Berlin: Symphony of a Great City - 1927 - Walther Ruttman (1887 - 1941)

 

This film was made in 1927, two years before the Wall Street Crash adversely affected the global economy and 5 years before Hitler gained a foothold in legitimate German politics. We who watch this film today can see much more in it, and impute much more to it, than the folks who saw it back then.

While watching the film, perhaps we wonder how a society like this, which seemed so benign, could shift so quickly to embrace a malevolent ideology of genocide and conquest. We see flashes of anger and conflict: a man slaps a horse, two men shove each other on the street, kids jostle and shove each other on the way to school, but these surely can't be a foreshadowing of the horrors to come. In the meantime, in a city to the South of Berlin, a maniac was slowly but surely conspiring to highjack the great city and turn its inhabitants into workers and soldiers toward an utterly insane vision.  

So we watch the film and wonder how many of these children died 10 to 20 years later in the war and how these folks could have been so thoroughly influenced ideologically by the Nazis. The film has taken on a meaning for posterity Walther Ruttman could never have imagined.

The orchestral score was composed by the pioneer in film music Edmund Meisel.

See the film here, free on youtube: Berlin Symphony of a Great City

Morituri - 1965 - Bernhard Wicki

This film received luke-warm reviews in 1965 but it works. Yul Brenner plays a German captain who is blackmailed by the Nazis into taking a dangerous mission: he is to transport 7,000 tons of rubber to a secret location. Marlon Brando plays a German pacifist who is blackmailed by the English to use his engineering skills to infiltrate the ship as a fake SS official in order to defuse bombs that could blow up the ship and the rubber if the Allies can isolate and capture the ship (which they intend to do).

The film is about coercion, whether it be from government agents or one's own sense of morality. The sense of moral coercion both characters tend to feel toward the end of the film mirrors, to a great extent, the external coercion they initially faced. Both characters resist their assignments but exercise their own forms of moral agency at different times during this story but are never satisfied with their decisions. Neither wants to be a part of an ugly war, neither wants to do ugly things, but both are compelled to act against their natures due to the horrors of Nazism and the consequences of not taking action against those horrors.

Funny thing - Brando affects a German accent in this film. Why not Yul Brenner? Why not Wally Cox? In fact, Brando is the only person in the film with a German accent but most of the characters represent Germans. Shouldn't the director have said, "Hey, Marlon, look....nice accent but...I mean, seriously...you need to drop it."?

See the film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2BGHatqGTw

Elephant - 2003 - Gus Van Sant

Here is a version of Gus Van Sant's film based on the Columbine massacre. It has Spanish subtitles - sorry about that. But, hey, it's free on YouTube.

It looks as if Van Sant wants you to bring a lot to this film to get meaning from this film. He especially seems to want you to recall a lot of your experiences in high school and to bring along your knowledge of the motives for the Columbine shootings.

It's as if he wants us to really examine the high school experience, within the context of our families and greater society, to fully understand this tragedy. What kind of stage is the American high school for the expression of human emotion and human relationships? Does it possess inherently harmful aspects or potentials?

He follows many characters throughout the school, as if he is examining the very architecture of the school itself to find possible flaws or contributing factors to the shootings. We see an environment often devoid of warmth and compassion and one in which casual cruelty has room for expression and growth. The only really kind or sympathetic adult character in the film seems to be the librarian who stands as a contrast to every other adult figure that we come across.

You can access the film by clicking on the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu3VkNwftE0