Normally, we talk about the evening’s screening in this space. But because SPA’s German class is going to have a few words tonight about topics related to Herr von Donnersmarck’s film, we thought we’d take a moment to discuss this evening’s animated offering: Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s “Balance.”
We choose animated shorts for a number of reasons. One is to offer an entertaining intro to the scheduled movie while providing students a few extra minutes to get to the movie before it starts. We also try to find short pieces that are, in some way, related to the feature film. And so we introduce Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), about an East German secret service agent who becomes intrigued by the lives of a couple he is assigned to observe, with a stop-action puppet animation about five men on a platform in space trying to maintain their balance when one of them pulls a heavy box onto the platform.
What’s the connection, other than the fact that both works are German? You might want to consider the effect that an oppressive system has on the individual as one theme. In “Balance,” the five men have organized themselves into a highly efficient society. (The fact that it is the product of oppression is suggested by the numbers each man wears on the back of his coat and by the pervasive grayness of the film’s palette.) Yet the arrival of the box, a red box that plays faint music, disrupts not only the balance of the platform but the balance of their culture. They go from working together to working against one another.
Das Leben der Anderen, which takes place before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also reflects a society that is, in one sense, highly ordered. A powerful government. An efficient information collection system. People who know their roles. Yet it is all disrupted by a single human emotion. In “Balance,” that emotion is greed; in Das Leben der Anderen it is, perhaps, love. Now that’s an interesting concept – the emotions that make us most human are also the things that will disrupt our attempts to form efficient systems. When the system being disrupted is an oppressive one – and one doesn’t get much more oppressive than the Cold War visions reflected in these two films – we seem to be celebrating the triumph the human spirit. We suspect, however, that even a benignly efficient system is vulnerable, a message that Gene Roddenberry drove home repeatedly every time Captain James T. Kirk dismantled a utopian society in the old Star Trek series.
But gosh, you’re saying, this is just an animated short. In fact it’s just a short piece meant to illustrate a particularly intense irony. After all, the balance depicted at the end of the film is radically different from that suggested at the beginning. How do we end up thinking about all this deep Cold War and culture stuff? Easy. “Balance” is designed to encourage us to think below its surface story. It has no dialogue, so we must interpret its action without intervention from onscreen explanations. It takes place in a hypothetical universe where the rules are metaphorical – to survive, the men must maintain the balance of their platform (one could even read that as an environmental message, no?). And the Lauensteins load the brief minutes of their piece with key visual images. The box, for example, is red, while everything else is gray. Does the red suggest anger? Is it anger that destroys their world? Does the red suggest life, passion, love? The viewer must interpret, or translate, the images. And in doing so, we construct a meaning.
“Balance” is a beautiful film, perfectly balanced in its storytelling and imagery. We hope it encourages you to think a bit, and that you’ll draw some connections between its story and the feature film. And we ask the same of every animated short we show, even if it’s “Iddy Biddy Beat Boy” or “Officer Pooch.”
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
No comments:
Post a Comment