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Showing posts with label Nazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
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"An average annual removal of 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest of a million babies means an increase in the power of the nation" so said Hitler in a 1929 speech. A perversion of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest', this philosophy of racial hygiene and a vision of a 'purified' German people was to lead to the darkest nights of the human soul. The most notorious of these was, of course, the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were incinerated in the ovens of death camps.
Somewhat less well known is Aktion T4, in which German doctors were given authorisation to select patients judged "incurably sick" and euthanise them. This programme became a way to excise disabled children from Hitler's brave new world, variously arguing that they're putting them out of their misery, that they're an economic burden to the state, and that they cannot allow 'harmful' genes to proliferate. The architects of this policy anticipated opposition to the systematic murder of children, so told the parents of disabled children that they were being cared for, covered up that they'd been gassed and burnt, and falsified death certificates.
Stephen Unwin's All Our Children dramatises the bureaucracy behind this horrible machine. It's set in 1941, and takes place entirely within the cosy, wood panelled office of Dr Victor Franz (Colin Tierney), Chief Paediatrician at the Winkelheim Clinic, near Cologne. Dr Franz has the pragmatic air of the experienced physician, comfortable in his skin and confident of his experience. He's assisted by his maid Martha (Rebecca Johnson), with whom he has the casual back-and-forth that comes with old colleagues.
Were these normal times, Dr Franz would spend his time caring for his young patients and doing his best to ease their various discomforts. But these are not normal times. Newly arrived at the clinic is SS man Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin) - a Nazi fanatic eager to bloodily realise Hitler's utopia. And so an unhappy Dr Franz spends his days choosing which of his patients to dispatch to the gas chambers, each signature chipping away at his soul and his perception of himself as a 'good man'. Over the course of the play, his self-deception is gradually demolished, first by an angry parent (Lucy Speed) demanding to know what's become of her son, and then by the visit of Bishop von Galen (David Yelland), who argues for the basic sanctity of life (and you know you've screwed up when the Catholic Church is lecturing you on mistreating children).
Unwin's play largely functions as a tautly, righteously angry evisceration of the intelligent but morally weak Dr Franz. He, like many of his generation, wilfully suppressed their consciences for the sake of maintaining a steady lifestyle, which Unwin conveys through a metaphor of the literal internal decay of lung cancer mirroring his moral decay. His are feet that need to be held to the fire, and Unwin takes no small pleasure in doing so. There's more than a whiff of Hannah Arendt's analysis of the 'banality of evil' in Nazi Germany, the doctor's actions bringing to mind her famous quote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
But All Our Children isn't just a furious condemnation of Nazi atrocities. Throughout the play Unwin returns to the concept of a citizen's financial worth to their society, with his Nazis brandishing figures that 'prove' a disabled person is a net drag on the state's funds, arguing that money allocated to them could be used to benefit the best and brightest.
By the time the characters are talking about 'scroungers' the play becomes a none-too-subtle allegory for austerity politics, through which politicians assign blame for economic woes on those least able to defend themselves. This is why we're taught to hate and fear the desperate refugee, the disabled person claiming state benefits, or simply those temporarily without work. Meanwhile, the politicians, economists, bankers etc who're actually responsible for economic misery skate by in a cloak of invulnerability - at worst suffering a slap on the wrist.
It adds a further layer of anger onto an already furious theatrical experience. The Jermyn Street Theatre is a compact, claustrophobic place, making the audience feel hemmed in with the characters. This, coupled with the beautifully low-key realism of the staging and performances, beats out a steadily increasing rhythm that held me rapt for its 100-minute runtime.
It's an excellent play that rarely puts a foot wrong and honestly, it's refreshing to see a straightforwardly realistic presented and mature of drama that doesn't call attention to its own artifice. I hesitate to say that All Our Children is enjoyable: I left feeling shaken and deeply uncomfortable. But then a play about the state-sponsored murder of disabled children shouldn't be enjoyable. Highly recommended.
All Our Children is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 3rd June. Tickets here.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Monday, July 4, 2016
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The opening night of Savage began with playwright Claudio Macur reciting a poem about the Pulse nightclub atrocity. It reduced the nightmare down to a repetition of "pulse", the word underlining the tragedy of snatched lives, the historical vibrancy of the gay rights movement and the universal idea of humanity pulsing - we're all in this together.
It was a moving, appropriate and emotive prelude. It was also the high point of the night.
Savage aims to educate its audience about Nazi crimes against gay men. The focal point is Dr Carl Værnet, a Danish GP whose experimental hormone therapy 'cure' resonated with the quasi-scientific theories used by the Nazis to justify their atrocities. Impressed by the apparent efficacy of his methods, Nazi higher-ups transferred him to Buchenwald Concentration Camp and allowed him to experiment on gay inmates.
Of his 17 subjects, 2 died of infection and the rest were considered to have remained homosexual. He was subsequently dismissed from the camp as a failure and returned to Denmark where he was arrested by Allied forces and interrogated under suspicion of war crimes. Faking a heart condition Værnet quickly made a beeline for South America, where he died in anonymity in 1965, never having faced justice.
The Nazi persecution, imprisonment and murder of gay communities is an important and oft-overlooked facet of their crimes, and the story of Dr Værnet is neatly illustrative of their perversion of the scientific method. His methods place Nazi homophobia in a wider context, showing a continuity between Nazi war crimes and, for example, the state-sanctioned hormone therapy Britain famously inflicted upon Dr Alan Turing.
It's an important subject and easily deserving of dramatic treatment. But, regrettably, Savage quickly turns out to be utter dogshit.
Most egregious is a meandering dramatic structure that appears more interested in a gay Nazi subplot than the crimes of Dr Værnet. Essentially there's two stories vying for attention; the theoretical A-plot follows the relationship between Nikolai (Alexander Huetson) and Zack (Nic Kyle), torn apart by the war and Dr Værnet's 'therapy'. Arrested after leaving a gay club, Zack is released due to diplomatic immunity while Nikolai is handed over to the sinister doctor to demonstrate the efficacy of his therapy. Following this, he's left traumatised and mutilated, surviving the war only because of the kindness of Værnet's guilt-ridden nurse (Emily Lynne).
Lovers struggling to reconnect upon being torn apart by war is a pretty classical romantic tale, and were Savage entirely this then maybe it'd work. But, unfortunately, Savage appears much more interested in a dom/sub tinged relationship between a Nazi general (Bradley Clarkson) and his pet drag queen (Lee Knight).
Purely statistically, many Nazis, even prominent ones, must have been gay. Some no doubt even kept secret lovers. Their hypocrisy is worthy of attention, but the amount of attention lavished upon it in Savage only distracts from the central subject matter. On top of that, Obergruppenfuhrer Heinrich von Aeschelman (who as far as I can tell is entirely an invention of the playwright) feels like he's wandered off the set of 'Allo 'Allo.
For the most part Savage is broadly naturalistically performed, yet watching this I suspect Clarkson is taking cues from Raiders of the Lost Ark, such is the level of sneering, moustache-twirling overt bad-guyness (it is probably a bad sign when audiences are giggling at the OTT camp Nazi in a serious play about war crimes). The seamy cherry on top, is a queasy fetishism that bubbles under the erotic scenes: the dom General's shiny jackboots, riding crop and swastika armband unintentionally giving the play a Naziploitation porno sheen.
Worst of all, this entire subplot could be excised without taking anything away from the history lesson on Dr Værnet. Then again, what would remain doesn't exactly set the world on fire. Though we learn a decent amount about Dr Værnet's motivations for pursuing his 'cure', we're kept in the dark about what the psychological and physical consequences for his subjects actually are other than a generalised trauma: partially the fault of the writing and partially due to a generally flat performance from Alexander Huetson. Everything else is plagued by clunky dialogue, overlong scenes and fuzzy character motivations.
The whole affair smacks of wasted opportunity and wildly undisciplined writing. I guess purely by dint of being about Dr Værnet the play succeeds in informing its audience of his existence, but on every other level it fails.
★
Savage is at Above the Arts Theatre until 23 July 2016. Tickets here.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
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As we glide through the clouds the voice of Death assures us that we're all going to die and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. It's a pretty harsh way to open a sentimental film about a young girl, yet his words ring truer the longer the film goes on. The Book Thief is a film about the power of stories; the internal narratives we forge for ourselves, the realities imposed upon us by authority and the liberating power of the written word. However, as Neil Gaiman correctly identified: "the real problem with stories [is that] if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
Adapted from the novel by Markus Zusak, The Book Thief charts World War II of a young German girl called Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). It's 1938 and her younger brother is dead, her mother is 'disappeared' Communist - with nowhere else to go she's placed with a non-descript German couple, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson). After a frosty beginning the three form a close-knit family unit, growing together as Europe tears itself apart.
As the years tick by Liesel gets an abridged version of the domestic German experience during the war; witnessing book burnings, her schoolmates becoming indoctrinated into Nazism, Jews having their shops ransacked and bundled into cars and the men in her life gradually being conscripted into the Nazi war machine. The most notable development is the arrival of Max (Ben Schnetzer), the Jewish son of an old war buddy of her adoptive father. The family hide him in their cellar and soon he and Liesel form a strong friendship, Liesel reading to Max from banned books she's appropriated from book burnings and private libraries and Max gently encouraging Liesel to express herself creatively through her writing.
For much of The Book Thief the war seems a distant concern. It's something you hear reports of in the newspaper, but the propagandist stories give little real insight into what's going on in the outside world. This puts Liesel's picturesque town in a bubble, a close-knit community where Nazism is an alien invader rather than something that's naturally sprung up within the community.
Pervical's film softly paints a picture that comes close to absolving the average German citizen of responsibility for the rise of Nazism. The majority of the townspeople we meet in this movie are kind, intelligent and understanding, most of them apparently secretly opposed to Adolf Hitler but intimidated into stepping into line and subsequently into uniform. The only 'true believers' we meet are obvious villains, cartoon pastiches of cruel bullies. While the Nazis obviously were cruel bullies The Book Thief presents us with an reductively Manichean world. In this film Nazi indoctrination becomes something that happens to other people, as opposed to the reality that racist, xenophobic, totalitarian fascism is something that, given the right conditions, can take deep root inside every human being.
Fortunately what the film lacks in narrative subtlety it more than makes up in careful visual storytelling. From the opening shot of clouds we quickly swoop down to following a train travelling through a snowy white field, white steam billowing from the smoke-stack. All too often these characters are surrounded by pure white snow, piled in heaps on the ground and gently fluttering down from the sky around them. This snow is the psychic echo of the pillars of ashes emanating from the ovens of Dachau that, unbeknownst to these townspeople (and certainly to the young Liesel), are burning not so far away. With the snatching of Jews from their shops, and later ragged, emaciated concentration camp victims marching down the street, they sense that something is deeply wrong but lack the information to articulate it - this unfocussed yet keenly felt guilt drifting in their streets, clogging their gutters and freezing their rivers.
Much like young Liesel, the film has it's heart in the right place yet occasionally struggles to articulate itself. From Death's opening lines we're know we're building to a morbid conclusion yet we get there by a frustratingly circuitous route: the film is never dull exactly but it comes perilously close. This largely a structural symptom, there's a few different mini-plots going on at once, and as these end there's pauses in the action where nothing much of interest is happening.
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| Geoffrey Rush is one of a very small group of actors who can retain our sympathy while dressed in a Nazi uniform. |
Preventing this stop-start narrative technique from torpedoing the film are the excellent performances throughout, with particular praise due to Geoffrey Rush's ultra-paternal Max - a rock of warm humanity within the nightmare of fascism. Emily Watson also impresses as the gradually thawing Rosa, effortlessly morphing from evil stepmother to nobly pragmatist. Roger Allam is a decently ambiguous Death (though his intonation distractingly recalls The Stanley Parable). But it's Sophie Nélisse that deserves the real plaudits, believably portraying the lead character over multiple years - somehow physically embodying every single stage of adolescence.
The only real problem with the performances is that there's the disappointing decision to have our leads speaking English with wobbly German accents rather than just speaking German. Annoyingly they decide to pepper the dialogue with the odd German word ('Ja' and 'Nein' instead of 'Yes' and 'No etc), as if they're scared we'll forget this is taking place in Nazi Germany (the omnipresent Swastikas kind of give it away...). Even more bizarrely they're not consistent about it, so some characters speaking in subtitles and some don't. This isn't so much of a problem when you're properly engaged in what's on screen but it definitely undercuts more than few dramatic moments.
Nobody is going to argue that the central message of the importance of books and how they teach you to viewing the world through a poetic questioning lens isn't a vital one, yet in my opinion it's a touch too vague, too fluffily humanistic to act as a true riposte to the horrors of Adolf Hitler. That said, the muffled sniffles from the audience as the credits roll is testament to the film at least succeeding on a emotional level.
★★★
The Book Thief is on general release from February 26th
Monday, January 27, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
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In 1961 Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and coined the phrase "the banality of evil". That straightforward, iconic phrase quickly came to define one of the most publicised trials of the 20th century, perfectly encapsulating the frustrations of having an architect of one of the most horrific acts in human history on trial, and finding him to be 'just' a boring, run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. This film chronicles the impact of this trial on Arendt and the wider Jewish diaspora, following her as she travels to Israel to observe the trial, followed by her articles in the New Yorker and her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose publication kicked up one hell of a stink.
Though Hannah Arendt keeps its focus on events surrounding the Eichmann trial, it also attempts to give us at least a cursory biography of its subject. She led a fascinating life, born to German Jews in Hanover, and going on to study philosophy under Martin Heidegger. As a student she entered into a passionate and complex romantic relationship with Heidegger, one severely tested by his support for the Nazi Party and her Jewish ancestry. As the Nazis tightened their grip on German institutions the life of a German-Jewish political theorist became ever more dangerous and she was forced to flee Germany for Paris in 1933.
In 1940 the Vichy Regime began to deport Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Arendt was arrested and interned as an "enemy alien". Again she was forced to flee, this time crossing the Atlantic to New York where she worked on behalf of Jewish organisations to aid those stranded in Europe. By the time we meet her in this film Arendt is a respected author, thinker and professor at the New School in New York, with a major work The Origins of Totalitarianism under her belt.
Barbara Sukowa plays her as confident and forthright, a woman possessed by the courage of her convictions and more than able to defend her views. She occupies a rarefied New York intellectual ocean, within which she is regarded as something of a big fish. Sukowa neatly captures the cloud of intimidation that accompanies people who are not only remarkable thinkers, but are all too aware of their own exceptionality. This stern, rigorous, chain-smoking exterior softens when she's alone with her beloved husband, but in all other regards the defences are up, the film making much of her stony face, behind which you can practically see the cogs and gears of her impressive mind whirring.
It's of course entirely appropriate that Hannah Arendt should be a cerebral film, and there's a refreshing lack of melodrama, the core premise being the publication of a political work, then subsequently defending it. As concepts go it's not immediately thrilling; after all, showing someone lying around smoking cigarettes and thinking really hard isn't exactly dynamic cinema. But rather than try to jazz things up, Von Trotta embraces a kind of no-frills aesthetic; working with a digitally restrained, desaturated colour palette and the absolute bare minimum of directorial frippery. This avoidance of any hint of studio glamour means the style of the film becomes a reflection of its subject, though that also means its a bit detached.
It's telling that the scenes where you get hints of genuine passion are the lectures/monologues by Arendt (which I assume are verbatim quotes). This reveals the film's true intention: not to entertain but to teach. There are moments when the film almost becomes a documentary, particularly during the Eichmann trial sequence where archive footage is cross-cut with a recreation. Particularly effective is the decision to only use footage of the real Eichmann rather than hire a lookalike. We can't help but stare into his face as he blithely argues that he was "just following orders". We try our best to somehow spot the monster within, but in the end we must throw up our hands and admit that there's nothing here except Arendt's "banal" man - a tactic that cleverly nudges us towards looking through Arendt's eyes.
Clever though this is it results in a smidge of intellectual myopia. As controversy builds concerning Arendt's arguments, we're told that numerous rebuttals to her are being published, but we never see them. This is a film that relies on a certain intelligence in its audience, so when we're confronted by the antagonists - represented as a gaggle of cartoon critics replete with snooty insults - it stands out as weirdly simplistic. It's totally reasonable for a film to take a certain viewpoint but it displays a curious lack of confidence to deprive us of even considering the opposing view.
It's refreshing to see a film that aims for the head rather than the heart; a film that understands that you don't need to dumb anything down and that simply being interesting and intelligent is more than enough to sustain our attention. The production design, score and performances are all quietly evocative without being overbearing, and Sukowa manages to make a restrained, frosty and intimidating woman heroic and charismatic at best, and deserving of respect at minimum. But the best praise I can give to Hannah Arendt is that it acts as a springboard to further learning, giving us a compelling and accurate overview of the life and work of a fascinating political theorist and academic.
★★★
'Hannah Arendt' is released on DVD today.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
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Glistening viscera oozes from executed innocents. SS Kommandos furiously fuck on a carpet of dismemberment. Mengele-warped human perversions stagger through the chaos. Driven mad by his mutilation a man screams in horror. Skeletal, spear-wielding demons pursue escapees through the trash ridden forest. Somewhere Ronald McDonald is screaming as he's subjected to unimaginably blasphemous indignities. In the corner Adolf Hitler proudly ejaculates on a heap of severed limbs. Me? I laugh and laugh and laugh.
I relish the point where horror tips into absurdity, it's in subtleties that true horror lies, so when I see something utterly bonkers mad crazy the only viable response is to giggle childishly. That moment comes about three seconds into Come and See (named for Elim Klimov's 1985 movie), the Chapman brothers excellently barmy exhibition in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. In a bestial taxidermy fucktrain, a fox bangs a hare bangs a rabbit bangs a rat bangs a mouse. Silently regarding this interspecies orgy is a smiley-badged Klu Klux Klan member, rainbow hippie socks and birkenstocks peeking out from below his robe.
There's zero gradient and no brakes; everything at this packed exhibition having spilled fully formed from the depths of a deranged mind. To criticise this collection for aiming for straightforward boneheaded shock value would be totally valid but then what's so bad about with shock value anyway? I'd much rather be teased, jolted and poked than cosseted with coolly minimalist abstraction, able to walk out of an gallery safe in the knowledge that what I've seen slots neatly into a classy art 'experience'.
A series of Little Death Machines nicely summarises the Chapman brothers aesthetic; microscope-precise craftsmanship, beautiful materials and astonishing levels of attention to detail combined with an scatologically aggressive fuck-you philosophy. There's no genuine anger behind this work, just the illusion of that it's been created by some childish, violently thrashing id-creature chained up in a dirty basement somewhere. It's this conscious illusion that powers the show, which, for all the blood n guts is actually pretty lighthearted - if you're of a certain frame of mind. Most illustrative of their philosophy is a machine sculpture whose focal point is a ceramic severed cock attached to a ersatz Sybian, below it a post-fucked brain (ours?) oozing a bilious cocktail of paint, semen and maggots.
It all feels like an assault on classically bourgeois sensibilities. Politely dull political preoccupations are challenged at every turn, the artists slyly getting us to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and mirror the poses of the KKK. But of all their attacks on taste and taboo, the most successfully shocking arrow in their quiver is aimed right at art itself. To deface an existing work, even a deeply crappy and inconsequential one, is an ultimate taboo - a liberal heresy on par with building a bonfire of books.
The Chapman brothers defaced series of 19th century portraits is probably the only thing here that causes some genuine discomfort in the audience. It's one thing to create something disgusting, yet quite another to destroy something beautiful in order to do it (even if it's a chintzy, pointless beauty). As we stare at a portrait of a flaxen haired Georgian child frolicing with his dog in some dappled forest glade (probably now underneath a Morrison's car park) it's impossible not to imagine the original artist handing it over to the child's pleased-as-punch parents - happy that a glimmer of childhood innocence had been preserved for eternity.
This was a object once treasured, yet those to whom relevant have died - first the dog, then the parents, then the child - all now an equally dusty pile of forgotten bones. So what the hell does this object mean to us? Should we keep it knocking around just because of crap sentimentalism? Nope - this is once more a blank canvas and so the paragon of innocence finds his face rubbed out and replaced with a hell-pixie needle-teethed grimace, blood pouring down his cute waistcoat and britches. Now it finally becomes something interesting; the spawn of a raped canvas.
Throughout the exhibition you hear muffled screams and snatches of industrial noise music coming from behind a curtain. This is Fucking Hell, a film played within the Kino-Klub installation. The cinema, pre-filled with the KKK attendees (it's interesting how quickly you begin ignoring these guys) is cosy and warm. What's on screen isn't. It's warped sketch comedy closely mirroring the tone of Chris Morris' Jam. Rhys Ifans stares on in horrified wonder as (in an echo of Takeshi Miike's Gozu) his wife gives birth, in slimy gynecological detail, to a fully-grown man, or David Thewlis teaches a vacuous life-drawing class with a two-headed model at the centre. There's a pleasant childish exuberance to this stuff, even as the creatures within frantically bleed and copulate with each other.
Despite this panoply of wonders, the obvious highlight is the intense dioramas of atrocity. It's Warhammer meets Bosch in a crackhouse, Where's Wally by way of de Sade, Iron Maiden crossed with Francis Bacon: thousands upon thousands of tiny flayed corpses stacked on top of each other, sprinkled with tortured killer whales, enslaved and debased McDonald's characters, hordes of slavering Nazis, lewdly fucking dinosaurs, moon landers pouring out more Nazis, men fucking severed heads and... and... it goes on! It goes on beyond all rhyme and reason, the worst depravities enacted in tiny plastic figurines in infinite detail forever and ever.
There's a fractal level of detail, allowing you to take in an epic God's eye view of this swarm of ant-like, indistinct horrors and for you to crouch down and focus on the anger and rage of an individual figure as he tears the head from his blood-soaked companion. It's easy to get caught up in the marvel of the construction, to wondering how long and how much focus something like this takes to create. But for all the crimes against humanity in front of us, we don't feel horror. We giggle at it like we laugh at an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, the guts being strewn over the landscape so grand-guignol that it immediately, irrevocably strays into the outrageously ridiculous.
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| Click for biiiiiig version (recommended) |
Come and See functions as a release valve for the everyday tiny horrors we encounter - fly buzzing dogshit in a park field, a pool of cold vomit on a Saturday morning high-street or a mother slapping her child in the crisps aisle of Tesco. If you don't develop a suit of psychic armour you're never going to get through this awful world without turning into a boring, angry little git. The Chapman brothers art allows you the experience of rubbing your nose through dogshit and laughing about it afterwards. It's super-fab - everyone should check it out pronto.
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