'Die Andere Heimat', or 'Home from Home' (2013)

Before I get to ‘Die Andere Heimat’, let me tell you a little about the Heimat trilogy.  ‘Heimat’ (1984), is either a film, or a series of films, or a TV series shown in cinemas.  It was followed by ‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (1993), and the more-boringly-named ‘Heimat 3’ (2004).  Between them, they make up an epic of Biblical proportions - and I’m not just flinging that around as a cliché: one of my favourite things about the Heimat series, and about the Old Testament (in particular the Pentateuch and the books of Samuel and Kings) is the way they take their time to tell a very long story, spanning generations; by necessity full of gaps, but peppered with great details, character sketches, and sudden moments of focus on things that are either significant or charmingly domestic.  In each case, it suggests that the whole of history is one long story, and helps us see how intimately the present day is linked to the beginning of humanity.  I really like stories, and I especially like these great hunks of story, into which all others fit.

‘Heimat’ tells the story of the small German village of Schabbach, out in a neglected corner of Germany where the people talk like farmers, from 1919 to 1982 - in particular, we focus on the family of Paul and Maria Simon.  Paul Simon (pronounced ‘Powell Semen’) walks out of the village, and out of the movie, at the end of the first couple-of-hour instalment, leaving Maria to take the focus and raise the next generation.  As per the Books of Kings, time passes, the new generation gradually take the focus, and by the end of 15 hours real-time and 60 years of story, everyone we were watching at the start is dead.

‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (sort-of meaning ‘the second home’, or ‘the second homeland’) focuses on my favourite character from the series, or from anything, Hermann Simon, a sexually precocious child who leaves to study music composition in Munich - and Clarissa Lichtblau, a cellist whose celling goes awry.  The 26 hours of this second Heimat take us from 1960 to 1970 - a fascinating decade in Germany, and everywhere.  Watching it was the only time I’d ever really believed that the sixties were a real era from the world I live in, rather than being a weird fantasy genre like Sci-Fi or Western.  ‘Heimat 3’ is a more concise, at eleven hours, and tells the story of Hermann and Clarissa’s return to Schabbach, and fills in the gap from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, up to the year 2000.  It brings in a lot of characters who were present in the first first but absent from the second, and most of them die, so much time having passed.

Brazil: a popular part of the Americas, if you're a 19th Century Prussian

For a long time, that seemed to be it.  A strong trilogy, spanning 81 years in what felt like real-time, but actually only lasting as long as the James Bond canon (including the first CR and NSNA).  In 2011, writer-director Edgar Reitz made a surprising announcement - there was going to be one more instalment, ‘Die Andere Heimat’, or ‘The Other Heimat/Home’ (though it was actually released over here as ‘Home from Home’, a reasonable title, but one that annoyingly breaks the pattern of the series).  This new film is a prequel, regarding ancestors of the Simon family in 1840s Schabbach, and deciding whether or not to leave frosty Prussia for the verdant warmth of South America.

How does it differ from the earlier films?  What makes this a film for the 2010s?  Well, we're in very wide widescreen, at last - I realise that's a 1953 innovation, but it's clear that this is a wholly-cinematic piece, not a TV-cinema hybrid like those earlier works.  Its much shorter duration (225 minutes) might represent modern tastes and attention-spans, or might just tell us that the director is near retirement, and the funding for sober dramas is hard to come by.  There's a rather more active camera, at one point following a full-pelt run through the village, and showing off the full run of 19th century building facades.

There's also a rather different use of colour to the earlier films.  The original 'Heimat' was made in black and white and colour (and on a variety of film-stocks, but this fact is slightly less obvious on the small-screen).  It starts off almost entirely monochrome, with colour shots used very rarely to highlight emotions, ideas or temperatures.  As the years go on, there's more and more colour (with the big switch to almost-all-in-colour coming at the the switch-on of West German colour TV in 1967), and this carries on until the end of 'Heimat 3', which is almost entirely colour.  'Die Zweite Heimat', coming in-between, uses it differently, giving us Munich's daytime in monochrome, and night-life in colour, to show the difference between the two worlds.  'Die Andere Heimat', set in history, is overwhelmingly monochrome, but very occasionally introduces a colour element into an otherwise black-and-white scene - a searing-hot horse-shoe, a green skirt during a discussion of colour language, or the great comet of 1844, for example.  It's something that was tried very briefly in the earlier films -a shot of colour sausages in a monochrome window in 1963, for example.  It fits in nicely, and makes good use of modern technology, but to anyone unschooled in Heimat it must seem an odd novelty.

Johann Simon (Rüdiger Kriese) and a splash of colour.

After all my feverish anticipation I’m afraid I’m a little disappointed with 'Die Andere Heimat'.  It’s good, but ‘Heimat’ was great.  If you've heard any publicity for it, you'll know it's about Jakob Simon deciding whether he wants to emigrate - but he seems to spend ages on the decision, getting into various scrapes along the way, and in the end we haven't learned a lot that couldn't be picked up from the trailer.  I wanted more.  I wanted bigger.  There’s a lot to recommend it - it’s engrossing, it's attractive to look at, it's educational, giving a convincing picture of a place, an era, and the people who lived there; the funeral for babies is as memorable as the original Heimat's funeral for Maria in the storm, so there are still some striking images.  It all just feels so short.  I realise three-and-three-quarter hours doesn't sound short, but compared to the earlier Heimats, this feels like a flash in the pan, like a first episode of something longer.  

Since starting this blog, I've watched a whole lot of films to represent the past hundred years of cinema, and while there's been a lot to delight in, it's made me weary of movie-shaped movies, films with the clear, familiar structure.  You can do a lot in 90 or 120 minutes - just look at 'Man With a Movie Camera' (1929) or 'Thirty Two Short Films about Glen Gould' (1993), for instance, but most films feel like pretty short, pretty limited stories, and I've probably found the most pleasure in the films that have done something outside the usual pattern of the movie-shaped movie, or entertained and engaged me so intensely that I forgot to watch analytically.  Now, 'Heimat' has always been a triumph of long-form story-telling, but 'Die Andere Heimat' feels more like a movie movie, a normal movie, than a Heimat movie.  At the end, it all felt a little insubstantial.  What happens next week?  Heck, what happened in Schabbach between 1844 and 1919?  It's a big old gap, and (alas) I'm not sure Heimat fan-fiction exists - at least, not in English.

(Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on films in the above paragraph, but compared to the great long-form storytelling of the modern TV serial - 'Orange is the New Black', 'The Killing' or 'Daredevil', for instance, which do so much with their characters and scenarios, movies seem very light sketches of their subjects.  A season of OitNB isn't a bad comparison to 1993's 'Die Zweite Heimat', as both are divided into 13 'episodes', each of which gives a good chunk of time to the main character - Piper and Hermann, respectively - while explicitly giving focus to a character-of-the-week, really mining into their character, situation and story.  They're both pretty intense in the drama stakes, though OitNB is more inclined to resolve to happy endings, while Heimat is bleaker, or more like real life, or more German, depending on your perspective.  They both suit binge-watching).

Margarethe (Marita Breuer) and Jakob (Jan Dieter Schneider)

Despite my complaints, I'm delighted by the existence of this new slice of time.  The whole of Heimat-dom is bigger and better for it, and when I'd finished it I really wanted to move on to the first episode of 'Heimat' proper (but I held back, as I know that's a slippery slope requiring a lot of hours and tears).  Marita Breuer, one of Germany's best method-actors, is the real star of both films - Maria in the 1984 original, and Margarethe here.  She's a great performer, and it's a real pity she's not known in the UK, and I'd happily go out of my way to watch her in anything you care to recommend.  The village, the family, and even the technology at the forge (which I thought of as crude in 1919, but can now see as rather ingenious) are all enriched by the extra context.  Go back another hundred years, and you'll notice all the things that aren't there, and that you took for granted.  It's this richness and detail and depth -- Heimat isn't like movies, it's like life.

P.S. If the 'Heimat' formula of something that's kind-of a movie and kind-of in episodes sounds odd, compare it to 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), a 5-hour movie designed to be watched in two parts on consecutive days, or 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), a movie and its sequel, designed to be shown as a double-bill because it was briefly illegal to make films longer than 90 minutes, and this was the only way to tell the whole story.  Or 'Das Boot' (1981), which was made for German TV as a six-parter, and simultaneously prepared for abridged international cinema release, and is now mainly thought of as a movie.  Did I watch those films just so I could compare them to 'Heimat'?  Maybe, but they were astonishing in all the good ways.

P.P.S. I’ve been waiting very excitedly for this film to be released, and then be released with English subtitles, for as long as this blog has existed (which is to say, since the end of 2012).  This was always meant to be the 2013 movie, but it’s taken until now for it to come out on DVD and blu-ray.  Finally, the Penciltonian’s original intentions have been met.  It’s been a lively ride.  Good work, readers!

DVDs of Heimat, Die Zweite Heimat (and soundtrack),
Heimat 3, Heimat: Die Fragmente, Home from Home.

A few fannish, spoilery thoughts, of interest to Heimat devotees:

I think the Simon family tree now goes something like this (with a lot of guesswork on dates, and things I'll need to check on rewatch):

Großmutter Mathilde begat Johann Simon (or possible Margarethe?)

Johann and Margarethe Simon (born 1785-1790ish) begat three children who didn't live to adulthood, plus Gustav (in 1824) and Jakob (in 1826)

Gustav Simon married Henriette (whose name I may have noted down incorrectly, as I can't find her in the cast-list) and they begat Mathilde (in 1843) and Jacobine (1844), the latter of whom may be the ancestor of the South American Simons who come to celebrate Paul's big birthday in part ten or eleven of the original 'Heimat'.

Jakob married Florinchen Niem, and must have begotten some children, probably starting around 1845-1850.  Original film grand-patriarch Matthias Simon was born in 1872, so the dates work out well for him to be their grandson.  It's hard to imagine a time when he wasn't ancient.  I've always rather ignored him as a character, assuming the laters Simons inherited their merits from Maria and Katharina, admirable women both - but knowing he's a descendant of wide-eyed Jakob makes me want to reconsider him.  It's a pity we never get to see him in his prime.

In short, the male line runs Johann, Jakob, mystery person, Matthias, Paul, and the trio of Anton/Ernst/Hermann (kind-of).  Looking at those who became Simons by marriage, and so took charge of the Simon house, it runs Mathilde, Margarethe, Florinchen Niem, ???, Katharina Schirmer, Maria Weigand, and then it was boarded up, and for the life of me, I can't think what becomes of the house after Paul puts his commemorative plaque on it at the start of the 1980s.

I will need to re-watch the film to be clear about a few characters.  There's one who might be Jakob's sister, though I was a bit confused on that point.  I assume (based on casting) that she or Jakob begat a daughter who married a son of the Pastor we see in this film, Dorfpfarrer Wiegand, as he is presumably the grandfather of Maria's dad Alois Weigand (1870-1965).

Anyway, I'd be very glad of any advice or corrections on sorting all this out.

Kids (1995)

Despite no particular plans in this direction, my film-watching project has encapsulated a lot of films set in New York - from 'Shaft' (1971) and 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' (1971) to 'Taxi Driver' (1976) and 'Party Monster' (2003), and 'The BQE' (2007) and 'Mary & Max' (2009), and six others besides.  It's a very interesting set of movies, but taken together they present a vision of a formidably ghastly city, full of cars and violent woe, not somewhere you'd particularly want to live or visit.

'Kids' joins this tradition, but takes a new perspective, looking at the great teen nineties of baggy clothing and public urination.  It's a rampantly heterosexual movie, opening with an abrasively long and noisy teenage snog, and going on to follow the sex and lives of a pubescent gang.  Bored, horny children, raping and mumbling and laughing.

"I have no legs," sings the man.

I didn't know anything about the film when I bought it.  I picked it up from a charity-shop because I found its spine interesting - normally DVD-spines are printed so you can read them when you tilt your head to the right, but this one was like the DVDs of continental Europe, where you have to tilt your head the other way.  The design made it look like 'world cinema', a vague, arty term that I don't often hear applied to American movies, but this is a film seemed to fit both categories.

It's thrillingly disorientating, shot largely in very close-up close-ups and highly saturated colours.  A cast of untried actors overlap their dialogue, and compete with the sounds of traffic and loud music.  It has a documentary feel, a spontaneity.  It feels oddly like real life, rather than performed drama, and it makes other films feel staid and artificial.  I'd expected 'Kids' to be bleak and hard to watch - it's a film full of HIV, romanceless underage sex and other widely-protested content, but it proved to be full of energy and vitality - a much more visceral and important piece than, for example, 'The Titfield Thunderbolt' (1953), the last film I'd looked at.  It passed quickly, and it troubled me.

Herostratus (1967)

The main reason I came to watch 'Herostratus', other than liking the title and cover, is that it came out in the BFI Flipside series of DVD/Blu-ray dual format releases.  It's a run of obscure, interesting British films from the archives, forgotten marvels given a chance to shine again.  'The Bed-Sitting Room' (1969), which I very much enjoyed, was one such release, and on the basis of it and BFI's release of 'Winstanley' (1975), I find the line very encouraging.

Then, of course, there's the film's basic idea.  In short, a young man goes to an advertising agency to get maximum publicity for his act of suicide.  It's an unpleasantly interesting concept, grim, but ripe for satire and social commentary.  I'd say the film grapples with both of these, but fares less well as a drama or comedy.

So, we follow Max, the main character, as he approaches the advertising man Farson, a very sixties businessman who comes across like a Number 2 from the same year's psychedelic stand-out 'The Prisoner'.  Farson puts Max up in luxury and sets about publicising a sellably bland version of him to win public support.  The film then intercuts Max's reclusive days in a comfortable black void with archive footage of Ginsberg, Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler, and juxtaposes sexy dancing with swirling offal, while making ironic comparisons between Max's herostratic desire for suicide and the conspicuous death of Jesus.

It feels like an investigation of ideas, rather than a narrative- or character-led piece.  A discussion, and quite a long one, at two-hours and forty minutes.  At times I wished the film would hurry itself along.  Perhaps I'm too impatient to really engage with this kind of art, or perhaps the film was making its point more slowly than necessary.  I'm inclined toward the latter, as the release also features director Don Levy's 'Time Is' (1964), which wants to wow its audience with the suggestion that time, as we understand it, is a human construct, a point that it makes quite effectively in the first five minutes, but persists with for another 25 - perhaps appropriate, given the content.

'Herostratus' has a chilling lack of glossiness, making it resemble Eastern and European films more than the American sort that I've come to think of as cinema's default.  The blood red and golden lighting, and the frequent cuts away to black, made me think of the then-recent Ukrainian movie 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' (1964).  (I feel pretentious comparing this art-film you probably haven't heard of to another art-film you probably haven't heard of; I'm only aware of them because I'm doing this film-based blog, and have deliberately sought out some obscure items in the hope of finding treasure.  Somehow it feels like it would be more acceptable if I was doing this with novels, because everybody knows books have an inherent cultural value).

I didn't find a lot of pleasure in 'Herostratus'.  It interested me, but stretched that interest very thin, and I found myself wondering whether I have too much love for the easy comforts of commercial cinema to really get on with art films.  Or maybe I just didn't like this one.  Never mind.


P.S. Herostratus, if you're curious, was an ancient Ephesian who set fire to the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) purely because he wanted to be famous for something.  It worked, and his name lives in infamy, as 'herostratic fame' today means fame at any cost, even fame for atrocities.  Anything to make one's name linger in the public mind.

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Two British films I was told were Indian films (2008, 2012)

A few months ago I bemoaned how white, how British and American the films I'd been looking at were - not that those facets are problematic in themselves, but that the films I was selecting lacked diversity.  The original plan for the blog was to see 20th Century cinema from all angles, but in the end I watched very few films from outside Western Europe and the States.  I put out a request for recommendations from less familiar nations, saying "these should be films conceived and made within the continent concerned," and, after seeing the American-Canadian film 'Life of Pi' (2012), I expressed an interest in some real Indian films, as opposed to films set in India but made for Western consumption.

The two I was lent were 'Slumdog Millionaire' (2008) and 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' (2012), and neither is really what I was after.  These are British-funded films with white British writers and directors (indeed the former is directed by Danny Boyle, surely the most famously British director there is, after his Olympic triumph).  They're both set in India, but have largely English dialogue, so they're Indian films to about the same extent that 'Das Herz der Königin' (1940) is a Scottish film or 'Shaft in Africa' (1973) is an Ethiopian film.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) under interrogation

'Slumdog Millionaire' regards Indian characters, and is based on a novel by an Indian author, so comes rather closer to being what I was after.  It's the tale of a man from the slums of Mumbai who lives an exciting and difficult life and makes his way onto 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire', with each question causing him to recall some part of his hectic youth.  'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' is about elderly white folks moving to India.  Dev Patel (who stars in both films) is its Indian lead, but he's the eighth billed on the poster after a catalogue of honkeys, and gets by far the smallest picture.

I was concerned that this film would show India only as an 'exotic' background, a colourful holiday location rather than a real nation of real people.  Thankfully the screenplay isn't so blinkered as I feared, and gives a rather more complex picture of India.  It's a mite more optimistic than 'Slumdog Millionaire', which tells of a nation rife with poverty and crime, while 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' is set in a country in which one can live without a door and yet have no fear of burglary.

Dame Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, and plenty of other stars,
old enough to have earnt their great fame.

Both films end cheerfully, with 'Slumdog Millionaire' turning either on either coincidence or destiny, and 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' giving an eyebrow-raising conclusion in which one of the British characters (Maggie Smith as Muriel) turns out to be more competent than Dev Patel's Sonny and relieves him of his responsibilities, so bringing prosperity and order to the white ghetto.  She starts the film as a disabled working class racist, and ends as a lovely able-bodied middle-class lady, and the film ties her moral transformation to a process of healing and rising from the wheelchair.  Alas, this is something one can find in a lot of fiction, the lingering implication being that one's impairment is a curse to be escaped through good deeds or a contrite heart.  It's a well-known trope, which upholds disability's massive stigma.  See also 'The Little Mermaid', 'What Katy Did', 'Avatar', and plenty more.

So, I still haven't seen any Indian films, at least by the criteria that I, and Wikipedia, like to judge these things.  These two were both enjoyable, well-made films, and present complementary pictures of modern India ('Slumdog Millionaire' giving us Mumbai on the coast and 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' showing Jaipur in the North), which I'm happy to put together with 'The Jewel in the Crown' (Granada television, 1984) to give a richer understanding, but I can't help feeling my knowledge of the life in the Indian subcontinent is very much tinged by Western interpretations.

The only other recommendation I've had for Indian cinema is 'how about some Bollywood'; would I just be embracing a stereotype?

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A Short Film About Killing (1988)

I was sad, and had been for a while, about international catastrophe, and about entropy, and about the rising tide of British racism, and the fact that the public and the media are not unsympathetic to this terrible thing, and because I had recently watched 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971), which is not a very happy film, though I think it worth watching.  So I decided to lighten my day by viewing a movie.  I had two hours in the middle of a working Friday, and the films I had set aside for The Penciltonian were all too long for that.  I needed something shorter, so I watched 'A Short Film About Killing', which is deeply unhappy but seemed to help.

It's a film by Krzysztof Kieślowski, who made the probably-more-famous Three Colours Trilogy, and whose 'Dekalog' I watched a few years ago, after hearing comparisons between it and 'Heimat' (1984).  'Dekalog' is a series of ten one-hour films for television, based loosely around the Ten Commandments, which left me with the impression that Poland (or at least, Soviet Poland) was a cold, cold, miserable place, always snowy and without hope, and that the main occupations there were dying and being cold while travelling short distances.  They were extremely well-made, and compellingly watchable, and two of the most striking were expanded into slightly longer versions for cinema release.  'A Short Film About Killing' is one of those two.  It may sound bleak, but the other, 'A Short Film About Love' wasn't radically more cheering.

This is a film about a young man, Jacek, who kills a stranger, a taxi-driver selected apparently at random.  Not because of some feeling of Nietzschean superiority, as we saw in 'Rope' (1948), but, perhaps, because he's sad, and sees no prospects for himself, or for other reasons undisclosed or barely hinted at.  Perhaps he thought it would be easy.  It isn't easy - he tries to strangle him with a rope, but it turns into a horrible ordeal, horrible for everybody involved, and horrible to watch.  We've watched the Jacek going about the city, and he doesn't seem unpleasant or unreasonable, he just seems disaffected with life - and we've also followed the taxi-driver, who has spent his day declining to pick up customers.  He picks up the wrong one in the end.  And we've been watching Piotr, a sensitive young lawyer with nice hair, who passionately opposes the death penalty, and who, a year later, has to defend Jacek.

Here, as in the hour-long version from the 'Dekalog', we cut straight from the murder to the end of the trial.  This isn't like a lot of murder stories.  There's no investigation of clues, no sense of how Jacek was caught.  We see the murder, then we see the last seconds of the trial, and then we lead up to the other killing, the execution.  It's a philosophical, devastating piece.  Perfectly, horribly directed, though it seems somehow inappropriate to praise the art when the message is so grim and so important.  Something has been done to the lenses or the grading to make the world around Jacek dauntingly dark and murky, as if wherever he moves he's walking into the dark.  He's distressed towards the end of the film, but at the start he's almost emotionless, except once, when he catapaults a spoonful of coffee at a cafe window to amuse some children.  He smiles at this, the only time he smiles in the whole film.  A clip of his brief, uncharacteristic smile was used in the opening titles to 'Dekalog', and once I knew its context, its use seemed terribly, terribly unfair and cruel.

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I think you should watch this film, but I understand why you don't.

Rope (1948)

Look, the forties have been going wonderfully well - 'The Third Man' (1949) for goodness' sake, and 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945) - and I've enjoyed the decade so much, more consistently than any of the others, indeed - that I didn't want to spoil things now.  1948 was the sole empty year of the forties (heck, the only unfilled year between 1940 and 1996, at the time of writing), and I didn't want to ruin the decade with something poor, or even something promising but mediocre.  So I chose Hitchcock's 'Rope', because I know it to be good.

Now, that isn't a problem in itself, many of the films I've watched I've known and loved and chosen for their familiar merits - but this won't be the only Jimmy-Stewart-Hitchcock-thriller-set-in-a-single-room that I've seen for The Penciltonian, though this and 'Rear Window' (1954) have very little else in common.  So do pardon me cherry-picking this film to fill the gap.  Such an indulgence seems permissible as a reward of sorts, since I'm down to the last five empty years.

I suspect he would humour anyone's aunt at a party,
in such a way as would amuse him.

Like many of the best films, 'Rope' is experimental enough to be interesting, but conventional enough to be watchable (or should those be the other way around).  The great novelty, of course, is that the whole film (after an establishing shot) is told in a single, unbroken shot, with the camera roaming to show us details, rather than the convention of various angles edited together.  It's a tactic used far more lavishly - ridiculously so - in 'Russian Ark' (2002), which is told from the point-of-view of an unseen central character, whereas here the camera stands only for the audience.  We're the ones watching this murder story.

When I first saw it about a decade ago, I was surprised by a couple of things that now seem utterly unsurprising.  First, it was made in 1948 - and the only Hitchcock I knew back then was 'Psycho', from 1960.  I was surprised, as the two years seemed incredibly distant one from another (though, as a mathematician would tell you, they're only twelve years apart).  1960 is very nearly the modern day, or so I thought, but the forties were practically Victorian.  I'd hitherto thought of Hitchcock's career as a tiny, intense thing, all occurring in a short blurt the length of a decade, like the Beatles albums.  It was the first time I started to tie films to their years, a process which led, eventually, to The Penciltonian.

'And what would you say to some champagne?'
'Helloooo champagne'.

The second thing that struck me was that it was that it was in colour.  Perhaps I had a notion that the world didn't go into colour until 'Doctor Who' did in 1970, or in the sixties at the earliest.  I'm closer to the truth now: after some odd experiments, colour happened in a big way in 1939, but was so expensive that the onset of war made it disappear again, except for the most spectacular pictures.  Colour was on and off for a while, and only became the standard about fifty years ago.  I suspect it was affordable in 'Rope' because of the relatively low budget - the film is a play, on one set, and without many fancy effects - and because, by the nature of the movie, I suspect relatively little film-stock was needed: the shots were few, and thoroughly rehearsed, and there were no alternative angles to worry about.

It is, as I say, a very fine film, and one which has aged well - there's the merit of a filmed play.  It regards two young men who, as the camera starts to roll, have just strangled their friend, purely because they could.  We see the remainder of their evening, as they throw a polite party, with the corpse's hiding place as a serving-table.  At any point it seems they could be discovered, or else give themselves away.  To an extent they seem to want to be discovered, and praised for their daring.  It's extremely tense, highly dramatic, but at the same time witty and very fun.  James Stewart is always worth watching, and all parts are enjoyably brought to life, except David, of course, who is dead to begin with.

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The Third Man (1949)

A few weeks ago I saw a very enjoyable amateur production of 'Travels with my Aunt', enjoyable because of the story: at every point I wanted to know what happened next.  Certain revelations were easy to predict, but I couldn't guess where they would lead the characters, and whenever I thought I had my head around it some complication would throw the plot in unexpected directions, and make the resolutions I expected far further away.  It wasn't just easy schlock, it was a morally complex and clever work of plotting.  Since the details, the characters and their dialogue were likewise very appealing to me, I praised Graham Green, who had penned the original novel, and resolved to re-watch 'The Third Man', as he wrote both the novel and the screenplay.

It's a British film about an American in Vienna, at a time when it was a divided and international city, a bureaucratic tangle, filled with crime, trouble and outlandish camera-angles.  It's an excellent noir, and I very much like noir, so long as it's excellent.

I like this shot of a bridge.  It looks so much more modern than
most of Vienna as we see it.  The city and the film seem to be
on the border between the old world and the present day.

My first viewing of the film was immensely satisfying, trying to work out the central mystery of the eponymous Third Man.  Subsequent viewings have been no less enjoyable, regarding the performances, the lighting and cinematography and the ingenuity of the story.

I feel a little guilty that I only have positive things to say about the film - I could probably be of far more interest if I condemned it, but it pleases me too much - a beautiful thriller with a great plot - it resists sentimentality and the temptation to grant a comfortable ending.  As it transpires, I've really enjoyed all the films I've watched from the 1940s (except the German ones, oddly enough, despite loving Weimar Republic cinema).  The great surprise of The Penciltonian is that this has turned out to be the best decade for films.  'Went The Day Well' (1942), 'Double Indemnity' (1944), 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), all amazed me.  Of course, I haven't looked at 1948 yet, so perhaps it will al go wrong from here.

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The film, if you'd care to watch it from some optical media. And you might like 'Third Man', a song by The Duckworth Lewis Method. They're very good, you know.

Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)

When I was quite a young child, I was fascinated and disturbed by the ends of two films that I had seen on TV.  One ended with a giant dinosaur being burnt to death in a church.  I never found out what that film was.  The other ended with the Tsar of Russia being taken to a house where all the windows were painted up so nobody could see in or out, and the family eventually being placed in a room and shot to death.  That film was 'Nicholas and Alexandra'.

Recently I found it again, on VHS in a charity shop, and was delighted to find that its three stars were all actors I very much like to watch.  Most obviously Tom Baker IS Rasputin.  This was three years before he was famous, and at this point he was still a really good actor.  He was as good as this when he started being The Doctor in 1974 - he's at the top of his game in 'Terror of the Zygons' and 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', for instance, but stayed in the role long enough to grow bored and tired, and rarely took a dramatic role seriously again.  But here he is, before all that, scintillating in the role of Rasputin, that most maligned of holy men.  Rasputin was not mad nor a monk, nor a monster - he was a fascinating man, a constant pilgrim, who struggled with his faith and (apparently genuine) powers.  Unlike Hammer Horror's schlocky take on him, this film gives us the historical Rasputin, a far more interesting and tragic person, and one I hope to meet some day, when we're all dead.

Secondly, there's Janet Suzman as Alexandra, the Tsaritsa.  When I think of eighties women, Janet Suzman always comes to mind for her performance in 1986 TV serial 'The Singing Detective', with her strong, cold, muscular manner, her big red hair.  There's an amazing, disconcerting strength to her that's evident here and in 'The Draughtsman's Contract' (1982?), and I think it a pity she isn't more famous.

Third, there's Michael Jayston as Tsar Nicholas.  He gives a quiet performance in the role of Russia's doomed Tsar.  Nicholas II is often presented as a cruel oppressor, but this film shows him as a man trying to be a good, kind leader, who wants to protect his family and preserve his power, that he might some day pass it to his haemophiliac son.  He doesn't understand his people, and he's terrible at taking advice.  I know Michael Jayston best as The Valeyard, that sarcastic, villainous barrister in 1986's 'Trial of a Time Lord', but he's given a far more emotional role here.  There's a scene after his forced abdication when he comes home to Alexandra and just weeps and weeps.  It's a terrible thing to behold.  I understand he recently reprised the role in an audio-drama entitled 'Tsar Wars' opposite Tom Baker as a robotic Rasputin.  I have not so far sought it out.

Nicholas and Alexandra, their daughters, their son, their doctor, waiting.

That would be quite a cast, but there's also Laurence Olivier, Ian Holm, Eric Porter, Julian Glover, Timothy West, Steven Berkoff and so on.  It's a handy hub when calculating actors' degrees of separation.

It's a very serious film, but a very interesting one.  It's quite an education, and a really devastating tragedy.  This was a terrible time to be Russian, and it only grows worse as the Tsar sends his nation into the first world war, and so seals his fate.  From the intermission to the Tsar and his family's long-drawn-out murder in the House of Special Purpose, this is a catalogue of disaster.  The Tsar makes this catastrophe, and it falls on him very heavily.  Not lightly do I compare anything to 'Downfall' (2004), but this is as close as I have seen a British film come to those depths, the gruelling horror of history.

P.S. When I die I want to die like Rasputin: poisoned with cyanide and shot with guns and stubbornly staying alive to prophesy terrible doom, before being bludgeoned to death with chains.  This film really stuck with me.  What a time in history.

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Why not watch this film?  It's in English, so you've no real excuse not to.  Don't watch it if you're unhappy, though.

Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

A disguise of Dr Mabuse

Many months ago, I wrote about this film's sequel, 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933), which pitted Inspector Lohmann from 'M' (1931) against the villainous Dr Mabuse from this silent picture, 'Dr Mabuse, the Gambler'.  At the time I was faintly curious to know what Mabuse had been up to before his insanity and institutionalisation, but at the time I was wary of silent films, so passed the opportunity by.  However, my trusty CRT television broke down and died a few weeks ago, so I upgraded to HD at last, and ordered myself a copy of this movie to test it out.  I learnt early in The Penciltonian that director Fritz Lang created pictures worth looking at.  As in 'Metropolis' (1927), he casts Rudolf Klein-Rogge as a charismatic villain, and as in 'Die Nibelungen' (1925) he tells his story over almost five hours, with the audience watching the first half of the film one day, returning to the cinema a day later to find out what happened in the second half.

Nice hat and pattern there, Aud Egede-Nissen.

This film breaks the division I'd imagined in Lang's directorial career.  In my mind, he spent the 20s making epic sci-fi and fantasy silent films, before moving into (slightly) more grounded Berlin-based crime thrillers with the advent of sound in the 30s.  But this is a silent crime film of gargantuan character, and feels like it belongs in both portions.  It's the age of monocles, of cocain and of intertitles.  Dr Mabuse is a psychoanalyst, a gambler and a hypnotist.  An evil hypnotist, mind.  As in the sequel, there's something of a mystery over whether his powers are granted by a knowledge of human psychology, by a triumph of patented German will-power, or by some force yet more malign and magical.  Mabuse is a brilliant and terrible individual, a stylish and intense fellow and a master of disguise.  He dresses up a lot, coaxes people into losing vast sums at cards, and uses his pawns to engage in the more practical criminal fare of theft, un-theft, stock-market cunning and (eventually) murder.  In short, he's The Master, 48 years early.

Chief Inspector Norbert von Wenk regards the artworks of high society.

Within ten minutes of the start, I was excited about some day rewatching the film.  It had an energy, a flair and a visual style that I found very alluring.  I used to have a rather dim opinion of silent films (an opinion you can share if you watch 'Birth of a Nation', 1915, first), but films like this are so rich and exciting, and tell their stories with a directness and drama that you wonder why spoken dialogue ever seemed like a necessary invention.  I love the scene of hypnosis that we see from the point-of-view of the hypnotee, as everything except Mabuse's face grows blurry and the playing cards change their faces.  I love the scenes of miss Cara Carozza dancing - she's an amazing dancer, but not necessarily a good one, but her unembarrassable flailing and jiving is something I one immediately wished to imitate - a strangely attractive, undisciplined style, with plenty of gusto.  I dig the amazing and scary expressionist art that stocks the houses of the city's upper crust; Mabuse says expressionism is just 'spilerei', 'playing about' - but he sees nothing wrong with playing about.  He's a Spieler!

The film very briefly passes the Bechdel test when Cara and Gräfin Dusy Told talk to
each other in prison, but in no time they're on about Dr Mabuse this and Dr Mabuse that...

It's a fine thriller, with a timeless flavour, if not a modern one.  Scenes that I take to be innovative (though they may already have been old hat) are things which later became clichés, but remain ever exciting: a taxi-driver surreptitiously pulls a lever releasing knockout gas in his passenger compartment, for instance.  It feels as if James Bond could break out at any moment.  This is so far advanced, so far advanced in terms of ambition, style and depth from that other tale of silent criminality, 'Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond' (1913, and yes, all doctors in cinema were evil until 1965) that it's hard to believe only a decade has gone by.  This is a sinister and exciting story, and is comfortably up to the standards of Fritz Lang's more famous crime-films.  And it's impressive indeed to remain exciting for so many hours.


P.S. This was the same year as 'Nosferatu' and the amazing 'Häxan'.  What a year for European cinema!  Over in the states 'King of Kings' was happening, so the year's merits may have been international.  Of the lot, I believe this is my favourite.  I may need to re-watch 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' again now, to remind myself what happened next.

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It may surprise you to learn that ancient cinema looks beautiful on blu-ray.  It isn't a format I advocate often, but it brings out every crinkle, every wall-paper, and is a fine way to take these thrilling stories.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

I've a friend and co-writer who occasionally claims that all British films fall into two narrow categories, Richard Curtis London rom-coms, and grim, gritty tales of the bleak North.  It's a limited viewpoint, which forgets Peter Greenaway, Richard Lester and the Bond films, but 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' fits very neatly into the latter category.  Factories, cigarettes, back-alley abortion, beer and austerity, with an aggressive, adulterous worker as its cocky protagonist.  All it's missing is mass unemployment, though that hadn't really been invented yet.

My 1960 film was meant to be 'Psycho', if only to show a massive contrast in style and scale with the previous year's 'Ben-Hur', but it struck me that American cinema was overbalancing my project, while Britain, my nation of preference, was getting a little neglected.  So here's England, the industrial North, and young Albert Finney, before he was a Sir.

Norman Rossington and Albert Finney down the pub.
Why is Rossington's face so familiar to me? What on Earth have I seen him in?  Hmmm...

A few weeks ago I described 'Orphée' (1950), probably erroneously, as being grounded in kitchen sink drama.  This, though, is the real kitchen sink, with life's small highlights embedded in a world of work and tedium, in which nothing is extraordinary and there is no lasting excitement.  It's a grim view, and one that doesn't particularly appeal to me in films.  In some ways it's too real, insufficiently fanciful, as the film's events probably played out in much the same way all over Britain in real life.  I'm always glad to see the cold truth in a film, but I prefer to see it told with more imagination.

In other places I've praised 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993), the events of which likewise begin in the austere, 50s-tinged world of 1960, and I've often described that as being more like life than like a film - but it has an epic quality, taking in the whole decade over two-dozen hours, and bears some suggestion of romance, art and progress.  'Die Zweite Heimat', or its forebear 'Heimat' (1984) could easily take an hour or so to look at bleak, inescapable cycles in the manner we see here, but would do so as part of a larger, more interesting story.  By the same author as 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', Alan Sillitoe, I prefer 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' (1962), which captures the same mood, but is generous enough to provide a likeable protagonist and the element of surprise.

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The Robe (1953)

There was, in the olden days of fifties cinema, a brief fad for Biblical films and, what's more, for Bible spin-offs - adventures about characters who don't appear in the Bible at all, or who only get cameos in the gospels.  Thus we have 'Quo Vadis' (1951), about Peter and the early church, 'Ben-Hur' (1959) about a young Jewish Prince, and 'Barabbas' (1961) about the murderer Barabbas who was freed by Pilate on the eve of Jesus' crucifixion.  Since the stories only need to touch very briefly on Biblical events they're freer to be more visual, less religiose, and where possible allow the heroes to be violent, deceptive and all-in-all conventional heroes before last-minute conversion to Christianity, whereupon they renounce their (hitherto very useful) violent ways.  Crucially, if your main character is Jesus it's hard to have him kill the villain at the end, and movie-goers like to see the villain trounced.  In an adventure story, forgiveness looks less exciting than revenge.  'Ben-Hur' probably does it the best, but 'The Robe' is shorter, so gets plenty of TV repeats.

The film follows a Roman soldier, Gallio, who turns out (eventually) to be the centurion who crucified Jesus.  Here, he happens to inherit Jesus's robe (it's red, as per the gospel of Matthew); anyone who's read the book of The Trial and Death of Pontius Pilate (Bible fanfic from the second century, and plenty of fun) may recall that Jesus' robe was considered to be a relic of unpredictable magical powers (with, as they say, hilarious consequences).  It's similar here, though that makes the film sound considerably more entertaining than it actually is.  What we get is a film about a soldier sent to destroy the early church, who, seeing God's work in the lives and hearts of the early Christians, comes to faith.  At points its rather too earnest, but at times it's rather exciting, as the loving pacifists find in Gallio a mighty defender, skilled with sword and political rhetoric.

Turns out this widescreen thing is really good for sword-fighting

The film is one of the earliest examples of anamorphic widescreen, and was shot in the super-widescreen of Cinescope which leaves ample black bars even on a widescreen TV.  It gives impressive scope, especially to landscapes and crowd scenes.  It's still not quite right, with long shots looking rather distorted around the edges.  Unlike the later 'Ben-Hur' (1959), there seems a reluctance here to use facial close-ups, meaning we're never really given actors expressions to scrutinise.  (The first time we get to see the pores in anyone's skin cones after two hours and two minutes).  Coupled with Richard Burton's habit of wearing a helmet in as many shots as possible, we get to see far too little of his performance, and his dialogue is too functional to allow him much freedom of expression.

His opponent, the Emperor Caligula, is, as they say, worth the price of admission.  I've seen him described as 'unforgettably camp', and he has an amazing delivery, rendering 'Christians' as 'kress-chuns', and getting more vowels out of Gallio than one might think believable.  This is Caligula as he might have been played in sixties 'Batman'.

The film makes slightly too much use of characters being inspired by simply
looking at Jesus, rather than being inspired by (say) his words or actions.

The real surprise, which I mean now to spoil, is the ending of the film.  The genre would seem to expect a daring escape, and Caligula defeated.  Instead, the villainous Caligula prospers and sentences our heroes to death, and they are taken outside to be executed, and this martyrdom is treated as a happy ending, with the hope of resurrection the real reward.  I was taken aback to see an adventure film, and a schlocky, campy one at that, giving us life in Christ as the true prize, rather than something's more tangible, crude or conventional.  I can't imagine a modern film presenting such a martyrdom as a happy triumph.  I suppose 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) and 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) come close, but we know those stories so their endings seem inevitable.  As it is, Caligula has to wait for the sequel, 'Demetrius and the Gladiators' (1954) to get his comeuppance.


P.S. This film has the rubbishest Pontius Pilate.  My Pilate of preference is Frank Thring, but I'll also speak up for David Bowie.

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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

This popped up on BBC iPlayer (and presumably on real live BBC television too, but it's some while since I last watched anything as it was broadcast, for this is the 21st Century), and since I always check out their monochrome films (it being a cheap way to fill Penciltonian gaps), naturally I investigated this one's year, and was glad that it fit.  I've a natural interest in Quatermass, it being classic British sci-fi, a rather different proposition to classic American sci-fi.  The three Quatermass serials were so heavily plagiarised by early 'Doctor Who' that it's nice to finally see where all those story ideas originally came from.  Ideally I'd be watching the TV original from 1953, but it's largely lost from the archive, and besides would not fit with my own Penciltonian Xperiment.

The film is set around London, no longer the war-torn London it was a decade before, but not yet the swinging London of the sixties.  It's an interesting and lesser-acknowledged gap, and well suits Nigel Kneale's penchant for dark, pessimistic, xenophobic tales about how, though we're a nation of ingenious innovators, the universe is utterly malign and is coming to kill us for no reason we can comprehend.

Of course, back in those days we all wore our coats all the time,
to show how serious we were.

Bernard Quatermass is not a Briton, as he was in the TV version, but the American Brian Donlevy, who gives a stiff and uncharismatic performance that's very hard to like.  He's meant to be an anti-hero, a man of science with serious business to attend to and little time for the media - but even so, I've rarely seen somebody so dull in the lead.  It's doubtless deliberate, and he's paired with a lively policeman, the good-humoured Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner, who went on to be Dixon of Dock Green).  A returning rocket - a great novelty in these early days of the space-age - presents them with a mystery, a crime, and an unknown form of life, prompting them to launch the two interlinked investigations, with Quatermass in pursuit of scientific facts and Lomax keen to determine whether a murder has been committed by Victor Carroon, the surviving astronaut.

Victor Carroon is played by the scary-faced Richard Wordsworth.  While all around him jabber in the polite accents we might see in 50s pastiches, Carroon is sweatily silent.  While talk of rocket-ships and paperwork makes this sound a sci-fi procedural, the film is a horror at heart - the first Hammer horror, indeed - with Victor Carroon is its monster.  It's a horrible performance, murderous and implacable, with the astronaut infected by something he cannot resist, compelled to smash and to drain life, leaving behind wizened husks which are still unpleasant to look upon today.

The infected Carroon approaches a cactus.

P.S. The film features an amazing one-scene cameo from Thora Hird as a gin fiend.  Despite an attempt to watch many films of diverse kinds, my century of cinema (of which I have now completed three-quarters) has somehow managed to include two films with Thora Hird, but none with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kevin Bacon.  I'd never really thought of her as a movie star.

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The Godfather (1972)

1971's 'Shaft' and 1972's sequel 'Shaft's Big Score!' seemed terribly similar to one another, seeming to present too homogenous a picture of the early seventies, so I resolved to watch another film for one or both of the years, to get a little variety in.  Since I felt I'd ill-appreciated the movie when I first saw it in 2007, I thought I'd watch 'The Godfather', commonly regarded as one of the greatest movies of the Twentieth Century.

Well, it turns out to be excellent.  It feels much more relaxed, more lifelike than 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965), for instance (if I may take an example of a substantial film from the previous decade, the direction and storytelling of which I had applauded).  But you don't need me to commend 'The Godfather'.  So many words have been spent, this last 41 years, in this film's praise that it would be a waste of your time for me to say anything more.

P.S. This is why The Penciltonian won't even be watching 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

P.P.S. I'm aware I've replaced one 1972 New York crime movie with another, but they're as different as they could be.  Nobody would have thought to append an exclamation mark to this movie's title.

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Doctor Zhivago (1965)

I was expecting to write about how 'Doctor Zhivago' is a film that, though I respect as great, well-made and technically excellent, I don't like at all, and find intolerable to watch.  Disconcertingly, though, watching it for a third time, I found myself enjoying it tremendously, not irritated by the wet passivity of the eponymous poet, not wearied by the tragedy, but interested and engaged.

What had gone wrong this time, or right this time and wrong before?  Perhaps, because I now knew the order of events, I knew what I was meant to care about - or perhaps Yuri Zhivago irritated me less this year because, since seeing it last, I had a lodger, a scientist from Dijon, who strongly resembled Omar Sharif's bright-eyed, moustached humanist, meaning I find the character more familiar and sympathetic than I did before.  I'm disinclined to suggest that this is a case of my tastes maturing in the last five years, as that would seem an insult to my younger self, who I believe found legitimate reasons to dislike the film back in 2007 and 8 - and might imply that I'm now more inclined to accept the boring.  No, I wonder whether the real reason for my turnaround is that we are now living in revolutionary times.

Zhivago, after the revolution

Before I get to that, let me praise the film for a moment.  Like 'Bridge on the River Kwai', this is a film by David Lean (this time adapting the work, and to an extent the life and the funeral, of Boris Pasternak), and there's good reason Lean is so well-regarded, and is the favourite director of another erstwhile housemate of mine.  His 'Doctor Zhivago' is exceptionally well directed - and I know I've been saying that about a lot of films without really explaining what can be an empty phrase, so on this occasion I'll try to explain what I mean: Lean presents a convincingly freezing Russia, and makes good use of quick cuts and transitions, sudden jumps through actions or conversations, to give us what we need to see but suggest a story in which everything takes even longer than this long film can put on screen.  He makes fine use of a limited palette of black, white and brown, with occasional red for the Bolshevists and big yellow flowers in the spring.

His images are striking and his camerawork inventive, sometimes moving through the dark to peer through different ice-covered windows, sometimes following in characters' drafts, making their way through dense crowds or packed rooms where there hardly seems space for a camera.  My favourite moment in the film comes straight after the intermission and entr'acte - the screen is entirely black, but not empty.  There's the sound of a steam-train, and after almost a minute a pinprick of light appears in the centre of the screen, and grows, until we realise our camera is mounted on the front of the train, and we've been watching a journey through a long, dark tunnel.  This isn't just a lot of fancy technique, indeed a lot of it is subtle unless one is watching for it - but it builds a real epic, lives fuller and more complex than we see on screen and a huge and deeply troubled Russia in need of a revolution, and then suffering from it.  The way the film is made, and the story told, raises questions: there is something fascinatingly odd about the meeting between the two Zhivagos, Yuri (Omar Sharif), the doctor and poet, and Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), his half-brother, the secret policeman, who bookends and narrates the film.  On the one occasion they meet, we never see Guinness speak to his brother.  His side of the conversation is carried entirely through narration in the past tense, leaving the two terribly distant even in their one happy union.

Says Klaus Kinski: "I am the only free man on this train.
The rest of you are cattle!"

This the second Russian Revolution film I've watched for The Penciltonian.  The first was 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), which had the merit of actually being Russian.  That film was a work of propaganda, so presented the revolution with great optimism.  Perhaps rightly so, as change was surely needed, and the men well motivated, but 'Doctor Zhivago' gives us the unpleasant 'what happened next', and even the unpleasant 'what happened during'.  It starts with peaceful protests, but our media often tells us how unsuccessful those are, and what tends to happen to innocent protestors.  Alas, it seems the police will always put down peaceful protest, as is memorably the case here, and as they did in New York and other cities two years back, tearing down the Occupy camps, and in many cases exceeding their jurisdiction, and that of any human being.

'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex' (2008) made a convincing case that peaceful protests are always punished and never achieve their aims, and that violent action and domestic terrorism are the only ways one can really highlight injustices and strike against their causes.  They're extreme and unpleasant techniques, but it may explain why peaceful protests, where they don't peter out and fail, tend to grow into the kind of revolution we see here.  As the film shows us, the Russian Revolution wasn't clean and wasn't very successful.  The old order was certainly overthrown - and eventually we'll get to 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) for the Tsar's sorry side of the story - but despite the change of regime, the social injustices stayed, or got far worse.  It's the same story of hopeful revolutions gone bad that we see in Iran in 'Persepolis' (2007) or in England in 'Winstanley' (1975).  Watching this as the story of a troubled Russia, rather than simply that of a mild-mannered medic, made the story come alive for me on this viewing.  This isn't merely a tragic romance, though it certainly is that - it's the story of revolutionary times, such as the world is experiencing today.  They're terrible times, where hope is trodden down in the name of progress, or else survives to blossom into something yet uglier.

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