Oedipal currents infused film culture in the early sixties. The French New Wave derided their forbears as "papa's cinema". This mob of young film critics including Rivette, Goddard, and Truffaut believed their own propaganda and spent half their lives denouncing the movies that their parents had cherished. The same thing happened in Germany with even more vehemence. A wave of young cineastes declared their independence from the German films made during the Nazi era and the next two decades; in the so-called Oberhausen declaration, the New German cinema was born -- 26 signatories to the manifesto declared that old German cinema was dead and that a new independent Kino had arisen in its stead. The 1962 manifesto, brief and exceedingly general in content, simply declares that Papas Kino ist tot (Pa's cinema is dead) -- although that phrase doesn't appear in the actual text but was the way in which the manifesto was interpreted. Only one of the 26 film makers producing this bold, if empty, declaration accomplished anything -- this was Alexander Kluge. However, within the next ten years, a New German cinema had, indeed, arisen and its proponents declared themselves free from the foul influences both of Nazi aesthetics and, also, independent from the pop culture commerce in movies (musicals, sex comedies, Heimat films) produced during the so-called post-war (late forties and fifties) Wirtschaftswunder. Once again, an adolescent screed was regarded as truth and the young Germans, in effect, believed their own bullshit. As a result almost all of the prestigious German movies produced in the wake of World War Two (as well as all of Nazi cinema) was consigned to oblivion. We are only now re-evaluating some of the pictures produced in West Germany as part of the world-wide film noir movement. One of the most remarkable of these movies is Robert Siodmak's Nachts wenn der Teufel kommt (At Night, When the Devil Comes, a lurid and misleading title that was translated as The Devil Strikes at Midnight, throughout the rest of Europe and as the film's English title when it was shown in this country).
Siodmak was German Jew who fled his homeland in 1932, worked in Paris, and, then, claiming that he had been born in Memphis, Tennessee, emigrated to Hollywood in the late thirties (As far as we know, he was born in Dresden.) Siodmak was a skilled and audacious director -- his early collaboration with Fred Zinneman and Billy Wilder, Menschen am Sonntag is a landmark of German silent cinema, a quasi-improvised documentary-style film, that was an important influence on the French New Wave. In the United States. Siodmak made psychologically acute thrillers and, then, a cycle of very important film noir. He was lured back to Germany by the Jewish producer Alexander Brauner in 1952 and The Devil... is his second German-language film. The movie defeats all expectations and remains compelling on many levels.
The audience is alerted that something unusual and startling is afoot in the opening shot. A group of men, perhaps thirty or forty, walk in parallel rows across a devastated landscape that looks like something from one of Anselm Kiefer's gruesome canvases -- it's all mud and wrecked foliage against a dismal forest of scrub pines. In the foreground, a strange figure with an anguished white mask-like face is sunk in a pond of black water. The monstrous figure slowly pulls into the mire a birch tree with chalky white bark. What this means is unclear and this overture-shot is never repeated in the film and never integrated into the narrative. But its astonishing and establishes the film's mood -- foreboding and dire, although, as we come to see, shot through with weird moments of satirical comedy. The picture, then, cuts to a Nazi Harvest festival in which a plump swinish Nazi is sexually harassing a bunch of Aryan maidens, awarding them prizes of flour (no one has anything to eat) while making boorish comments about their physiques. The Nazi has a homely waitress as his out-of-town mistress (he's married and supposedly a good family man). He's courting the waitress in her squalid apartment with food to which he has access. She's hiding some cherries in a baby perambulator and, when she goes down into the Expressionistically-lit Treppenhaus (stair-well), the scary figure with the pale face half-drowned in the pond during the opening sequence strangles her death. All Hell breaks loose -- it's an air-raid and bombs whistle through the air as the murderer drags the corpse off-screen. The Nazi official (he's named Willi Keun) is arrested for the crime and, because he was drunk when his girlfriend was killed, he can't recall anything and confesses to the crime. This misfortune, as they say, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Enter a wounded war veteran from the Eastern front, Inspector Kerstens. He's assigned to the homicide division in Berlin. Both he and his boss think their work is meaningless -- what's the point of solving crimes involving homicides when thousands of people are being slaughtered every day at the Front. Nonetheless, Kerstens is an honorable man and quickly determines that the swinish Nazi bureaucrat lacks the physical strength to have strangled the robust bar-maid. There's no suspense involving the solution of the crime. From the outset, we know that a half-wit gorilla named Bruno Luedke is the killer. Luedke is a serial murderer and has killed some unknown number of women. Kerstens figures this out and gets Luedke to confess. Luedke, who is mentally challenged, is a show-off and confesses to 80 murders. We see him exchanging gruesome information for cigarettes and Kersten's approval. (Cigarettes seems to be the only viable currency in late 1944 and Kerstens meets his romantic interest, Helga, when she asks him for his cigarette rationing coupons.) Meanwhile, the Gestapo decides that the whole situation is an embarrassment to the Reich and a suave, feline Gruppenfuehrer tells Kerstens to let sleeping dogs lie and abandon the case. The Nazis don't want to admit that they have tolerated these murders without successfully bringing the perpetrator to justice. Further, there are weird theories about hereditary and race as factors that cause crime and the authorities don't want to accommodate the circumstances of this case to their ideology. The Justice Department, as it were, plans to go ahead and execute the loathsome Willi Keun. Kerstens protests and tries to save Keun. But he's told that he's just making things worse for all concerned, including Kerstens' own girlfriend Helga. Keun is unjustly executed for a murder that he didn't commit and the moronic killer, Bruno, is also "liquidated" for a good measure. The Nazis punish Kerstens by sending the limping, wounded man back to the Eastern Front as a "buck private." Helga escapes with the help of her cousin, a Nazi who is sexually interested in her and has been, more or less, stalking the woman. With her loutish alcoholic cousin, Helga prepares to flee to Sweden. A locomotive swarmed with soldiers departs for the Eastern Front; the men, including Kerstens, are all getting drunk before their deaths "as heroes" of the doomed Third Reich.
The film is brilliantly shot and conveys in an oppressive way the corruption of Nazi regime. In one scene, we see the Gestapo officers with their girlfriends partying while bombs fall. They go downstairs into a bomb shelter equipped with a bar and buffet. There's a bravura suspense sequence in which Bruno prepares to commit a murder of opportunity -- he's brought potatoes to a Jewish woman who is hiding in an apartment; Bruno, who is a mass murderer himself, seems to know nothing about the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans -- he's never heard of Auschwitz. When one of the Gestapo officers goes to discuss the Luedke case with Hitler, we see the Nazi Rolls Royce parked in front of an official ministry while the soundtrack blares the theme from Liszt's Les Preludes, one of the radio anthems of the Third Reich. There's an astonishing sequence in which Bruno confesses to a murder committed in a woods and runs around frantically -- we don't know if we're watching a flashback or if this is happening during the investigation. The big scene at the end at the train station is gorgeously lit and serves as a sinister coda to the action -- a nurse who was friends with Bruno asks about the man. Kerstens, who is now complicit with the regime, says that he's never heard of Bruno and, as far as he's concerned, the man never existed. The film's atmosphere is grim: people work in offices with roofs caving in over their heads and, near the end, when Kerstens returns to his office in Berlin, the place has been half-destroyed, a big rotunda filled with debris and files heaped up and half-burned on the steps leading to his looted rooms -- these sequences are remarkably designed and look like Tarkovsky at his most grim.
Obviously, this is an impressive film with very sharp, ironic dialogue, replete with grimy characters so carefully portrayed that you can almost smell them. Later, Fassbinder was to work with the actor who plays the porcine nasty little Nazi, Willi Keun. It's hard to imagine that this film, which won many German awards and was a huge box-office hit, wasn't a powerful influence on the directors who later comprised the German New Cinema.
No comments:
Post a Comment