November's Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman -- BARBARIANS: The Wolf and the Eagle Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD

 

This post is written by our 

monthly correspondent Lee Liberman

The wolf is the earthy forest threat; the eagle emblematic of Roman power. These are the symbols (notes 3,4) of a more empathic and personal story of pillage-and-plunder than you’ve seen in other series about the ancients. BARBARIANS, now streaming on Netflix, beats many blood-and-guts epics and harnesses your emotions to its galloping close, like a beautiful poem. It has plenty of sturm & drang, ‘Mists of Avalon’ tropes, and urgent, compelling drama. But showrunners Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf have higher purpose — the rescue of an historic moment from Nazi fake news (note 1). 

For story, we follow friends and poignant love triangle (above from l) Arminius (Laurence Rupp),Thusnelda (Jeanne Goursaud), and Folkwin, (David Schütter), from childhood into maturity and a famous battle. It’s a tale conceived around feuding local Germanic tribes (‘barbarians’ to the Romans) who join forces to throw off Roman rule. The battle of Teutoburg Forest 9AD was a singular loss and insult to Rome, ending its expansion in Germania/Germany. The Nazis used it to magnify German prowess and claim Arminius an ancestor to Hitler. 

Of the three leads, only Folkwin Wulfspeer (above) is imaginary — village swordsman of humble folk, with smarter, gruffer intensity than Brad Pitt’s Achilles. Schütter is oddly arresting as the jock who spears and thinks, even more so than Arminius, whose story this is. Folkwin is lover of Thusnelda, whose controlling father, a Cherusci elder, is priming her for sale to the Chatti chief for five horses. Meanwhile, Arminius had been taken as a child and raised to a position of authority by renowned General Varus, whom he has now joined in Germania (below, Varus, l, Arminius, r). 

According to historians (notes 1,2) the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD became an ideological rallying point for the Nazis and Arminius an inspiration for far-right extremists. Primary scriptwriter Andreas Heckmann set out to remedy this Reich-wrong, spinning suspense and a love story quite apart from battle history, which has been avoided because of its Nazification. In 1875, after the founding of the German Empire, a mighty statue of Arminius was unveiled in the forest (below). He is depicted as a colossus who saved the ‘purity’ of German blood (Barbarians ‘pure’?) from Roman conquest. (Too bad the swastica, a pagan symbol of life, is too far corrupted by the Nazis for rescue.) 

Arminius is convincingly acted here by the dark-haired Mr. Rupp, not a Nordic German ideal. As young son of the Cherusci tribal chief, he is given away in a transaction to keep the peace. Ari, renamed Arminius, is raised personally, lovingly, in Rome by Varus, governor of Gaul, to become a knight (‘Rome will be your mother and your father now’). (Below, Varus, played by Gaitano Aronica). 

It is young-adult Arminius’s struggle that gains painful traction as he re-engages with the father who had allowed him to be taken,

then endures a second betrayal that tears him apart. How do you process betrayal by someone who loves you, dreams for you and with you, and whom you love in return? Arminius steps up, but his choices (and also Folkwin and Thusnelda’s) are fraught with rage to redress grief, treachery, and the rank transactional nature of existence. You see Arminius juggle his loyalties — to his tribal origins and to the ordered Roman world in which he has been educated and ennobled (Arminius below: he is Roman armored, Cherusci painted). 

The series begins with Thusnelda being offered to Chatti chief, Hadgan, a greasy guy with bad teeth who complains her pelvis is too narrow. A bully, Hadgan is way out of his league here—Thusnelda talks to the gods and is a lethal warrior; she’ll dispose of him later. But for now, the Romans demand cows and grain — a resumption of their former depredations. Thusnelda escapes to Folkwin where they make love and plot to hunt bird — the Roman golden eagle standard— though there will be blood. The theft will prove that Rome can be beaten; the battle approaches. 

Note that the Barbarians speak German and the Romans in orderly ancient Latin. Although subtitled, the effect adds authenticity; you are time-warped to a period when motley tribes of Germania (the Cherusci, Bructuri, Marsi, Sicambri, Chauci, Chatti) chanted in circles, wearing weird get-ups and painted, convened in ‘the Thing’ (group assembly), fought each other over ‘fistfuls of wool’, but cowered before steely Rome— its brutality ruthless, arrogant, elegant. All these wild folk and authoritarian leaders feel familiar —like people you know. And their business and feuds are as compelling as our own idiot mishegas.

(Spoiler alert for the following paragraph: 

If you plan to view Barbarians, watch the series first 

and then come back to finish this article.) 

The tribes are cleverly maneuvered into a great army and humiliate Rome on the battlefield. Exactly how it is carried out is completely absorbing, despite gruesome bits best ignored. (Above: artist’s impression of the battlefield as tribesmen wear down the Roman column.) It unfolds with the beauty of a great symphony with rain and fire that thunders as affectingly as any climax in Game of Thrones — and less showoff-y. Thusnelda shouts at Varus “You are the army of the dead”. The look on the General’s face as he surveys his unimaginable loss (three legions, 15,000 men, a great river of steel) and his own trust betrayed, is devastating. He calls for the removal of his armor and dies on his sword —the eagle has fallen. (Below, archival)

Note 1. 

Note 2.

Note 3. 

Note 4. 

September Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman: Marco Kreuzpaintner's German series, BEAT

 BEAT   POP   BPM   LOOP   BACKSPIN   DROP   CODA 

This 7-episode German tv series (chapter heads are shown above the photo) picks up on the after-effects of the Soviet annexation of East Germany, a horror story that reflects the soul abuse and freedom limits of the Communists following WWII. It also jibes with our now year-round proliferation of horror film spurred by both authoritarianism and climate chaos, such as monster hurricane Dorian that has us locked in dread these coming days. Hoping the storm does not murder, summer dog days lead to fall’s reassembly of students and partying — here’s a close-up of BEAT and the Berlin techno club scene.

Starring some accomplished young German actors, its grimness unspools on Amazon Prime with two main threads. One is a crime procedural involving the work of an FBI-like European security investigative unit, ESI, to take down a soulless entrepreneur engaged in multiple illegal activities, here a particularly lurid business of traffic in human organs.

The crime story is set against the techno beat of Berlin’s club life that burgeoned following the fall of the Berlin Wall; it burst with rebellious energy after East German Communism died. A Vice report notes that when the Wall fell in 1989, an energetic, industrial sound for a new era already existed. But in the ruins of Communist East Berlin, a no-man’s land of transformer stations, power plants, bunkers, hangers, and factories morphed into ravers’ paradises.

These derelict brutalist buildings (where once a Berliner could have been shot for trespassing) became havens energized by German kids’ demand for hard sound. Pumping techno became the backdrop for “...left-wing politics, gender experimentation, nudity, and huge-scale brutalist architecture…” (The Guardian, 2016). *

The work of Marco Kreuzpaintner (right), this is a weird love-letter to Berlin where he had spent a dozen years visiting existing venues like Berghain on which he modeled BEAT’s Club Sonar. But the tribute seems ironic and ambivalent. Here Kreuzpaintner pairs rocking techno with the most brutal of crime, instilling, conditioning, if you will, more revulsion for the club scene than maybe he meant, given his affection for it — even his chapter heads are DJ terms, as though the club were metaphorically orchestrating the crime and its investigation. Below, the story kicks off with club-goers finding blood dripping on them from the bodies of two women suspended from the ceiling who have been carved up for the sale of their organs. Night of revels — not.

Robert Schlag, aka BEAT, above r and below, is played by accomplished young veteran Jannis Niewöhner (Maximilian in Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne — the terrific series on Starz -- in a wildly different leading role from this one). Right off, Beat describes the feeling of the club as the pure, unconscious comfort of returning to the womb, soothed by the maternal-like heartbeat of throbbing music, a world of play and sublime escape. (And Kreuzpaintner is said to be the first filmmaker to come close to showing what that world feels like.)

Beat is club promoter, involved in all aspects of operation along with the owner, his best friend, Paul, below, (Hanno Koffler, of Free Fall). Paul and his wife have a small boy (Beat’s godson) who needs an organ transplant. They are the closest thing to family in Beat’s life.

Orphaned as a child, Beat sees the world as corrupt and uses drugs and club life to shape a reality he can handle — yet he’s caring to his friends and reliable at work. He runs club programming while being a true creature of the scene — gaunt, hyperactive, strung out, snorting blow and popping pills through days and nights of rocking and casual sex.

We see his recurring dream of being in a park with his parents when they vanished; know he was sent to an orphanage, later adopted. His very early foundation seems to have enabled his current relationships and high-functioning as an adult.

Early on we are thrown off track by a schizy weirdo (below) — in a fine bit of character acting by Kostja Ullmann. (He was in World Without End as Gwenda’s brother, Holger). Named Jasper, he floats in and out of Beat’s periphery, clearly much the worse for his own childhood orphaning and implicated in Beat’s early life and current gruesome events.

Meanwhile ESI is recruiting Beat as an asset to aid in their arrest of Philipp Vossberg (Alexander Fehling of Inglorious Basterds, Homeland, and Three Peaks) who, among other illegal operations, owns the business that traffics in human organs. It’s relentlessly ugly and hard to watch: the capture and murder of migrants and harvesting of their organs. Vossberg coaxes clients desperate for organs into becoming business partners; he uses their auspices as cover for his other criminal enterprises. Beat’s partner, Paul, has been promised an organ for his ailing son and is seduced into Vossberg’s web, making the handsome, sociopathic kingpin a regular at Club Sonar as a stockholder.

We follow a little boy who has been seized for organ donation to Paul’s son and the slow meltdown of the surgeon who works for the harvesting operation and finds his job intolerable.

It takes ESI’s Emilia (Karoline Herfurth: a screenwriter, director, and actress) and her boss, Richard, (Christian Berkel of Inglorious Basterds) some time to woo Beat (all three above) into spying for them on Vossberg but Beat is finally persuaded by his worry for Paul and by ESI’s promise they will trace what happened to his parents. As his handler, Emilia comes to his aid (he calls her ‘Jane Bond’). Beat makes himself useful to Vossberg who begins to trust him, and Emilia in turn finds out about his missing mother and father (shedding some light on his nihilism).

The unimaginable showdown among the main players (above, Vossberg) remains for your discovery which despite some earlier tediousness will not disappoint for charisma, twisted, and shocking.

* For more on the club scene, see Der Klang der Familie (The Sound of Family): Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall; Felix Denk, Sven von Thulen - Google Books.

NOTE: The series is offered on Prime in subtitled and dubbed versions. Dubbings are always terrible, but I watched some of this one to make sure I was on top of the unsavory plot I had already seen subtitled. If you watch, choose the compelling version in German — otherwise it just dies.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

Film Forum debut for famous Fassbinder TV series: EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY

When TrustMovies was young and Rainer Werner Fassbinder was alive and his internationally acclaimed work was in full bloom, that work seemed to me bracing mostly because of its "newness," strangeness and transgressive qualities.

One of the tests of time regarding how well art that initially shocks actually holds up decades later involves how meaningful it remains. In this regard, most of Fassbinder's oeuvre -- for me, at least -- has certainly stood that test.

As I've grown up, slowly and haltingly to be sure, Fassbinder's films seem to have opened up to include so much more than I initially could appreciate or understand.

That funny, chubby little artist, pictured at right, who possessed such an understanding and rather dark appreciation of women, men, sexuality, the workplace and the post-war Capitalist system that was slowly strangling his own country of Germany, as well as the rest of the western world, was able to transfer his knowledge into cinema (and television) at a rate that can only be called astonishing. Fassbinder completed in all some 48 films (as writer) and 44 (as director) in only 17 years, prior to his untimely death in 1982 at the age of 37.

Though his theatrical movies made the most noise overseas, it now turns out that his best work -- Berlin Alexanderplatz and the just-now receiving-its-U.S.-theatrical-debut EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY (Acht Stunden sind kein Tag), to use two stunning examples -- were made for German television.

The latter of those television series, first shown on German TV in the fall of 1972, is made up of five parts and runs 478 minutes (just a shade under eight full hours). At this point I've only had time to watch the first section, a 102-minute piece entitled Jochen and Marion that details the evolving love story/work story between the two title characters, a smart fellow who labors in a tool manufacturing plant, and his new girlfriend who takes classified ads for a local newspaper.

This striking pair is played by actors from Fassbinder's "repertory": an impressive man of near-Neanderthal beauty, the late Gottfried John (above, and below, underneath), and that still-stunning actress, Hanna Schygulla (below, on top), who made her mark in the title role of The Marriage of Maria Braun.

The two performers are magic, alone or together, and their story is the focal point around which revolve so many of Fassbinder's major interests -- from politics and economics to industrial design, love, lesbianism, child abuse, workers vs the Capitalist system, bathroom usage and necessity as the mother of invention. (And that's only a very incomplete list.)

This first part ends with a funeral (in the rain, of course: Fassbinder does love cliche and melodrama, but he manages to use most of this in ways both appropriate and slightly twisted) followed by a lovely, charming, deeply humane scene in the bedroom between our two lovers.

The workplace gets every bit as much attention as do the leading characters and their family life, and the scenes on the job are full of life, anger, surprise and lots more -- including a power play by management and some blackmail from the workers, along with some very interesting takes on the relationship between men and women. To call this director prescient does not begin to do him full justice.

How Fassbinder orchestrates all this is quite wonderful. Because he was working in television, his movie never "shocks" (even a near-full-frontal workplace shower scene is modulated just enough to pass the censors) yet he is able to give us a look at this surprisingly large-yet-distinct canvas in ways that are both specific (Jochen's family is made up of quite an eccentric bunch) yet pretty universal, too.

In the supporting cast are a number of Fassbinder vets -- from Irm Hermann (above, left) to Kurt Raab -- which should only increase your appetite to view the entire project. Released by Janus Films, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day will have a 2-week engagement, March 14 – 27, at New York's Film Forum and will be screened in three parts. Part 1 (202 minutes) and Part 2 (184 minutes) are separate admission. Part 3 (90 minutes) is free of charge for the viewers of the other two parts. The full screening schedule can be viewed here. Bookings elsewhere around the country? Nothing appears on the Janus website yet, but I can't believe there won't be more cities in which this series can soon be seen. In any case, a Blu-ray and DVD will surely be in the offing from Criterion at some future point.

Streaming non-recommendation: Netflix's crappy German time-travel series, DARK

Yes, I know that conventional wisdom  has long insisted that Germans (and German movies) have no sense of humor. But Look Who's Back, to use just one recent example, disproves that theory entirely. Unfortunately, the idea bounced back into my mind while viewing the dismal new Netflix-produced German series entitled DARK, which is now available pretty much worldwide via the cable behemoth. There's not a moment of levity, lightness or anything approaching humor anywhere to be seen in these ten tiresome, derivative and annoying 50-minute episodes.

This is one of those series chock full of pseudo-science, pseudo-religion, pseudo-philosophy, and pseudo-entertainment that keep promising some kind of coalescence that never arrives. Worse, it consistently trips over its own ideas. All about time travel, supposedly made possible every 33 years via our not-quite reliable calendar, it posits a bunch of kidnapped children used in some experiment (above) to facilitate this time travel who keep turning up dead (the experiments evidently continually fail).

And yet, as we see throughout the series, time travel in this sodden little German town is not just possible but is increasingly discovered by a number of its citizens (the one above, for instance), who simply open a couple of doors in a cave beneath the earth (see poster, top) and find themselves either backward or forward in time by those 33 years.

Yet the movement of those citizens is certainly well known to the "experimenter," so what's the point of keeping up the experiments on that rather silly-looking machine? This piece of nonsense is only the worst example of stupid plotting that relies completely on the viewer's inability to stop and "think" for a moment or two. There's so little logic in so much that happens here (the dead come back to life, along with other nonsensical dreck) that you might as well place your brain on hold as you watch.

Yes, the series offers its titular "noir-ish" themes, cinematography, ugliness and gloom. All this is offered up with the kind of expert professionalism we now expect out of Netflix. But then it merely keeps repeating the stuff, over and over, until one has to ask (to quote Peggy Lee), Is that all there is?

Nuclear energy is also on view here, and is part and parcel of the town's problems, as are other things like lust and love (unrequited, of course). The characters are as sullen and sodden a bunch as you will have ever seen in any TV or cable series. The only humor finally arises mostly from how utterly lacking in any the series actually is. It almost becomes something of an inside joke. You can image the producers, writers and directors watching the day's shoot and suddenly saying, "Oh, my god -- that actor just smiled. Delete that moment immediately!"

The performers are mostly good-looking and get the job done, but as we keep moving from 2019 back to 1986 and then (in the last three episodes) 1953 and piecing together exactly who is the grandfather of this one or the mother of that one, not only our interest but any chance to care much about these people dissipates. Also, the series lasts twice as long as it needs to, thanks to its very slow pacing and the camera constantly stopping to focus on a character's angst for maybe two to three times as long as necessary to get the point across. (Were the filmmakers worried that we might miss the abject "seriousness" of all their fine work?)

The finale helps in no way whatsoever, except to begin a whole new section in what I imagine is the year 2052. The series keeps promising some closure, none of which ever arrives. Dark exists to simply string us along. Perhaps that's its point, but if so, then it's mostly for folk who enjoy being diddled without ever reaching a climax. (Think of it as the television equivalent of Tantra Yoga.)

Netflix has just announced that it is renewing Dark for a second season. Good luck -- but count me out. These eight hours-plus have now taken their place as my biggest waste of time this year.

GENERATION WAR: Kolditz/Kadelbach's look at WWII German youth opens at NYC's Film Forum

First things first: GENERATION WAR, the lengthy new German entertainment that opens in New York City tomorrow at Film Forum is television. However, it is not American television but the European variety (specifically German), which raises it a few notches above what we get over here from our major networks. (Our cable channels are another matter.) Four-and-one-half hours long, the "movie" is shown in two parts, the second of which is by far the stronger. The first part, while it draws you in somewhat, seems a bit too fraught with both coincidence and the kind of predictable events that television loves so well. The longer second section is where the growth and change most occur, in which the characters deepen, events coalesce, the noose tightens and finally closes.

The subject here is also telling, and it must have been even more so for the German populace (it was an enormous success in Germany, in the manner, I am guessing, that both our own Roots and Holocaust series took American television by storm), for it involves five young friends (shown above) in the Berlin of 1941 -- kids, really -- as Hitler's war rages at its fullest, when it looks to many, and not just to Germans, as though the Fuhrer might indeed win his campaign and, with Italy and Japan at his side, conquer the world.

As written by Stefan Kolditz (shown at left) and directed by Philipp Kadelbach (shown bleow), along with the very big budget, the program looks quite good in terms of period, decor, costumes and all the rest. And because the cast, in both leading and supporting roles is made up of faces that most Americans will not know or have previously seen, rather than those of big-name stars (à la the current Butler movie), this lends the series another coat of veracity.

Because two of our five friends are soldiers and one of the two women is a nurse at the Russian front, Generation War is indeed a "war movie" for much of its length, and as such is a pretty good one.

The strangest thing for most Americans will be to experience this war from the German side, as the movie allows us to do. This forces us to identify with and to some extent root for these young people, and the effect is odd and disturbing. Add to all this the disturbances felt by the main char-acters as everything they know and have been taught starts to fall apart, and you have the makings of some-thing richly provocative and equally unsettling -- as well as something that we in American almost never get to see. Nor, I wager, have they seen this much in Germany. "What did you do in the war, Gramps and Granny?" is a question probably asked in Deutschland rather more often since the airing of Generation War.

The series moves back and forth from Germany to Russia and Poland, from the fighting to the hospital (above) to the Berlin homes of the Germans, and because one of our five friends is a Jew, we see antisemi-tism raise its ugly head in ways small and huge -- in all three countries (the Poles seem to hate the Jews every bit as much as do the Germans).

There are four tales going on simultaneously here. The first involves the two soldiers -- who are also brothers -- one a gung-ho hero type (Volker Bruch, above, right), the other (Tom Schilling, above, left ) a retiring, intellectual who wants nothing to do with fighting. Both change drastically over the course of the story.

The girl who loves the older brother and works as a nurse at the hospital on the Russian front is played quite well by Miriam Stein (above). Her story -- which takes a happy, healthy pro-Nazi into situations that will test her decency and leave her bereft -- is in some ways the most interesting and original of the bunch.

The other two characters are the young woman (Katharina Schuttler, above, right, and below) who wants a musical career -- which she gets, in spades -- and her boyfriend, Viktor (Ludwig Trepte, above, left), whom she tries to save via the sleazy Nazi official she uses to both further her career and save her lover. (Interestingly, it's the Nazi who ends up in the catbird seat, as happened, post-war, with so many of these killers.)

Ironies, big and small, pile up over the course of the series, leading to a dark, angry finish, in which our sweet kids, below, not yet even 25, have turned into empty husks. Those who are still alive, at least.

Generation War, from Music Box Films, opens tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and in the weeks to come will open in at least nine more cities across the country. You can see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters buy clicking here and then clicking on THEATERS halfway down the screen.