Reposting my #Berlinale18 review for TRANSIT's Canadian theatrical launch (with the companion film SILENT REVOLUTION not showing in Canada):
Within hours of each other I saw two new German films in Berlinale competition set in precarious mid-20th century Europe.
Christian Petzold (BARBARA, PHOENIX) based his latest TRANSIT (
trailer) on Anna Seghers’ eponymous novel and found a unique way of setting the 1942 plot of desperate flight from Fascist Europe in present-day Marseilles, successfully creating not a costume drama but a “timeless” parallel universe of human challenges.
Asked what his connection to the book was, the director said:
“It was brought to my attention long ago by Harun Farocki
, for whom it was of great importance. Harun was born in 1944 in Sudetenland to parents fleeing their homeland, so I think he’s always been trying to rediscover that connection to the 1920s. What existed before fascism was basically a lost home, and “Transit” is a book that was written in transition.”
The film premiered to international rave reviews in Berlin, deservedly so: stand-out acting paired with yet again hypnotising cinematography and unique, creative editing by veteran Petzold team members Hans Fromm and Bettina Böhler and near flawless direction.
There should be a Bear in here somewhere.
Another TIFF alumnus, Lars Kraume (THE STATE VS. FRiTZ BAUER), revisited the timeframe of his last film, the mid-1950s telling the story of a SILENT REVOLUTION (think Dead Poets Society with higher stakes).
Based on a true story, a group of sixth-grade students in East Germany show their solidarity with the victims of the 1956 Hungarian uprising by staging a minute's silence during a lesson. The consequences of this act of protest and dissent spiral out of control under the authoritarian regime that sets "order" over (just experienced) chaos, alas at all costs.
The film starts off as a 1950s TV movie of ebullient daredevil youth pranks but soon turns somber as the situation gets uncontrollably out of control. Credit of the good ensemble performance of the class and the top league of German actors –(normally Petzold favourite Ronald Zehrfeld, Jördis Triebel from the GDR refugee drama West, Kraume collaborator Burghart Klaussner aka Fritz Bauer, Michael Gwisdek –in another German competition film, 3 Days in Quiberon- and other well-known faces. The film is smartly scripted and well dramaturged to make the atmosphere of menace, threat to one's live and luck and family palpable, but it is quite explicit in its messaging and does not leave a lot to the imagination. The film does not add revolutionary insights into the workings of authoritarian regimes, but it is an interesting slice of a precarious, in-between time in recent history for international audiences, of a divided Germany before the Wall and before the full-blown Stasi terror of The Lives of Others.
As in Transit, you don’t have to look far to find references to today’s climate, from fake news and propaganda (on both political sides) to the minute of silence reminiscent
of the recent #blacklivesmatter kneeling of US athletes (in the film too, the revolutionary guts of Hungarian soccer captain and pan-Eastern European sports hero Ferenc Puskás triggered the protest).
As unlike as the two films are stylistically, what we walk away with is a sense of the cancerous impact of fascism to date and a tangible, lingering sorrow at the vast loss of life and passion and talent throughout the dominoes of German disasters throughout the 20th century. At the end of the day, I was again grateful that my parents had good instincts and packed two suitcases in East Berlin in 1953.
by Jutta Brendemühl
film stills: Transit by Marco Krueger c Schramm Film courtesy Berlinale
Silent Revolution c Studiocanal GmbH-Julia Terjung courtesy Berlinale
