jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Like Weltschmerz and Fahrvergnügen, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is one of those German words that don’t quite have an equivalent in other languages: “working-off-the-past” has been a national project for the last sixty-odd years; it stands to reason that no other country has a history quite as heavy with guilt and horror to cope with. To be sure, the Holocaust has been the topic of countless films, but precious few address the legacy of the most efficient genocide in history as it confronts us today. With And Along Come Tourists, writer-director Robert Thalheim has made an understated film about a particularly sensitive place where past and present collide with unforgotten atrocities: the present-day town of Oswiecim, Poland, site of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Read the rest of my review of And Along Come Tourists on About.com. At the reception following the MoMA screening, I had the distinct pleasure of being mistaken for the director several times. MoMA is screening the film, which doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, as part of its Kino! 2007 program. You can catch it tomorrow at 2pm. Related: Yella and Q*Bert at the Holocaust Memorial.

Am Ende Kommen Touristen. Robert Thalheim, 2006. ****

The German trailer:

This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)

It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.

Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.

Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.

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When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn’t cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks. The word for this is Shoahxploitation.

How titillating is Black Book? At cliffhanger pace, Rachel (Carice van Houten) flees from her bombed-out hiding place, and Verhoeven runs down a comprehensive checklist of World War II tropes: endless narrow escapes through attics, trunks, and caskets, barges that get the Apocalypse Now treatment, resistance airdrops, backroom operations, midnight raids, botched kidnappings, prison breakouts, firing squads, and tense passport controls: “Papiere, bitte!” Oh no, we’re carrying secret microphones and suitcases stuffed with Jewish gold!

Plenty of machine-gun violence leads to gleeful close-ups of mass graves, and Verhoeven doesn’t skimp on the sex, either. When good men are imprisoned, it’s clear that somebody must sleep with the occupiers to free them. Graphic Jew-on-German action follows, and in one extended scene, our dedicated heroine colors her pubic hair to fool the Obersturmbannführer (Sebastian Koch). In turn, drunken fascist swine piss in front of their whores, and our heroine has to vomit a little. And you know if there’s a shitbucket, Verhoeven won’t be satisfied with a simple close-up: somebody has to dump it out over someone else, preferably a naked woman.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of movies where the murderous villains carry my father’s name, and the Nazis in Black Book are about as three-dimensional as the ones in Indiana Jones. With Starship Troopers, Verhoeven himself created a compelling satire of fascism. There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance, but is it asking too much that they grow more insightful rather than more graphic and exploitative? Black Book pretends to bring news about duplicity and treachery and the odd bedfellows that wartime makes, but it’s obvious that nothing gets Verhoeven as excited as the cold steel of a Nazi gun against hard Jewish nipples.

Zwartboek. Paul Verhoeven, 2006. *

• Here’s the trailer

I’m still retching over how awful this was–total Holocaust Exploitation, every bit as shameless and hoaky as Life is Beautiful. Meryl Streep? “I stole a Ham, and they zent me to Auschwitz!” Jesus Christ. And Kevin fuckin’ Kline, whacky and crazy like he just popped over from A Fish Called Wanda? Give me a break. Sophie’s choice, three hours in the making, is a heart-wrenching moment (how could it not be?) but the movie that’s been constructed around it is an even worse atrocity. None of the historical details ring true, all of the sets and theme music and bullshit accents (Polish and Southern) make sure you can’t take this seriously for a second. Here’s the give-away: we don’t know anything about Sophie’s son or daughter; they’re not characters at all. Pakula uses them as shamelessly as the Nazis. And Sophie herself, once she initiated our Southern boy into the mysteries of sex and death, gets to die. What a load of hooey.

But I can’t stop saying it: “I stole a Ham, and they zent me to Auschwitz!”

Great & twisted. Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde are both fantastic. Wicked.