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German night at the Castro:
Moloch
Lessons of
Darkness
viewed April 26, 2000 on video
For full
information about Moloch, click
here
For full
information about Lessons of Darkness, click
here
It was a "Germans at war" night at the
Castro: the first film, about some of the most notorious
Germans of the last century's most devastating war; and
the second, filmed by a German director depicting the
devastation of a recent war. What both films had
in common was a grandiose lyrical treatment of their
subject matter, alternately breathtaking for its visual
beauty and troubling for the duplicitous implications of
that beauty. After all, can we really look
at war and call it beautiful? Moloch,
directed by the acclaimed Russian Aleksandr Sokurov,
takes us into the inner sanctum of Adolf Hitler's
mountain retreat during the Second World War, where we
see that Adolf and his inner circle -- including Joseph
Goebbels and Eva Braun -- are people at once
frighteningly powerful and remarkably shallow.
Hitler is depicted as a dictator-cum-performance artist,
who must always be on, must always call upon himself to
be the centerpiece of every scene he enters, always set
to deliver a profound remark which the group
stenographer duly records for posterity. It is
under this self-generated high-pressure situation that
Hitler shares such profound remarks as attributing
inclement weather to the craziness of Finns, or that the
entire Ukraine should be spread with thistle. His
entourage is a ready audience, always on eggshells,
eager to make the right remarks. Only Eva Braun is
brave or clever enough to challenge her beloved Adi,
alternately serving as lover, mother, playmate,
challenger, disciplinarian and nurturer. The
scenes are viewed through a kind of haze which,
disturbingly, mysticizes its subjects, a kind of veil
that romanticizes the period and the players.
Although the ideological implications of this tactic are
questionable, the effect is immensely pleasurable on a
pure visual basis. Overall, the film is very
believable, evenly paced, and beautiful
to watch, and makes a major achievement in salvaging the
humanity of people who have been relegated to sub-human
status by contemporary history. ----- An
even more troubling approach to depicting war is
Herzog's sweeping camera movements through the wasteland
that is the setting of Lessons of Darkness.
There is no questioning the devastating emotional impact
of the footage Herzog captures, taken in Kuwait shortly
after the end of the Persian Gulf War: we look at what
appear to be large bodies of water in the middle of the
desert, but Herzog informs us that they are pools of
black oil, deceiving our eyes with their reflection of
the blue sky. We then move slowly over a landscape
that can only be described as hell on earth -- miles of
sand covered with black, with rolling clouds of smoke
framing the sky. Damaged oil wells spit
plumes of ignited oil into the sky like pillars of
fire. Herzog and his crew literally singed their
eyebrows trying to get their helicopter close enough to
these infernos spewing from the sand. In the
film's fascinating and most disturbing closing sequence,
a group of American engineers successfully extinguish
one of the fires, only to light it up again deliberately
-- with no explanation why. To use Johnny Ray Huston's
word, the pleasure derived from this film is
"Faustian" -- that such stunning visual
footage can be obtained from such an environmental
disaster is troubling in itself. However, Herzog
does little to assure us that his intentions are more
than exhibitionist. Some have said that the film
tries to redeem the destruction, aiming for a state of
transcendence,
but his grandiose manner detracts from even this objective. His use of
heavy-hitting composers like Wagner, Mahler and Ligeti is an attempt at
hitting transcendent tones but come off being very full of itself.
Herzog
himself narrates the film as if he were the voice of
God. At the screening local filmmaker Ellen Bruno
introduced Herzog's film as a reaffirmation of the
humanist approach to filming stories of inhumanity -- a
quizzical comment given that humans are shown in an
anything but favorable light. Bruno was treated
rather inhumanely as her acclaimed film on human rights
violations in Tibet, "Satya: A Prayer for the
Enemy" was stopped due to technical difficulties
and Bruno had to witness half of the impatient audience
walk out while they fiddled away with the
projector. Perhaps if they had set the exodus to
German music she would have felt more transcendent about
it.
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