Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick | The Cameraman / 1928

a matinee idol behind the camera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clyde Bruckman and Lew Lipton (writers), Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton (directors) The Cameraman / 1928

 

 Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman is an absolutely splendid comedy that also saw the beginning of his decline. The move to MGM, with its film factory-like techniques, eventually did away with Keaton’s improvisatory methods, and demanded even more formulaic comedic plots.   

   Yet this film has a wide range of quite innovative scenes and techniques, including a supposedly disastrous movie made by the former tintype portrait cameraman as his first film which reminds one of the work of Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose Man with a Camera appeared one year later.

 

      In another scene, Keaton plays with the rather homoerotic tropes that often appear in his films, as his character is forced in a small changing room with a large man, with whom he must struggle in order to put on his bathing suit; ultimately the two appear in each other’s swimming gear, which hints at the intimacy of their bodies and comically suggests the exchange of identities that often occurs in the intensity of sex.  

      The longest film-scene, a gangland battle in Chinatown, was ordered up by studio head, Irving Thalberg, much to Keaton’s distress, but it’s still wonderful filmmaking, and Keaton even was able to mock the shoot by placing a small monkey on his back throughout.

      The heroine this time around, Sally (Marceline Day), is a far more independent and capable woman than the simpering Southerner in his The General of a couple of years earlier. And even the more standard routine comedic skits, such as the scene in which he is forced to sit in the rumble seat, while the man, trying to steal away his lover Sally, drives away with the heroine at his side. As critic Donald Egan notes, it is clear, given the sudden rainy downpour that he must endure, that the writers of Singin’ in the Rain had seen this film.

       Keaton is even able to mock studio executives further by allowing the monkey to switch reels, losing him, at first, any possibility of winning over Sally, but finally vindicating his talent and his lover for her; when the reel is rediscovered it also revealed that it was he, and not his enemy, Harold Stagg (Harold Goodwin) who saved Sally’s life. In short, The Cameraman is so much fun, in part, because Keaton, although now drinking more heavily and getting a bit too old to play the naïve innocent, appears to be willing to let the audience in on the jokes. For even his double-exposed and apparently under-lit images are so much better, to my taste, than almost any of Chaplin’s carefully composed and over-rehearsed shots.

       When it appears that Keaton has lost the girl, and he walks off as a kind of Chaplinesqe figure, we still recognize him as a bigger man than the Little Tramp. And Keaton’s true beauty comes through at all moments. We side with him not simply because he is an ordinary man prone to dozens of daily pitfalls, but for the fact that he truly is a kind of matinee idol underneath who, despite all the handsome boys that swarm around Sally, is the one she truly deserves—something I believe both he and the listed director, Edward Sedgwick, were deeply aware of. There is always a kind of secret sexual energy behind Keaton’s best performances, even when he plays an absolute innocent. If nothing else The Cameraman truly reveals that if Chapin was cute, and Harold Lloyd a kind of likeable nerd, Keaton, behind his constant pratfalls, was a truly beautiful being. Even a monkey could recognize that.                     Unfortunately, this film would be his last great work, with MGM, a company change that he described the worst decision of his life, ultimately draining all Keaton’s brilliant comedic subtlety.   

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018)

 

Yasujirō Ozu | 彼岸花 (Higanbana) Equinox Flower / 1958

the bright red teapot

by Douglas Messerli

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay, based on a novel by Ton Satomi, Yasujirō Ozu (director) 彼岸花 (Higanbana) Equinox Flower / 1958

 

The bright red teapot in the middle of almost every shot within the Hirayama household stands out in the Agfra-color film of mostly mute blues, greens, grays, and beiges of the family clothes and décor in much the same way that the red ball gown worn by Bette Davis to the annual Olympus Ball in William Wyler’s black-and-white movie Jezebel. In that 1938 film, she was shunned and drowned in the sea of all-white purity.

     In Ozu’s 1958 film, 20 years later, at least there are a few other colors, sprigs of yellow flowers, a bright pink sweater worn by the young heroine, and bright orange bottles of soda, that suggest that we are in, at the very least, a more diverse world.

     Indeed, in the very first scene, while attending the wedding of an employee’s daughter, business head Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi), commends a young couple for having married in the “modern” way, for love, without the confines of parental choice and vetting. His affirmation for their love also reveals, quite painfully, that his own marriage—despite the near saintliness, we later perceive, of his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka)—has not always been a happy one. And, indeed, we later learn through Kiyoko’s gentle complaints that he is often missing from their dinner table and arrives home late many nights.

     Ozu reiterates both his patriarchal demeanor and disdain for Hirayama’s wife when he does return, tossing his clothes, one by one, to the floor as she literally scoops them up, presumably to clean them for their next wearing. And, although he is a gentle man in the office, where we observe him mostly signing contracts, he is far more hide-bound and unforgiving at home. In one of the film’s final scenes, we see this obedient wife sitting patiently alone at her table with a beautiful smile on her face, while the director cuts to a window view of a clothesline with hanging garments. Kiyoko, it is clear, has spent her entire life caring for her husband.

      In the outside world, others come to him for advice. An old friend, Shukichi Mikama (Chishū Ryū) is worried about his daughter, Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who intends to marry a musician of whom he does not approve, and who has left her home to work in a Ginza bar, asks if Hirayama will check in on her. A woman friend, Mrs. Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa) visiting Tokyo from her home in Kyoto, where she owns an inn, complains of her daughter Yukiko’s refusal to meet any of the men she has chosen for her.

      We never quite know what the relationship is between Hirayama and Sasaki, who is presented by Ozu as a kind of comic chatterbox, from whom both Hirayama and later his wife must escape, before she begins her endless conversations, to the bathroom.

     But we might suspect that, despite the familial friendliness between the Hirayamas and the Sasakis—Hirayama’s daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima) is also a good friend of Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto)—it may have something to do with the past “business” trips to that city that Hirayama has made.

     In any event, Hirayama gives sage advice, and is willing to help bring those family members together.

     When suddenly confronted in his own house, however, with a young man, Masahiko Taniguchi (Keiji Sada), asking for his daughter Setsuko’s hand in marriage, Hirayama is horrified. He knows nothing about this man, a junior businessman soon to be transferred to Hiroshima. Neither Hirayama nor his wife has even been told by their daughter about their relationship.

        

     When upbraided for her behavior, Setsuko runs to her lover, who gently sees her back home, which, at least, gains her mother’s approval. But Hirayama, obviously perceiving that his control of the home is being weakened, turns suddenly into a kind of tyrant, demanding that his daughter be locked in until she perceives the error of her ways. “Bad things happen when young girls go out. Stay home for a few days and think it over.”

       But this new “modern” world is one controlled by the women. Setsuko’s younger, completely modernized sister, agrees with her decision, while Yukiko and Setsuko go even further in making a pact to help in each other with their autocratic parents. Although always obedient to her husband, even Hirayama’s wife subtly joins forces against the old ways.

 

       Ozu slyly joins forces also by intercutting the brown-beige-blue-green colors of Hirayama’s home with the bright neon greens and yellow colors of the Ginza bar where Hirayama goes to visit his friend’s daughter, Fumiko, whom, he discovers is not only happy in her life but utterly determined to marry her musician boyfriend. Oddly, he gives her his blessing. And even at home, of course, Ozu keeps reminding us of the brightness of the future in that shiny red teapot.

      So too, does he bless Yukiko’s decision to marry someone other than her meddling mother’s choices. Love is more important, he insists, than what her mother wants. When Yukiko announces that she has really been speaking for and about his own daughter, she declares that Hirayama has, in fact, given Setsuko the permission to marry she has sought.

 

    Flustered by his obvious hypocritical behavior, Hirayama storms home, where even his gentle wife observes that he is a man of “inconsistencies.” Hirayama’s answer is as profound as Ozu’s film: “as a scholar said: ‘the sum total of inconsistencies is life.’”

      Ultimately, Hirayama has no choice but to attend his daughter’s wedding, and even do penance by visiting the married couple in their new home in Hiroshima. Let us hope, however, that his visit will be more joyous one than the parental visit in Tokyo Story. But this is now a brighter world than that one. The Japanese culture had already seen the enormous changes that would lead to its dominance of the Asian market and its deep relationships with the US and other western markets. That bright red tea kettle might soon be available in all of our homes. Ours is bright green.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).

Seijun Suzuki | すべてが狂ってる (Subete ga kurutteru) (Everything Goes Wrong) / 1960

over the cliff

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seiji Hoshikawa (screenplay, based on a story by Akira Ichijō), Seijun Suzuki (director) すべてが狂ってる (Subete ga kurutteru) (Everything Goes Wrong) / 1960

 

If one can imagine a re-mix of the American popular film series Gidget with Douglas Sirk’s Rebel without a Cause with a soupçon of West Side Story mixed in, one might reveal some notion of what Seijun Suzuki’s 1960s SunTribe film, “The Cliff and the Madness of Youth” (a title that surely calls up Rebel)—released in the US now as Everything Goes Wrong—is like.

      The young “gang” members of this film, actually rather docile, but nonetheless rebelling high-school students, who hang out in a local café, are really just normally disaffected youths of the period, unhappy with the values of their war-time parents, and unable to find a way yet, given the patriarchal and often World War II-bound society in which they live, to make the changes they see necessary. Mostly they hang out, steal—like the characters of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—small grocery-store items, and hope someone shows up with enough cash to treat them through their next round of drinks.

      Don’t get me wrong, there is a dark undercurrent of their activities which might threaten even the strongest of normative societies. Many of the young males involved see themselves as being part of a “gang,” and, occasionally, they pull off an auto-theft or other more serious activities which puts them face-to-face with the Japanese Mafia, and suggests their future in the  1960s society in which they exist. There is a great deal of casual sex and male misogynistic behavior. If these young beach-loving kids might “grow out of it,” as we might say today, some will surely be lost, like James Dean, Nathalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. And murder and death, as in West Side Story is always just around the corner. Worst of all, in their dedication to their moment in history, they are almost pathologically selfish.

      What is so remarkable about Suzuki’s film, 57 years after its original shooting, is just how current it still feels to that time. These gang members dance, not quite like Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story characters, but through the endlessly electric and jumpy camera images of Suzuki. For the first part of the movie, indeed, any old time-viewers need not apply. Suzuki looks ahead to the cellphone text-message society of today, whipping through relationships and conversations faster that the ear can sometimes even ascertain—at least these older, pre-contemporary ears. Conversations between friends are completely cryptic, cut off mid-discussion, personalized to such a degree that, during the first few moments, it is difficult even to establish the student’s (and adult’s) relationships with one another. But, of course, that is part of the problem, at least as Jirō Sugita (Tamio Kawachi) perceives it. His mother, the traditionally-bound Misayo, has taken up, presumably after the death of his father in the war, with a wealthy married business man, Keigo Nanbara. To us he seems a loving replacement, helping to pay for Misayo expenses, as well as the education of Jirō; but to her son he is not only an interloper, but a man who is paying for his mother as if she were a prostitute—a endless theme in Japanese filmmaking.

 

    On top of the youthful dissatisfaction and jump-cut editing of their behavior, Suzuki also adds a brilliant jazz-score by composer Keitarō Miho, including song-cuts from current groups  of the day. The results are electrifying, and help to express the youthful uncommunicative expressions in a way that very few members of the older society might have comprehended.

     Indeed, despite the hateful and rude expressions of Jirō, Nambara determines that he must simply “connect up” with the youth and “talk with him” to resolve the distress expressed by Misayo. That, of course, is his big mistake. To try to sympathize with a young person by suggesting you might comprehend his angst is like calling across a canyon while being shaken by an earthquake. As one of the Jet’s gang says in West Side Story, when a similar adult suggests, “When I was your age,” “You were never my age!”

      Trying to track down Misayo’s son, Nambara encounters several of his “wild” friends, including a girl Etsuko, who, in an attempt to seduce the elder into her room, tells him she will be at the Zushi beach resort with her friends and Jirō the next day. Clueless, Nambara shows  up, where Jirō finds him in the room with Etsuko, after having dragged his own mother to the resort to prove that her lover has been seeing younger girls.

      If the mix-up and the following violence—in which Jirō nearly bludgeons the elder man to death—and runs off in a police car chase that ultimately kills him, is a bit contrived, so be it. It’s a scream out to youth—with both its moral freshness and its total lack of vision—that can only make one cry for the impossibility to bring these groups together. As in both Rebel without a Cause and West Side Story, the elders can only look on after the youth’s deaths with a feeling of distress for their not being to deter the inevitable, feeling like sacks of flesh that can no longer have much effect on the next generation’s lives. Although Nambara forgives is youthful attacker, it has utterly no meaning—unless you believe in some religious redemption.

      Nearly all of the SunTribe movies, films based the contemporary youth subculture and “their affinity for beach life, jazz music, and progressive attitudes towards sex,” met with great public outrage and eventually were halted on behalf of the Japanese Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee. Yet the genre came back again even stronger, soon after, including the production of this film.

      Today, Suzuki’s films, particularly this one, seem in sync with the French New Wave, and present us with a completely different vision of the great Japanese modernists such as Ozu, Kurosawa, and others.  Along with the later Hani and, of course, Oshima, through Suzuki, western viewers were able to get a completely new perspective of Japanese contemporary culture.      

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).

Jacques Becker | Casque d'or / 1952

doors and windows

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Becker and Jacques Companéez (writers) and Jacques Becker (director) Casque d’or / 1952

 

Named for the golden “helmet” of hair worn by its heroine, Marie (Simone Signoret), Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or is his most likeable and influential of films, despite critics of the day rejecting it for its emphasis on atmosphere over psychological realism. The film has many links with Jean Renoir’s (a director with whom Becker often worked) French Can-Can of 1954 and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur of 1956, all three films leading the way, in some aspects, to the French New Wave.

     

     Yet, while the latter two films seem busily complex in their plots, structures, and character motivations, Becker’s work seems, on the surface, quite simple. Its story is so slender it can be summed up in a few sentences. On a Sunday boating trip a group of Belle Époque gangster’s and their whores stop by a country inn, where they boisterously drink and dance. The most beautiful of these women, Marie, however, is not happy with her current beau, Roland (William Sabatier), with whom she constantly argues. One of the gang members, Raymond (Raymond Bussières), meets up with an old friend, Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), a former gang member but now a simple carpenter—to whom Marie is immediately sexually drawn—and despite Roland’s anger, Georges and Marie dance, at the end of which Roland attempts to attack Georges, who quickly knocks him out. The following day, Marie is missing, and gang members have been sent out to bring her back. She is apparently staying with one of her women friends, but soon after visiting the gang leader, Félix Leca—who would also like to have a relationship with her—she visits the carpenter, where she is spurned by his bosses’ daughter, whom is obviously attracted to or having an affair with Georges.

  

     That evening the gang members, along with wealthy Parisians, “slumming” it, gather at a local café along with their women. Georges suddenly appears, proposing to fight Roland for Marie’s love. Despite the warnings of Raymond, the two retreat to the back of the “club” for a knife fight, which ends in Roland’s death. Although the gang members and their women escape the café, the police arrive, discovering the corpse and arresting all those still within.

     Raymond sends a message for Georges to meet him in the country, but when Georges does so, it is apparent it was Marie who written to him, and for a few days the two have a passionate affair at the small cottage run by La mere d’Eugène (Odette Barencey) before there are tracked down. Meanwhile, the gang head turns informant to his police detective friend, suggesting that Raymond has been the murderer. When Raymond is arrested, Georges—out of loyalty to his beloved friend—returns to Paris, turning himself in. Raymond discovers that he has been framed by Leca, and is held as an accessory. Georges is carted away to prison, and in the last scene, as Marie watches from a nearby window, is guillotined.

      Throughout this frail plot, there are few other complications, as the authors focus on their fairly small cast; and even from the beginning we know, in the closed and violent world in which they live, the central couple is doomed. The wonder is that they discover a way to even find a few days of happiness.

     Despite its dark themes, however, and the fact the movie was filmed in black and white, the work seems, almost, to have been made in color. One might swear, after seeing this film, that Marie’s hair was indeed blonde, that the boa she standardly wraps about her neck is a bright color, the country scenes filled with greens and browns.

      While Becker seldom “explains” his character’s motives, he amply demonstrates their conditions and their metaphysical situations. Casque d’or is a world of “open” and “closed,” space, of “out” and “in,” a horizontal society that has no vertical lift. In scene after scene, Becker’s camera takes his figures through doors, which are continually demanded to be closed, but are secretly opened or, in the country scenes celebrating Georges’ and Marie’s love are thrown wide open. So too do windows, throughout this film, reveal the conditions of these figures’ lives. Particularly in the scene where the police arrive at the café where the already escaped prostitutes and other neighbors peer in at the trapped customers, in the scenes in the country, where upon awakening, Marie throws wide open the window, and in the last scene through which she observes her lovers’ death, windows reveal the violence, love, and destructiveness of the society at large. Although these “thugs” often roam the streets and the countryside, most of their life is spent in small rooms where they hunker together like docile beasts. And even then they are continually told by the gang leader to retreat to even smaller spaces.    

     This is a world in which even the dancers move in spirals, in dizzying spins, legs and heads in place. Even the joyous boat party of the first scenes is a movement through the horizon. The closest these figures get to heaven is in Marie’s radiant gold hair, but that is just a “helmet.”

  

     The only moment of true verticality in this film that I can recall is the final downward slide of the guillotine blade at the very moment where Georges looks up to accept it and the will of God.

       In short, although Casque d’or’s plot is so essentialist that it is almost abstract, Becker’s images reveal to us all the internecine rules, regulations, and limitations of these gang member’s world, a place, like Sartre’s later play, that has “no exit” accept in death.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2013).

Konrad Wolf | Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) / 1968

goethe and auschwitz

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Kohlhasse and Konrad Wolf (screenplay based on Wolf’s War Diaries), Konrad Wolf (director) Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) / 1968

 

It is mid-April 1945 in which Wolf’s fascinating film begins. From the viewpoint of the Russian troops near Berlin, we hear a young man with a P.A. system speaking in German to Nazi soldiers who have not yet surrendered. They are told not only of the hopelessness of their cause, but that if they surrender they will be protected, saved from certain death. There is no one visible on the scene, a forlorn-looking lake, except for a small boat upon which a gallows has been constructed, a body hanging from it with a sign around its neck: “DESERTEUR Ich bin ein russen knecht,” “Deserter! I am a Russian lackey.”

      The young man speaking on that P.A. system, Lieutenant Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwartz) might almost see himself in the dead man’s visage, for Hecker, whose family escaped at the beginning of the war to Moscow, now fighting with the Red Army, is of German heritage, a nineteen-year-old boy who was born, much like director himself, in Cologne. His German background and his ability to speak German is why he has been assigned this role, and probably why he is traveling, like a human mascot, sleeping against the shoulder of Wadim (a Russian teacher turned soldier) (Vasilil Livanov), and sitting, at other times, next to the music-loving Sasha (Alexej Ejboshenko), Gregor’s easy-going superior.

     By the very next scene, as the soldiers reach the city of Berneu, near Berlin, Gregor is called for by the troop’s Commander, he is suddenly transformed into a Commandant, ordered to take over the city, transforming the few remaining residents into law-abiding citizens of the new Soviet order. The immensity of his sudden rise in power is brilliantly realized visually by Wolf, as the young man stands in the middle of the street in utter confusion as reads, time and again, the written proclamation in disbelief.

      Throughout all of these early scenes Wolf creates tension simply by throwing his major figure into a series of vast responsibilities that nearly overwhelm the nineteen-year-old—and any sympathetic audience. Berneu, at first, appears almost like a ghost town, with only a young, frightened girl (Jenny Gröllmann) left. She has just witnessed the dead body of the woman she has lived with, a suicide victim, and is terrified of what may lay ahead for her in a city of occupation troops.

      As well she should have been when one realizes, that, in fact, thousands of German women were raped by the Soviet occupiers, their fathers and husbands shipped out and lost in Russian Gulags. The closest Wolf’s film comes to this truth is the immense hostility with a Soviet woman soldier (Galina Polskich) greets the young girl when she comes to beg a place to stay near Gregor—certainly comprehensible when we realize he is the only German-speaking male left.  Terrifying the child, the Red Army woman gloats, “now, she too, is frightened.”

     Gregor is sympathetic, but also clearly confused. What is his relationship with the German girl, with the German language he speaks, and the German people of whom he is now in charge? If he now “rules” a kind of a “ghost-town,” he is also clearly haunted by its ghosts.

      Due to Soviet cinematic restrictions—previous films by Wolf had been delayed or confiscated—the director does not honestly pursue any Soviet misconduct save the unnecessary murder of one discovered ex-Nazi. Here the Soviets, typified by Gregor, Wadim, and Sascha, are presented as heroes attempting to find a way to save the Germans more suffering and to help them build a new country out of the horrors of the old. We might well describe this film, accordingly, as utter propaganda, were it not that one might imagine the East German audience of 1968 could read between the lines.

     

     And those important gaps in the film’s story do not diminish the questions it does address: how to rebuild a nation of individuals who have been so perversely hateful, sadistic, destructive? To give Wolf credit, I Was Nineteen does explore some of the events of the concentration camps, presenting them through a kind of pseudo-documentary of the gas-chamber showers and descriptions of concentration camp life between cuts of the young Gregor showering, surely in an attempt to wash his own association with his German roots away. A later character’s explanation of the rise of Nazism as the German’s endless history of obedience to all leaders, and an declaration by one concentration camp survivor of the war as being a product of the manipulation of industrialists and corporations, however, is clearly inadequate. What Wolf makes clear is that Germany, East or West, can never free itself for rest of its history from the World War II events. If Germany might be associated with Bach, Goethe and other great artists and thinkers, it will also now be associated forever with Auschwitz. Any attempt to explain what happened to students of the future cannot escape the inevitability of speaking about both:

 

                 Goethe and Auschwitz. Two German names. Two German names in every

                 language.

    

      Through the character of Gregor, Wolf continues throughout this film to explore the tears of sensibility between the Germans and the Soviets—less in political terms than in very personal emotions, the pull of his roots and his detestation of his countrymen’s actions. Throughout this film, we encounter various types of Germans, including the honor-bound soldiers of a garrison about to be captured. Sent to try to convince the Nazi enclave to surrender, Wadim and Gregor nearly lose their lives. But ultimately, the Germans are necessarily convinced to abandon their impossible position. Logic, even in this absurd world, wins out.

    In another scene, as their truck once again overheats, Gregor walks a short distance to a stream of water, suddenly discovering a lone German soldier, now blind, waiting in his overturned vehicle, certain that Gregor is one of his returned comrades. The painful confusion of this misled and certainly dying soldier, can only, once again, reflect Gregor’s own pulls between his native language and his role in life. Only the taste of a cigarette he hands the lost soldier reveals his origins: the tobacco is from the Caucasus mountains. But even then, the blind survivor presumes he has been serving as a German there. Finally, Gregor, no longer able to speak, walks off.

     At a final outpost, where Gregor has been once again enlisted to broadcast to straggling German soldiers to give themselves up, we witness a similar standoff. This time reason again prevails, as dozens of Nazis surrender and are brought into protection at the farm where the Soviets have holed up. But, at the last moment, SS troops speed up in trucks, shooting down and killing their own men in order to prevent them from turning themselves in. In the shootout, Sascha is also killed.

    

      Confused and passive for much of the film, Gregor suddenly accepts his own German background,  but also declares his allegiance not just to Soviet forces but to a kind of international determination to track them all down, to destroy any Nazis still ready to destroy those who do not embrace their blind fury.

      Throughout Wolf’s film, no matter how one might feel about its cultural forgetfulness, we are moved by his sensitive attention to the human beings caught up in this tragic battle: focusing on simple everyday acts, people simply speaking to one another and participating in the necessary activities of drinking and eating, singing, listening to music, washing, reading. Food is particularly important. In nearly every scene in the film, characters, Russians and Germans, eat, sometimes serving up simple meals, at other times, as in the grand Russian celebration, cooking up prodigious amounts of food. No matter how divided Wolf’s figures are politically, he presents them as human beings simply trying to survive. It is through that nobility of human expression that Wolf’s cinematic art ultimately becomes something more than a propagandistic tract.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2012

Reprinted in International Cinema Review (December 2012).