The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen)                       A                    

Germany  (137 mi)  2006 d:  Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

A brilliantly realized depiction of the East German Stasi secret police, set in the mid 1980’s when they were in full swing, casting their net of surveillance over the entire nation, sadistically turning neighbor against neighbor, all under the thumb of an information hungry police state, where all choices were impossible, where for an entire nation there was no option, as failure to cooperate with the authorities usually meant dire consequences.  This is a revival of Kieslowski’s behind the iron curtain cinema of moral anxiety, and in many ways parallels his 1988 film, A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), as in this case, instead of an ordinary citizen spying on his attractive neighbor, it is one of the highest Stasi agents bugging the home apartment of one of the country’s leading playwrights, a man who flaunts western attire, interests, books and other periodicals, also having a demure leading actress as his girlfriend, so the police can only conclude he’s up to no good.  In both cases, the voyeur becomes intoxicated with the subject, so much so that they act in a way that might otherwise be considered insane, as it’s beyond logic or reason, and might even be considered an act of love. 

Ulrich Mühe, a man who was in real life married to a Stasi informer, who understands all too well what it feels like to live under constant police surveillance, plays Captain Gerd Wiesler, an Alec Guinness look-alike from DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), an unassuming man of quiet intelligence, a Party advocate who rarely speaks, but continually jots down what he sees in a small pocket notebook, the eyes and ears of the State.  At each level above him are more despicable men, men enthralled with and corrupted by their own power, men who hold themselves above the laws of the nation, who would rather intimidate the entire population into blind obedience.  Their systematic infiltration of the population is legendary, their interrogations ruthless, operating with 100,000 full-time employees, 200,000 informers, forcing each citizen to capitulate to the police one interrogation at a time.  In the opening sequence, Wiesler demonstrates how he wears down his subjects, offering them no sleep, coldly and calculatingly waiting them out until their resistance is broken, then threatening their family or loved ones with arrest until they confess.  Sebastian Koch is the East German playwright Georg Dreyman, “the only non-subversive playwright we have,” while Martina Gedeck is exquisite in the role of his girl friend, the nation’s leading actress, Christa-Maria Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R,” who unfortunately has an addiction to popping illegal pills.  The head of the Stasi is forcing Christa to submit to weekly sessions of sex in exchange for allowing her to work, an artistic practice that is completely controlled by the State.  It is their apartment that Wiesler bugs, sitting and listening and typing his reports on everything he hears.

Dreyman is connected to a community of other artists, many of whom have already defected to the West, which is the government’s greatest fear, which is why they keep such close tabs on them.  Many have already been interrogated and imprisoned, leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouths, while others have been blacklisted and out of work for as long as a decade.  The Stasi’s method is to imprison them indefinitely, but long enough so that they voluntarily never again contribute anything else in their chosen field.  What Wiesler discovers, however, is that these artists are hiding nothing, exhibiting a rare openness in a society that thrives on secrets and covering up, discovering instead that it is his own superiors who have the suspect motives, which puts him in the same impossible position as the people he is spying on.  This turns into a series of calculated risks, where each side realizes they’re being watched, but they have to decide how to act.  When a blacklisted director who hasn’t worked in ten years finally hangs himself, Dreyman and Wiesler simultaneously commit to more drastic actions, beautifully rendered in a musical sequence where Dreyman plays a piece of piano music given to him by the director called “Sonata for a Good Man,” a piece written by the film’s musical composer, Gabriel Yared, which has a significant impact on Wiesler, who begins to identify with “the lives of others,” omitting significant details in his reports, as it’s hard for him to believe his government didn’t drive that man to the breaking point.  Dreyman at one point is heard asking how anyone who has listened to this music, really listened to it, could ever think of it as anything bad.  On several occasions Wiesler nearly blows his cover, one is a beautifully designed sequence in a bar which is one of the turning points in the film, as without ever coming out and actually saying so, he subtly persuades Christa to re-examine her weekly sessions with the Stasi superior, where she inquires into his motives, as he seems to know so much about her, questioning if he is a “good man?” 

Beautifully written, mixing meticulous detail with intelligence and humor, where the tone and pacing of the film are perfectly matched, where the music does not overreach, yet is genuinely in synch with the mood of the film, where the ensemble cast is flawless, and where the urgency of the story starts to feel overwhelmingly personal after awhile.  There’s another scene nearer the end where Christa is arrested and subject to interrogation, a scene of indescribable conflict and tension, where she identifies her interrogator as a friend from an earlier moment in the film, yet cannot reveal anything, where the interrogator himself is under observation, so both are placed in an impossible dilemma.  This poignantly describes living under the thumb of relentless totalitarian psychological pressure, eloquently described in his book as The Captive Mind by Polish Nobel prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and the film never for a minute wavers in this regard, filled with small moments that are as revealing as the larger ones, which include a not so incidental reference to Communist Party Premiere Gorbachev, a man who simply walked away from a position of unlimited power, and a man who incidentally changed the entire culture of living under an authoritarian police state, and in doing so, changed the course of possibilities for others.  It’s a powerful work for a first time filmmaker who also wrote the film, whose recollections include his mother being searched by the secret police as a young boy, which may help explain the dramatic impact this film reaches by the end, stunningly understated, yet precisely to the point.

Benny's Video

BENNY’S VIDEO           C-            

Austria  Switzerland  (105 mi)  1992  d:  Michael Haneke

Obviously, in Benny’s Video and Funny Games I attempt to explore the phenomenon of television…I am most concerned with television as the key symbol primarily of the media representation of violence, and more generally of a greater crisis, which I see as our collective loss of reality and social disorientation.  Alienation is a very complex problem, but television is certainly implicated in it.  We don’t, of course, anymore perceive reality, but instead the representation of reality in television.  Our experiential horizon is very limited.  What we know of the world is little more than the mediated world, the image.  We have no reality, but a derivative of reality, which is extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political standpoint but in a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of everyday experience.

—Michael Haneke, March 8, 2004 interview with Christopher Sharrett,  Kinoeye | Austrian film: Michael Haneke interviewed

One of the intriguing aspects about Michael Haneke is just how late he got into the game, as he was 46 years of age when he started work on his first feature film, having spent more than two decades writing plays and working in television, where surprisingly he was born before Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, or even Werner Herzog, all significant forces in the German New Wave of the 70’s, while Haneke was not at all a factor.  His surge of influence came later, perhaps described as post modernism, examining the human condition, including major themes like suicide or murder, but doing so in a way outside all established norms, directly confronting audiences, where he has a way of implicating them into his films, leaving questions unanswered by the end, forcing viewers to make their own moral choices about right and wrong.  He built a cinema of cruelty and discomfort, showing graphically disturbing adult content onscreen, which in itself is questionable, using exploitive imagery that crosses all boundaries of good taste, which disgusts some and creeps out others, but it serves to provoke audiences into extreme reactions.  In just his second film, the opening few minutes tells the story, as it amounts to a snuff film, with Benny, a young Arno Frisch, who we would see again in Funny Games (1997), arguably the most thoroughly despicable character in the annals of film history, does a dry run for that role here as a menacing 14-year old kid obsessed with videotaping everything, including the killing of a farmyard pig, with a captive bolt pistol to the head, which he then rewinds and watches again in slow motion and freeze frames, including the auditory wailing of the animal.  So yes, Haneke is the guy that made that film.  The audience is jolted into an awkwardly discomforting position in the opening few minutes of the film, already squirming in the hideous fascination with death.  While Fassbinder was driven to analyze the origins of the German Nazi in his massive TV mini-series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), using Franz Bieberkopf as his ordinary man who is capable of making that transition, now with this film Haneke has created his own making of a Nazi in contemporary German society.  In this case it’s not based on poverty and class oppression, or extreme deprivation, but comes from the rich and affluent class, as they’re the ones that never hold their kids responsible for anything, but allow them to literally get away with murder. 

While Haneke is a proponent that violent images on television or video games have an impact on society at large, contributing to a dehumanized effect, developing an appetite for greater and more destructive violent imagery, using Hollywood as the prime example, where after a while viewers grow numb to the impact, creating a fractured psychological fissure suggesting an absence of moral judgment, becoming more and more immune to behavioral consequences.  Films that were shocking in the 90’s are much more commonplace in today’s world, where there’s even terminology to describe it as torture porn, becoming a genre for cinema export. Because the world around us contains violent and disturbing war imagery that seems to play continuously on television news reports, including Bosnian atrocities shown here, Haneke suggests there is a direct correlation in the viewer’s ability to process this information, as some seem to feed off the violence, making them more prone to violent outbursts in their own behavior as well.  In America, for instance, how many school shootings have there been since Columbine?  Actually the number is 208, to be exact, as of February 2018, averaging one a week in the year 2015, (Parkland to Columbine School Shootings List | Westword, also School Shootings Since Columbine: By the Numbers - ABC News), where they have become so frequent that often they’re not even reported in the news anymore unless the casualty numbers are extreme, most with no prior criminal records, not even an arrest, where more than two-thirds of the offenders obtained their guns from a relative or from home.  In Benny’s case, he stole the bolt pistol from the farm, placing it in a drawer in his room for safekeeping.  What brief images we get of Bennie at school suggests he’s nonchalantly arrogant, viewing himself with a superiority complex, running a financially successful pyramid scheme, thinking he’s the smartest person in the room.  At home to wealthy parents, he’s the picture of polite obedience, sitting at the breakfast or dinner table, keeping his thoughts to himself, revealing little to nothing, retreating to the isolation of his room, which has been reconfigured to his liking, keeping the window curtains drawn, and a surveillance camera pointing down to the streets, with another live camera stream capturing any activity in his room, such as guests or visitors, with plenty of viewing screens for his pleasure.  When left alone, which is often, loud heavy metal music can be heard on full blast while he sits and does his homework.  Benny has an older sister Evi (Stephanie Brehme) who lives outside the home, but takes advantage of their parent’s absence with a huge party on the premises, having to answer for it afterwards with little to no consequences. 

Benny is a regular visitor at a local video store, where his taste for recklessly violent videos comes as no surprise, yet the film documents the banality of the ordinary routine, returning older videos, checking out new ones, each transaction written by hand on a company invoice, where we also see a brief exchange of money.   One day, when his parents are away for the weekend, he notices a girl (Ingrid Stassner) standing outside the video store at the window looking in, inviting her home, treating her to some reheated frozen pizza before showing her the pig video.  Not at all repulsed by it, so he pulls the bolt gun out of his drawer and teases her with it before shooting her offscreen, all captured by his live video screen.  Her cries and screams are heard constantly while he attempts to shut her up, yet reloads at the same time, shooting her again.  Her shrieks only increase in volume, which seems to set him into a panic, both drowning in hysteria before he silences her with a third shot, all happening just offscreen.  In the aftermath, he couldn’t be more casual, slipping into the kitchen for something to eat, wiping up blood on the floor, moving her into a closet where she is wrapped in plastic.  When he gets a call from a friend, they go out to watch a live band, spending the night at his friend’s place afterwards before returning back home.  Before he does, however, he gets a buzz cut, the preferred favorite of neo-Nazi’s, and the typical look behind being called skinheads.  After a brief lecture from his father about his hair, Benny shares the video with his parents, who are utterly shocked by what they see, but simply put him to bed without a word, before discussing the ramifications among themselves.  Georg, Ulrich Mühe, who returns as the beleaguered father in FUNNY GAMES and again as a sympathetic East German Stasi agent in THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), and Anna (Angela Winkler) attempt to rationally analyze their options, discussing the pros and cons with the same logic as if they were making a business decision, with Georg attempting to remain calm and unemotional, while Anna breaks into awkward smiles that suggest her own unease.  As he gets into meticulous detail about what they must do, it all sounds so scientific, without any thought whatsoever about the girl, or her family, or even their own son, for that matter.  As it is with most crimes, the cover-up is even more appalling, because those are supposedly the adults in the room.  With self-preservation taking center stage at the expense of all else, Georg sends Benny and Anna on a luxury trip to Egypt, supposedly for a family funeral, but it’s a ruse to give Dad a chance to dispose of the body and clean up afterwards, removing all evidence of a crime.  With Egypt being the cradle of European civilization, the irony is not lost on viewers, as the culture of human development has evolved into elaborate cover-ups for sophisticated crimes.  A glimpse of a reformed Benny near the end as a choir boy singing in church is perhaps too big a stretch, but the chilling finale is icy cold.  While overly grim and depressing, not really proving anything, the film reveals the raw amateurishness of an early career effort, where moral outrage feels more like a sermon, as Haneke literally rubs viewer’s noses with repeated images of the crime, watched afterwards by Benny again and again, literally rewinding the story and beginning again, a precursor of what’s to come in the more definitive Funny Games (1997), all implicating the viewer in the lapse of moral clarity.