For my Indian friends
“I
am convinced that it is still best that I speak the truth, even if it
costs me my life. For you will not find it written in any of the
commandments of God or of the Church that a man is obliged under
pain of sin to take an oath committing him to obey whatever might be
commanded of him by his secular ruler.”
(Franz
Jägerstätter,Berlin, 1943)
This is Terrence Malick´s first film based on reliable historic sources which are not yet blurred by myth or insufficient past on written records. The is almost entirely made in English language. The film is about the tragedy of the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter who refuses to join Hitler´s army and who is imprisoned for that and executed in 1943.
There
was a lot of talk about the role of the English language inn a film
mostly cast with German speaking actors. Strangely the use of English
in a film which was supposed to be entirely in German language did
not irritate me as much as I expected. It even worked very well in
the voice overs but one has to get a bit used to the dialogs. Only
some background phrases are audible in German. But as soon as we get
acquainted with this weird fact, we are open to the wonders the film
will offer like they appear in each of his films from the last
decade.
The
often mentioned “beauty” of a film by Terrence Malick is often a
painful reminder of the fleetingness of it. In this case, the beauty
of the mountain landscape of an Austrian village with its seemingly
intact social life collides already at the beginning with hints and
images of terror and destruction.
The
film begins with a memory of the couple Jägerstätter´s first
encounter, the young love an excursion on the bike through a
landscape of breathtaking beauty. To love and to be in the world in
all its glory, these euphoric moments of happiness, only Malick can
transform in unforgettable visual moments. Suddenly the flowing
movement of the camera stops and the beauty of a beginning love is
suspended by an excerpt of a propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl.
Centered in the middle of this mighty cinema scope format and
transparent as a quotation between the film´s narration, Malick does
not use it without a comment or better without an “attitude” ( a
quite unsatisfying English pendant of the German words “Einstellung”
or “Haltung” about something.)The sound design of Malick´s film
like the cinema scope-format over proportional to the academy aspect
ratio of Riefenstahl´s film let literally Hitler´s hate speech
drown. The fatal hate speech appears as a miserable hardly
understandable croak. This moment alone is Malick´s formal very
sophisticated pendant to Chaplin´s mocking of Hitler in his The
Great Dictator. But it is also an example of Malick´s aesthetic
system which works like sometimes an organic immune system.
That
stands also for an aspect in Malick´s work which is often denied or
ignored and it stands for the fact that it is pure nonsense to label
Malicks films as “esoteric”. Malick´s view on human
civilizations deals always with the contrast between the beauty that
mankind is able to create but as well its ability for cruelty and
destruction. That brings A Hidden Life close to The Thin
Red Line where the cruelty and destructive power of war is
confronted with an island of breathtaking beauty. It is like the
beauty of the light in his most underrated masterpiece To The
Wonder contrasts with images of desperate poverty and decay of
America with the country´s beautiful landscapes. Malick presents the
world in an extremely bright scale between happiness and deepest
despair. Malick´s christianity (often mocked in much spiteful
reviews) and whenever it appears is the most non dogmatic religious
point of view one can imagine. And even more his religious aspect is
in now way in conflict with this often overlooked realistic aspect of
all his films. Sometimes, Malick´s images can be disturbing the
audience like they probably disturbed himself too but this specific
moments of beauty are not understandable for people who believe in
nothing.
It
is true with A Hidden Life, Malick leaves for now the terrain
of his most personal and often playfully autobiographical inspired
films from up to The Tree of Life. But it nevertheless
correspondents with all his previous films. Valerie Pachners “Fani”
Franziska adds another unforgettable female character to his work. As
she reminds in all of his female characters from Sissy Spacec, Linda
Manz, Q´Orianka Kilcher, Jessica Chastain or Olga Kurylenko, she is
also the closest Malick character to René Falconetti in Dreyers La
Passion de Jeanne d´Arc. That reminds us that A Hidden Life
is not only “The passion of Franz Jägerstätter” but the
“Passion of the couple Jägerstätter”. At all one could collect
shots of human faces from all Malick´films and one had a variety of
human faces as landscapes like in the films by Dreyer but as well
like the heartbreaking vulnerability in the human faces in the films
by Ritwik Ghatak.
The
rollicking of the lovers or playing with their little daughters on
the porch at the beginning are revealed with a freely moving camera
almost freed of the law of gravitation. The closer the fatal signs of
history are coming the more the camera seems to turn into a prisoner
itself. The moment, Jägerstätter is imprisoned, the view of the
camera is leaning towards a miserably trace of light from the window
like a desperate captured child or a captured animal. Even Fani lives
from now on like a prisoner in her own village . Outlawed by most of
the villagers who call her husband a traitor the mundane walks
through the village become a running the gauntlet.
Hitler´s
fascism did invade and conquer other countries but also poisoned his
own country from inside. Seemingly casually, A Hidden Life is
full of very wise observations about fascism and its impact on every
day life.
There
is one pan shot through a cathedral, a breathtaking movement which
captures centuries of art and architecture. These cinematic
admiration is again a contrast of news reel excerpts of the invaded
and bombed cities the Nazis just conquered. As Jägerstätter looks
for consultation from authorities of the church and when he tells
them that he can´t support Hitler because he is evil, a bishop tells
him “one has a duty to the own country because the church told you so.”
(Very late, in 2007,Franz Jägerstätter got his beatification, more
than 60 years after his execution).
Here
also Malick distinguishes religious faith and it´s distortion, in
this case of the institution church (which gave in the enormous
pressure the Nazi-Regime put on the church) He did it also in The
New World when British conquerors occupied the new world “in
the name of God”. And he also distinguished between the two man made
concepts of God in The Tree of Life, the angry god of the old
testament who is to be feared and the other concept of God as eternal
love and forgiveness in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. O` Brian.
The
scenes when Jägerstätter is imprisoned and Fani outlawed by the
villagers belong to the darkest moments in Malick´s work.
Even
though there is no excessive display of violence, the moments when
Jägerstätter is tortured and mocked by the prison guards are often
hard to bear. They remind him cynically that his faith , his decision
does not cause any effect at all. Separated from his family, his
martyrdom is a very lonely one. Even if we already know that
Jägerstätter´s death is a historic fact like we know already about
Pocahontas in The New World or about the death of the younger
brother in The Tree of Life, the emotional intensity of this
scene is almost to big for my little soul.
The
camera movements, especially this rollicking in landscapes without
borders is suspended in Jägerstätter´s small prison cell and
reduced on small pan shots and this point of view seems to me like
the one of awed and captured children.
We
see a man who is going to die literally what Jean Cocteau means with
“watching the work of the death”. But the closer the film moves
to Jägerstätter´s execution the more the narration splits in these
claustrophobic prison scenes and fragmented flashbacks of lost times
of happiness. They try to resist against the inevitable death.
Since
Malick´s comeback 1998, his aesthetic system and all the moods and
emotion it evokes appear as organic - despite or probably because
his use of the most recent film technology. Since his collaboration
with Mexican cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki, Malick cultivated a
kind of cinematic dances between camera and acteurs, a very specific
element of his recent films – and which is completely and congenial
continued by Jörg Widmer, Malick´s new director of photography. It
is evident in this rare and strange accordance between the image
making technology and the performance of actors. Usually there is a
lot of space and freedom for actors and camera. It is very striking
that the suspended freedom of moving actors and camera in the prison
scenes gives A Hidden Life for moments a nightmarish
atmosphere. The camera, the protagonists and our own view is captured
in it´s rollicking around suspended.
When
Fani is allowed to visit Franz the first and last time, they sit on a
table face to face. Touches and hugs are not allowed. When they try
to hug each other for a last time, they are violently separated.
Touches, physical signs of affection, essential in a film by Malick
whose god is pure love, is suppressed. The last hour of the film is
literally a tour de force between heaven and hell, a fight between
hope and desperation.
As
the film is by its subject more bound to linearity than other filmy
by the director there is a special dynamic between more grounded
elements and a camera which tries always free itself. Malick uses a
lot of original letters between Fani and Franz Jägerstätter, mostly
spoken in voice overs by August Diehl and Valerie Pachner. That
creates this dynamic between a historical drama and a poem about an
almost forgotten martyr.
After
3 hours the end credits begin with a quotation by George Eliot: “The
growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and
that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,
is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and
rest in unvisited tombs.”
So
ends the film, for my side one of the most emotionally exhausting
cinematic requiem since The Tree of Life. But it is as well
the end Malick´s most important decade of film making, the last film
of a breathtaking series of 6 masterpieces in only 8 years. It is not
only another example of his exquisite meditations about faith and
religion, but it is as well one of the wisest meditations about
fascism and its fatal impact on ordinary lives. Terrence Malick´s A
Hidden Life is in good company with another masterpiece from
2019, Aparna Sen´s Tagore adaptation Ghawre Bairey Aaj (The
Home and the World today) which is like Malick´s film a very rare
symbiosis of a political comment and formal cinematic excellence.