Symbols

Hysteria (2025) - Büyükatalay German filmmaker Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay's Hysteria touches upon sensitive subjects in modern day, multicultural Germany: racism and representation. The film plays out like a tense thriller until it morphs into a chamber drama where the identity politics within the immigrant community are dissected and hotly debated. Hysteria might not be as subtle as fellow Turkish descendent filmmaker Thomas Arslan (A Fine Day)'s work, or as flashy as Fatih Akin (Head-On)'s, but the film is more direct and piercing in dealing with the complex subject matter. The plot sometimes feels clunky and forced as it gets tangled up in its own intricate web, and the seemingly important loose ends don't tie up neatly by the end. But Hysteria is an anxiety inducing pressure cooker of a film that concludes with the literal fiery end.

Hysteria starts with an arson, a staged one: it is revealed in a long zoom out that the house being torched is in a giant film stage. The film director Yigit (Serkan Kaya) interjects and gives the context to the image - it's the reflection of the arson attacks that took place in Germany in the 90s by the ultra right-wing groups against Muslim immigrant communities that killed hundreds of innocent people. What Yigit is trying to capture is immigrant non-actors’ emotions, going through the aftermath of the arson attack. These extras are culled from a local refugee center for authenticity's sake. After the shoot, it is revealed that the copy of Quran is burned along with other household items during filming and some of the extras are upset. One of them, Majid, walks off the set. So, the driving duty falls on a young and eager intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau). She has to drive extras back to the refugee center and drop off the film negatives (the project is shot on film) to an apartment that belongs to the film's producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz) who is also well known, respected filmmaker herself.

Elif has a healthy discussion with the extras about what the project is about on the way back to the refugee center. Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt), himself a theater director back home, thinks Yigit is just perpetuating the victimhood on screen, which has been long prevalent in German cinema - so called "Gasterbeiter (Guestworker) Cinema" or "Cinema of Duty" of the 70s and 80s. These are the films the white liberals can have their conscience clear and make them feel good after viewing. Others disagree, including Elif, a university student with a Turkish immigrant father, who thinks the film is saying something important.

After Elif drops them off, she arrives at Lilith's but realizes that she lost the keys to the apartment. After calling a locksmith, she places several fliers about missing keys around the neighborhood. But she conceals the lost key incident to Lilith for some reason. This little deceit snowballs into full blown paranoia when she gets text messages about the lost keys from a stranger. The texts, with bad grammar and their profile picture and their social media linked to some scary looking Muslim extremist group, Elif, sufficiently freaked out, calls Said (Medhi Meskar), a young immigrant who was an extra in Yigit's film and tells him what's been happening. When Yigit and Lilith come back, to Elif's dismay, they find the footage that contains the burning Quran is gone. Someone broke into the apartment and lifted the footage. Yigit, furious and suspects the extras and calls cops on them. Mustafa, Said and Majid all deny any involvement in wrongdoing.

Lilith, who wasn't fan of the footage and in fear of controversy, convinces Yigit to file a theft insurance claim and reshoot the scene without Quran. The problem solved. But for Elif, the problem is far from solved. She confronts Lilith and Yigit with Mustafa, Said and Majid, and asks for an apology. This is where things get a little shaky in terms of narrative contrivances. While I appreciate the need of seeing frank discussions about how people perceive others and others perceive themselves, class disparities, 'write what you know,' etc., but nothing really gets sorted out in Hysteria. The jarring tonal shift, untied loose ends, underdeveloped motivations and obvious symbolism (not only Quran but actual negative film catches fire at the end) devolve into a melodrama. Büyükatalay has a knack for making an anxiety inducing thriller. But issues don't necessarily get solved themselves even when they are screamed out loud for everyone to hear.

Femme Fatale

Bis ans Ende der Nacht/Till the End of the Night (2023) - Hochhäusler Leni (Thea Ehre) just got out of jail serving 2/3 of a 3-year sentence for drugs. She made a deal with the police to go undercover with Robert (Timocin Zeigler) as a couple to get closer to a former DJ/suspected drug kingpin Victor Arth (Michael Sideris) who sells drugs online. Arth used to know Leni when she was Lenard, his sound engineer in the past. Robert and Leni have been in a very unhealthy relationship - he psychologically abuses her but also can't get away from her. His behavior stems from his own identity issues. Their undercover status isolates Leni from her friends. An obtrusive ankle brace doesn't help the matters either. The couple approaches Arth and his girlfriend at the dance lessons and with their former relationship, Arth brings them into his life. Robert gets a job as Arth's driver, and they become trusted friends. As Leni and Robert get in deep in their cover, their friendship with Arth makes things blurry.

It's Fassbinder worthy of drama between Leni and Robert. But Robert really loves her and willing to give up everything. However hopeless Robert seems, Arth sees a beauty in their relationship.

Till the End of the Night is a sleek film noir with trans actress Thea Ehre as a femme fatale. Tall with big blond hair, she exudes the big time 80s Emily Lloyd vibe. Zeigler's ratty, greasy hair suits a police man who struggles with his sexual orientation. Sideris is great as not your typical villain but a reasonable man with a lot of compassion and envy. I just wish the script was a little tighter on the noir's pot boiling aspect, so we can feel more tension. But the rendezvous at the airport ending rolls on and Till the End of the Night is quite a satisfying noir.

Oracle of Cinema

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) - Farocki We first see the giant wave making machines at work in Hamburg. Scientists are trying to find the pattern in ocean waves however impossible of a task it is. Harun Farocki then connects that with the age of enlightenment and human technology. Enlightenment in German is Aufklärung which also means reconnaissance, in military terms, it's also flight reconnaissance. Photography was used for evaluators to evaluate the scale of the buildings without fear of falling to their death when measuring buildings. Photography is also used to verify the right targets in World War 2 during air raids.

Farocki rightly questions the acuities of 'seeing is believing' with the example of why Auswitz was never bombed by the Allied despite two escapees testimonials of atrocities there. It didn't look like a munitions factory and therefore not a priority. It was two Pentagon officials in 1977 who admitted that they were examining these aerial photos and clearly seeing crematorium and air vents and lines to the gas chambers.

Images of the World and the Inscription of War predicts our current world - drone warfare, surveillance state, deepfake and misinformation wars in astonishing detail without ever mentioning internet or AI. A photographer from the occupying forces in Algeria took photos of Algerian women without their veils and published the photo book in 1960. At one point, a voice of a woman who has been narrating the film in absolute objectivity until then, asks, "How can a face of a human being be described with certainty, so that it can be recognized by everyone, by a machine?"

Both nazi's and concentration camp survivors took detailed records in numbers - one the evidence of genocide, the other, coded evidence for preservation and uprising.

Farocki, as a film essayist, shared many of the same traits as Godard and Alexander Kluge, but he was more direct and succinct than the other two. His ability in provoking the audience to think for themselves while guiding slightly with big ideas had no equal. With wars in Ukraine and Gaza in the internet age, the misinformation wars are raging like never before and I can't help noticing how prescient Farocki's film is.

Rehearsals for Living

Leben - BRD/How to Live in FRG (1990) - Farocki Filmed just before the dissolution of the East Germany, but came out afterward, Harun Farocki's Leben - BRD or How to Live in FRG (Federal Republic of Germany/West Germany) stands in contrast to both, the egalitarian (East) or capitalist (West) utopias that never have materialized. He knew that the West hadn't really won the Cold War game- that there was something inherently unnatural and inhuman about the advanced capitalist system in the West. Farocki strings series of 'how to' instructional videos of all kinds from all over West Germany, where people were enacting scenarios - from birth to death, intercut them with various household products - toilet seats, washers, drawers, car doors, going through rigorous and repeat stress tests.

It's 'how to' instructions on anything in life from sex, birth, caring for child, crossing the road, interacting with clients, customers, climbing out of a wrecked car, letting others know when locked out of your house, de-escalating arguments, reprehending a gun wielding hooligan, attacking the enemies in combat, stripping even, ANYTHING. Everything is prepped early on in life. There's an instruction for everything. Unlike other 'documentaries', Farocki's non-narrated film creates its own rhythm as it equates these 'learned' human behaviors to the repeated slamming of inanimate objects. All these activities are heavy on the business transactions and also law and order. The film shows a series of rehearsals to live 'actual life' as if you are not ready to live it yet.

Leben - BRD makes you wonder about human existence before all the technologies we have now. How did human beings survive without knowing how to have a baby without hurting either mother or a baby? How do we deal with difficult people without resorting to violence? The capitalist world is so complicated that it needs an Ikea instruction mauals on everything we do? The whole endeavors seem so patronizing. But that's the point Farocki is making. In this so-called free world, you need to be told early on how to live. How is it any different than the communist totalitarian society?

Often funny yet pointy, especially intercutting between the residents of a group home discussing and organizing their grocery list for dinner and people practicing dining table manners with empty plates and learning the orders of cutlery use.

Leben-BRD will make a great double feature with Godard's Germany Year 90 Nine Zero about East-West dynamics.

The Zone of Unsubtlety

The Zone of Interest (2023) - Glazer The film starts with a family, a father fishing in the creek with his children. It's peaceful and there's nothing that suggests that he is an SS commandant in charge of operations at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Maybe not nothing, since he has the buzzcut that is most severe as far as cinema memories go, he has to be a nazi. It turns out Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel of Amour Fou, White Ribbon, Babylon Berlin) is indeed a commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and his Aryan children live in a brick and mortar house with a perfectly manicured vegetable and fruit garden, overlooking a barbed wire fence and a very active furnace of the camp. For Heddy, who hated city life, the place is a dream come true, more space, a garden, extensive supply of servants (from the camp), material goods (fur coats and jewelry, also collected from the camp), and fresh air(!) for the children. She touts proudly that she is known as the queen of Auschwitz in her social circle.

The Zone of Interest features great sound design and score. Low rumble of industrial machination (furnace) is always heard, so as frequent muffled screams and gunfires while they dine, sleep and play in the garden. Glazer doesn't let you forget that these banalities of evil are built on power and dominence, that they are not naive people shielded from what's going on just over the fence. They were consciously aware of what they were doing the whole time.

There are some striking sequences, like Höss hurriedly getting his children out of water when a sudden flow of ashes and bones flashfloods the creek they were frolicking in. The swanky garden party features active furnace spewing human ashes in the background just over the fence. And cutting between the past and present days at the end is also very powerful. But as a feature length film, the premise already has overstayed its welcome within thirty minutes of the film.

The miscalculation of the filmmaker here is that obvious visual metaphor doesn't quite work in a serious feature film, especially one about the holocaust. The point Glazer is making, the characters' willful blindness and absurdity and evilness of it, serves much better in shorts. I kept thinking of one of Roy Andersson's masterful absurdist short skits where he balances humor and tragedy perfectly.

The Zone of Interest is an obvious misfire from Glazer. Maybe his craftmanship is more suited for shorts and music videos after all.

Look Around, The World is Burning!

Afire (2023) - Petzold As the Canadian wildfire rages on and its smoke, carried on by the wind, covers the entire US Eastern coastline in thick orange hazardous air last week, Christian Petzold's new film, Afire, playing in this year's Tribeca Film Fest and coming out in US theaters in July, is such a prescient film about the world we live in now. You think Petzold shifts gears and concocts a seemingly a lighthearted summer fling story during covid? No. Quite the contrary. His previous films, Phoenix, Transit and Undine are laced with potent German history and reflecting on 21 century living. But at a glance, Afire doesn't seem too concerned about the German history, but it's still very much steeped in Petzold's usual themes: guilt, shame, forgetfulness and loneliness. And the Baltic sea set Afire is very much about the present- the world on the brink of ecological catastrophy. Afire is distinctly a Petzold's version of a 'summer movie'.

We are introduced to Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel), unlikely friends going to the Baltic seaside where Felix's mom has a summer house. The car breaks down and they have to walk the rest of the way. It is apparent that Leon is the designated pessimist of the two; too serious for his own good kind of a guy. Once they get to the house, they find that it is already occupied by Nadja (Paula Beer). They learn that Nadja is a family friend and now they will need to share the house during their stay. Leon is doubly disgruntled because he needs peace and quiet to finish his second novel, incongruously titled, Club Sandwich, but Nadja's nightly activity with a local lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs) is just too loud.

After meeting the other occupants a couple of days later, Leon keeps being a major A-hole and a party pooper every chance he gets; whenever asked to come to swim and join them, he coldly tells Nadja, "Work doesn't allow it." a phrase that he instantly regrets saying right after, which fills him with much self-loathing. He just can't help it. His arrogance and superiority complex always get the better of himself, while struggling with writing his 'masterpiece'. But, when alone, he bounces the rubber ball off the house wall and falls asleep on the patio in front of the house that he claimed as his workspace.

To Leon's surprise, there's a budding romance between Felix and Devid. It's more like Leon is too obsessed with his own little world, he hardly notices anything else around him. It's like a forest fire that is raging in the distant which lights up the part of the sky red every night. It won't reach us, they tell themselves.

Nadja gives Leon every chance to open up, but his stupid pride keeps walling off her friendly gestures. At one of those of her attempts, he reluctantly agrees for her to read his manuscript. She reads it in one sitting one afternoon, as he nervously walks back and forth from distance. She returns it to him, "It's bad and you know it too." What does she know? She is just a seasonal ice-cream seller at a nearby town. He bitterly tells himself.

When Leon's agent, Helmut (Matthias Brant) comes into town to go over his manuscript and decides to stay for dinner which Nadja provides, it is revealed that Nadja is a literary scholar doing her Ph.D. She recites Heinrich Heine's poem Asra, about an Arab tribe, who perish when they love. Felix, who's in love with Devid now, so moved by the poem, asks her to recite it again. Foreshadowing what's to come.

There's a striking scene, where the ashes of the nearby forest fire descending upon the group. It's a surreal moment - mixture of beauty and imminent danger. It's one of the showstopper in Petzold's cinematic world. Helmut collapses at the same moment and must be taken to the hospital. Fire is fast approaching, and Leon witness firsthand the destructive power of all consuming fire.

Afire is very much a Petzold's version of a summer film like that of Eric Rohmer's (which he says he watched a lot before conceiving Afire, during the covid lockdown) and other French summer fling films but with stinging message. Instead of summer love, we get Leon, our anti-hero completely blindsided by his self-centered world view and misses out on life. And even ecological disasters at his doorstep can't make him see what's in front of him.

The film tells a lot about the self-absorbed world in the face of climate change and global catastrophe unfolding. You might ask, 'Leon can't be that thick headed. How is he a friend with good natured, younger, optimistic Felix?' 'There's no chemistry between Leon and Nadja, how can he declare his love for her?' and so on. Afire is also about creative process and self-reflection. And it's beautifully, deliciously constructed by the master storyteller. It's as if Petzold saying get out of your head once in a while and look around you because if you don't, it might be already too late.

Eternal

Music (2023) - Schanelec Angela Schanelec's new, nearly silent film, simply titled Music, is supposedly 'freely' based on the Greek Myth of Oedipus. It might be the most enigmatic offering from the esteemed German director. But its depiction of melancholy and fragility of human life is nevertheless so beautiful and timeless, I can't help tearing up by the end.

As always with Schanelec's films, there are striking images and a ghost of a narrative thread with lots of gaps that you will need to fill in yourself. Time is elastic in Music; in one scene you see an infant being found and adopted, the next we see Jon (Aliocha Schneider) accidentally killing someone (his father?) and going to prison. There's a prison guard Iro (French actress Agathe Bonitzer) who attends to his swollen feet (like Oedipus by his unsuspecting mother/lover), and gives him the list of classical composers to listen to. Then he's out of the prison, and they are expecting a baby. But fate would have it, tragedy follows Jon as his past catches up with him. He is a musician now, living in Berlin with his grown up daughter. He sings melancholic songs in falsetto on stages. And also, he is going blind.

Static framing and stoic acting that Schanelec cultivated over the years are all present here. Pivotal, life-altering actions happen mostly off frame. It's almost dialog free. And it doesn't really matter if Jon looks the same after many years, if not decades.

Schanelec told me once that she usually maps out an idea for a project from one or two images. This time, she takes a cue from a Greek theater. And images in Music are indeed striking. The windswept rocky Greek terrain against stunningly blue Aegean sea and sky in the first half invokes both the timelessness of nature and our impermanence in it. The static, staged scenes featuring groups of young people - street gang, wistful prison inmates, bystanders in uniformed kitchen staff strongly remind you of the world of Aki Kaurismaki. And of course, music flows where dialog would have been with the help of Canadian musician Doug Tielli in his high-pitched voice (a cross between Sigur Rós and Nick Drake). His songs not only serve as a Greek Chorus chronicling Jon's melancholy, but also as testaments to the beauty of music, transcending this fleeting dream we call human existence.

The long tracking shot that ends the film, filmed from the other side of the river embankment as the characters walk and sing in the beautiful summer day has the feeling of an eternity. It's an achingly beautiful film.

Chamber Piece with Thousands Stories

The Girl and the Spider (2021) - Zürcher Twin siblings Ramon and Silvan Zürcher's second film, after enigmatic The Strange Little Cat (2013), is yet another chamber piece as a microcosm of people's inner yearning and desire to connect in the modern society. And The Girl and Spider is just as ambiguous and non-conclusive as the former, if not more so.

The plot is pretty simple - one of the two roommates (who seem more than roommates), Lisa (Liliane Amuat), is moving out and getting her own flat. Mara (Henriette Confurius) with striking dark blue eyes, with herpes on her upper lip prominently displayed, is the one who is left behind. Like their debut feature, Zürchers concentrate on the indoor flat settings with a camera firmly fixed on the confines of the flats with several characters crammed in, squeezing by one another, making the places claustrophobic and devoid of any room for privacy. There's Lisa's mother, their friends, flirty neighbors, a handyman and his son, a cat, a dog, rowdy kids and of course, a hefty spider from the title who usually sits on the corner of the ceiling and makes unannounced appearances from time to time. Also like their previous film, The Girl is a very wordy film. Everyone has a story to tell, whether it falls on deaf ears is not as important. No communication is direct, no one would blurt out that they want to sleep with each other, or being extremely judgmental or cruel. Our society is too polite for that. It's in the slight touches on the shoulders and glances.

The human relationships are fickle; there are a lot of missed opportunities, one night stands, jealousy, yearning and desire that are not fulfilled - all these are happening around Mara, our static figure on the sidelines. She's not immune to be the object of desire, as she gets attention from both sexes. Is she taking a break from the sinewy human connections because of the STD? Or is she somewhat autistic the way talented people are (she sketches gorgeous portraits of people around her). She is also capable of cruelty. Does the spider which gets passed on from Mara to others and back, signify a disease or desire or both?

Only solvable mystery is the case of missing cat. It was the neighbor upstairs- a lonely old lady who took the cat in to her apartment. Does she need our scorn or empathy? Therefore, however complicated we see ourselves to be, do we need to be scorned for our jealousy, desire and cruelty or do we need empathy? Everyone, in Zürcher's films, imagined or otherwise, like the shop girl at the window, the chambermaid who left the piano in their apartment and went on to work at a cruise ship, even inanimate objects - plant, drawings, styroform cups, feathers, paint, have a story to tell and needs to be heard and deserve our empathy.

Stylistically original, but The Girl and the Spider reminds me of the ending of Kieslowski's Red by way of Schanelec in its enigmatic storytelling and it's wonderful. I can't wait for Zürcher's The Sparrow and the chimney as they conclude the trilogy.

Post-Realist

What Farocki Taught (1998) - Godmilow Harun Farocki, a German filmmaker, made a short film The Inextinguishable Fire in the late sixties. It was a fierce anti Vietnam War film that implicates not just the US Government and the Dow Chemical but it implicated the ordinary US citizens in its atrocity also, while explaining the napalm production in such a detached, scientific manner. To put it better way, instead being confrontational by showing the pictures such as the iconic 'napalm girl' or other atrocities and turned the viewers off, it explained how modern division of labor- 'the building blocks' of the Dow Chemical company, where each individual worker makes only one component of the bomb, surreptitiously hides its true intent on what those individuals are contributing in making. The film broke down scientifically how it's done and how the thought of individual responsibilities in those kind of endeavor dissolve. It was short. It was emotionless and it was to the point.

Jill Godmilow, an American experimental filmmaker, watched the film in the 90s for the first time and thought it was perfect. It was a documentary unlike any other, but far more effective than any documentaries that plead to the viewer's emotions with 'shocking' evidences. She was just disappointed that she didn't make it herself. So she decided to remake it, shot-by-shot, but this time in English and in color. She would make it in the US and closer in vicinity to where the Dow Headquarters were situated. With the colleagues and collaborators, Godmilow seeks exact copies in reenactment scenes. Farocki's minimalist and obviously fake staging of Dow Chemical offices are reenacted in the same manner. The burning of the lab rats, non-actors portraying scientists, delivering lines in monotones are exactly the same, except it's now in English and people in period costumes. Godmilow sometimes superimposes Farocki's film directly over her image, making sure that viewers see it is the exact replica. The message remains the same. The times have changed but the atrocities commited in our name have not.

Considering that, just like any other decade, 90s were riddled with wars as it is now and the modern military industrial complex is fully in place with the thought of individual responsibilities in the atrocities of war getting further and further away from our consciousness with more complex division of labor, What Farocki Taught reminds us that things haven't changed much. And it's quite remarkable the far reaching influence of Harun Farocki, as a writer, philosopher and filmmaker, to generations of filmmakers both in experimental and narrative field.

What Farocki Taught is also a good reminder of the state of what is considered as a documentary nowadays. Since the explosion of topical liberal documentaries in the 90s, the word is hijacked by the news media - every major newspaper now has its vlogs, CNN has its own documentary production division, streaming platforms are awash with its own documentary productions, all catered toward shocking revelations and appeal to your emotions with 'real footage' and 'truth seeking' manipulating viewers this way or that way. Is showing the shocking images and playing with your emotions with a narrativeized documentary a right way to go about discovering the truth? Or is the truth elsewhere, in a cellphone shot footage of war in Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Ukraine put on youtube? Our critical analysis of what we see is necessary. The context matters. How we approach to seek the truth is important. Farocki and Godmilow shows more effective way to communicate and it's valuable.

Domestic Terror

The Strange Little Cat - Zürcher An unusual chamber piece that holds more mystery and tension in its 70 minute runtime than an average thriller, Ramon Zürcher's The Strange Little Cat calls on a normal German middle-class family life into question: Are they OK?

The film is composed entirely of medium static shots in the family's small apartment, never to reveal the goings-ons of off frame. Everyone says things in a matter-of-fact fashion and their interactions with others are limited to us watching them staring vacantly to the other person off camera. Mom, played by Jenny Schily who always looks like she is suffering from migraines, tries to hold it together for one day, hosting a dinner party for her extended family. Her two grown children, Simon and Karin, are visiting from elsewhere. Her younger daughter Clara screams on top of her lungs whenever the blender is on and always wrecking havoc with the growling family dog and the orange tabby cat, which won't stop jumping on the dining table. The washer is broken and in need of service, there's moth flying around the kitchen and there's a rat scurrying around in the courtyard below.

Everyone has a strange encounter stories to tell but no one really pays any attention to them. Are they not significant enough or are they the signs of distress? How about the shots of objects - a glass of milk on the kitchen counter with floating hair on top, a yellow ball the dog plays with, a dancing bottle on the stove - what do they signify?

Anything that is said and heard in The Strange Little Cat accumulates into an uneasy feeling. Everyone's saying something to the others but nothing really sticks. This is more of the case to mom than others. She tells a weird story about going to the movies and a stranger next to her put his foot on her foot but she missed the opportunity to withdraw or let him know. Was she getting hit on, or was she making things out of proportion? She tells Karin about a crowded place she goes for lunch during the dog walk, just to have lunch next to some strangers.

People's cruelty to one another seems more accepted - Karin's attitude toward the neighbor's kid who kicked a hacky sack into the kitchen window, or mom's lingering foot above the cat's head, Simon's story about a drunk woman at the party who later got arrested, or mom's contemplation of pricking her finger with a sewing needle, and so on.

There's a lot to unpack in The Strange Little Cat. It's the everyday domesticity that plays out like a horror film.