THE NORTH WALL • THE WHITE RIBBON • KARL MAY

Foreign Films

It is for many years now that I favor foreign films 
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/12/the_best_foreign_films_of_2009.html

the smaller productions, the less glamorous lifes, the more modest stories and the easier to follow plots which in my opinion avoid disappointment  and confusion. Also the story keeps lingering in your mind long after.  I saw the Oscar nominated AVATAR but “no” I cannot get excited about green people 

and a fairy tale plot.

 I was able to see three German movies in a row (I am not partial, of course not!) The first one was THE NORTH WALL referring to the steep Eiger North Wall, great. I sat at the edge of my seat. The first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger mountain in the Mont Blanc region in Switzerland by two climbers in the summer of 1936. Beautiful, tragic and spellbinding. I loved it.

The next movie was THE WHITE RIBBON (Das Weisse Band) by Michael Haneke, writer, director.  http://www.sonyclassics.com/thewhiteribbon/

Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years just before World War I. It takes you into the darkness of humanity and the foreshadowing of Germany in the 1930s.  Everything seems quiet and orderly in the village until accidents occur that are never easily understood. The narrator is the school teacher and the whole village starts to get worried. A horse ridden by the doctor crashes into a wire and severely wounds him; a barn is set on fire, a farmer hangs himself, the baron’s son disappears, a bird gets stabbed in a cage and so on.

The children behave more and more unruly, nobody knows why. The pastor, a particularly strict character, had tied a white ribbon to the arms of his two eldest children, a boy and a girl, at the beginning of the events to remind them permanently of their duties to purity. But almost no family is a stranger to child abuse with brutal beatings and the children of the village seem to be the heart of the mystery. But there is no real answer to all of this. It ends with the start of World War I and one walks out off the movie quite disturbed and without answers.

KARL MAY played at the MOMA and I ran to see it:

a Hans-Juergen Syberberg production. I had read most of his books when I was young (and so had almost everybody else in my age group). Old Shatterhand, Winnetou are all characters that were ingrained into all of us. Our dog was then named Hadji after one of the characters, short for: Omar Ben Hadji Abul Abbas Ibn Hadji Dawud al Gossarah — I still remember the full name!) There were these very exact descriptions of American Indians, their habits,  and American landscape and prairies — all of this was extremely exotic to us.

For 30 years Karl May turned out 40 pages a day of adventure fiction and lived at the end of his life  in his house "Villa Shatterland."  He neglected to tell anybody that he spent the first part of his life in prison where he wrote a good part of his books. He never lived in any of the countries that he described so lovingly and so detailed. He manufactured fake degrees for himself and, most shocking to his fans, he'd somehow failed to mention that, as a young man, he had been imprisoned for a total of more than seven years for various offenses, including thievery. And this is also where he wrote many of his stories.

The whole movie was shot in a pinkish tint, in a dramatic and even a bit sentimental way. Maybe it was rather long. Hans-Juergen Syberberg (he also did Ludwig, the Virgin King) included the most beautiful music — Mahler, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven,  in different variations. What a picture.