Created
September 24, 2014
“Phoenix” Christian Petzold and the late Harun Farocki a masterpiece about the displacement of the Holocaust.
Phoenix “, the very title of Christian Petzold’s doppelganger story from the early post-war Germany is a masquerade. In it is hidden, well disguised into recognition, Hubert Monteilhets novel “The ashes emerged”. Just as hiding the title so to speak behind himself, also contributes to the protagonist of the story, played by Nina Hoss Nelly, a face that is not quite the same as their own.
with a disfigured face that does not see the audience, the Auschwitz survivor comes shortly after the war ended in a Berlin hospital. In the opening scenes we see her eyes behind the drums awaken and find almost curious back to life. A hard explicable, fragile rays penetrate because of the narrow holes as a sign of rebirth, which was anything but expectable – as that of the mythological phoenix from the ashes
Also Lene (Nina Kunz village. ), an old friend who wants to help her on her return, impressed by this fresh spark in the midst of all debris. As a member of the Jewish Agency, they came back to Berlin and would like to go with Nelly when it comes to Palestine. But Nelly’s looks contagious fire on them not too heavy she wears on the loss of their own loved ones and the fates in the mountains of files, which it manages. Also, in the newly freed Germany already the climate of repression felt.
While Nelly urges back to life, she is driven by the anxious question, whether it was her beloved husband, they has betrayed, it attracts Lene to the dead. Kunz village is impressively present in this supporting role. How Nelly wears Lene a mask that is born out of necessity: With strict work ethic they met the smoldering depression until they nevertheless chooses suicide
From then heard the movie quite Nina Hoss. and her fellow actors from Petzold’s “Barbara”, Ronald Zehrfeld, in the role of her shady husband. Recognizes in Nelly’s new face only a woman who sees the its somewhat similar. And that can help him to get to their property. “Generous” he offers her half of whom, if they mitmache because: And participate as homecoming Nelly in his staging of the return of a presumed dead on the platform. How neat and tidy, the former singing star should since before his relatives to its former glory rise, like a phoenix without ashes. “And when people ask me how it was in Auschwitz?” – “You no one will ask,” he replied without thinking
Lene (Nina Kunz village) contributes heavily to the fates in the mountains of files, which it manages as a staff member of the Jewish Agency. Photo: Christian Schulz
In fact: So depressing no one has this renewed silence of the majority in a German film conveys: That going away over the crime in post-war history a fatal chain reaction caused from reduced penalties, barred crimes and offenses marginalized. Christian Petzold has dedicated his film Fritz Bauer, the Frankfurt judge and prosecutor, who braced himself against it and the so-called Auschwitz processes initiated.
But Petzold’s film is not a work-up film, each function assignment would his rank diminish as a work of art. Like a phoenix, he rises from a self-thought dead genre, the mass of younger movies that presume to represent with representational means, what the mind will hardly believe it. The time of the TV series “Holocaust” much-discussed question of whether there can ever be allowed to operate cinematic genres in the context of the Shoah, Petzold presents the bull by the horns.
Phoenix – The set for the year 0 – Making Of
The very first filmmakers of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis told, chose detours into the fairytale to call the horrible truth by name. In Frank Borzage’s drama “Mortal Storm” (1940) attempted to assist James Stewart, the family of his persecuted Jewish professor in a wintry wind-blown mountains. And Charlie Chaplin dreamed of in “The Great Dictator” from the same year did the secret exchange of the tyrant by his Jewish alike. So this film artists dealt before the American entry into the war the repression that had built up there in conservative camps as a bulwark against Nazi Germany.
Christian Petzold wrote this screenplay adaptation together with his friend, the late film artist and theorist Harun Farocki. As no one else in the German cinema both played with the masks and metaphors with which the classical genre cinema political truths by name calls – without having to call them by name. The old Hollywood camouflaged topics that were considered non-commercial or objectionable, such as contraband. Petzold and Farocki used in their unique series of common movies similar transformations, without being forced by market or forced to censorship. And thus achieved a subtle artistic exaggeration. “Phoenix” is again a masterpiece.
The in itself also impressive Erstverfilmung of Monteilhet novel with Ingrid Thulin and Maximilian Schell, J. Lee Thompson, “The door slams shut” circumnavigate it widely. Thompson had a thriller filmed as a thriller, the script had written him Julius Epstein, the author of “Casablanca”. As such, he is one of the template appropriate iciness and produced already in the famous opening scene of a train journey a gooseflesh. The can also be at Petzold feel, but less as a result of effective safe craft, rather an anxiety that can produce artistic minimalism.
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There are few interiors and a few ruins street corners. Amenities cinema is different. This simplicity fits a doppelganger story of how she would have loved the German cinema before 1933. Even before the First World War, the subject came from the collection of German romanticism in fashion, a late flowering experienced it in Fritz Lang’s the Nazis prohibited masterpiece “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse”. When Nina Hoss character to their own doppelganger is driven to forgive from the power of love and desire what you can forgive, it is like an angelic revenant. And is precisely because the specter of a Germany that does not want to remember. In the unforgettable strong scene of Nelly’s staged arrival the audience look as if through them. And Johnny will keep right, of course. Nobody asks for the warehouse
How much it is actually ready to forgive, we are not told. An invisible but it does not remain. Even if it the path supervisors would be the dearest.
Phoenix. Director. Christian Petzold
2014 D 98 min
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