Osip

While Cabra-Cega strikes me as a very well made and emotionally engaging film, it leaves me in the dark as to what it is trying to say -- even though I'm of course aware of the fact that all narrative genres say things that are more complex than what could be summed up in a sentence. Because of the film's narrow focus on the underground left group at its center, their isolation and suffering -- which latter is in part a consequence of that very isolation -- the movie comes across as a mere celebration of the left revolutionaries during Brazil's military dictatorship. While I don't have a problem with such a celebration, it doesn't seem to be sufficient material for an entire film.

If this film is trying to remind Brazilians of their quite recent authoritarian past, then why doesn't it tell the stories of those who supported and benefited from the military government? Looking back, it's always easy to identify with the victims or those who fought on the right side; it would be more difficult to portray those who operated the torture chambers -- and who may still fill important positions or be otherwise influential in today's Brazil. It seems to me that this film found a way of immersing itself in the recent past that does not encourage viewers to think about how this past connects to and may indeed still be present in today's Brazil.

Alexander Kluge's "Artisten unter der Zirkuskuppel, ratlos" has often been criticized as inaccessible. I've heard that at the time of the film's first release some cinemas allowed viewers to see the film twice while having them pay for only one ticket, acknowledging that more than one viewing was needed to digest this complex film. Clearly, the film's montage technique and its use of quotes from Hegel, Nietzsche and others in often rather rapid succession doesn't help and may leave some viewers almost as clueless ("ratlos") as the artists of the title. I've nevertheless experienced the film as a deeply moving attempt to deal with the question of the role of art in the face of historical catastrophe - the question of how art after Auschwitz is possible as asked by Theodor Adorno and other intellectuals and artists in post-war Germany.

Ironically, Leni Peickert, the film's hopeful circus director, and her production team, is confronted with the same questions Kluge may have asked himself before making the film. After having solved the problem of producing art for the market, which had caused the first artistic setback (a deus ex machina solution all of a sudden provides Leni Peickert with money), the team is pondering difficult artistic questions. Should we try to reach a mass audience, popularize and simplify matters? Should the circus produce politically engaged, "tendential" art - our would this reduce the issues at hand to mere slogans?

That the circus is a stand-in for artistic production in general becomes clear when Leni Peickert and her team visit a writer's congress that triggers off a discussion of "can there be art after Auschwitz," resonating with Adorno's statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Rather than endorsing this discussion, however, the film appears to exhibit its sterility and formulaic quality.

The film's insistence on catastrophe, violent historical upheaval and failed revolution through its use of historical footage implicitly makes a claim for the task art has to take on. Kluge's film begins with the recent past many Germans of the sixties wanted to forget: a hilarious documentary sequence of a "festival of art" staged by the Nazis and featuring extras wearing (unhistorical) ancient Germanic costumes. The soundtrack ironically underlays this with an Italian version of Paul McCartney's song "Yesterday." Against this "yesterday," against Nazi art with its blind celebration of a presumably glorious Germanic past, Kluge's film critically reflects on the role of art in post-war German society.

Most memorable are perhaps the scenes with the elephants - the animals that never forget. At one point, scenes of circus elephants filmed by Kluge are cut with historical photos, while Kluge's voice tells of elephants who died in a sensational fire in a zoo. "We won't forget," the elephants say, and Kluge's voice-over mysteriously tells of a pain that had to be locked up in crates and submerged in the ocean: the experience of trauma that can neither be dealt with and faced, nor forgotten. Kluge's film is a plea for an art that enables us to work with historical trauma and to transform it into artistic production and political action. Unfortunately, his film was not, like, for instance, his earlier movie "Abschied von Gestern" ("Yesterday Girl") a success with audiences, but it remains a moving and intellectually engaging contribution to the discussion of the role of art in postwar Germany. Unfortunately, to my knowledge Kluge's films are not generally available on video.

In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript -- a novel with the title "Blue mountains or Tienshan." The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity. Even after the end of the Soviet Union a film that is worth while watching.