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64 Die Versöhnung
66 Stella
67 Galaxis
67/68 Jane erschießt John, weil er sie mit Ann betrügt |
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80 Hast Du Lust mit mir einen Kaffee zu trinken? 84 Zwei Bilder |
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| Feature Films | ||
| Info |
| Chicago Magazine, 7. 9. 84 Dave Kehr, Salt in the Wounds |
| CLOSED CIRCUIT |
| Dave Kehr Chicago Magazine 7. 9. 84 |
Rainer Werner Fassbinder is dead; Wim Wenders has made his last four films in America, and Werner Herzog has made his last four films on Mars. The New German Cinema, such as it emerged in the 70s, has lost its leadership, and the German films we're seeing now seem slack, confused, and often shrill - as if the filmmakers were trying to make up for a loss of conviction with an increase in volume. The German cinema still has its courageous individualists - directors such as Alexander Kluge, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Percy Adlon, and Herbert Achternbusch - but theirs are styles too idiosyncratic to stand at the head of a school. There's no one left who can inspire a wide range of work in the way Fassbinder did - no one to attract followers. Perhaps Fassbinder's style was so influential because, ultimately, it was formulaic. His decision to treat social problems in the form of broad Hollywood melodramas satisfied both the German taste for didacticism and the German taste for formalism, and it could be easily reproduced (though seldom with the same finesse in execution). Fassbinders example stimulated scores of young filmmakers: he gave them a language they could use. But in Fassbinder's late films, his formalism began to devour his content: by the end, his work had turned gothic, decorative, and empty. German friends have told me that just before his death Fassbinder was preparing to launch a new style, as fiercely naturalistic as his last films had been abstract; perhaps something of what he had in mind can be seen in the cool realism of Robert van Ackeren's A Woman in Flames. But the didactic melodrama of Fassbinder's penultimate period remains the chief model for the young German directors of the 80s. Nothing strong enough has come along to dislodge it, but its potency has just about been exhausted. Rudolf Thome seems to belong with the individualists. Though none of his eight previous features has been exported, by all accounts they belong to an avant-garde tradition - of research into the weight and texture of film language - that the German cinema hasn't often touched. Closed Circuit (which will be shown this Friday and Saturday at the Film Center) represents Thome's first venture into a more commercial arena: it's in color, in 35 millimeter, and features a trio of art house stars - Bruno Ganz, the French actress Dominique Laffin (The Crying Woman), and the critic and occasional actor Hanns Zischler (Kings of the Road). It also has a commercial-sounding plot: Ganz is a computer expert who allows himself to be seduced by Laffin into joining Zischler's scheme to electronically burgle a Berlin bank. But Thome while he delivers all the tension and ingeniousness that the thriller.plot demands, is also using the project to explore alternatives to Fassbinder’s approach. He seems to have inverted Fassbinder’s formula: in Closed Circuit melodrama isn't used as a style, but seized as content, as a theme. Where Fassbinder looked at ordinairy lives through the filter of a melodramatic manner, Thome imagines how an ordinary life might be upset, undermined, and perhaps recharged by a shot of melodramatic experience. The German title of Thome’s film is "System Ohne Schatten” - "System Without Shadows.” The system is both the precise, orderly, mathematical universe that Faber (Ganz) has constructed for himself - represented by the either/or alternatives of his computers digital brain and the black and white squares of the chessboards Faber likes to keep before him - and the cold, antiseptic, and evenly lit environment that Thome has constructed out of the office blocks and apartments of the rebuilt city.Faber is a perfect citizen of this new Berlin, which has been built for stripped-down efficiency: he lives alone in a white-walled apartment, which seems to be empty except for his orderly desk; he has no social connections, except for an upstairs neighbor who asks him one night to accompany her to a reception in the home of an art dealer. Faber reluctantly abandons his computer (he’s working an chess program - trying to teach the computer how to sacrifice a piece in order to win a game) and tags along. At first, the reception seems to offer only more of the same - white walls and minimalist furniture - until he spots a woman standing across the room. He'd seen her earlier, through the window of a book store as he walked home from work; Thismsecond meeting confers a kind of fatedness upon their relationship, and he approaches her. She, at last, is something different: a French actress living in Berlin (we find out later that she starred in a film called The Crying Woman), Juliet (Laffin) is dark, flirtatious, and energized; she seems to give off a glow of intensity that no one else at the party possesses. She also has a friend (Zischler) a prosperously dressed ex-convict who now "buys and sells.” His first name is Melo; we’re never told his last name, but it’s easy to guess. The first part of Closed Circuit follows Faber's rising infatuation with Juliet: a habitual gambler (Faber takes her to the city casino and with his help she wins), she represents the risk that's been missing from his life. The dynamics here are pure film noir - it’s dutiful husband Dick Powell falling for sultry nightclub singer Lizabeth Scott all over again - but Thome doesn’t film it with a film noir delirium. There's no pull of obsession in these images: they remain crisp, bright, and cleanly framed, composed in a simple manner that borders on the stolid. Fassbinder's foreground clutter and the range of color overlays he used in his late films to suggest an environment fraught with erotic peril have been banished from Thome's tidy, repressive world; everything and every character here occupies its ordained place. Thome expends a good minute of screen time on the spectade of Faber carefully clearing off his desk, putting away the papers and notebooks that pertain to his chess problem before taking out the material he needs to crack the computer program at the bank. Thome isn’t poking fun at Faber’s prissiness with this scene (which would be most directors’ automatic reflex); he’s recording the strangely sensual pleasure that Faber takes in his orderliness - his clearing of the desk is like a private ritual, a kind of little dance. Thome films the desk clearing in a continuous take, and throughout the film he cuts as little as possible, prefering to shoot conversations in a slightly standoffish master shot rather than analyze them into bouncing close-ups. The camera doesn't often move, and there’s very little movement within the shots, for the most part, the actors stay frozen in place. But something odd happens with these static long takes: because Thome holds his images a little longer than conventional good technique would dictate, they take on a subtly abstract quality. The shots cease to serve the drama, and acquire an endurance, an independent life, of their own. As the shots continue, the studiously neutral settings - the white walls and plain furniture - take on an importance equal to the motionless characters; background merges with foreground into a single continuous surface, and the effect is lightly hallucinatory, a kind of quiescent vertigo that draws the characters toward death. When Faber is drawn to Juliet, it’s less out of a masochistic yearning for selfdestruction (the classic motivation of the film noir hero) than out of an appreciation for the fact that she can still move. Juliet is the only character who can escape the creeping surfaces, she wears a bright red lipstick that accentuates her wide mouth ans seems a constant challenge to the neutral tones that otherwise define the movies world. (At one point she’ll playfully apply some of that lipstick to Faber’s mouth ) Juliet is a promise of movement, of escope - a sign of another life, of an alternative. At the start of the film, Melo, who's learned to play chess in jail, challenges Faber to a game; Faber wins, using the sacrifice strategy he’s been trying to teach his computer. The body of the plot is a continuation of that chess game - a rematch between Melo and Faber, in which Melo, will try to use Faber’s ploy, sacrificing his relationship with Juliet in order to draw Faber into his bank robbery scheme. Faber is attracted by the element of risk in the plan, but he’s also determined to minimize it: he envisions a bank robbery without violence, in which the computer will be reprogrammed to deposit odd sums of money in a Zurich account that he and his partners have opened. It’s this alternation of security and risk, of order and chance, that forms the "closed circut” of the English title: Faber doesn't want to abandon himself to either element, and so he keeps spinning between them. A break-in is necessary to introduce the short circuit that will allow Faber, in his guise as a computer repairman, to enter the bank and "fix” the machine in his favor. But during the burglary, a guard is shot, and the two professional thieves whom Melo has hired to assist in the attempt demand a larger share of the loot. The elegant plan is in ruins: though the money bas been deposited in the Zurich account, Faber, Melo, and Juliet must now hide from the mob as well as the police, and they take to a cabin in the Swiss mountains. A trace of Thomes avant-gardism remains in the musical passages that periodically interrupt the action - a cellist performs a long improvised solo, performance artist Laurie Anderson does a turn in a Berlin concert hall, a band of Swiss musicians costumed for a local carnival performs an extended percussion piece. These improvised pieces, with their interplay of structure and impulse, comment on the action in a fairly obvious way (Anderson's song, which sounds like a bad cop of Ken Nordine, bluntly delivers a moral to the story), but if they seem rhetorically clumsy, they do work formally: they impose an extra degree of distance on the action, making manifest the director’s detailed structural plan. What I like most about Closed Circuit is that it’s an orderly movie about the lure of chaos and the need for chaos. Thome, unlike Faber, never loses control. His themes are so tightly nested within his story, and his story so tightly nested within his style, that the movie might strike many people as airless. But the control is so tight, so intense, that the film, acquires something like a centripetal force: everything is rushing inward, packing around a central idea. Most films on this subject are meant to explode, unleashing a liberating wave of energy. Closed Circuit implodes: the energy rushes inside, gathering somewhere in the back of Faber’s mind. At the end of the film, he stands alone: nothing has worked out as it was meant to, and Faber has nothing left. And yet, as he stands there, abandoned on the roof of a parking garage, a mysterious smile forms on his face. He has sacrificed everything - his security, his stability, his whole established life - and suddenly be realizes that he’s won the game after all. |