A Hidden Life

These days, when everyone talks about 'resistance', Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life, is timely in a startling manner.  The film is overblown and very long (174 minutes), but its defects are part of the program -- in other words, the film's eccentricities are part of the design, and, I think, built to engender debate.  Indeed, the picture's very grandiosity, which feels suffocating at times, is thematic:  are we seeing a majestic revelation of the Truth or, merely, an exercise is self-aggrandizing pride?  The very questions that dog the film are integral to its meaning.  In this moment, when 'resistance' seems mostly defined by muttering imprecations, at your cable news feed, Malick's film about this subject should be seen by many and discussed.  But the picture is too solemn, it's setting too remote from contemporary affairs, and the movie's vast and humorless ambition coupled with its length will make it inaccessible to most people.  This is unfortunate because Malick's movie has much to tell us about our present political dilemma.

The plot of A Hidden Life can be summarized in a couple of sentences:  An Austrian farmer, married and with three small children, finds himself unable to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.  He defies the system and it doesn't end well for him.  For the film's first hour, the hero (Franz Jaegerstaetter) agonizes over the loyalty oath.  At the 72 minute mark, he refuses to swear loyalty the the Fuehrer.  About two more hours pass detailing his imprisonment and the hardships that his alleged disloyalty inflict upon his family members, principally, his wife, Fani and his elderly mother -- the three little girls as is the case with children are mostly oblivious to the tragedy around them.  He's executed about ten minutes before the end of the film and there's a short coda exploring the meaning of his life, posited to be "hidden" in that his sacrifice (or martyrdom) was unseen by the world, not marked by anyone but those who lived in the village from which he came, and, seemingly, "unhistoric" -- that is, without historical consequences.  The film is fundamentally philosophical in that it poses certain questions as to the hero's motivation and whether his sacrifice (which also involves sacrificing family members as "collateral damage") is warranted in that it seems to have no practical effect except to increase the quotient of suffering in the world.  As people repeatedly urge, Franz can avoid all this misery by signing a paper that means nothing, by simply maintaining his inner reservations about the regime, and by a tiny modicum of cooperation -- he's told again and again that if will agree to the loyalty oath, he can perform his military service as a nurse or in a hospital, that is, without compromising his pacifist principles.  But Franz maintains that even the slightest cooperation with the Nazi regime is immoral and he will not in any way lend himself to a political system that he despises -- this is notwithstanding the fact that literally everyone else in the film urges him to not be so stiff-necked (that is, prideful) about the situation.  Curiously, Franz' stance resembles the deranged protagonist in the documentary Tread, a man who destroys a whole town with a bulldozer because he refuses to compromise (even though it would be to his own benefit).  There's a whiff of madness and extremism about Franz' quest for martyrdom (something that brings a prosecuting attorney to literally froth at the mouth) -- after the guy destroyed the town with the bulldozer, a tape recording was discovered in which he said:  "And, then, I became unreasonable" -- the motto for the Right wing anarchist Boogaloo boys who are presently trying to foment a race war in this country.  A Hidden Life is about Franz becoming "unreasonable."  

This discussion of the film as an essay in political philosophy neglects the fact that much of the movie is overtly mystical.  In Malick's view, human beings dwell in the cathedral of a deified nature -- we don't need to imagine heaven as a remote paradise:  in fact, we live in terrestrial paradise that all too often we defile.  This notion is dramatized by the film's insistence on the extraordinary physical beauty of its locations:  Franz lives in an idyllic village surrounded by hanging mountain meadows beneath enormous granite peaks.  A mountain that appears in about a quarter of the shots in the movie is a soaring collection of improbable buttresses and pinnacles that looks like a Gothic cathedral.  Central of many shots of the landscape is a onion-dome steeple, the local Catholic parish, filmed against the backdrop of the cathedral mountain.  (The church is central to the film's narrative as well -- as is usually,the case the congregation are adherents to the established order and, if they have an reservations about Hitler, they keep them to themselves.)  The film's pictorial beauty is astonishing -- it's overwhelming on my TV and I can only speculate as to the effects of these landscapes on a big screen.  Enormous rivers course relentlessly through the meadows.  Mills stamp and hammer under the impact of water turning water-wheels.  A huge cascade gushes off the top of an 800 foot escarpment and is visualized in the film as the equivalent of God's majesty descending in a torrent to earth.  Malick's camera glides over verdant wheat fields and poses peasants in picturesque stances in these green and glowing alpine meadows.  In many shots, the director uses a sort of fish-eye lens to cause the landscape to seem to wrap around the central figure in the image -- this effect dramatizes Malick's contention that we are each at the center of our own universes and, therefore, morally responsible for what happens in them.  In the last two hours, the film rhythmically alternates between prison cells in which the hero is suffering, Piranesi-like dungeons full of brick barrel-vaults, iron scaffolding, and long corridors with light only faintly visible at the end of the tunnel and the landscapes of the Austrian Alps with the sun shining in splendor on the green pastures and luminous peaks.  Malick's problem, of course, is that the mountain imagery is too breathtaking and tends to devolve into Hallmark card or Nat Geo prettiness and, so, he often cuts away from the scenery to something more problematic, an aspect of the landscape that is troubling.  A good example is a couplet of shots in the middle of the film -- a couple is shown embracing in a gorgeous meadow in the magic hour of twilight; Malick's editing is generally counter-intuitive -- he cuts when you don't expect an edit, introducing an element of instability into what would otherwise be tediously architectronic compositions.  In this case, he cuts away to another angle on the landscape in which a weird-looking scarecrow seems crucified near where the couple are embracing.  Malick uses jump cuts -- he will suddenly cut from an encounter between characters to a moment apparently several minutes later but using the same camera set-up and figures in the image.  These cuts have a very peculiar resonance in Malick's work that is hard to exactly characterize, but they are essential to his style.  The idea seems to be that the later shot comments in some way on the earlier image, not exactly explaining it but rather extending its meanings -- furthermore, the cut demonstrates that time is discontinuous.  Our sense of time consists of "highlights" or moments that are important to us -- hence, the time-cuts seem to suggest that the imagery is refracted through someone's memory.  We aren't seeing events as they happened but as they are remembered to have happened.   This imparts to the whole film something of the aspect of elegy -- Franz has already died and we are shown the remnants of images in which he is remembered.  The film's ambitions are underscored by compositions by Bach and Beethoven as well as Dvorak, Gorecki, and Arvo Part on the soundtrack.  The enormous tableau are off-set by strange tiny details -- after Franz has been sentenced to death, he is driven back to Tegel prison in Berlin; on the way to the jail, the driver, a fat military officer, stops at a cafe possibly to buy cigarettes.  Franz accompanies the man into the cafe and, when the officer accidentally knocks over someone's umbrella leaning against the door frame, the prisoner reaches down to set it up again.  Out on the sidewalk, the military officer does an odd little Bavarian dance.  When Franz is awaiting execution, the camera cuts away to domestic animals -- a cow in chains that appear to the audience like some kind of  manacles, some geese, a small, patient-looking donkey:  we live in a world, Malick seems to say, in which human suffering is extraordinary, but in which the ubiquitous suffering of animals is mostly invisible, routinely disregarded.  (This idea is driven home by a shot of Franz' wife standing next to the carcass of a large pig that is being bled out into a bucket.)  Farm work is shown as drudgery and, even, has a literally sinister edge -- in many scenes, the peasants wield scythes and everyone seems to have a blade that they periodically caress.  The repeated images of wheat and grass being mowed down by people swinging huge curved blades remind us that human life is like the grass -- we flourish for awhile and are, then, thrown into the furnace.  Biblical correlates, of course, are everywhere:  when Franz is admonished by a troubled judge (played by a miserable and much dilapidated Bruno Ganz), the camera tilts downs to show the old man's weathered hands -- Pilate, of course, washed his own  hands after condemning Jesus to death.  By this stage in the film, Franz's rectitude is no longer in doubt.  The Judge is frightened that Franz is judging him -- the convict is no longer judged but his mere presence judges others.  When the sentence of death is announced in the Reichstribunal courtroom, Franz's lawyer seems about to faint.

Franz's motivations are obscure.  The characters are not developed in any conventional way. Malick introduces Fani's sister into the film and we expect that he has done this so that Franz's wife will have someone to talk with when he is imprisoned and, therefore, off-screen -- the character seems to be a device to allow for dialogue:  after all, people in movies have to have someone with whom to talk.  But there is almost no dialogue between the two women and the sister exists primarily to aid Fani in sequences involving backbreaking agricultural labor.  The sister is less a tool to allow speech and dialogue, then, a figure to be employed in beautifully staged two-shot compositions. And, in fact, the middle hour in the film is essentially silent -- it's mostly music and whispered voices-over. We learn that Franz was a local hoodlum, proud of "fighting with the police."  We see him tooling around on a motorcycle that seems to distress the stolid peasants laboring in their fields.  His father died in World War One in "the mud of the trenches" and he comes to believe, after seeing movie newsreels, that his "nation has become a predator" murdering the weak -- there is some mention of the regime killing "idiots" or the mentally defective but the plight of the Jews remains off-screen.  (At one point, we see someone who may have escaped from a concentration camp bedraggled and half-crazed in the woods.)  Malick uses Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to show Hitler descending from the crowds into Nuremberg and there a couple of shots of Styrian (Austrian mountain) peasants marching in a parade to bring gifts to Hitler, but the film doesn't show any atrocities or war violence -- Franz' resistance isn't really based on anything that occurs to him and he's not witness to anything bellicose that extends beyond the sort of bluster that a recruit experiences in basic training.  His martyrdom arises from who he is, not what he sees or what he experiences.  At one point, Franz's elderly mother begs for forgiveness, presumably implying that she is somehow to blame for her son's fatal intransigence -- but this theme isn't developed and we don't why this pathetic figure is asking to be forgiven.  The movie suggests that Franz' misspent youth (he had no father at home) ended when he fell in love with Fani, and much of the film consists of quotes from letters that the two exchanged when Franz was in prison.  (The film is based on true events and the prison letters have been published.)  In some sense, Malick implies that Franz's love for Fani inspires his heroism -- but this is perverse, of course, because that heroism separates him from his wife and children and ruins their lives.  (The villages refuse to aid Fani whom they construe as a sort of traitor and she has to plow her field with the help of her sister only; in one scene, when her well goes dry, we see her laboriously digging in the bottom of the well and hauling up the heavy mud in a bucket -- no one will help her and the family runs the risk of starving.)  When Fani and Franz see one another for the last time in the Berlin prison, she says that she will be "with him"up to the end.  As he is being executed, the film cuts away to shots of Franz on his motorcycle, evidence of his freedom that apparently inspired Fani's interest in him, and we see her in his visions as he is taken to the guillotine.  But, even, these episodes are complicated by countervailing or discordant imagery -- the film's mise-en-scene resembles in some ways a fever dream, a delirium in which all manner of imagery is presented, some of it inconsistent with the apparent thrust of the narrative.  While he is awaiting execution, we see a shot of Franz standing outside -- he's on the edge of a lush forest on the right of the screen; plowed fields here "read" as a wasteland, as a barren space, to his left (we scan from right to left and the composition seems to suggest the desolate terror of the execution that is about to occur).  Franz turns around as if hearing someone crying out behind him and he looks over his shoulder with an expression of fear and anxiety.  It's a startling image that suggests elliptically the horror of his plight.  After he is killed, Malick cuts to a plowed field that Fani and her sister are harrowing -- the big harrow, like an instrument of torture, is flung onto the furrows and the two women, like beasts of burden, drag it across the field.  

Several sequences stand out thematically.  In one early scene, Franz, who is tormented by his decision to refuse the loyalty oath, goes to a church where an artist is retouching and restoring Baroque murals.  The artist says that he is painting for the complacent "church-goers who will look up (to his images) and imagine that they would have stood fast with Jesus during his Passion" -- the artist implies, of course, that they would have lacked the moral fortitude.  The artist alleges that art does nothing -- that it merely confirms the self-righteous complacency of those who fantasize that they are heroic when, in fact, they are creatures of comfort and, like most of us, incapable of real sacrifice.  (Is this a message, not so veiled, to those of us watching this movie?)  In the prison yard, there is an atheist with a beard and wild eyes like Rasputin.  He mocks Franz and says that God is indifferent to his sufferings or worse a sadist because he had designed the world to inflict pain on His creatures.  The atheist is later executed with Franz.  The execution scene takes place in a bleak, nondescript sort of warehouse, a place in which each dock is numbered.  (In hell, everything will be numbered and damned will count incessantly.)  The place of execution is a room with black curtains, a bit like a David Lynch set, and vegetation is growing through the roof, extending long yellowish tendrils into the building.  The guillotine is like a farm implement set on concrete splashed with sinister puddles of water.  The condemned are given sheets of paper on which to write their last remarks -- a boy who is about to be killed says "I don't know what to write."  After Franz is killed, the film cuts away to a wedding in a rural church and, then, a mysterious scene of an old man helping a little girl drink water from an ancient stone fountain in a drizzly rain storm.  The mountains persist forever and we see them in the end, ambiguous fortified heights,both beautiful and forbiddeng.  In a voice-over, Fani says that she will meet Franz again in the mountains and that the orchards will be planted and the farmland restored -- the only heaven we can imagine is the world in which we live.  

A couple of shots in the end establish, very obliquely, the film's theme.  As Franz is taken away to be executed, a guard who beat him savagely in an earlier scene looks momentarily shaken and removes his hat -- no doubt, he will go back to bullying and torturing but for a moment he has seen something that troubles him.  When the bell tolls for Franz in his village, the peasants working in the fields pause and look up into the sky for a moment.  Malick makes his point explicit with a quote from George Eliot.  Eliot's words say that our plight, dreadful, perhaps, as it is, is not as bad as it could have been because of those who led "faithful hidden lives" and now "rest in unvisited graves."  The movie bears witness to such a life.  Much of this film is silly and the landscapes overwhelm the people, but this picture must be seen and debated.  It's a work of great moral seriousness.  Moral gravity can run the risk of seeming foolish, particularly in our debased times -- but the issues that the film raises are persistent, grave, and worth of thought.