"Stalingrad"
Feb. 5th, 2006 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicWow. "Stalingrad." (Germany, 1993)
Bloody and tense and unflinching and un-melodramatic and bleak and filthy and horrific and you can tell it wasn't made in Hollywood if only because none of them made it out -- not the main character, not the second-in-command, not the next-to-last one left, not the sick one, not the brave-turned-crazy one, not the Russian who almost gained them salvation, none of them, as the numbers dwindled from battle injuries and disease and suicide and hunger and cold and miscommunication, and the last pair huddled frozen to death in the blizzard in the middle of nowhere wasn't cheapened by a just-too-late rescue or even a slow zoom-out. No cameras lingering over battlefields, no discomfort with the depiction of the intense relationships between and among soldiers. And it managed not to be about Nazism, really, for all that it was a German film about German soldiers starting to lose Germany's war.
A little like "Saving Private Ryan," only the constant shock of warfare wasn't exploited for an old man crying at a cemetery or used as a backdrop for a love story (as they say "Enemy at the Gates" was, which was apparently also about the Battle of Stalingrad). No time to mourn for fallen friends. Dwindling belief in getting out alive. Cold sores and gangrene and blank stares and the breakdown of hierarchy and de facto personal alliances with enemies. Too cold to feel.
Three scenes I liked best, other than the gory fight to gain control of a factory near the beginning:
- Sent on a suicide mission for insubordination, the lieutenant -- played by Thomas Kretschmann, I have to say it, hardly recognizable at 30 and resembling, actually, Cary Elwes -- and his men have been working with other prisoners to clear a snow-blocked road in sub-zero temperatures long enough that their lips are blistered and their eyebrows frozen. An officer announces that because it's Christmas, he's going to give them some bread -- but not until the disgraced lieutenant begs. Only a moment or two, and he whispers, "Bitte." And then, standing in the back of a truck with his chin high, the officer tosses bits of bread into the scrambling crowd. I remember reading about or watching similar scenes in a Holocaust class in high school.
- Having returned mostly intact after all, the remaining men are honorably reinstated but promptly lined up and, to test their loyalty, ordered to act as a firing squad for a group of supposed Russian saboteurs. The men try to protest, look to their lieutenant for help. He tries his best, short of getting himself shot or discharged, tries to plead for one doomed boy who had helped them before. No use; the Captain, who has disliked him from the start, suggests that perhaps the boy reminds him of someone special back home, and orders him to stand down. The lieutenant turns away as his men take aim, says nothing as they wait for a word or a sign from him so they don't have to shoot. The look on his face as the guns fire... his head locked in position but trembling, swallowing hard, mouth working, eyes wet... And in the next scene he sits there, silent, staring at the floor, while the others debate desertion. Their later victory over the Captain feels hollow.
It reminded me of reports of the German death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who murdered entire villages of Jews as they marched through Eastern Europe into Russia: how they would line up the peasants and shoot them so they fell into ditches, and after the war when the trials started the soldiers would claim they weren't to blame because they were only following orders. I don't mean to condemn or exonerate them or the characters in the movie, only to point out the similarity.
- I don't know what to make of this yet, but it was marvelous. Near the end of the movie, the lieutenant and "his" remaining men find a deserted, fully-stocked cellar. In the back is a bedroom where they find a woman tied to the bed. The soldiers decide to "go by rank" and leave the room so their commanding officer can have a turn first. The lieutenant recognizes her from weeks or months earlier, when she shoved him into a sewer and left him for dead. He waits for them to leave; then, clearly exhausted by the entire war, walks over, cuts her bonds and drops to the bed beside her. The next few minutes of the movie cut back and forth between the men in the other room playing cards waiting their turns, and the two of them: he cleans her face, she taunts him, he shoves her and says he wants a woman before he dies, she shouts at him to rape her and shoot her, he tosses her his gun and tells her to shoot herself, she can't do it, they fight more, they give up and talk. Then another cut and they're sitting in the other room with everyone else, sullen and silent, until one of the men mentions sleeping with her and the lieutenant completely loses his temper, throwing a tin across the room and screaming that no one will touch her. They don't.
It was what you wanted to see the soldiers do in "28 Days Later."
In short (well, a little late for that now), if you're into World War Two movies that don't feature Americans or Britons saving the day, put this one on your list.
Bloody and tense and unflinching and un-melodramatic and bleak and filthy and horrific and you can tell it wasn't made in Hollywood if only because none of them made it out -- not the main character, not the second-in-command, not the next-to-last one left, not the sick one, not the brave-turned-crazy one, not the Russian who almost gained them salvation, none of them, as the numbers dwindled from battle injuries and disease and suicide and hunger and cold and miscommunication, and the last pair huddled frozen to death in the blizzard in the middle of nowhere wasn't cheapened by a just-too-late rescue or even a slow zoom-out. No cameras lingering over battlefields, no discomfort with the depiction of the intense relationships between and among soldiers. And it managed not to be about Nazism, really, for all that it was a German film about German soldiers starting to lose Germany's war.
A little like "Saving Private Ryan," only the constant shock of warfare wasn't exploited for an old man crying at a cemetery or used as a backdrop for a love story (as they say "Enemy at the Gates" was, which was apparently also about the Battle of Stalingrad). No time to mourn for fallen friends. Dwindling belief in getting out alive. Cold sores and gangrene and blank stares and the breakdown of hierarchy and de facto personal alliances with enemies. Too cold to feel.
Three scenes I liked best, other than the gory fight to gain control of a factory near the beginning:
- Sent on a suicide mission for insubordination, the lieutenant -- played by Thomas Kretschmann, I have to say it, hardly recognizable at 30 and resembling, actually, Cary Elwes -- and his men have been working with other prisoners to clear a snow-blocked road in sub-zero temperatures long enough that their lips are blistered and their eyebrows frozen. An officer announces that because it's Christmas, he's going to give them some bread -- but not until the disgraced lieutenant begs. Only a moment or two, and he whispers, "Bitte." And then, standing in the back of a truck with his chin high, the officer tosses bits of bread into the scrambling crowd. I remember reading about or watching similar scenes in a Holocaust class in high school.
- Having returned mostly intact after all, the remaining men are honorably reinstated but promptly lined up and, to test their loyalty, ordered to act as a firing squad for a group of supposed Russian saboteurs. The men try to protest, look to their lieutenant for help. He tries his best, short of getting himself shot or discharged, tries to plead for one doomed boy who had helped them before. No use; the Captain, who has disliked him from the start, suggests that perhaps the boy reminds him of someone special back home, and orders him to stand down. The lieutenant turns away as his men take aim, says nothing as they wait for a word or a sign from him so they don't have to shoot. The look on his face as the guns fire... his head locked in position but trembling, swallowing hard, mouth working, eyes wet... And in the next scene he sits there, silent, staring at the floor, while the others debate desertion. Their later victory over the Captain feels hollow.
It reminded me of reports of the German death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who murdered entire villages of Jews as they marched through Eastern Europe into Russia: how they would line up the peasants and shoot them so they fell into ditches, and after the war when the trials started the soldiers would claim they weren't to blame because they were only following orders. I don't mean to condemn or exonerate them or the characters in the movie, only to point out the similarity.
- I don't know what to make of this yet, but it was marvelous. Near the end of the movie, the lieutenant and "his" remaining men find a deserted, fully-stocked cellar. In the back is a bedroom where they find a woman tied to the bed. The soldiers decide to "go by rank" and leave the room so their commanding officer can have a turn first. The lieutenant recognizes her from weeks or months earlier, when she shoved him into a sewer and left him for dead. He waits for them to leave; then, clearly exhausted by the entire war, walks over, cuts her bonds and drops to the bed beside her. The next few minutes of the movie cut back and forth between the men in the other room playing cards waiting their turns, and the two of them: he cleans her face, she taunts him, he shoves her and says he wants a woman before he dies, she shouts at him to rape her and shoot her, he tosses her his gun and tells her to shoot herself, she can't do it, they fight more, they give up and talk. Then another cut and they're sitting in the other room with everyone else, sullen and silent, until one of the men mentions sleeping with her and the lieutenant completely loses his temper, throwing a tin across the room and screaming that no one will touch her. They don't.
It was what you wanted to see the soldiers do in "28 Days Later."
In short (well, a little late for that now), if you're into World War Two movies that don't feature Americans or Britons saving the day, put this one on your list.
no subject
Date: Feb. 5th, 2006 07:41 pm (UTC)That said, don't write off "Enemy at the Gates" before you see it. There is a love story, but the war is centre-stage, and both the love affair and the war are depicted realistically: the former is founded on a sense of real comradeship and a we're-going-to-die-tomorrow urgency that avoids being at all glamourous (their first sexual encounter takes place fully clothed in a room full of sleeping soldiers and is shot with less voyeurism and more realism than I thought Hollywood capable of), while the latter is stark, bleak, and messy. Both love and war also feed into a subtle, ongoing philosophical debate in the mind of brilliant propagandist Comrade Danilov, who's charged with selling the myth of the heroic Russian sniper to the Russian people. It's still Hollywood, with certain Hollywood emotional flourishes, but it's bloody good Hollywood. I became fanatically attached to Danilov and was a shivering wreck at the end.
no subject
Date: Feb. 5th, 2006 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 5th, 2006 10:16 pm (UTC)I don't know if you've ever seen a French film called "A Ma Soeur" (mysteriously renamed "Fat Girl" on its American release), but there was a similarly uncompromising, shockingly untheatrical quality to the violence in it. I wonder if Continental cinema has that quality, or if it's just that all the gloss and glamour are an American invention and films from the rest of the world are generally more raw.
no subject
Date: Feb. 5th, 2006 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 7th, 2006 12:22 pm (UTC)But I'm going to second catilinarian's recommendation of "Enemy at the Gates," because it was I who originally convinced her to watch it. For one thing, it's fun to watch because all the Germans are played by Americans and all the Russians are played by Brits, but that's just a sidenote. It starts with a devastating scene showing the pointless carnage of the Battle of Stalingrad, with boats being blown up on their way into the city, men running into battle with one gun between two of them (apparently inaccurate, but damn good drama), these loads of dirty, terrified, mute, numb BOYS, who all look about SIXTEEN, going into this burned-out shell of a city for no reason that they can see.
And then the focus gets very very small. Instead of trying to do seventeen characters at once, they just take two - Zaitsef and Danilov; the hero and the propagandist. And then the Germans send a sniper after Zaitsef, and it becomes one long, tense cat-and-mouse game in the ruined city, with Zaitsef, Danilov, and Chernova (Rachel Weisz) all going back and forth between hope and despair, commitment and desertion, thought and action. It's absolutely incredible, and that's BEFORE you add the constant mind-sex going on between Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes.
no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2006 02:27 pm (UTC)I'm going to have to see "Enemy at the Gates" before I can really comment on it, but my impression now is that it can't really be compared to "Stalingrad" because they exist for different purposes and for different audiences. One is meant to be a stark depiction of the horrors of war as seen through a small group of men while the other is a battle of wits-cum-love story set against a backdrop of war. One is meant to be entirely authentic while the other casts Anglo-American movie stars in roles of differing nationalities. One seems to use fiction to talk about war while the other uses war to talk about -- well, not fiction, because it's based on a true story, right? -- but you see the difference in focus. Historical fiction/romance and Jude Law/Joseph Fiennes UST is all well and good but I'm a little uncomfortable with sex being the focus in a film that also features one of the bloodiest battles in history -- again, this may only be because the other movie treated the subject matter so differently. I just suspect that watching "Enemy at the Gates" so soon after "Stalingrad" would, however unfairly, negatively affect my opinion of the former.
no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2006 09:01 pm (UTC)The love story is in there, but it isn't the focus of the movie, and it comes about very organically, very much as "part of the lives of the characters," not as "the focus of the plot."
I agree that it's different from "Stalingrad." For one thing, it uses Anglo and American actors, because it's a film made by English and American producers (but written by two Frenchmen - odd). But it is not emotionally manipulative or sensationalist, and it aims for emotional realism.
It's about propaganda, about whether heroism exists at all or if it's just a myth to win a war, it's about redeeming your image of yourself in the middle of senseless carnage, it's about loyalty and survival, it's about tactics, it's about getting by.
At one point, Vallisi says, "All these men here know they're going to die. So, each night when they make it back, it's a bonus. So, every cup of tea, every cigarette is like a little celebration. You just have to accept that." That's basically where the love story comes in - it's something to hold off the darkness for one more day, a straw you're grasping at in the middle of all of this. It's not a "Hollywood love story against the backdrop of war."
Just see it, and then we can talk.
no subject
Date: Feb. 9th, 2006 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 7th, 2006 05:33 pm (UTC)I think that's an excellent point about Americans being more able to glamourise the Second World War because it didn't take place in among their homes and families, so it's easy to turn it into an epic (American) adventure. (Do you remember Eddie Izzard's routine about the peculiarly American crowd on the Normandy beaches in "Saving Private Ryan"? "You can imagine the British soldiers going, 'Hello! Over here! Could you just bring the cameras round here? I'm a British soldier, yes, and that's an Australian soldier, Free French soldiers, Free Polish over there - what was it we were called again? Oh, yes, THE ALLIES.'") I actually hadn't made the connection before that Civil War films might be bloodier and less glamourous for the opposite reason, but that makes a lot of sense.
no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2006 02:18 pm (UTC)I don't remember the Eddie bit but I can totally hear and see him doing it. Do you recall which show it's from (other than "not Dress to Kill")?
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Date: Feb. 8th, 2006 11:24 pm (UTC)And I wasn't entirely kidding about post-9 p.m. - Channel 4 just had Penis Week, with programmes along that theme every night at ten.
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Date: Feb. 9th, 2006 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 10th, 2006 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 10th, 2006 05:46 pm (UTC)