Between the Wars: Film Review of 'Frantz'

Film Review: Frantz - Directed by Francois Ozon

In the First World War, France and Germany lost a generation of youth.  France - over 1,150,000, Germany about 1,800,000 to 2,000,000.

In this mainly black and white film, circa 1919, we are led by the camera through cobble-stone streets and into lamp lit interiors of stone buildings in a small German country town.  In the town cemetery, lies a memorial for Frantz.  The grave is empty.  For the parents of soldiers killed in the trenches there were two cruel twists - the burial of their sons in anonymous graves, far from home, and not knowing how they died - "killed in action, "cause of death unknown", "missing in action presumed dead", "died of wounds at .....".  The streets are not only free of rubbish and traffic, but also free of young men.  At a ball, attended by the two main characters of the story, Anna (Paula Beer) and Adrien (Pierre Niney), Adrien is swamped by girls, anxious to dance with a male of their own age, even though he is one of the hated French ("Every Frenchman is the murderer of my son").  The adult population is consumed by grief for their lost sons.  Frantz is the deceased son and only child of Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and his wife Magda (Marie Gruber).  Anna, Frantz's fiancée lives with the Hoffmeisters - a surrogate for their only child, loved as though she is their natural daughter.  Anna's days are spent in grief and mourning, daily visits to the cemetery and abandonment of studies.  A suitor, probably twice Anna's age, favoured by the Hoffmeisters, waits for her grief to subside.  Then she finds a mysterious Frenchman (Adrien), standing and crying at Frantz's memorial.  This is were the story begins.  There are two parts, the one beginning in Germany and the one ending in France.  The story contains structured, complex lies, illusions, pacifism, flashbacks, hints of homosexuality, suicide, and train journeys.  Although there are two uncomfortable scenes of patriotic fervour, the film is certainly not another tiresome, superior-than-thou, moralising, anti-war film. Praise be to the Director.  

Audience reaction: Not enough patrons to judge.  Show-time: Easter Sunday after 6pm.  We witnessed the shuffling exit of patrons (many) from the afternoon showing - to get home before night fall and I presume, to be in bed, circa 7.30pm.  An intro. for students of demographics, who may be interested in Graceville.

Now showing at The Regal Twin - Boutique Arthouse Cinema at Graceville, Brisbane AUS

Hauteur to Empathy: Film Review: "The Innocents"

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
      
The Innocents (French:Les Innocentes) is a 2016 French film directed by Anne Fontaine.


"It is a grim irony that although it had been a member of the victorious alliance, Poland was the ultimate loser of the Second World War.  It lost its dependence and almost half of its territory - in defence of which the war had been declared.  According to the Bureau of War Reparations, it also lost 38 per cent of its national assets, a gigantic proportion when compared with the figures of France and Britain: 1.5 and 0.8 per cent respectively. These assets included the majority of its cultural heritage, as museums, libraries, palaces and churches had gone up in smoke.  But the real losses were far greater than that, and the consequences.

Nearly six million citizens had been killed, a proportion of one in five.  The proportion among the educated elites was far higher: nearly one in three for Catholic priests and doctors, and over one in two for lawyers.  A further half a million of Poland's citizens had been crippled for life and a million children had been orphaned.  The surviving population was suffering from severe malnutrition, while tuberculosis and other diseases raged on an epidemic scale.  Another half a million Polish citizens, including a high proportion of the intelligentsia, most of political and military leadership, and many of the best writers and artists, had been scattered around the world, never to return.  In all, post-war Poland had 30 per cent fewer inhabitants than the Poland of 1939.  But these figures give only a pale picture of the real harm done to Polish society: the Second World War destroyed not only people, buildings and works of art; it ripped apart a fragile yet functioning multi-racial and multi-cultural community still living out the consensual compact at the heart of the Commonwealth.

Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were determined to destroy Polish society.  They therefore imported onto the multi-ethnic and socially diverse territory of Poland methods of racial, social and political manipulation they had developed in their own countries.  It was these that tipped the realities of war in occupied Poland into a circle of hell far below that reached in any other country.

In October 1939 The Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland came into effect.

The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next months about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labour camps in Siberia or the far north of Russia.

Hans Frank [the Governor-General of Nazi occupied Poland] announced that the concept of Poland would be erased from the human mind, and that those Poles who were not exterminated would survive only as slaves within the new German Empire.

The process began at once.  ....... priests, landowners, teachers, lawyers and other persons of education or influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Oswiecim, renamed Auschwitz, in a process that aimed to decapitate Polish society and leave a leaderless and compliant workforce.

Poland's Jewish population was singled out for special treatment.  In small towns and villages, Jews were rounded up and shot by the Wehrmacht or special police units following in its wake, and in some cases burnt to death in their wooden synagogues.  In May 1940, the Jewish ghetto of Lodz was sealed, and the same happened in Warsaw and other cities.  From 1942, the people trapped in these ghettos were transported to camps set up at Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz and elsewhere, for extermination.  In all 2.7 million Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered. 
 
In Poland, anyone caught assisting or sheltering a Jew faced an automatic death penalty not just for himself, but for his entire family."

The same penalty applied to anyone failing to report that someone else living in the same apartment block was sheltering a Jew.

Adam Zamoyski   -   Poland a  History  -  first published by William Collins in 2009  -  paperback addition published 2015   -  ISBN 978-0-00-755621-2

Warsaw 1945

By comparison France suffered little in World War11.  After the capitulation of the French Army to the German Wehrmacht, a puppet French government set itself up in Vichy.  In so doing, France gained the dubious honour of being the only country defeated by Germany that established a new regime which collaborated with the Nazis.  Occupied Paris carried on, as though an invasion had not occurred.  Germans and French lived side by side and collaboration was the norm, in business and pleasure.  The Arts flourished. Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir continued to write and publish.  Camus published L'Etranger  and The Mythe de Sisphe in 1942.  Pablo Picasso was not able to show his work in public, yet he produced almost 400 paintings in addition to prints, drawings and sculptures during the Occupation, and his works were sold privately.  The painter of Guernica continued to live and work in Paris during the Nazi occupation!  Unlike Warsaw - which the Germans turned into a desert of rubble, during and after the Polish uprising in 1944 - as the vulture, in the shape of the Soviet Union's army, looked on - Paris was a peaceful paradise.  The maintenance of this peace was built on collaboration, including to France's everlasting shame, the internment and deportation of over 75,000 Jews - including 11,000 children - to the Nazi gas chambers in Poland.

Paris during German Occupation

In January 1945, Soviet Forces invaded East Prussia and began the mass rape of German women as the they sped towards Berlin.  "NKVD rifle regiments did not punish their own soldiers for rape, they punished them only if they caught venereal disease from victims who had usually caught it from a previous rapist.  Rape itself, in a typical Stalinist euphemism, was referred to as an 'immoral event'.  It is interesting that Russian historians today still produce evasive circumlocutions.  One writes:  'Negative phenomena in the army of liberation caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the armed forces and could have a negative influence in the future relations with the countries through which our troops were passing.'  This sentence also indirectly acknowledges that there were many cases of rape in Poland.  But far more shocking from a Russian point of view is the fact that Red Army officers and soldiers also raped Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian women and girls released from slave labour in Germany.  Many of the girls were as young as sixteen when taken to the Reich; some were just fourteen.  The widespread raping of women taken forcibly from the Soviet Union completely undermines any attempts at justifying Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union."

Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945

The Innocents is set in Polish countryside in 1945, after the events described above.  A guerrilla war is being fought, outside Warsaw, as Soviet forces and Polish communists quell nationalistic Polish resistance.  (Mathilde, the main player in this film narrowly escapes being raped in an encounter with a Soviet patrol controlling a road block.) 

Winter covers the landscape under a silent canopy of ice and snow.  Not only is the landscape depressed, but also the spirits of the medical staff working in a Red Cross hospital rehabilitating French soldiers and French Jews,  former inmates of work camps established by the Germans in Poland and Germany.  Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laage), a young French doctor bearing a frosty demeanour, works in the hospital.  A nun emerges from the throng of beggar orphans outside the hospital entrance.  She finds her way into the hospital and begs Mathilde to help a sister who is seriously ill.  Mathilde turns her away.  Another begging Pole.  Later, resting beside a frosted window, she sees the same nun, in prayer, on her knees in deep snow.  Touched, Mathilde answers the nun's prayers and goes with her.  They arrive at the convent, isolated and defenceless, on the edge of a forest - black tree trunks, stretching upwards, still and silent, from a floor of white snow - beautiful to the eye, but in the mind foreboding, because of what it may conceal.  The cold, grey-stone interior of the convent, and a bare unlit altar do nothing, to allay the sense of foreboding.  Are there no priests left?  But the sister is not ill or suffering from disease.  She is about to give birth.  Mathilde assists her and the baby is delivered.
 
The following day, Mathilde revisits the convent and finds several more pregnant nuns.  Soviet soldiers had raped them.  Mathilde confers with Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) and the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) and it is agreed Mathilde will assist the remaining pregnant nuns.  The Mother Superior stipulates the pregnancies are to be kept secret, and the infants placed by her in outside communities - her motive - to preserve the reputation and continuity of the convent community.  Mathilde, an atheist, witnesses with secular indifference, the nuns struggling to retain their faith in God, given their rape, the irreversible loss of chastity, the baby and motherhood.  Mathilde remains aloof, impersonal and professional.  When she witnesses the nuns, singing, beautifully uplifting anthems of prayer, she begins to melt.  Then the nuns, despite their anguish, open up to her, with affection and gratitude. Mathilde is defrosted.  Hauteur to empathy.  She engages warmly with the remarkable Sister Marie, ( "..twenty four hours of doubt for one minute of hope"), - the go-between - who holds together the vital communication between Mathilde and the prickly Mother Superior - and who kindles trust between Mathilde and the expectant nuns.  When Mathilde realises she cannot cope on her own with multiple deliveries, she persuades her professional colleague and casual lover to help her deliver the babies.  He is Jewish, scarred permanently by the holocaust, in which his family disappeared, and openly hostile to the Catholic church.  If it was not for Mathilde he would not be in the convent.

The mother Superior, driven by her ardent desire to protect the convent and her charges, commits an unforgivable crime.  Agata Kulesza gives the best acting performance of the film.  She is brilliant, transforming the Mother Superior into a tragic Shakespearian character, who plunges irredeemably from grace to damnation.  Despite her iniquity, you cannot fail to grieve for her, as she lies in bed, her chastity, her gift to God, ruined by the defilement of rape, guilty of mortal sin, waiting the final audit. 

Sadly, the end of the film lapses into modern-day sentimentality.

Postscript: This story is based on the experience of a Red Cross doctor, Madeleine Pauliac in Poland, after World War11


Audience reaction:  Silent rapture from start to finish.


Literary sources for this review: 
Adam Zamoyski - Poland A History
Michael Curtis - Verdict On Vichy
Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945 
Primo Levi   - Is this a man

Bus Stop homicide - surgery efficiency - the wicked vicar

Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978

While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear.  "He demanded that I give him my wife's purse", said Mr Thirsty.  "Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it.  It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died."



Stephan Westaby writes that on obtaining his first junior post as a surgeon at London's Royal Brompton Hospital, he commandeered the rubber boots that had once belonged to the eminent surgeon Lord Brock and later adapted them with a length of tubing and sticky tape to avoid having to take toilet breaks during lengthy operations.

Fragile Lives:  A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephan Westaby
 
Entries from the Parish Register of Seasalter, Kent:

1734  Edward Trice and Mary Acros married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.  A Bowl of Punch was made almost as big as the Caspian.

1734  John Powney Huntsman to that ancient Corporation of crucketsoles the City of Canterbury and Miss Eliz. Johnson, daughter to the Devil's own, commonly called a Bailiff, were married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1742  Buried John Ellis, a very strong young fellow and a great smuggler.

1744 John Housden, widower, a young gape-mouth, lazy fellow, and Hannah Matthews, an old toothless wriggling Hagg, both of Faversham, were trammel by Licence at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1750  William Parnel and Mary Steed, a dolefull forbidding saturnine damsel, married.

These extracts were written by the Rev. Thomas Patten, who was appointed Vicar of Seasalter and Perpetual Curate of Whitstable in 1711, and held the two livings until his death in 1764 at the age of eighty.

A law unto himself, he not only kept a mistress, but drove to church in a butcher's cart, wore ragged, dirty clothes, signed himself "Bishop of Whitstable", refused to read the Athanasian Creed, and would suddenly break off a sermon if he thought that any of the congregation would join him in a visit to the nearby pub.

In Archbishop Secker's visitation of the parishes in 1759, Patten is described as 'half-mad impudent, poor".  When the archdeacon reproved him for not reading the Athanasian Creed, which the archbishop did, "That may be," answered Patten, "perhaps he may believe it; I don't.   He believes at the rate of $7,000.00 per annum: I at less than fifty.

He died in October 1764 and was buried in Old Seasalter Church on the south side of the altar, his grave marked by a stone slab set in the chancel floor.  Here it rested for over 160 years but in 1927 Seasalter received a new vicar, the Rev. Edward Thompson, a short, thick-set martinet with a stentorian voice, straight from the China Mission.  He had Patten's gravestone dug up and thrown out, saying he was not going to have so scandalous a man commemorated in his church.  It languished among the weeds until the 1960s, when in that more tolerant decade (one which might have suited Patten) it was brought back into the church, where it now rests on a window sill.

A Christmas Cracker  -  2008

BYSTANDERS TO GENOCIDE

Flicking on the remote, at home, I stopped suddenly, on seeing Samantha Power, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, berating some stony-faced males seated opposite her.  One was a Russian representative.  Her outburst was hot and scolding, sprayed at Syria, Russia and Iran.

"Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our consciences decades later.  Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.  Your barrel bombs and mortars and airstrikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose.  Are you truly incapable of shame?  Is there nothing that can shame you?  Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit?  Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?"

Phew!  Great stuff!  But hang on.  Samantha Power was part of the Obama administration and this language is most unlike that used by Obama.  Note: these fiery words were spent on December, 2016, five weeks before the end of the Obama presidency, and three and half years into Power's tenure as America's UN ambassador.  

Consider those words, in the context of the past crimes of genocide she listed, Halabja, (A gas attack on Kurds in Iraq), occurred on the watch of George H.W. Bush.  Rwanda, Srebrenica and Aleppo occurred during the administrations of presidents Clinton and Obama.  Power was unsparing in her criticism of the Clinton
administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.  In 2001, she published an article called, "Bystanders to Genocide". In it, she excoriated the administration for its indifference.  In Power's own time, as a servant of the Obama administration, she witnessed weak, ineffectual intervention by the U.S in the Syrian conflict, which allowed Assad, Russia and Iran to operate unhindered in the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs by Shiite-Iranian militia.  Obama's administration to use Samantha Power's title looked like another "bystander to genocide".

So was Samantha Power, in fact, venting her frustration with Obama's inaction when she gave both barrels to the boys on the other side of the UN?  Could be.  We await with interest to see whether she supports the Trump administration's prompt military response against Assad's regime for its recent gas attacks on civilians including children.   

 

Connections are obvious, yet denied. 1 & 2

What's in a name?   Mohammad, Muhammed or Mehmet when multiple witnesses heard something, which may or may not have been "Allah Akbari" before Mohammad Muhammed/Mehmet blew himself up, in a passenger train, or shot dead the policeman, or drove a truck into pedestrians.

Police spokesperson: "We will never understand this.  That understanding may have died with him."

Of course how dumb of me, to think otherwise.  After all, it's a religion of peace, don't you know?

On 22 March 2017, Khalid Masood drove a 4x4 across Westminister bridge, mounted the kerb and mowed down 50 people.  On leaving the vehicle, the attacker stabbed an unarmed policeman to death.  The police investigating the attack concluded that Masood, in this instant, the agent of terror and death, had acted alone and that "his motives may never be known". 

London police seem to suffer a degree of intellectual impairment, given it is clear, Masood followed the instructions of Inspire magazine. - a booklet published by Al Qaeda which urges its readers to use cars and knives to perform effective, yet low-tech attacks.

Awake - a poem by Tom Vaughan

                         Awake

                         At our age, it's more funerals than weddings -
                         both equally good for catching up on gossip
                         although now more usually about whose suffering
                         from what than who's sleeping with whom  - whose hip
                         joint is ceramic, or whose by-passed heart
                         pumps as well as the one they were gifted at the start
                         Then the big C-word - the strange one-upmanship
                         of comparing which particular body part

                         is caught in that disease's pincer grip
                         and calculating the chances of survival.
                         We note when memory begins to slip -
                         a first sign of Alzheimer's?  The removal
                         chapter by chapter of the storied self,
                         a death before a second death, by stealth.
                         Yet there's always the occasional daredevil
                         boozing and smoking, and still in robust health....

                         But courage should mean a brutally frank appraisal:
                         life's just an actuarial calculation
                         and there's only one direction for our travel -
                         towards, surely, complete annihilation.
                         It's strange that such farewells are called a wake
                         When friends go out forever, and daybreak
                         won't bring them back, or herald their salvation,
                         or comfort those who loved them, for whose sake

                        we offer words we all pretend can ease the ache.


                                                                                                    _  Tom Vaughan

                       
                             Overheard:
                        Two friends both in their late eighties, leaving a similar aged friend's burial.
                       "It's hardly worthwhile Tom, us going home, is it?"