Tag Archives: Film history

Losing a Guardian Angel

Posted on by
Reply
The film poster for "Bockshorn"

The film poster for “Bockshorn”

What would you do if a creepy man in a bar claimed that he had sold your guardian angel – but could get it back to you for a price? If you are Mick, the older of the two boys living on the street, you might be wise to this trickster “Landolfi” and tell him to get lost. If you are the young Sauly, you might be confused that he knew your name (Mick’s “He overheard it!” does not convince you) and begin to wonder whether you had been living without a guardian angel all this time. It would explain a lot for two homeless boys trying to figure out how to get to the beach. Sure, they’re pretty clever and know how to survive – but is that enough?

Mick and Sauly (filmportal)

Mick and Sauly (filmportal)

Frank Beyer‘s 1983 film Bockshorn (Taken for a Ride) – tells the story of two boys’ adventures hitchhiking through a fictive country that looks suspiciously like America and Cuba. They let themselves get tricked (ins Bockshorn jagen lassen) into Landolfi’s attempt to punish them for rejecting his favors. Although they had wanted to make it to the beach, Sauly becomes literally sick with the thought that he might be missing a guardian angel, so they go off to look for it in the town of Prince. Mick, trying to solve the riddle of this guardian angel story, tries desperately to find the Mr. Miller who supposedly bought the angel from Landolfi. The joke is on him, since everyone in the town is named Miller and no one has a clue about angels, real or imagined. The boys continue on their way, Sauly gets sicker and Mick is at his wits’ end. They track down Landolfi, but even his incredulity that they would have believed such an absurd story is not enough to turn their fate around. Sauly, still longing for a guardian angel, uses his last energy to try and attack Landolfi, but falls to this death.

Sauly attacking Landolfi (filmportal.net)

Sauly attacking Landolfi (filmportal.net)

If Sauly’s tragic death seems to be the result of a con man’s evil sense of humor, we would not be so moved by the poetics and larger moral tale of the film. In some ways, Sauly and Mick had both lost their guardian angels long ago when they wound up homeless. Although they try to look out for one another, they are ultimately only two children faced with a world that does not want them. Mick is not old enough to be a father figure for Saul and himself both; the few adults who want to help them turn out either to be scheming against them or not entirely trustworthy. In the family town of Prince, not a single Mr. Miller takes them in. On a farm, the family offers to let them stay in exchange for back-breaking work for Mick. The disappointment turns the film title’s warning into an ominous foreshadowing. There is no reason to think that Sauly would have lived happily ever after had he not been bullied about by Landolfi in the bar; the problem is that he and Mick were in a place where there was no one to care for them. It is more than a road movie, despite some characterizations of it as such. Hitchhiking is not child’s play, and their initial good luck at tricking adults out of money and food does not make them good candidates for the open road. They did not have a family or home, a situation they are confronted with at every turn when everyone else seems to have one, whether biological or a family of like-minded friends. That is the real tragedy, and one that is not new to the twentieth century. Homeless children are not safe in or from society, and there is nothing they can do but hope the next truck driver who stops for them is honest and will get them to the beach. They had been tricked long before they met Landolfi – they had no escape for a life in which the search for a guardian angel is their best hope of survival.

Nazi Fairy Tale Films

Posted on by
Reply

The phrase “Nazi fairy tale films” seems like either a bad joke, or else yet another area that Nazis turned into propaganda. Yet, Nazi film adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales represent important examples of children’s films in cinematic and educational history. Although the film industry in Nazi Germany came under the purview of Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, he stated explicitly that children’s films should be free of Nazi symbols and ideology. It is time to lift the taboo of freely discussing Nazi filmmaking beyond the well-known overtly anti-Semitic and nationalistic films. After all, in 1940 alone, German film companies produced nine 35 mm feature films based on fairy tales, seven of them Brothers Grimm adaptations – almost half of the total nineteen fairy tale films intended for the Big Screen in Nazi Germany made between 1935 and 1944. From Puss in Boots to Red Riding Hood, Nazi fairy tale films offer us a unique glimpse into the values of good vs. evil that the Big Screen presented young cinema-goers – values that cannot be reduced to stereotypical Nazi slogans of the supremacy of the German race.

These films are not easy to come by, with rare exception, but I think this lack of access to films is part of the problem. What happens if Nazi fairy tale films were remastered as DVDs and made available through, for instance, the Goethe Institute or the German Center for Political Education – as many East German iconic films are? They would then become part of a clear socio-political framework that would situate them within German and cinema history. More important, they would not remain such a Big Secret, and more scholars than the few now writing about them could offer more interpretations than currently available.

Rumpelstiltskin, 1940

Rumpelstiltskin, 1940 

Let me give a small taste of some of these films, which I will be discussing in the weeks that come: Let’s start with the delightful Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater, dir. Alf Zengerling, 1935), which demonstrates the director’s successful transition from puppet films to live action films mixed in with the occasional costumed animal character and odd documentary film footage of animals (the lion jump cut is a bit odd, but the film still rates as one of my all-time favorites). And of course there is Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Fritz Genschow and Renee Stobrawawhich, 1937), which smacks of Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) Dorothy-in-Kansas reality (b/w) and dreams (bold color) of the fantasy world. Unfortunately, Red Riding Hood’s Nazi-era hunter is decked out in Nazi gear or else I would recommend it for any family film evening… maybe a bit of Film-Photo-Shopping could rescue it. Then there is The Rabbit and the Hedgehog (Der Hase und der Igel, dir. Alf Zengerling, 1940), interestingly particularly for the rabbit character, played by Paul Walker – a world-renowned actor of diminutive stature who, with Zengerling, managed to make a living in Nazi-era filmmaking, including starring in such classics as Rumpelstilskin (pictured above with the farmer’s daughter and the instruction to turn straw into gold, 1940). I lose trace of Walker after his last films in the 1940s – reason enough to open up the files and film-reel canisters and release Hitler’s celluloid princes, princesses, and all of their subjects to some scholarly scrutiny today.

War Orphans in Film – No Happy Endings

Posted on by
Reply

Of all of the post-World War II films that addressed the problems of orphaned children, the Hungarian film Valahol Európában (Somewhere in Europe, also known as It Happened in Europe, 1947) elicited the most shocked public outcry about the youngest victims of the war. Directed by Géza Radványi, who wrote the screenplay with writer Béla Balazs, Somewhere in Europe continued with the filmic trope of pointing unrelenting, accusing fingers at the adults who had allowed the onset of a war (i.e. pretty much everyone) that continued to punish young people long after the last shots had been fired and bombs had been dropped in Europe. Unlike the films Somehwere in Berlin (Irgendwo in Berlin, dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946, DEFA/Germany) or Germany in the Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1948, France/Germany/Italy), Radványi’s work focused on war orphans themselves, instead of employing children as part of a larger plot about societal renewal. Somewhere in Europe is a cry of anguish, not a lesson on shame or the politics of reconstruction.

cropped-hanging.jpg

Screenshot of children attempting to hang the conductor in “Somewhere in Europe.”

Radványi positions a group of wandering children who find their way to an abandoned castle against the adults of the surrounding village who gleefully shoot at – and in one case kill – the “juvenile delinquents” who steal food and supplies in order to (barely) survive. He does not pretend that the children are innocents; indeed, he highlights the ways in which the war and its end pushed young people into criminal acts. Most haunting is perhaps the scene at the castle where the children decide to hang the once-famous conductor who also resides there. When the slightly older leader of the group, Peter, stops them from killing the older man, he asks what motivated them to want to execute another war refugee. The answer: “For fun.” These are children who have learned not only to fend for themselves, but to imitate the behavior of the adults they have encountered, and who abandoned them.

Radványi offers a supposedly happy end for everyone. The local villagers realize that they should be helping the children instead of treating them like the enemy; the children wash their dirty faces and put on suddenly clean clothes and happily wave from their castle – officially now theirs – to the conductor as he heads off across the green pastures of Hungary towards, one presumes, a rekindling of his musical career. I find this “happy ending” rather unhappy and troubling. Forgetting the fact that, in hindsight, the castle would likely have been nationalized in the next years, we are still left with a group of children who have no means of feeding themselves. There is no garden in sight, and the larder of meat left by the conductor will run out at some point. True, the villagers have recognized the errors of their ways. But for how long? There is no talk of caring adults looking after the children’s well-being, or even feeding them. When do the children start pillaging again? The castle is not an orphanage. It is at best a temporary solution, one well-suited to the needs of the time, that is, to find a place where children could be forgotten, at least temporarily.

Screenshot of wandering orphans in "Somewhere in Europe"

Screenshot of wandering orphans in “Somewhere in Europe”

I do not think that Radványi or Balazs intended for their audiences to take away this other message of accusation; the story of war orphans, however, had few happy ends in any postwar society. Somewhere in Europe, in this sense, unconsciously documents this second act of tragedy, in which adults learn to feel solace that children can be saved – from themselves and from their experiences. It is only a temporary salvation; not even a fairy tale would know how to fix this tragedy. If this reason is not enough to bring Somewhere in Berlin more fully into international scholarship and history and film studies classrooms (it has excellent English subtitles, since the United Nations supported the postwar international distribution of the film, helped along by such politicos as the then-French president Auriol Frack and his Dior-clad wife exclaiming that this was a “must-see” film), then the curious use of the nineteenth-century American melody of the folk tune “O Susanna” that the children sing-shout in the castle would surely peak anyone’s curiosity.