to appreciate it as the work of art that so many others think it is. Maybe so, maybe not, but the images will be with me forever.

Do You Have a Fever? Pudovkin's Montage in Chess Fever

Chess Fever (1925) Synopsis: A young man who is complete obsessed with chess enjoys an international tournament of the game. He becomes so obsessed that he neglects his fiancée who has no interest in it. She becomes frustrated by the neglect from him and find that no matter what she can't escape the game. She tries to give up on him and the game all together until she runs into Capablanca, the world champion of chess. He changes her views. Seen here.

Like many other films during this time Pudovkin uses real footage in his film. They used footage from a chess tournament in Moscow. Using this footage they were able to show the intensity of real players. This helped to create more understanding for the main characters chess obsession. “The general enthusiasm for Chess is making itself felt in cinema. The comedy is pieced together as a parody of a newspaper story. Ordinary everyday matches acquire exaggerated scale: caricatures of the policeman, the cabman, of the chemist, the public at the tournament and others are wittily portrayed . . . There is much humorous incident, much movement, the material forwarded pointedly by the serial story form” (Sovetskoe kino 1. 13). For Pudovkin the shots of the film combine to build the whole work, as bricks combine to make a wall, rather than conflict with one another in dynamic suspension. Chess Fever is an appealing example of this because he uses and breaks the conventions of soviet silent film to create humor.

The style of this film connects to the Kuleshov experiment where “art grew out of joining these rigorously composed fragments into wholes” (Mast 199). The fragments were tail ends of films that were used to practice the art of storytelling. During this time the film stock was too expensive to use and create new footage. They had to use what they had left over from past news stories and films. Pudovkin was one of Kuleshov most famous students at this workshop.

Montage : Creating Geography

• Pudovkin makes an entertaining play on creative geography tested by Kuleshov. Creating geography is creating a connection of shots from different locations and editing them together so that the audience believes they are a consecutive location. This is seen early on in the film during the chess match. He creates a montage of footage from different times of the competition. The audience sees a player on the left and a player on the right. Teaming this together with shots from the audience we have an understanding of a tournament, even though they were all shot at different times.

Multiple Illusion

• He uses montage later in this scene to create the feeling of a mass amount of cats. We see a group shot of kittens on the ground. Then we see his pulling out a kitten from various items in his room like a shoe, jacket sleeve, and coat pockets. This gives us the idea that there are many cats in the apartment, hiding in every nook and cranny. This editing style continues through the rest of the film.

Conclusion:

• In the final act we see Fogel return back to the Chess championship. He has lost his love and he still hasn’t gotten over his addiction to chess. It is there that he runs back into his love Zemtsova. She looks happy and pulls him aside to inform him of her new love of the game of chess. Intercut with this action we see the chess champions from earlier in the film. Each is now looking at the camera with a sense of happiness on their face. This works to show the viewer that all is now resolved. The editing causes us to think that the champions had some sense of the love story and now are relieved as Fogel is. In the other room Zemtsova asks Fogel to show her the chess move the Sicilon Defesnse. Fogel looks very excited but his face turns to worry. The audience knows that he has previously thrown all of his chess memorabilia into the river. His face turns again as he remembers one last board that he has hanging around his neck. This, as the title card says, is “the beginning of a very happy marriage.”

Pudovkin’s unique editing style for this time creates a blend of humor and inimitability appropriate for this type of caricature. And all though the couple ends up happy at the end the question posed in the film “could love be stronger then chess?” is never really resolved. In the end it doesn’t matter. Fogel gets both and is able to continue his fanatic obsession with his girl by his side.

Corr

Pola X (1999) directed by Leos Carax

Summary: A young writer gets intrigued to a dark hair girl who claims that she is his long-lost sister. They develop a unusual relationship and eventually crosses the line of brotherly love, promoting a down-road spiral involving his domineering mother and innocent fiancé.

Recently I saw Pola X (1999) directed by Leos Carax. The film is based on a novel written by a American writer Herman Melville, “Pierre, or the Ambiguities.” First thing to say, I liked the film a lot. I am confident enough to say that I am a Leos Carax fan. I started watching this at like two in the morning planning just to watch half of it, but as the film proceeded, I could not take off my eye from it.

What I liked about it so much? First of all, the cinematography is absolutely beautiful. Not only about the looks, but I was especially amazed by Carax’s ability to craft images with scrupulous attention in every gestures, sound of the steps, intensity of light, tempo and camera movements to create a meaning, or mood in each frame. What’s magnificent about it is that the coherence of images are so perfectly orchestrated, because all the elements I just mentioned were so meticulously tuned in to a beautiful flow of images. Especially, how they illustrated the theme of the film. “ambiguity,” in the visuals was just perfect. I honestly could not believe how he could pay a tension in all those elements when he is directing! I’m not trying to exaggerate. It’s probably the dexterous work of the film crew, and it’s wonderful. It’s worth watching just looking at those crafts of mise-en-scene.

The story explores a controversial theme, incest. I didn’t mind it at all. The story is dark and sad, but amazingly mysterious and enticing. Exploration the topic of incest, the film takes us to a mystery of life where we are not familiar with and makes us anxious causes fear. The film is not fast, but it’s so visceral. Pola X gives a scene of fear of the unknown, or the alien and we are forced to constantly confront with this. Interestingly, this fear of the unknown could be the strong implication of political fear in France. According to Michael DeAngelis, “Carax's film has concerns in territorial isolation and the threats and realities of invasion, implicating French culture historically, politically, and culturally by relocating Melville's land narrative from America to France.” What makes this film fun to watch is that the images always challenges us to interpret its implications. I highly recommend it and I am going to go head and watch some of his other films.

Work Cited

DeAngelis, Michael. "Inverting French Heritage Cinema: Melville, Carax, and Pola X." Film Criticism 27.1 (2002): 20-35. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 4 Nov. 2010.

Hour of the Wolf: A Murderers Confession

I believe that “Hour of the Wolf” is a confession to murder. Alma has alluded to murdering her husband out of fear for his mental illness. I believe that Johan was a mentally unstable man, and Alma began to fear for her own mental well being as time progressed. She describes the demons that Johan had drawn as coming to life, and mocking him. I believe that these demons were facets of Johan’s psyche that began to destroy his life. As Johan became more and more withdrawn and unstable Alma recognized this. I believe that the turning point of the story is when Alma asks Johan the question if people that live together for so long start to share the same thoughts. After she has raised this question, Johan gets worse. His demons start to mock and taunt him more, and he sleeps less and less. At one point Johan describes a story where he says that a young almost naked boy attacked him. Johan tells Alma that he killed the boy, and threw him in the water.

By the end of the film Johan is overcome by his demons, and lets them destroy him. I think that Alma realizes that Johan has been overcome by his demons, and she realizes that if she were to stay with him any longer that she may be attacked by these demons too. Fearing for her own safety Alma kills Johan in the woods. To cover her tracks Alma tells the story as if the demons did come to life and destroy Johan. She also claims victim by accusing Johan of shooting her in an attempt to kill her. Perhaps he did shoot her, and that is when Alma realized that she would have to kill him for her own safety.

Alma’s realization that Johan was mentally unstable, and possibly dangerous allowed for her to kill him. She believed that if she were to grow old with him she would have inherited his illness, and she could not live with that. Even at the end of the film she asks the question again. Would she have become like him? I think Alma regrets her decision to kill Johan questioning if there was another way to save him. She will never know.