Tag: German

REVIEW: The Zone of Interest

musicalsoup Leave a comment

[TW: This review contains information and descriptions of film content surrounding the Holocaust.]

Inspired by the 2014 book with the same title, The Zone of Interest  takes us into the political landscape of 1943 Poland. The film follows the journey of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his family of six living a seemingly ordinary life inside the walls of the most horrific area on the planet. Framing the film through Höss’ character is an adaptive choice by director Jonathan Glazer and is based on a real person: a high-ranking S.S. Commandant whose contributions to the Nazi regime propelled significant advancements at the concentration camp Auschwitz I. He was the longest-serving commander at Auschwitz, and the film primarily revolves around his family’s life in a villa within the camp.

The movie first depicts the Höss family living a blissful life filled with trips to the nearby lake, picnics in the sun, and small gatherings in their beguiling backyard. His wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and five children reside in their idyllic house only a 10-foot, barbed wire-lined wall away from unimaginable horrors. Their pristine home is lined with a blossoming garden and filled with a herd of anxious servants attending to their every need. While the family lives in comfort, sounds of screams, trains, and gunshots are consistently murmuring in the background. Hedwig remains dismissive of the disruptions, choosing to ignore the truth behind her privilege, but her guests often question the blazing fires surrounding the sky at night and the smoky cough-prone air. The title, “Zone of Interest”, comes from the German word “Interessengebiet”, which was a term used to depict the restricted zone around Auschwitz. (Much like the family’s eerily cultivated lifestyle.)

The shots in the film are very matter-of-fact. We see moments in their life as they happen naturally, without a direct opinion from Glazer. The audience is fitted as bystanders, set up to observe the observers. We were left to parse through the morally uncomfortable life of the family individually, making the content even more unsettling. Glazer gracefully dances around the known violence that is occurring within the camp, but there is an implication that the audience is aware of the nightmares beyond, limiting the voices of the victims to sounds from outside and alarming innuendos. This choice haunts us and leaves us waiting for the terror that the audience never directly faces. Almost like the remaining five members of the Höss family.

The film briefly features music from the University of Michigan’s own Dr. Patricia Hall’s research, who founded the project “Music From Auschwitz”. Dr. Hall brings to life lost music written and performed by Auschwitz prisoners. The music is accompanied by a deeply painful context, but a firm reminder of history and a memorial to millions of lost lives. Her group has toured Holocaust memorial centers throughout Michigan and New York, and this summer will be traveling to Vienna to perform a concert of her manuscripts.

The film stands as a reminder of the horrors behind violent perpetrators and ignorant familial bystanders, along with all the art-deco bells and whistles. Zone of Interest  is playing in theaters now in Ann Arbor.

 

More on Music from Auschwitz.

105 minutes. Rated PG-13. German and Polish with English Subtitles. 

Image thanks to Cut & Run.

REVIEW: Schwarze Adler (Black Eagles)

Himaja Leave a comment

Last Friday the German Department hosted a free curated screening of the 2021 independent documentary film “Schwarze Adler” (translated from German: “Black Eagles”). The space they held it in at North Quad was great – it was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows spanning the length of one wall, whiteboards and cushy chairs spanning the other, and a big blank wall up front to project the film onto. The physically-distanced chairs they’d set up in the room were fairly packed with people coming for the event.

Watching this documentary was a pretty emotional experience for me (which is why it took me so long to write this review!).

Steffi Jones, former defender for the national team

Seeing footage in 2021 of fans at a soccer game doing the Hitler salute will do something to your psyche. I’m privileged — some people don’t have the choice of whether to turn away from the screen, because they live through this every day. Imagine being a player on a professional sports team where the only difference between you and your teammates is that your skin is a shade darker. You’re trying to focus on the game you’ve trained for for most of your life when you suddenly hear 1000s of fans in the stands surrounding you, most of which are from your own country where you were born and raised, yelling at you to go back where you came from. That’s an experience that was recounted by every single German soccer player interviewed in this documentary.

The way fans treat athletes is something worth having a whole discussion on. Cheering for your favorite players and booing when the other team scores is all good fun. But when that morphs into jeering, chanting hateful racial slurs, and hurling insults at players, that’s when it becomes absolutely cruel. Michigan football games are not immune to this behavior. We put athletes on pedestals, but they are not made of titanium, they’re made of flesh and blood! They’re humans just like us and when fans dehumanize them, they deprive them of so much: joy from being on the field, joy from being with their teammates, and the focus they need to stay in the game.

Gerald Asamoah, former forward

Many of the players in the documentary talked about how hearing those shouts of “go back to your country” and “kick out the negro” would affect their playing, and they thought about it for the whole rest of the game. At one point one of the players, Gerald Asamoah said he had “never seen such hate anywhere else before.” One of his fellow teammates of color left Germany to play for Ghana because of the experience. Another player, after being subjected to it for half a game, picked up a small red crate on the sidelines and threw it down in a fit of anger. His teammates said nothing to him — the referee just handed him a yellow card. Another recounted how sad it made him when he saw that not only were the parents chanting slurs, but their small children were too.

Almost all of the players also made connections between the way they were treated to Germany’s dark history. “How can you show this behavior when we have seen exactly where it leads?” I think the same could be said of racism in our country. The U.S. has an equally dark history, it’s just that it’s usually glossed over in our history textbooks.

When the credits began to roll, I was feeling kind of hopeless and defeated. I know that’s not the right response to world issues, but I couldn’t help it. But then one of the professors from the German department got up to say a few words.
Here’s what she said, paraphrased:
“Don’t be disheartened. These thoughts of racism have accrued over centuries and it will take time to undo them. Martin Luther King Jr. was only assassinated 52 years ago so really we’re just at the beginning of the work to undo it. And don’t feel bad if you are not the one who goes out and marches and shows up in a big way. The small acts matter to. Every act of kindness, and every act that does something to acknowledge the humanity in others matters.”

So go out and show up in a small or in a big way this week, and know that we have a long way to go but every act matters.

PREVIEW: Schwarze Adler (Black Eagles)

Himaja Leave a comment

Tomorrow afternoon, you could kick off the weekend as I usually do — plant yourself down at the library and glue your eyeballs to your laptop screen for two hours.

ALTERNATELY, you could plant yourself down in a comfy chair in the neat North Quad collaborative space and glue your eyeballs to a different screen to live and learn through the experiences of Black players on the German national soccer team.

UM’s German department is hosting a curated screening of the 2021 documentary film “Schwarze Adler” or “Black Eagles” tomorrow from 2-4PM in North Quad 2435. https://events.umich.edu/event/90023

“The documentary lets black players of the German national soccer team tell their personal stories for the first time. What road did they take and what obstacles did they have to overcome before they got to where we cheer for them?”

As we head into a weekend of events celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, I strongly encourage you to make time to reflect on the values that drove his and countless other lesser-mentioned civil rights leaders to fight inequities in their community, and how you are upholding those values.

I think we can all agree that working and living as an athlete is extremely challenging. There are a heap of pressures riding on these people’s backs: the internal drive to win, press and media attention, and the demands of your coach and teammates. It’s stressful at all levels, from high school to the NCAA to the pro leagues.

Those pressures are multiplied for athletes of color, who are often dehumanized. In the U.S. today, Black athletes are dogged by stereotypes that chalk their talent up to “inherent physical ability” rather than the actual years of hard training and practice they put into the game. They have to deal with antiquated competition restrictions that center the needs of their white counterparts (Exhibit A: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/style/olympics-soul-cap-ban-swimming.html), and then are shamed for using their platforms to protest their unjust treatment or prioritizing their mental health (ex: Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka). Here’s an interesting history of Black athletes at our very own university: https://heritage.umich.edu/stories/lonely-as-hell/.

Now move the map to Germany. The personal stories of these players will likely be entirely different, and yet…similar in some fundamental ways to what we see in our country. What I think will be invaluable about this film is that the soccer players will be telling their own stories directly to the camera — no filtering or watering down included. This will be a thought-provoking way to get out of the U.S-centric perspective bubble I live in.

I hope to see some of you there!

REVIEW: German Film Series: “Transit”

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

As soon as the credits roll I hightailed it out of the viewing room. I can’t stand the cold so I ran all the way home, and the scene was so terrible. There’s the harsh yellow of the streetlights reflecting all along the ice on the road, which is shining wetly like a giant tongue. I look back to check for headlights before I dash across the street to my block, and the wind takes the liberty of yanking through my hair so it flies in my face and mixes with the sickly lights.

So this might be my new favorite movie.

Georg’s expression at the last few frames was terrible. Forget Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, this guy creates a symphony with his painfully hopeful eyes and the gentle set of his lips, scarred from a childhood cleft palate surgery, only adding to the confused ambiance he creates. Throughout the film he occupies a character with infinite, though guarded, softness, while maintaining a fairly traditional father-figure posture. He is not completely any one thing, but I recognized a fragility in him I hoped wouldn’t prove to be dangerous for him. 

Marie is by contrast mostly flat, though her wishy-washy approach to everything still makes her a wild card. She is a ghost, pale and able to see through people. She reacts to conversation quietly, choosing subtlety over big outward expression, and in this way, she haunts.

Director Christian Petzold has made me the exact right kind of unsettled with Transit. There is so much casualness in this: a complete disregard for metaphors in the weather, the sun out even in times of keen distress; traumatic events regarded with little ceremony. Strangely it’s the smallest things that are amplified. Right off the sound seems wrong: the tiny tapping of a glass on a table rings out, a door sliding shut is like a jail cell clanging. All throughout I don’t quite understand what I’m feeling, unable to cry though I can sense sadness here.

The way Petzold plays with time works so well with the confusion of identities throughout the movie–cars and clothing and language are modern, but there are typewriters present, and historical architecture. Members of the Navy in Crackerjack-esque uniforms dine with our Georg in the local pizza shop; air travel is not mentioned, only by ship. The sleepy brightness of the seaside seems infinitely ancient in its sun-bleached scenery. Nazis are occupying countries all throughout Europe, but The traveling itself is another element, coming upon a new place full of strangers, trying to reach another, more obscure land across the ocean. It all collects together to blur any useful divide between the real and imagined.

Going back and forth to the hotel room and port and consulate did seem repetitive, without any discernible reasoning. Already there is a considerable amount of confusion present, so the redundancy of the dashings does nothing for the film’s emotional success. It only creates repeating, nearly identical cycles that do not move the plot forward.

Cycles are, however, the most important part of the movie, and may say something about the message Petzold was trying to convey. After Marie disappears back into the city at the end (as she does so well), Georg is left eternally waiting for her in the pizza shop, mournfully gazing out to meet the eyes again of the woman he had immediately fallen in love with. It seems she is free now, like he used to be, and he is stuck wandering looking for his lost love, the very sickness that had plagued her.

It’s interesting to drag a historical event out of its place comfortably in the past and out into the open modern era. It makes us nervous to consider whether political and military atrocities will really stay away from the present, or if we’re still capable of unbelievable things even after we have advanced as a society. Maybe they take different forms, but it is foolish to think we are any less evil than before, and thus we cannot pretend we live safely apart from those terrors.

REVIEW: Nosferatu

Emma Pinchak 3 Comments

Nosferatu is oddly enough a character who is easy to relate to. I, too, am looking for suitable housing (an impossible task in Ann Arbor), sleep at hours these mortals deem “strange,” and have an awkward gait. But more deeply than that is a common feeling between Nosferatu and I of a sensationalized otherness. Perhaps his placement as a social pariah is based in folklore more ancient than my own, but the results are the same, creating a clear boundary between ourselves and genteel society. But this is not a feeling I suspect is unique to myself; however much we interact with others there seems to lurk some lingering doubt of our place amongst humanity. It is exactly this relatability to the undisputed villain of a story that enriches and truly enthralls.

Besides the titular character, I am most struck by Ellen, the heroine who is married to the real estate agent that is saddled with the responsibility to sell Nosferatu a house. She is the epitome of 1920s silent film glamour, with her wide eyes, expressively drawn eyebrows, and impossibily pale complexion. She is similarly ghoulish in appearance to Nosferatu, looking perfectly skeletal in the strength of her jaw and the hollows of her orbital cavities. Although the lady in distress act is a terrifyingly misogynistic trope, I think she is still able to exhibit her character’s strength even while continuously fainting and falling all over her brave husband. She is the reason Nosferatu is defeated, even if she is not credited much for her bravery. And through all the distress this lady goes through, her ringlets remain immaculate.

         

The movie as a whole is simply so encapsulating to experience. The architecture is dominated by heavy stone and dense wood, underground cavernous spaces and grand buildings that feel claustrophic despite their massive size. Though created and set in a time after the gothic period, that sense of aesthetics is present in all aspects of the film, from the buildings to the formality in the characters’ behavior and clothing.

Furthermore, the great Andrew Rogers added to the ambiance and feeling of the movie through his greatly talented organ playing. After the show, he came on stage and answered questions about his work. Amazingly, though there is some composed music for Nosferatu’s organ accompaniment, Rogers chooses to play it freestyle, taking his love of the movie and his knowledge of the instrument and turning it into song that perfectly plays up emotional moments and adds tension. He spoke with such passion, and I could feel how much he cared for the organ and its preservation. Though the movie is an hour and a half long, he doesn’t feel so much time passing, equating the performance to ten minutes of playing. His commitment to keeping this art form alive is truly inspiring, and it was so nice to see how fully lost he got in what he loves.

Andrew Rogers speaking on his experience with the ancient organ (which has just been completely refurbished, a painstaking procedure that was long overdue!).
As promised, I dressed for the occasion.

If you have not seen Nosferatu, I’d recommend renting it, especially during this Halloween season. Watch it alone in a dank, dark basement (if you dare) or with a group of friends and family all dressed as your favorite characters. Though I have not had the pleasure of group Nosferatu costuming, I feel that applying and rocking a bald cap with the people you love is a fabulous bonding experience.

REVIEW: Transit

Abigail Fox Leave a comment

Christian’s Petzold’s Transit is a sprawling, moral adventure that examines questions of loyalty, morality, and the modern global order in the face of fascism. Set primarily in the French seaside town of Marseille, the background to the drama is a façade of gorgeous pastel storefronts that police vans race past in a flurry of sound and light. The setting is noticeably modern; the outfits chosen by the characters, the ships in the harbor, the vehicles in the streets all clearly belong to the modern era, and it’s also clear that Petzold wants it that way. The ambiguity of eras is only one part of the ambiguity that Petzold has carefully constructed for his film, as he places grand amounts of trust in the viewer to think critically about and understand the messages he wants to send.

The ambiguous setting contains both undertones of the Nazi occupation of France, and the modern rise of fascism in Europe. Most of the characters in Marseille trying to flee are German, and although the identity of those occupying the country goes unsaid, references to Jews, “the occupation” and “cleansings” evokes strong similarities to the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. Yet there is also a modern twist. A family of African descent that the protagonist, Georg, befriends is described as “illegal”, living a careful life in avoidance of the authorities. Their entire apartment complex is revealed to be a haven for cautious, illegal families largely of African or Middle Eastern descent, mirroring the current refugee crisis in Europe. Petzold carefully draws the comparison between the historical threats we have learned to fear and the more modern ones we may have not.

The ambiguity stretches into the exposition of the characters and the choices they make. The narrator, who appears partway into the story, goes deliberately unnamed and largely unidentified for much of the saga, but he is identifiable as an outside observer, someone witnessing the events but not privy to the inner thoughts of the main characters themselves. Petzold also avoids the potential easy moralizing of his characters. They act in unpredictable and frequently selfish ways, given opportunities to act in a clear, ethical manner, they abstain for sometimes selfish reasons, and sometimes reasons wholly unclear and never explained. Petzold’s characters are constructed as complex, whole people, with rich, unexplained inner lives. And that is what makes Transitultimately worth seeing. The characters are rich, real people, with real, complex desires, who refuse to fall into the mold of action heroes or love interests. The film artfully touches on serious modern issues while simultaneously immersing the viewer in a carefully constructed world of drama and tension, the one the unexpected ending ultimately topples.