jürgen fauth’s muckworld

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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Sarah Polley’s first feature, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, is getting a lot of praise on the festival circuit, and she was appropriately celebrated at the premiere for MoMA’s Canadian Front program last night.

Julie Christie plays a woman in her sixties who finds herself putting pans into the freezer, and before you know it, her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) has to drive her to a home — where she soon forgets all about him and begins a touching/infuriating relationship with another patient instead. It’s well acted, of course, but the dialogue is a tad too “literary” for my taste, and Polley’s direction left me somewhat confused in the end. Still, it’s a story that rarely gets told–when was a last time you saw a tour of a nursing home as act-ending set piece? It’s goes without saying that it’s all terribly sad, even though there are a few flashes of humor. In a way, this is a movie not quite unlike Severance: Away From Her can be just as hard to take, and you really have to be in the mood for it. At the Q&A with Polley and Olympia Dukakis, it was nice to see that Polley can, in fact, smile.

Away from Her. Sarah Polley, 2006. ***

• Official site with trailer
• Wikipedia
• Away from Her on Rotten Tomatoes
• Away from Her on GreenCine: Sundance
• The Reeler has photos and quotes from last night’s screening
• Reverse Shot loved it
• YouTube Bonus:
  • Sweet Hereafter video of Sarah Polley singing “Courage”
  • Sarah Polley talks about Away from Her at the Berlinale