woyzeck (w. büchner, d. leander haußmann)

A visit to the Berliner Ensemble

It’s a warm Sunday evening. The square in front of the theatre is adorned by a statue of Bertolt Brecht. He looks almost too content with his legacy, an intriguing issue in a unified Berlin. The theatre itself is a baroque jewel, which always has half a dozen works of the maestro in rep. 

It's hard to assess a show critically when you know the culture it emerges from on little more than a superficial level. I guess that is part of the reason critics garner respect. By paying their dues. The Berliner Ensemble had a reputation for innovation which has since, perhaps, been overtaken by the Schaubuhne or the Volksbuhne. I have little idea what to expect. We are there to watch Woyzeck, which one imagines has become a kind of ur-text in Germany (and beyond). A tabula rasa upon which a director can weave his or her magic. 

Leander Haußmann’s version is immediately, resolutely modern. The most arresting facet of the show is its squadron of soldiers. Woyzeck is one of a band of about 25 brothers, whose erratic discipline, sometimes marching in step, sometimes acting as mocking chorus, sometimes jiving, gives the staging texture and depth. Marie is a spirited, flighty fun-loving figure who jitterbugs whilst Woyzeck is being tortured in a sadistic military hazing ritual. 

The military uniform suggests the soldiers are from the US, something which is reinforced by the use of American music. At any moment a dance might break out, a dance which transforms into a battle. The fairground scene uses the revolve to create a beguiling ad hoc merry-go-round, as the soldiers “ride” helium-filled animal balloons. It’s a beautiful, virtuoso scene, one matched by the appearance of a real-life ape-man who struggles with a chair and then drinks a beer; ‘poor theatre’ with a philosophical punch. The play never uses any constructed scenery as such: the stage remains bare, defined by a vigorous use of lighting and the number of bodies which populate it. At one point a dozen pop-up tents appear; on another occasion an apparent verdant mound turns out to be made out of camouflaged soldiers.

There is no shortage of violence, something the play ironises when Woyzeck kills the sergeant major a dozen times to the music of Mozart's Figaro. The production veers in an increasingly expressionist direction as it nears the denoument. The political references introduced in the opening hour begin to feel slightly contrived as the play appears to fail to develop them in any meaningful fashion. I say “appears to” because the production is, naturlich, in German, a language which I don’t speak. I have no way of knowing if the text was was being adapted or not. I had the impression that it hadn’t been tinkered with much, but this opinion is purely speculative. 

All in all, it could be said that Leander Haußmann’s production delivered what I might have expected. Self-consciously radical, an imagistic theatre, one which uses music and seeks to create a liberation from the word, one that uses violence with a Jacobean glee as a theatrical code, rather than naturalism. It is also a theatre whose use of staging elements: lighting; scenery; music; costume is resolutely anti-naturalistic, something which comes as a relief. There’s a theatrical dexterity which the British stage seems to struggle to emulate; a wilfully radical approach that might sometimes feel contrived but on the other hand ensured that this 2 hour version in a foreign language never felt dull or over-extended. 

cat and mouse [günter grass]

Cat and Mouse is a novel that’s as agile as it’s title suggests. The narrative is seemingly straightforward, dealing with the difficulties of evolving from childhood to adulthood. However, this simplicity is muddied by the fact that the characters undergoing this transformation are living in Nazi Germany, during the war, on the Baltic coast. Grass’ prose feels, even in translation, effortlessly lucid. The slipages as the narrator veers between the third and second person as he tells the story of Mahlke, the child-man with the outsized Adam’s Apple, sometimes addressing him and sometimes the reader, feel like a masterly trick, revealing the narrator’s incipient guilt. This guilt gradually builds, suggesting that it is not merely caused by the narrator’s part in Mahlke’s downfall. but also by the war itself. Without in any way ever suggesting that he’s taking on the burden of that which he was born into. This is a guilt which is unavoidable, destined, as much as a story has an unavoidable shape, as much as a cat unavoidably goes for the mouse. 

andrei rublev (w&d. w. tarkovsky, andrey konchalovskiy)

The newly refurbished Renoir screen, within the Renoir cinema (as I shall continue to call it), is a fitting place to watch Tarkovsky’s epic. Obviously words like masterpiece can and should be applied to this spectacular piece of filmmaking. It might be that there is little to add. It feels as though Tarkovsky’s reputation, justifiably, continues to grow. Each new generation of auteur filmmakers acknowledges their debt to the Russian, none more so than Inarritu in The Revenant. Someone put together a striking comparative video of that film with images from Tarkovsky’s, claiming the Mexican was stealing from Tarkovsky, but, as Brecht pointed out, all writers are thieves. 

SCALE

Watching this film on the big screen, for the first time, allowed many of the set piece scenes, including in particular the battle scenes, to be appreciated in all their glory. Whilst on one level a poet of the natural world, Tarkovsky was also a master composer of the grand set piece, showing a flair which Hollywood can only envy. The screen is filled with detail, like a Breughel painting, the camera lingering on the scene for long enough for its glorious complexity to be assimilated on a large screen; a TV or a computer cannot do justice to these moments. 

MUD

There’s so much mud in the film. The last scene is Rublev in the mud with the child bell-maker. Having visited the area around Vladimir, including Suzdal, there’s nothing exaggerated about any of this. Even in the middle of Summer, when I visited, the mud was wonderfully pervasive. The film takes place in the 15th c, but it’s no better now. Which also suggests the reason for all this mud. There’s something elemental about it, something overwhelmingly Russian. The mud is actual and metaphorical. Nothing is easy in Russia, everything is muddied, which might have something to do with a climate which veers from one extreme to the other. Andrei Rublev is a film about Russia, this elemental, unchanging Russia, the same now as it was under Stalin or the Peter the Great. The mud is a constant which glues this all together, both within history and within the film.

3-D

The film famously opens with a balloon trip, offering a sky-to-earth perspective. Thereafter the film continues to play with perspective and angle. The camera is employed to encourage a sense of viewer disorientation. Tarkovsky was not the only Soviet director to do this, and it’s a methodology which has since been pushed further. (Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba immediately springs to mind.) The question is why this technique is adopted. The man in the balloon is not central to the narrative of the film. Who is he? (The film never clarifies this, nor does a cursory internet enquiry, beyond telling us his name is Yefim). What we can say about him is that he appears to be an ordinary, anonymous individual. As such, he’s the reflective image of the spectator. It’s a bold move to open the film highlighting a character who has, as they now like to say, no agency within the story. Perhaps this is Tarkovsky’s nod to us, his audience. We are about to embark on a balloon ride; to soar, to lose ourselves in the clouds, to get caught up in the exhilaration of the experience. At the end, we will come crashing back down to earth (like Yefim) with a hard landing, as discordant, colourful images fill what has been a black and white frame. For a brief while, the camera’s perspective offers the common man another vista. You could make an argument to say that in so doing, Tarkovsky is towing the blockbuster line (what is Andrei Rublev if it’s not a blockbuster?). You could also make an argument that in Soviet Russia, as in the hegemonised world of global capital, the need to dream, to look at the world from an altered perspective, is paramount. Art is one of the few mechanisms available to us to do this, to step back and see the world afresh. It was ever thus, the film’s protoganism appears to imply, from 15th c Russia to the present day and beforehand too. Tarkovsky’s film is a remarkable proto 3-D portrayal of a 2-D artist. 

alone in berlin [hans fallada]

The war, the war. I’m not sure why the second world war suddenly feels so immediate. Of late, so much of my reading seems to return to that point. It might be connected to the fact that in a few weeks I am to return to the city of my great grandparents, which I would visit as a child, the city where they spent the second world war, which is the first tangible point in history where my identity begins to be recognisably formed - genetically, psychologically, spiritually.

That city is Berlin. Fallada’s novel captures it during the course of the war. Fallada’s Berlin is a cruel, suspicious city where the venal are rewarded and the good lurk in the shadows. People still drink in bars, there is still a discernible communal life, albeit one that revolves around suspicion and fear. Those who seek to live in something akin to normality head to the rural outskirts, which then turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, than the city. This is a 1984 world with a snooper’s charter, where the punishment for non-conformity is likely to be death. 

The narrative is a gritty, perhaps even Loachian tale of a common man who resists the machine. The machine being nothing less than the Gestapo and the apparatus of National Socialism. Otto Quangel decides to take on the system via the simple mechanism of producing letters which he drops around the city, hoping to create a viral campaign of resistance. HIs wife, Anna, joins him in his campaign. Ultimately, their failure, and the doomed fate of the couple, are secondary to the significance of the instinct being acted upon. Fallada would seem to imply that the act of resistance, no matter how impotent, is never futile. The novelist commemorates the Quangels and dignifies their actions in spite of their apparent futility. The fact that this narrative is “based on a true story” makes it all the more poignant.

In Fallada’s novel, the Kantian imperative to act is weighed against the societal drift towards inert corruption. The Second World War might have been the last time that the notion of the individual had such little currency in Europe. Wartime is a time when the notion of personal destiny is subsumed to the notion of national destiny (or the destiny of the chosen cause). It’s probably the greatest misunderstanding regarding the concept of terrorism. The terrorist believes him or herself to be at war. War suspends the normal rules of ethical society, primarily that saying “thou shalt not kill”. The Quangels are also terrorists. Their actions are not predicated on the notion of a ‘productive’ result. Instead the action itself is definitive. Their individuality is sacrificed to a greater cause. It’s notable that very little of the novel actually focuses on the potential drama (or dramatic tension) of the Quangels’ actions: instead it looks at the impact their actions have on themselves and others. Within the grand scale of the war, theirs is a minimal tale, one whose impact, measured by spreadsheets, is negligible, but measured by another less definable standard, contains the real stuff of glory. 

Perhaps I find myself returning to the war because I’m trying to understand the societal logic in a world where the individual has become king to such an extent that almost anything can be sacrificed on its altar. On a psychological, spiritual and ultimately even genetic level. Which, in a way, would seem to be far more of a reflection of the Nazi culture Fallada demonstrates in his novel than that of the Quangels, who resist it.

evolution (w&d. lucile hadzihalilovic; w. alante kavaite, geoff cox)

I came out of a meeting and went into Evolution. I should have come out of nightmare and gone in to see it. There’s something other worldly about Evolution, not just in its supposed “mermaid horror” premise, but also in its pacing, sparse storytelling and medical porn scenes. I’d enjoyed Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s previous picture, Innocence, which had a similarly opaque, hallucinogenic quality. The world seen through a lens, darkly. This is auteur moviemaking: you come out of Evolution feeling like you’re stepping out of someone’s mind. Which is dangerous because you need to be in the right viewing space to appreciate it’s whimsical glory. I’m not sure if it’s because I went in with the wrong frame of mind, but I came out feeling a bit nonplussed. The concept of psycho-mermaids seemed more attractive in theory than in practice. Maybe that’s as it should be; maybe it was just that the repeated explicit operation sequences and injections meant that this notoriously squeamish viewer found himself coming in and out of the film from behind his fingers more often than was good for the narrative flow. It seems like a shame we have had to wait so long for Hadzihalilovic’s second feature to arrive; there’s a mesmeric quality to her filmmaking, even if I came out with the feeling that sometimes she might be stuck in her own shadow.  

ophelia’s zimmer (d. katie mitchell)

I’m going to assume that you, the reader, are unlikely to see this show. It had a four day run in London and finished tonight. If you’re in Berlin I guess you might. The show’s in German. It was surtitled, although it didn’t really need to be. 

Zimmer means room in german. The whole play takes place in the hypothetical bedroom of Ophelia. It’s an unremarkable space: a bed, a chair, a cupboard, a side table. The re-imagining of a Shakespeare play from another character’s point of view is not radical. Stoppard did it famously with Hamlet. In Montevideo, Percovich recently did it with the same character as Mitchell chooses here. Ophelia is fertile territory for this kind of project. She’s one of most underwritten characters in literary history. Her tragic denouement is somewhat thrown away by the original author.

The play is split into five sequences, each one announced by a projected sign which denotes the five stages of drowning. Each of these scenes, or sequences, is composed of a myriad of tiny, fractured scene-lets. They are denoted by a sound cue, always the same, and a change of lights. This is the play’s punctuation. 

We are, assuredly, in the territory of deconstruction. Deconstruction of Hamlet, deconstruction of drowning. And deconstruction of the process of creating a work of theatre.

There is very little dialogue. Which is not to say there is none. There are three registers of dialogue. Firstly, a voiceover from a woman, perhaps Ophelia’s mother, perhaps just the voice in her head, instructing her how to behave. How to make herself small and fit in the cracks. Secondly, there is the voice of Hamlet, on tapes which he supplies, as letters, to Ophelia. Hamlet’s voice is playful, lewd, tender, manic, crazy. Ophelia fasts forwards and rewinds these tapes. (They are not the only Beckettian aspect of the play). At one point the tape has Hamlet’s voice say: To be or… Ophelia abruptly fast forwards. That moment got the biggest laugh of the night. The final register is the dialogue of Ophelia herself and four other characters who appear, including, explosively, Hamlet. Mostly she is spoken to by a maid. But the maid’s lines are as repetitive as her actions. She brings flowers, presumably sent by Hamlet. Ophelia and her exchange a few words about the flowers. She tells her she has to go and see a play, or that Hamlet is downstairs and wants to see her. The maid’s role is essentially that of messenger, a mechanism which helps the offstage action to be communicated.

This is a technical theatre where the lighting and the sound have just as much weight as the writing and the acting. It’s highly cinematic. In fact, the way the stage is set up, in part in order to permit the water to enter at the end, means that those in the stalls would have seen a different play to the one I saw in the circle. There’s a raised black section which cuts off the view from the stalls, suggesting the widescreen of cinema. Added to this is another mechanism taken from film. Three of the actors perform foley in a booth in the corner. They create the sound of the outside world. Feet on stairs, doors opening and shutting, keys in locks, feet running. The diagetic world is visibly deconstructed before our eyes.

Once again, this process of deconstruction. As a director of a play, you are aware of every moment, every beat. Moments which apparently have little importance are all part of the mechanics of the machine you are creating. Mitchell reveals this process to the audience. There is no seamlessness. It is all seams. (She has Ophelia doing crochet at times.) The play, like Ophelia’s descent towards suicide (the madness of suicide) is an accumulation of moments. Normally a director tries to hide this process. So that the audience lose themselves in the ‘story’. Mitchell does the opposite here. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s just as hypnotic as a conventionally-told narrative. Once you adjust to the sparse, staccato, rhythm of the piece, you become sucked into the story. A move from one side of the stage to the other has meaning. (Here again, the echo of Beckett, especially late Beckett.) The action is transparent and part of an elaborately constructed journey. A journey towards both madness and the end of the play.

Maybe for some, this becomes tedious. It might be seen as a purist’s theatre. Maybe in Germany it’s ten-a-penny, old hat. For me, it felt like a vision of the theatre freed from the tyranny of the word. I’ve never seen a show that did away as magisterially with the need for a playwright as this one (with all due respect to Alice Birch, credited in the program for “text” ) or, perhaps, which succeeded in showing how rich a non-writer-lead theatre could become. Which doesn’t mean to say that language is not important. Much of Birch’s ‘text’ has a poeticism which contrasts wittily or movingly with the austereness of the room and the staging. Whilst riffing off the untouchable original. A jazz score, if you like. But the point here, in this deconstructed theatre, is that the actions of the actors, the lighting designer, the composer, the set designer, have as much weight as the language. 

I enjoy the transitory nature of theatre. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. When Ophelia’s Zimmer finished, with a wrong-footing flair, (she doesn’t drown), I didn’t want to leave the theatre. I wanted to linger in the play’s strange, hypnotic space. This space which had deconstructed everything and then put it back together again. A kind of clinical madness. Or a clinical kind of madness. Which might be another way of describing the process of staging a play. 

So I cycled back across Hyde Park, Serpentine winking seductively, at me, at Ophelia, at Shakespeare’s ghost, and because I didn’t want to let the play go just yet, I put the bread on to cook and sat down to write these words. 

the seventh fire (w&d jack pettibone riccobono, w shane slattery-quintanilla, andrew ford)

The Seventh Fire recounts the story of two indigenous North American Indians living in a small town in Minnesota. Neither the older Rob Brown or the younger Kevin are role models. Rob has spent his life in and out of prison. He’s a drug and alcohol addict. The film follows the days he spends before he’s about to start his fifth stint in prison, desperate to enjoy his last days of liberty. Kevin is younger. He’s 18. He has more hope. But he’s already dealing meth and getting addicted at the same time. He deals to the young white youths (who could probably step out of a Linklater movie). His girlfriend ditches him. His life is going to pieces and he ends up in a correctional facility. Rob’s last night of freedom descends into a bacchanal, which is filmed in the raw just as potently as Toro Negro, (Carlos Armella, Pedro González-Rubio), another film which depicts with a terrible candour the ongoing struggle of the native American indians to adapt, half a millennia later, to the imported culture which was imposed upon them. 

This culture is artfully kept at the margins of the film. Kevin makes enquiries about an organisation called La Plazita Institute which incorporates Native American traditions into the rehabilitation of young offenders. It looks at one point as though this is going to turn into a life-affirming positive narrative and the film is all the stronger for not going down that route. Similarly, Rob is a wannabe poet, (one of his poems is featured in the film), who when he’s off the drugs in prison reconnects with his Ojibwe roots. But The Seventh Fire isn’t addressing the exceptional, upbeat stories. Both Rob and Kevin’s cases are all the more poignant because, in spite of the fact we like them, we want them to prevail, they don’t. Life for them is about hard times, bad choices and prison. Only in the very final sequence does the movie suggest, somewhat cryptically, the possibility of another outcome to Rob’s story.

The Seventh Fire is a film which is greater than the sum of its parts. Not a lot happens. There’s no great moment of catharsis or epiphany. This is about how people live day-to-day live within a society where their very presence is like a guilty secret that shouldn’t be told. This is the anti-Utopia, the stolen land, belonging to souls who live in internal exile. 

victoria (w&d sebastian schipper; w olivia neergaard-holm; eike frederik schulz)

I feel mildly guilty for not enjoying Victoria as much as one is supposed to. I say this because in some ways Victoria is the holy grail; a foreign language art-thriller, possessed of a dose of technical genius which is matched by some lovely acting and a penumbra of dramatic tension. In fact, from this viewer’s POV, the last phrase is the problem. Because, yes, in the first hour, that dramatic tension feels all-enveloping, colouring everything. The young, friendless Spanish woman, all alone in Berlin, hooking up in the middle of the night with a bunch of pissed, raw Berliners: something has to give sooner or later. The tension of the build-up to this “something” is indeed, pervasive. Every second feels pregnant with the dread that is to come. Time slows down and the relentless camera’s refusal to cut means we, like Victoria, are trapped by the onrushing force of destiny; these quiet moments can’t last forever, very soon, within the next hour, the levee is going to break. My problem with the film came when that break occurred. Suddenly we find ourselves in a well made Gangster B-movie. Swarthy hoods with guns and bleached-blond criminal uber-men. Shoot-outs and urban terror. The film’s credibility bubble burst for me somewhere along the way and so did the dramatic tension; all those carefully assembled minutes, so skilfully stitched together, seemed to be frittered away. Who is Victoria? What’s her real problem? I realise these are banal questions but in a film so resolutely and titularly dedicated to its protagonist, they feel relevant and I don’t feel as though I ever found the answers, no matter how artfully Laia Costa portrayed her. Her acting and that of the Brandon-esque Frederick Lau as Sonne are lovely examples of unmannered naturalism, and their love story almost began to convince as a kind of harder-edged Berlin Before Sunrise, but in the end the tragic stakes didn’t quite seem to have been earned. Perhaps my sense of anti-climax could be explained by declaring that at the end of the day, having done the hard work, I felt as though the script let its characters off too lightly, they could have suffered more. I realise that dying a violent death is considered by some to be a cruel way to go, but in this case it just goes to show that in cinema, or fiction, there are all kinds of violent deaths, some more excoriating than others. On the plus side, this is only a film that disappoints because it sets its bar so high; the talent and flair of its originators is not in doubt. (The camera work of Sturla Brandth Graven being the real star of the show.)

the sky trembles and the earth Is afraid and the two eyes are not brothers (w&d ben rivers)

Ben Rivers’ long titled film possesses the ascetic, ironic beauty of Two Years at Sea, married to the more philosophical reflections of Slow Action. The first half of the film follows the filming of a movie being made by a young Frenchman in Morocco, in the Atlas mountains and the desert. Rivers’ film is a documentary, following the real crew, making a real film. Rivers’ camera is a mildly subversive presence, observing the niceties of the European and North African worlds meeting; the difficulties of filming under taxing conditions. The film director mooches around looking suitably moody. It’s entertaining, but it feels slightly inconsequential. Then, at the midway point, the director gets into his 4x4, drives to a remote desert hotel, gets kidnapped and is used as a dancing tin-can gimp by a group of Moroccan bandits. 

The switch in tone is completely unexpected and hypnotising. The man who is supposedly making entertainment for the European masses instead becomes a source of entertainment for the third world minority. The second half of Rivers’ film is apparently adapted from a Paul Bowles story, but it would be wrong to see it as being a separate entity from the first half. The moment of ultimate horror, for the director, after all that he has unwittingly suffered, is the sight of a blank TV screen. It may not be the most subtle of messages, but it would appear that Rivers is questioning the whole nature of our idea of what entertainment is or should be. He does so with a deadpan humour which hints at the more profound disunities of the modern world. When the tables are turned, and only then perhaps, will we begin to understand the vacuity of that which we presently consider entertaining. 

Which is not to say that this is a worthy or dour film. It seems unlikely that Rivers is ever going to belong to the mainstream. Which again raises questions about what the function of cinema is or should be. Is it to observe, to reflect the world, or is it to tell stories, stories which might be mundane? In some of the scenes from the film the director is making, we see moments of real engagement from the Moroccan actors, which suggest a whole narrative whose content we never learn. (We also don’t know if these moments belong to the Frenchman’s film itself or are observations stolen by Rivers.) These flashes contain a humanity encapsulated in the angry shake of a head or a captured smile. We are outside the story, looking in. Later, we are inside the story, as we empathise with the director’s fate. Rivers, it seems, wants us to be both Brechtian observers and committed servants of his narrative. On the whole it’s the second side of the coin which determines how we watch film in this day and age. The early cinema, which caused amazement by doing nothing more than reflecting the world as it was, has lost its sway. We need the screen to dance; the director’s fate is a parody of our restricted expectations. The film’s earlier, observational take, has no place in the modern cinema; instead we look to rediscover the Wizard’s of Oz’s tin man in every film we choose to watch. If it doesn’t have pathos, if it doesn’t dance a jig, it doesn’t exist. 

son of saul (d. lászló nemes, w. nemes & clara royer)

It struck me about five minutes into Son of Saul that László Nemes, the director, probably knows the work of the previous entrant on the blog, fellow Hungarian Imre Kertész. The scars of the Holocaust on the Eastern European psyche still run deep. How is it still possible to make a film about the Holocaust that feels urgent, pressing, of the now? And why is it necessary? 

Son of Saul is brilliantly made, possesses a peculiar beauty, yet still succeeds in conveying shock. The shock is twofold. On the one hand there are the prosaic details of the process. The death, the barbarity, the bodies, the showers, the machine, the complicity. All these things are known, have been visited time and again. By framing his story through the prism of its ‘hero’s’ journey over the course of three days, maintaining a narrow focus, we observe all these things at the periphery of our vision. Every now and again the background leaps out at the viewer. A body dragged across the floor; a bloodstain being scrubbed. Sound and image are employed to make this terrible world come to life, every shot meticulously constructed to portray the heaving mechanism of the concentration camp, a machine of constant movement and barely-controlled chaos. 

The second shock has more in common with the wry observations of Kertész: that within the confines of this hell, a man can retain his values and his humanity, as shown by Saul Auslander’s desire to provide a fit burial for the child he believes (or chooses to believe) is his son. The simple, ludicrous, mission renders everything else secondary. It’s a classic piece of storytelling which is delivered via a masterly use of the cinematic format. 

If the film reminded me of any other, it’s perhaps Mungiu’s Five Weeks. The ability to convey a story with a claustrophobic focus, the bigger picture always present but kept in the background. Like the novel, cinema allows the storyteller to lead you through a world from the point of view of the narrative’s chosen protagonist. Why is it necessary? The urgency of the filmmaking stye succeeds in making Saul’s story feel like something that could be happening today. Nemes bridges the historical gap, creating empathy through shared experience. We don’t look on Saul as a historical figure, but as a contemporary. Cinema revokes history, and a modern audience is compelled to think: that this should never be permitted to happen again. The reasons why it might be necessary to remember this all over again right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, are, sadly, far too evident.