Review - The All-Around Reduced Personality aka Redupers (1978)

Helke Sander's first and best film, made in West Germany in 1977, is a harrowing yet heartening portrait of a woman colliding with the glass ceiling in slow-motion. The woman (played by Sander) is Edda Chiemnyjewski, a photographer and single mother juggling artistic ambitions with work and parental duties, and the ceiling is an actual physical barrier. The Berlin Wall, a looming presence established in a long tracking shot that opens the film, effectively embodies the impediments and partitions that Edda and her all-female photography collective must navigate. Their planned project, a series involving the wall and the citizens on either side, is repeatedly rejected for being too political, and not reflective of traditional "women's issues." The runaround continues, culminating at a particularly exasperating gallery reception, a gauntlet of condescension that leaves Edda sickened, figuratively and literally. Rather than give in to frustration, Sander seeks solace in the ritualistic pleasures of the photographer's craft, specifically the repetitive, strangely hypnotic processes of developing and printing. She also interjects alleviating humor, via a steady stream of wry, intelligent dialogue, and episodes that highlight the subtle absurdity of the workaday balancing act. Sander's films, as ingenious as they are, still have yet to receive the consideration they deserve. In her first go-around, she exhibits the saint-like equanimity required to continue creating in lieu of that consideration.

Review - The Left Handed Woman (1978)

Novelist Peter Handke's humane, gently inspiring directorial debut (which he adapted from his short novel) follows Marianne (Édith Clever), a German expatriate and housewife living a sleepy life in a Parisian suburb with her husband Bruno (Bruno Ganz) and their son Stefan. The morning after welcoming Bruno back from a business trip and spending the night at a hotel, Marianne suddenly and plainly demands that he move out of their home at once, and leave her to raise the boy alone. Ignoring the bewildered protestations of her husband, she rearranges her house, resumes her career as a translator, and shakily at first, but with increased resolve as the film wears on, re-learns how to live for herself.

For his first feature, Handke leans heavily on two of his cinematic idols for inspiration, close collaborator Wim Wenders and Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. From Wenders, he borrows regular actors Ganz and Rüdiger Vogler (in a charming cameo as himself), the longstanding cinematographer/ editor tandem of Robby Müller and Peter Przygodda, and the continental European milieu the two directors belonged to in the 1970's. Like the loners that populate Wenders' efforts of the period, Handke's protagonist is trapped between cultures, taken to bouts of silent introspection and wandering in search of some elusive place of belonging. Ozu, still a cult figure at the time, is lovingly referenced, twice overtly (Marianne sees his silent feature 'Tokyo Chorus' in a cinema, and a portrait of his face adorns her living room wall) and more subtly throughout the film (in the placid transitional shots, pervasiveness of trains, and the understated familial themes).

Homage aside, Handke proves himself a gifted visual storyteller with a painterly eye for tableaux, and a singular, almost rhythmic editing style. He bathes the still interiors and chilled, early-spring townscapes in golden sunlight and ponderous shadows, and utilizes clattering trains and brusque cuts like punctuation to underscore his heroine's ordeal. In its best stretches, the author turned filmmaker achieves a wordless beauty, refreshingly free of elucidation or psychology, that belies his literary calling.

Notes on... The Short Films of Wim Wenders, 1967-1982

Despite the restoration of almost all of Wim Wenders' early works in 2015 and a recent spate of retrospectives across the globe, as I write this in June of 2016, most of the director's short films are not available commercially. Only two are purchasable or otherwise legally viewable: 'Same Player Shoots Again' (1967) and 'Silver City Revisited' (1969). These became available just days ago, as bonus features on Criterion's essential Road Trilogy box set. I had the pleasure of seeing all of the shorts discussed here at the Burns Film Center in March, where they played only once, on a Sunday morning to an audience of about a dozen curious spectators. As Wenders continues to grow in estimation (and transition from aging wunderkind to full-fledged cinematic icon in his own right), it's increasingly important that we revisit his earliest filmic exercises, which as it turned out, presciently plotted his career and many of its motifs.

The earliest extant short from Wenders' film school days in Munich, 'Same Player Shoots Again' is the sort of subversive formal experiment that aspiring filmmakers at similar institutions lined up to make in the 1960's. It's a deconstructionist take on a gangster film that plays very loosely with genre tropes; seedy hotel rooms, phone booths, a tough bleeding in the back seat of an American car, the central image of a wounded man trudging along a street holding a rifle. This conventional imagery (the cinematic language of B-movies) is divorced from familiar context and scrambled in an attempt to disrupt the predictable ritual of filmgoing. The looping of the gunman scene may confound and frustrate, but it also forces the viewer to think about what they're seeing, rather than settling in for another gangster story. Something can certainly be inferred from the armed figure, who, with his long, military-style coat and assault rifle, evokes a Nazi solider as much as an archetypal criminal. By denying any exposition or context for this image, Wenders may implicitly offer a commentary on the psyche of the young, post-war German cinéaste; while weaned on genre films, they had no interest in replicating formulae, and were even less interested in rehashing the national trauma. Subtly hidden in ‘Same Player’ are two winking allusions to Jean-Luc Godard, who Wenders idolized (and "interviewed" for his 1982 short documentary 'Room 666'). The pinball theme (the main sequence is shown five times and tinted a different color each time, a reference to the multicolored balls allotted to a pinball player; also, the title) recalls the ever-present arcade machines in 60’s Godard, particularly ‘Vivre Sa Vie.’ Another of the French director's oft-utilized images accompanies the "Tilt' screen that functions as the end credit as well: the Coca-Cola logo.

'Silver City Revisited,' while just as experimental as 'Same Player,' offers more in the way of insight into the director's headspace. Made while studying at Munich in 1968, it's a series of static, three-minutes shots, run back to back with no camera movement or deviation. The images, mostly street scenes, function like a photo album or set of post cards, documenting the director's stay in the southern German city. Wenders, whose work is generally defined by an insatiable wanderlust, is surprisingly still and present, and his vignettes effectively capture the poetry and melancholic beauty of the cityscape. Trees blow in the breeze, sun glints off of steel edifices and traffic lazily flows. The most obvious precursor would be the contemplative "pillow shots" of Yasujiro Ozu (Wenders was an avowed fanatic, dedicating 1985's 'Tokyo-Ga' to the Japanese director), but the urban art of Edward Hopper is also echoed in the architectural use of composition and the scarcity of human figures. (Wenders would draw inspiration from the painter's work for the look of 1977's 'The American Friend' and recreate Hopper's 'Morning Sun' in the 1982 short 'Reverse Angle,' covered below.) Across the ocean and of the same era, contemporaries like Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow were making films that were superficially similar, but the more one watches Wenders' exercise, the less comparable it is to the lyrical home movies of the former, or the rigorous structuralism of the latter. More traditional in its reference points, 'Silver City' is more akin to the actualités of the Lumière brothers, and still photography (which the director would practice for the duration of his career, publishing multiple collections). It would be Wenders' last purely formal experiment, and with his next short he moved onto firmer narrative ground, and for good.

1968's 'Police Film' is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it constitutes perhaps the only overtly political statement of the director's entire career. Shot during that tumultuous summer, when student demonstrations erupted into riots across the globe, it is a direct criticism (albeit a silly one) of Munich police and their surreptitious psychological tactics. Wenders was heavily involved in student activism, so such a statement is not surprising. What's surprising, and what strikes the viewer most when watching the comical short is how shamelessly it imitates the style of Jean-Luc Godard. From its rambling, whispered narration and subversion of Disney comics to its grotesque view of modern architecture and fashionable leftist politics, even in its very format (the Godardian faux-documentary, epitomized by 1967's '2 or 3 Things I Know About Her'), there is no doubt who's work it's modeled after. 'Same Player' slyly paid homage, but this is unequivocal pastiche. Wenders' countryman Rainer Werner Fassbinder committed a similar plagiarism with his 1966 short 'Das kleine Chaos', but at the very least some of his incipient cinematic philosophy comes across. Little of the Wenders' thoughtful character is evident in 'Police Film,' making it the least memorable entry of his student period.

Visually and thematically, 'Alabama (2000 Light Years From Home)' picks up where 'Same Player' left off. It's another gangster story, this time containing a sequence of events that is fairly easy to follow: A trench-coated man enters a bar full of scruffy bohemians and accepts a mission to assassinate a figure that is never seen. He is shown driving to his destination, then back to the bar, apparently wounded. He slumps into the darkened establishment, where all of the patrons have been massacred, and puts a song on the jukebox. The camera then cuts back to the car as the man flees the city, fading to black before revealing his fate. What the short lacks in exposition, it makes up for with its unique use of music, which is playing in some form in every scene. The soundtrack (diegetic and non-diegetic) fills in the narrative gaps, providing emotional cues and even clues as to what's happening on screen. John Coltrane's ominous Alabama accompanies the street scenes where the man arrives at the bar, a portent of the events to come. Upon entering the first time, the lazy blues of The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix plays, denoting an unsuspecting calm, while in the second scene, after everything has gone awry, the man selects another song by Hendrix on the jukebox, his raucous take of All Along the Watchtower. "There must be some kind of way outta here... the hour's getting late," he sings, the lyrics seeming to register with the man as he realizes that he must soon make his escape. Here, music is not a secondary consideration, subservient to the visuals or the story; it is equally as important as the other two components. In fact, it precipitates the images, evidenced by the film's title (a compound of song titles, of the Coltrane composition and another by The Rolling Stones). The importance of music to Wenders, as a creative catalyst, subject and cinematic tool, cannot be understated. He would go on to become a musical authority among directors, curating a number of noteworthy soundtracks, shooting several successful documentaries on musicians and setting some of his most memorable scenes around and during musical performances. 'Alabama' marks several firsts for the filmmaker. It was his first time working with cinematographer Robby Müller, who would lend his polished aesthetic and unique pallet to most of Wenders' films through the late 80's. Also, the clientele that loiters in the bar is the first significant look at contemporary Germans. They're just the sort of characters - misfits, hippies and artists - that weren't being depicted in national cinema before the advent of the New German Film, and that would populate the director's early 70's works (personified by actor Rüdiger Vogler). Lastly, the final shot is the first of many long takes from a moving car that Wenders would utilize throughout his career. A progression of the tableaux of 'Silver City,' he would expand upon the traveling shot in his next short, and it would later become a distinctive feature of his road movies.

'3 American LPs,' Wenders penultimate student exercise, is the director's first "filmed diary," as he would later refer to this sub-category of works that would include 'Reverse Angle' (covered below), 'Tokyo-Ga,' 'Notebook on Cities and Clothes' and (to an extent) 'Lightning Over Water.' Shot on grainy 16mm, it follows as he and an unseen companion (first time co-writer Peter Handke) drive from one unnamed German city to another, listening to songs and conversing about their love of American music as they go. The first segment takes place in a high-rise where one of the narrators peruses a record collection, a solemn redheaded woman smokes a cigarette on the terrace, and Van Morrison's 'Slim Slow Slider' plays. Next, Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Lody' accompanies travel shots (taken from the car window) as the pair move from one city en route to another. Finally, after arriving at their destination, there is a final driving shot, a slow creep at dusk scored by Harvey Mandel's instrumental version of 'Wade In The Water.' Wenders is briefly glimpsed driving the car in the crepuscular light just before the credits appear. As simple as it seems, this film is loaded with hints as to where his career would go and how far it would range. It anticipates his diary films, which would all be narrated in the first-person, poetically shot (so as to avoid qualifying as pure documentary) and have an ostensible subject (though their true subject, as with a written diary, is inevitably the author). '3 American LPs' may also be considered his first road movie. Granted, he and Handke are not invented characters, but the central predicament is the same as in those narrative films: the reconciliation of one's actual surroundings (drab post-war Germany) with an idealized, almost fantastical place they wish to reach (America, the land of Hollywood and rock and roll). Lastly, this film represents the earliest union of Wenders' inseparable, twin obsessions, music and the open road, which would constitute a sort of dual philosophy for the director (introspection via art/outward searching), and characterize his entire body of work. Handke would go on to co-write Wenders' first feature, 1972's 'The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick' (his first traditional road-movie, adapted from Handke's novel), as well as 1975's 'Wrong Move' and the 1987 masterpiece 'Wings of Desire.' Wenders completed one more film while in Munich, his 1970 full-length thesis 'Summer in the City' (named after a song by The Lovin' Spoonful and dedicated to another American band, The Fugs). He would return very sparingly to the short film format in the years to come, doing so mostly for television.

Some thirteen years after '3 American LPs,' Wenders would pick up the thread of the diary film again with 'Reverse Angle: NYC March '82.' He shot it in New York while completing post-production for 'Hammett,' his disastrous Hollywood debut, which was finished, then allegedly taken over and reshot by producer Francis Ford Coppola. The frustrations experienced by the filmmaker, his estrangement as a European director working in America and many other impressions are documented in this intimate, free-form film. Wenders wanders the city, taking in the carnivalesque sites and musing philosophically, in a style that recalls the less-political works of Chris Marker, particularly 'Sans Soleil.' As he would in a proper journal, he arbitrarily rattles off his current interests: Edward Hopper's New York portraits, reading Emmanuel Bove's Mes Amis on the subway, the music of burgeoning no-wave band The Del-Byzanteens. It seems it's all he can do to ward himself from an increasingly volatile situation. Wenders would use the diary film quite effectively as a stopgap between features in the 1980's, either as a diversion during a difficult period ('Reverse Angle') or while he made preparations to mount a large production ('Notebook on Cities and Clothes,' shot while orchestrating 'Until the End of the World'). In the 1990's, he transitioned to making smaller features and more traditional documentaries, a balance he maintains to this day. Though 'Reverse Angle' appears to have little in common with the student projects in the late 60's, when viewed alongside those shorts, it further illustrates the director's clearly defined themes and singular narrative voice.

Notes on... History Lessons (1972)

If the notoriously bewildering filmmaking tandem of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had a patron saint, it would undoubtedly be Bertolt Brecht. Like the pair, the German playwright's career was informed by staunch Marxist beliefs and a devotion to the avant-garde as a means for social change. He also introduced to the dramatic vernacular the "estrangement effect," a term so befitting the filmmaking style of Straub-Huillet that it could title a monograph on their collected works. According to this principle, rather than striving for an empathetic viewer-subject relationship, dramatists should actively work to subvert narrative norms that lull audiences into complacency. To increase the likeliness that they will intelligently consider what they're witnessing, viewers must routinely be shocked, jostled, and knocked off balance. This concept can be said to underpin all of the Straub-Huillet films, most of all 'History Lessons,' their adaptation of Brecht's only novel, The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.

Like an even sparer reduction of Rosselini's 'Socrates,' this unconventional biopic recounts the life of the founder of the Roman Empire through long scenes of unembellished dialogue. In a series of blatantly staged tableaux, an unnamed man in modern dress interviews costumed historical figures who knew or encountered Caesar. Photographed rigidly against bucolic backdrops, the blank faced actors pose like mannequins and recite their dialogue in harsh-sounding German. As if the staginess of these scenes wasn't perplexing enough, they're intercut with long, static, in-car shots of the modern interlocutor driving around present-day Rome, seemingly without destination or urgency. Viewers familiar with Brecht's epic theatre (or the Straub-Hulliet oeuvre) may know what to make of it all, but most will be left scratching their heads, or worse, nodding off from the lack of action. Indeed, estrangement is in full effect.

Still, through these awkward retellings of key episodes, the filmmakers do succeed in conceiving of a more concrete, modern Julius Caesar. Neither magisterial statesman nor imposing military commander, their version is something much more novel, a proto-capitalist in an imperial age. He did not enslave and execute out of ruthlessness, but to gain economic advantage, and through instinct and opportunism built the most powerful empire of his day. The anachronistic modern figure on his trail functions as a link to our present-day world. When juxtaposed with the dialogue scenes, his excursions through the streets of Rome are imbued with a fresh significance: choked with cars, commerce and milling crowds, the city is transformed into a monument to Caesar's machinations. Such are the suggestive powers of Straub and Hulliet. Much more than a demythologization (or didactic exercise as the title suggests), this unorthodox work compels us to consider what really spurs a man to seize power, and strongly implies that the world we inhabit today is still shaped by men of that ilk. By not showing the audience what it expects to see, they evoke the very notion they wish to impart, and without a single ideological statement, they politicize the viewer. It's more than a neat trick; it's the result of a finely tuned method that the pair, like seasoned dramaturges, employed year after year, film after film.

Notes on... Not Reconciled (1965)

'Not Reconciled,' Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's first feature film (Straub is credited as director, Huillet as writer and actor), is something of an early-career anomaly. While it establishes the pair as adapters of thematically weighty, highbrow works, and hints at the abstruse dialogue and Brechtian disruptions they would later be known for, the feel of the film is uncharacteristically light and animated. In a way, it was the pair's "New Wave" film, a riff on the aesthetically revolutionary motifs and techniques of fellow countrymen like Godard and Truffaut. Appropriated by Straub-Huillet, the elliptical editing and subjective realism of early 60's French film achieved a far different impact, one that would continue to reverberate well after they moved on to their classical style.

Based on a 1959 novel by Heinrich Böll, 'Not Reconciled' tells the fragmented tale of the Faehmel family, focusing on three generations and how they took part in and were effected by the events of the Second World War. Heinrich Faehmel, accomplished pre-war architect is the father of Robert and grandfather of Joseph, both trained in architecture as well. Through flashbacks, we see how Robert falls in with a group of war-dissenters, is exiled from Germany, then conscripted into the Nazi ranks and tasked with demolishing buildings, including an abbey designed by his father. On Heinrich's 80th birthday, there's a reconciliation, an unexpected act of violence perpetrated by the family matriarch, and a glimmer of hope in the form of Joseph, who it seems will elude the guilt and trauma of the Third Reich. The intricate, intergenerational narrative moves freely and quickly between past and present, creating a disorienting, dreamlike tone that is no accident. Just as Arthur Penn adapted dynamic New Wave editing and sequencing to bring a sense of existentialist paranoia to 'Mickey One' the same year, Straub-Huillet use these methods to engender a feeling of moral confusion and inconsequence. Like a nightmare shared by an entire nation, the ethical morass of World War 2 and the ensuing ambivalence is a dream state that the fated characters have fallen into.

A few seconds into the film, while shooting billiards, Robert essentially asks the audience "what would you like to know?" As the camera pans down to the spiraling balls, we're zipped to a sports field where young boys are playing, one of them a school-aged Robert whose story we are about to witness. It's straightforward enough in this instance, but this sort of leap through time without warning or elucidation happens throughout 'Not Reconciled.' Related to, but practically distinct from the jump-cut (which skipped the formalities, so to speak, by cutting out old-fashioned transitions), these warp-cuts accomplish quite a bit more. They help to create a discombobulated feel that mirrors the moral disarray of the characters. As they are mostly jumps in time, they also obscure the lines between past and present, highlighting the interconnectedness of generations and allowing for the reexamination and re-contextualization of past transgressions. The disjointed narrative itself is a hallmark of the New Wave, specifically the works of Alain Resnais. Straub-Huillet also populate their film with inexpressive actors, not to capture some truthful essence or prosaic charm as with Godard's non-actors, but to characterize the ambiguous nature of the Faehmel family, and by extension, post-war Germany.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art (who screened this film as part of their complete Straub-Huillet retrospective) hosted an enlightening series called Germany 66 that focused on the watershed year in which the New German Cinema took form. What surprises me most about Straub and Huilliet's debut is not its stylishness or lively pacing when compared to their later works, but how neatly it would have fit into the slate at MoMA beside first features from Volker Schlöndorff and Alexander Kluge. Right alongside the new class of native filmmakers (and ahead of quite a few of them), the French duo diagnosed the national ills of their adopted country, and the results are revelatory. Like the finest entries in the Young German Film, they grappled with the demons of the Nazi horror, incorporated the richness of German literature, and helped mend the seemingly irreparable rift in the nation's cinematic lineage. That Straub-Huillet found their way to the vanguard of this movement should not come as a surprise. The itinerant filmmakers came to these insights as they always did, through their profound understanding of the arts, and what those arts communicate about their creators.