Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl (1990)

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Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930)

The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1930, is an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat. It stars the iconic Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, a cabaret singer, and Emil Jannings, as Immanuel Rath, a teacher at a boy’s Gymnasium.

This film is known for marking the start of the historical Dietrich-Sternberg collaboration, and also being one of the first German films to employ sound. But, this film provides more than just these two milestones.

Lola and Rath are two drastically different characters. Rath embodies austerity while Lola epitomizes liberation. The narration follows the authoritative Rath down his path of self-destruction. The film begins with Rath catching his students looking at risqué photos of Lola Lola, the headliner at the local cabaret The Blue Angel. Rath then goes to the club, in attempt to stop them in the act. Much to his demise, there he meets Lola, the infatuation begins, and his integrity crumbles.

Many look at this film as an allegory for the state of Germany before the first World War – Rath symbolizing Germany’s peremptory disposition and Lola representing the countering force. Rath’s downfall, then, would represent Germany’s ruin. Whether or not this was Sternberg’s intention, The Blue Angel captures the sentiment of the time and the downtroddeness that defeat yields.

Cinematically the dark shadows render a sinister effect, and the characters always seem at the edge of danger. Lola personifies this mood. She embodies a dark exoticism not seen in prior films, an unbridled sexuality not present prior in the cinematic world. Her sexuality, however, is not what makes Lola a compelling character; it is her inaccessibility. She possesses both masculine and feminine traits, passivity and muscle, and her fluctuation between these traits give her power and depth. This energy inspired the femme fatales of the later film noir movement.

Looming danger, sexuality, cultural revival, and the emancipation of women were prevalent in the Weimar Republic, and this film provides a window into the condition of the German state.

This film’s significance, however, does not solely lie in its historical context. It is also an examination of the human psyche. Stemberg uses the relationship between Rath and Lola, and their fluctuating dependence on themselves and society, to question man’s self-reliance. Ultimately he questions whether or not satisfaction can be derived from others, and from the self.

Although this film possesses many cinematographic conventions of the time it still holds poignancy. Stemberg’s use of imagery, jest, and character interplay provide a palpable gateway to the past and a connection to the current cinema

Ella Coon
Film Club Co-President

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979)

Everybody who sees Volker Schlondorff’s film Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) should have an opinion on whether it should be shown at school. You might be glad that Film Club has the freedom to show risqué movies, or you might be shocked that they would, or you may even be upset that the school supports to its showing. Even if the fact that SPA is showing The Tin Drum doesn’t shock you, the movie very well might. It’s groundbreaking, dark and somewhat comedic, and very surrealist. It is also graphically suggestive. (Unless that’s an oxymoron. Hey, it’s surrealism.)

The film’s sexuality earned it enormous controversy when it came out in 1979, and controversy over controversy, on into the 1990s. The state of Ontario banned it as child pornography. Later on, an activist group in Oklahoma County asked their library system to remove their copy of the movie. When they refused, the group showed a single scene from the movie to a judge. Through a snowball effect, he not only blocked the movie from the library, but deemed showing it illegal. Tapes of the movie were confiscated, and police demanded the names of people renting the movie from Blockbuster outlets so those films could be confiscated as well.

Thankfully, the American Civil Liberties Union heard about the case. They filed suit, saying that the seizure of videos violated first, fourth, and fourteenth amendment rights. In the end, the film was re-legalized.

Among film critics, the film is considered a classic. It received the top prize at the famed Cannes Film Festival – the Palme d’Or, a mark of distinction for films as unusual as The Tin Drum. It also won an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film), an award rarely given to a film as dark or strange as The Tin Drum.

In fact, there are rarely films as dark or strange as The Tin Drum. It’s cited as a landmark of the terrifying type of movie that takes you way out of your comfort zone in the name of art. Premiere Magazine calls this type of film a “Dangerous Movie” – a movie which “puts square in your face all of the things Hollywood usually presumes you go to the movies to get away from.” Their examples of “dangerous movies” include Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Weekend. It’s great that we live in a nation with not just the artistic freedom to make bizarre and shocking movies, but one with people willing to see them.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club

Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998)

When most people talk about films and time loops, they refer to time loops as “a la Groundhog Day.” In Groundhog Day and many other films like it, time loops are a way for normal people to try everything again. Ultimately, time loops are seen as a sort of bad karma. But in tonight’s film, Run Lola Run, time loops are a chance for Lola (played by Franka Potente) to try things again in an attempt to save her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreau).

In Run Lola Run, both written and directed by Tom Tykwer, it appears that nobody is aware that they are in a time loop at all, unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day who is completely aware of his repeating, so much so that he manipulates his experience to set up certain events, learn to play piano, and win the heart of a woman he’s smitten with. The plot of Run Lola Run rotates around Lola’s need for a large sum of money to save her Manni’s life. He owes a lot of money to a crime boss who will kill him if he doesn’t deliver. Lola chooses to try to steal money from the bank where her father works, then deliver the money to Manni, who’s trying to get the money himself by robbing a grocery story. Tykwer repeats the sequence three times. Each time Lola goes to the bank, she learns the same things. If she were aware that she had tried this before, she would have not gone back each time. However, notice that in the first sequence, Manni shows Lola how to load a gun. In the second sequence, she knows how to use a gun already.

So, a major theme in this film is the concept of chaos. The chaos theory states that small things that people do can (and often do) result in major changes. Notice that the only real difference between the three sequences is how Lola responds to the man on the stairwell during the animation sequence. Each response causes a slight change in timing, and therefore a totally different outcome. Also, each time Lola passes people on the street, a different future is shown for those people, though there are seemingly no differences within the context of the film.

One final theme in the film is futility. Lola seems to make quite a few decisions in each loop that result in the outcome. But did she ever decide how the sequence would end? Was there any great planning on her part? Or is fate simply in the hands of the man with the dog? Is Lola simply running around like a ball on a track, encountering whatever obstacles she will? Nobody, perhaps not even Tykwer himself, can know.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
SPA Film Club

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

How do we watch a silent movie like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)? Really, most film-goers feel the same way about silent film that we feel about rotary phones and typewriters – why would we even spend time on something so technologically out of date? Well, we’re not dealing with a tool here (you don’t use a movie), we’re looking at an art form. One of the problems with film lately is that the technology of it, special effects if you will, seems to have overwhelmed our appreciation of that.

So say this to yourself, out loud (or you can silently mouth it for less ironic effect): silent film is not an antiquated, obsolete method of movie-making. It is a specific form of expression, different from what we are currently used to. Few musicians currently write and perform music using the instrumentation of the western European medieval period (the lute! the sackbut! the hautbois! the vielle!), but that doesn’t mean that the music of that period has no value or that it cannot be appreciated. In fact, it’s pretty cool. And so is silent film.

Here are some things to love about silent film. First, its black and whiteness. Nosferatu is a horror movie, and horror movies are better in black and white. Yes, we know blood looks cooler if it’s actually red, but horror movies are more effective if they don’t show the blood. The original Halloween (1978), for example, avoids any blood, and it’s a slasher movie, but it is scarier than most of the horror that follows it in the genre because so much of takes place in your mind. Psychological horror is freakier than gross-out horror. Black and white further engages the psychological effect of a film because it recedes from the verisimilitude of color, it’s unreal. And horror is all about otherness. What’s more, if you do have blood, isn’t it creepier if it’s black? Tim Burton thought so in Batman Returns (1992).

Second, silent movies are silent. Film-makers struggled for 30 years to sync up sound with image, a technological difficulty that took ingenuity to overcome and didn’t happen until 1925. But in the meantime, the silent approach developed into a laudable form. Watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) sometime. Underneath its musical plot, it recaps the transition from silent to sound and acknowledges that many great silent actors could not make that transition because their voices weren’t auralgenic.

But look at that phrase: “great silent actors.” What does that mean? It means that actors of the silent era created indelible characters, memorable, expressive, larger-than-life actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and on and on. And a lot of them did this with their faces; if you can’t speak out loud, emotion must be communicated through face and physical expression. Watch for this in Nosferatu, how the actors capture love, horror, fear, sadness – the basic human emotions – effortlessly with their faces. Now, this is a bit more expressionistic, or exaggerated for emotional effect, than we’re used to, and that can seem weird. But as we get used to it we realize we’re seeing human emotion more clearly as an element of narrative than we do in modern film.

Finally, one of the modern film-making’s most bothersome elements, to this writer anyway, is the soundtrack, so manipulative, so distracting, so much like a band-aid slapped over a film’s weaknesses or a chaperone that interferes with our engagement with a hot date. In true silent film, film without the ongoing organ accompaniment that would have been improvised and played by an organist, live during the movie, we connect directly with these emotions. All modern DVDs of silent film include musical accompaniment, mostly because contemporary film fans cannot fathom the total absence of sound. We’ll leave the recorded organ accompaniment turned on during tonight’s screening, but imagine if it was just you, and the vampire, alone in a castle room so dark there’s no color, and no one can hear you scream. Because there is no sound.

Happy Halloween!

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006)

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

Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Imagine, if you will, a giant boat. This boat is three stories tall, over three hundred feet long, and weighs 340 tons. It’s luxurious and a sight for almost everyone to see. Now imagine that same boat being pulled up a giant mountain, with no machinery whatsoever. Welcome to the world of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Herzog’s Fritzcarraldo is one of those films like Apocalypse Now that works on two levels. On the first, it is a brilliant insight into the dreams of one man. On the second, it is a marvel to see how far a director will go to accomplish his vision. The film is a realist vision of an eccentric Irishman trying to accomplish the impossible. But beyond the film, director Werner Herzog demanded more out of his crew than any other director before him, pushing his crew to insanity, and thus making the film even better. The two stories go hand in hand: the film influenced the production, and visa versa.

The film begins with madness and continues throughout. We see a small boat with a dead motor, slowly pushing its way to an opera house in the middle of a small town on the Amazon River. The man on the boat is Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald (based on a real man), or as the natives call him, Fitzcarraldo (played by Klaus Kinski). Fitzcarraldo has one vision: build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon and have the great Italian singer Enrico Caruso star there opening night. But the only problem is that he cannot get to the place where the Opera shall be built. But Fitzcarraldo has a brilliant idea: carry his boat over a mountain from a river close to where the opera must be built and into another river.

The madness of such an idea makes for a brilliant film but something more amazing happened. Director Werner Herzog actually carried that boat over the mountain. The images of the boat climbing the mountain are both absurd and glorious. It’s almost impossible to understand what could drive a man to do that. But if it had been a plastic boat or special effects, this film would have no power. The spectacle is in the reality. Not only did Herzog carry this boat, but he did it in the heart of the Amazon with a crew of natives who spoke neither a word of English nor German (and were unfairly never paid).

Werner Herzog has been one of those directors whose ambitious expectations have become legend. Aguirre: The Wrath of God, telling the story of one man’s mad quest for El Dorado, also featured the story of man versus nature and was also shot in the middle of the jungle, miles away from civilization. Nosferatu, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, explored the madness of the main character and was shot using Murnau’s original locations. This is ambition bordering on insanity, and Herzog has always explored madness whether as a director, a documentary filmmaker (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man), or an actor in a documentary (Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe).

And the only actor who could complement Herzog was Klaus Kinski. Klaus and Werner went together like two best friends with PMS; put them together and they could either create magic or kill each other. (On the set of Aguirre, it is rumored Herzog pulled a gun on Kinski in order to make him finish a scene.) In Fitzcarraldo, Kinski pulled his soul and heart into the film. You can feel his pain at every mistake and his amazing joy at the successes. Originally, Jason Robards was cast (and Rolling Stone’s singer Mick Jagger as his captain). But Robards would have simply been playing a madman; Kinski is a madman. Kinski and Herzog made five films together, and despite the hatethat frequently erupted between the two, they formed a deep respect (as seen in Herzog’s My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski).

Fitzcarraldo is a film that can only be appreciated when seen. It’s such a strong and ambitious experience that it’s almost impossible to deny its power. Whether you enjoy this film or not, you must respect the power of Herzog and Kinski.

Peter Labuza
Film Club Co-President