Titanic (1943)
October 1st, 2007
Neither the first nor the best film telling the story of the doomed ocean liner, the 1943 German version is nonetheless fascinating– mainly because of the ways the story and imagery compares to John Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, and as a study in overt propaganda. There’s the obligatory love story, poor immigrants dance below deck, and the band keeps playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” but the real thrust of this version is an accusation of the ruthless capitalists who caused the catastrophe.
Usually, the tale of the RMS Titanic serves as an object lesson in hubris, but in the Nazi-version, the sin that causes the death of over 1,500 passengers is greed: Sir Ismay, the owner of the White Star line played by Ernst Fritz Fürbinger, wants to break all records to drive stock prices up while John Jacob Astor (Karl Schönböck) is trying to thwart him so he can take over the company. The epilogue makes clear that there is no justice for the death caused by the speculating Englishman and his American nemesis. The sympathetic characters display more “German” virtues that must have seemed useful to the Nazis in 1943: honor, duty, obedience.
Nonetheless, Goebbels wasn’t happy with the film. From Wikipedia:
Titanic was the most expensive German production up until that time and endured many production difficulties, including a clash of egos, massive creative differences and general war-time frustrations. All of this resulted in Joseph Goebbels arresting the film’s director, Herbert Selpin, for treason and ordering him to be hanged in his cell the very next day. The unfinished film, the production of which spiraled wildly out control, was in the end completed by Werner Klingler.
The premiere was supposed to be in early 1943, but the theatre that housed the answer print was bombed the night before the big event. The film went on to have a lacklustre premiere in Paris around Christmas of that same year, but in the end, Goebbels banned it altogether, stating that the German people, at that point going through almost nightly Allied bombing raids, were less than enthusiastic about seeing a film that portrayed mass death and panic.
Titanic. Herbert Selpin and Werner Klingler, 1943. ***
- J. Hoberman on Titanic
- Wikipedia
- Jared Poley: Analysis of a Nazi Titanic
- Titanic at TCM
Yella
September 19th, 2007
Christian Petzold, proud member of the “Berlin School” of young German filmmaking, won the Silver Bear at last year’s Berlinale with the moody tale of a rootless woman who joins forces with a roving venture capitalist. Yella is a richly textured allegory of lust, greed, loneliness, and desire set in the rural East of Germany. It also features a mesmerizing lead performance by Nina Hoss (also awarded with a Silver Bear) and the most obvious, superfluous, and all-around maddening trick ending in memory.
“Who dares to dream in the times of venture capital?” is the film’s strangely juxtaposed tagline, combining the surreal pull of its dreamlike surface with the hard-nosed business sense evidenced by Phillip (Devid Striesow). The young business man takes Yella (Nina Hoss) to negotiations in sterile boardrooms where she shows that she “likes financial statements” and can help him strong-arm his adversaries. Soon, they roam office parks and out-of-the-way motels together, scamming percentages and evading Yella’s bankrupt ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann).
Outside of the office, sober calculations give way to the precisely observed countryside, full of peculiar colors and an irresistible slipstream of pregnant details: red garbage bags that line the corridors of an empty train car, the sonic boom that punctuates a scene otherwise marked by awkward silences. The sad vultures of global capitalism move through a charged world in which even the rustling of wind in the trees seems to bear a hidden meaning. With dazzling intensity, Nina Hoss, a rising German star with an angular face and haunted eyes, holds the film together and propels it forward. If Yella was two minutes shorter, Petzold would have made a film worth raving about.
But then there’s that ending. Not satisfied with the unique place and characters he created, Petzold and co-writer Simone Baer cap Yella with a twist that is as unnecessary as it is obvious. I am tempted to give it away just to free you from the nagging suspicions that plagued my experience, but the film itself hints so strongly at its much-copied 19th century literary antecedents (”Peyton Farquhar” is all I’ll say) that you’ll probably see what’s coming anyway. As a fellow German, I know that it’s in the national character to over-explain and literalize, but I wish Petzold had dared to leave some mystery. Yella would have been no less poignant and infinitely more original.
Yella is currently playing in Germany; the film does not yet have a U.S. release date yet.
Yella. Christian Petzold, 2007. ***
