This preview features reviews of three of the strongest films at this year’s Festival:-
MICHAEL VERHOEVEN’S ‘LET’S GO’
LET’S GO takes its title from the words of an American GI who liberated Laura’s dad from a German death camp. He took it literally for the rest of his life, a real go getter, always trying to make life better for his family.
The film begins in 1968 with Laura jetting into Munich from America where she now lives to attend the funeral of her father.
Late due to tardy travel connections, she is met with stoic stoniness from her mother. To compound the conflict, her younger sister lies in a coma in hospital.
In the midst of death, the life of the family is told in flashback, happiness haunted by the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Laura keeps vigil over her vegetative sister. When her mother suggests that it might be better if the comatose girl be let go, Laura asks an Aryan looking doctor who becomes furious and outraged at such an idea.
Laura muses that twenty years ago the same man would have had no qualms in gassing and incinerating her.
Based on Laura Waco’s autobiographical novel, writer director Michael Verhoeven has fashioned a beautifully subtle film about ordinary people forging a semblance of normality after experiencing extraordinary upheaval.
Many of Laura’s family friends, relations and neighbours opt to quit Germany after the war for places like America, Australia and Israel – Laura herself finds herself domiciled in the United States due to her husband’s work. But Laura’s father is adamant about staying, a moral defiance against the disgraceful Nazi regime.
Alice Dwyer is radiant as Laura, a loving daughter who has never quite understood her mother’s maternal aloofness.
The role of the mother is shared by two wonderful actresses – in flashback by Katherina Nesytowa and contemporarily by Naomi Krauss.
LET’S GO is a cathartically heartbreaking bottom of the iceberg story of Holocaust survivors and the titanic impact on their children.
STEFAN RUZOWITZKY’S ‘RADICAL EVIL’
The first ten minutes of RADICAL EVIL had me thinking I was watching a radio program, a presentation better suited to Radio National than a feature film. Then the mastery of film maker Stefan Ruzowitzky kicked in and the drab visuals became interesting and informing rather than mere accompaniment to narration.
Ruzowitzky, probably best known for his Oscar winning feature film The Counterfeiters, has created a remarkable film in RADICAL EVIL, part documentary part verbatim cinema.
Using quotations from letters and diaries, Ruzowitzky illustrates how Nazi soldiers rounded up and murdered Jewish civilians between 1941 and 1943 and how ordinarily normal people transformed into mass murderers.
Before the introduction of industrial annihilation via gas chambers, extermination was up close and personal, fuelled by peer pressure, perpetrated by pistol and rifle.
Conformity, a positive aspect in social cohesion, showed its counter side, the prevailing policy of the ruling party promulgating pogrom and genocide.
Ruzowitzky employs talking heads – psychiatrists, historians, lawyers – to examine and comment on the hows and whys ordinary folk become mass murderers. This combined with the verbatim testimony of the perpetrators is absolutely chilling and personally confronting.
How quickly the mind can rationalIse ordinarily unconscionable acts – two soldiers in tandem would excuse their executions through discombobulated thinking – if one shot the mother the other was doing the humane thing by shooting the child, reasoning the child could not survive without its mother.
The academics argue that the Holocaust is unlike the genocides of the Turkish-Armenian conflict or the tribal African atrocities of recent times, but rather based on a biomedical fantasy.
There is also the reference that war is a means of escape from the banality of everyday life and licenses men to behave abhorrently.
Because it holds up a mirror for each of us to reflect on our own moral strengths and weaknesses, RADICAL EVIL is a valiant film made by a courageous film maker to be seen by a brave audience. Be brave.
Felix Moeller’s doco FORBIDDEN FILMS
While it deteriorates, nitrate base film makes a kind of pressure cooker of the film can in which it rests, especially when it’s taped closed. If the gases can’t escape, heat builds and spontaneous combustion may not be far behind. Therefore, nitrate film must never be closed in.
Escaping toxic gases can attack nearby acetate and polyester base films, so store nitrate films in their own special place and not in a place too heavily concentrated.
It’s not just the original film base that the movies featured in FORBIDDEN FILMS that is toxic but the narratives recorded.
Film historian and documentarian Felix Moeller’s fascinating movie not only lifts the lid on films not seen since the fall of the Third Reich but on the argument that these films should remain banned fearing that their propaganda is still potent, that the mass manipulation contained in the movies would still wield its ugly power among the contemporary population.
So these films are locked away not only for their chemical volatility but their perceived ability to ignite a powder keg of prejudice still prevailing in parts of Europe.
Interviews with neo Nazis show that these films have attained some sort of cult status and these latter day National Socialists admit that they see them as recruitment tools.
Certainly these films reinforce the stereo typical evils of Jews, Poles, and the French, the English, Bolsheviks as well as the mentally and physically infirm.
The argument about these artefacts being banned is whether the now seemingly crude and melodramatic depictions would cut the mustard as instruments of hate or whether their power to incite prejudice prevails.
Chorus line Stuka pilots are ludicrously laughable but the inverse depiction of the invasion of Poland to free pogrom afflicted Germans is the height of Hitlerian chutzpah and downright jaw dropping in its hypocrisy and truth tinkering.
FORBIDDEN FILMS certainly ignites debate and that’s its great achievement by doing the right thing in a free and democratic society – bringing things to the table to discuss.
The manipulation of the media is an ongoing phenomenon. These films put the issue in both historical perspective and inspire thought as to how the media continues to manipulate public opinion today.
The Holocaust Film Series plays March 12 -25 at Event Cinemas, Level 8, Westfield Shopping Centre, Bondi Junction (02) 9300 1500 Tickets via www.jiff.com.au or at the venue box office Full $20 / Cinebuzz Students & Seniors $18 50. Full ticketing detailswww.jiff.com.au