Modern Film Classics: “Goodbye Lenin!”

One of the best things they don’t tell you in German tourist guides are those small shops that sell Soviet-era goods. When the Berlin Wall fell, the flush of capitalism flooded East German shops, washing away goods from that era, including now-defunct brands like Spreewalt brand pickles, Moccafixgold hot chocolate, and Trabant automobiles. These were replaced by more familiar names such as General Mills, Starbucks and Audi. Nevertheless, there remains some fondness for the East German days by the older generation, a nostalgia referred to affectionately as “Ostalgie”. I thought about this while watching Wolfgang Becker’s raucous 2003 German dramedy Good Bye, Lenin!

We first meet the Kerner family in 1978. Young Alex (Daniel Brühl) dreams of becoming an astronaut (called “cosmonauts” back then) some day. His sister Ariane (Maria Simon) has the potential to become a great academic. Their father has gone missing, presumed to have taken up in the West with a woman of ill repute, according to their brittle mother, Christiane (Katrin Saß), who responds by becoming a leading educator in the East German Communist Party. A decade later, Alex and Ariane have become layabouts and Christiane is still going strong. On October 7, 1989, during an anti-government demonstration, Christiane sees Alex being taken by riot police and promptly suffers a heart attack. As she lays in a coma, she has no idea that Communism has collapsed, that the Berlin Wall fell, and that German reunification had been realized. Doctors warn Alex and Ariane that their mother is in such frail health that she cannot be excited or disturbed, and they wonder if she will ever wake up.

By the summer of 1990, Alex ekes out a living by installing satellite dishes and has struck up a relationship with the Russian nurse looking after her mother, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). Ariane has quit university to work at Burger King and is now in a relationship with her free-wheeling coworker Rainer, who enjoys dancing to Indian trance music in the cramped family apartment when he’s not whiling away in his tanning bed. All seems to carry on well until one day, Christiane awakes. Alex, not wanting to disturb his mother or shock her by revealing the truth – that Communism and the system she had believed in so fiercely and unquestionably had evanesced, leaving her without a legacy for her life’s work – decides to bring Christiane back home into her old room in the apartment, filling the space with now-outdated Communist propaganda and shielding her from the truth about German reunification. The ruse becomes so elaborate that when she craves Spreewalt pickles, Alex finds out that grocery stores no longer sell them and he resorts to buying a Dutch brand that he then puts in old Spreewalt jars. Eventually, he recruits his zany coworker Denis (Florian Lukas) into filming fake newscasts for his mother to watch, confirming that all was alive and well in the DDR (German Democratic Republic). As Denis is an aspiring filmmaker, they stretch the truth by concocting stories on alleged political developments, and create an entirely new reality exclusively for Christiane, who has no idea what’s going on.

The film is structured like a juggling act, with Alex as the juggler adding not only more balls to his act, but also flaming torches, electric saws and knives, struggling to balance everything in the figurative air. They might have created a birthday party for the bedridden Christiane in her room, with “official greetings” from the Party and East German Youth singing songs of loyalty to the DDR, but they can’t conceal the unexpected Coca-Cola ad that is being installed at that exact moment in the building across the street. When Christiane suggests an outing to the family’s summer cottage, Ariane snipes at Alex’s elaborate ruse that he should set about redecorating all of Berlin if he expects to keep up appearances.

While I have just described possibly the zaniest film ever inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a film that is informative and has great insight on the immediate fallout. As the Communist system no longer existed, seniority amongst its ranks amounted to nothing, and high-ranking officials that Christiane knew have defected or been made unfit for useful employment, turning to drink and endless hours of television to fill the abrupt void foisted upon their lives. Capitalism resulted in a strange devaluation of the old system, and Becker understands that the new freedom was not for everyone. It reminds me of the old Simpsons episode where an ant colony is destroyed and the made-up subtitles read, as the ants go flying into space (this was on a spaceship), the ants squeak, “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”

VIFF 2011: “The Singing City”

Those of you who have been following my blog know that I have a major preoccupation with German opera. In particular, the long and difficult works of Wagner have been known to keep me rapt for the many, many hours that they last. So it was with much anticipation that I saw The Singing City (Die Singende Stadt), a documentary on the Stuttgart Opera’s 2010 production of Wagner’s opus Parsifal.

This mighty opera is not for the faint of heart or the impatient. A long meditation on King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, the opera features a cast of hundreds at any given performance and requires considerable endurance from the performers, the orchestra and the audience. In 2010, Vadim Jendreyko was given unprecedented access to the Stuttgart Opera’s unusual post-Apocalyptic mounting of Parsifal, complete with gas masks, scuba gear, nudity and shrunken baby-doll heads worn as headdresses. Jendreyko followed the company for the entire length of the pre-production, covering every aspect of the play. We see how props and sets are built from scratch, and cleaned up after dress rehearsal.

Shot using HD cameras and featuring a magnificent sound recording, the film allows us unprecedented access to the production. We observe the Spanish-speaking costume designer, who doesn’t speak German, as she attempts to balance the director’s design instructions with the logistical impossibilities of singing opera in her designs. We delight in the American tenor attempting to master his pronunciation of the word “unrevealed” in German, to the unending patience and amusement from his dialect coach. The director clashes with the cast, the make-up artists meticulously weave wigs on prop corpses that the audience will barely see, the lighting designer works complicated spreadsheets to ensure that he computes and calibrates the lights just the way the director wants, and the orchestra has to contend with the prop blood spilling out from the urine bags tied to corpses onstage into the orchestra pit. The Opera has an international cast, and at any given time you can hear English, German and Spanish being spoken in the course of rehearsals.

What The Singing City conveys most vividly is the meticulous manpower and efforts of literally a thousand people attempting to bring the director’s avant-garde interpretation of one of the most controversial, complicated operas in history to life for a discerning, cultured audience. Jendreyko forgoes the standard narration and title cards that accompany most behind-the-scenes documentaries and instead plants his cameras at rehearsals, workshops and meetings to give us the sense that we are there. The effect is that rather than having a narrative guide to the proceedings, we view the work as it organically takes shape, lending the documentary a greater immediacy than most other non-fiction features. What’s most exciting is that the film shows us the dignity and joy in work, and in creating art. Every member of the production, from the child chorus to the make-up artist to the sound engineer, is given an opportunity to be seen and heard in the film. Although The Singing City might be a misleading title, it makes sense in the context that everything in the Stuttgart Opera’s building operates within the context of its own rules and governance, much like a city itself. My only quibble is that we do not get to see a snippet of the finished work, but one can easily find these clips on YouTube (the clip is slightly NSFW, but the nudity is used tastefully and not for exploitation or titillation purposes).

The Singing City is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with one final performance on Thursday, October 13. For ticket information, click here, and you can view the trailer here. If you’re interested in more information on the Stuttgart Opera, click here. The film is presented in German, Spanish and in English, with English subtitles, and runs a lightning-fast 92 minutes.

Eurovision 2011: The Wrap-Up & Final Results

Well that was a most exciting three and a half hours!

Ell & Nikki of Azerbaijan, 2011 Eurovision winners

Azerbaijan made history this evening by winning the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time. As per custom, they will host next year’s contest at a location to be determined. Italy, returning to the contest for the first time in over a decade, claimed the runner-up spot. Sweden’s Eric Saade, whose fans were locked in a bitter Internet rivalry with fans of Russian Alexey Vorobyov, earned enough points to place third.

The Blogger is saddened that neither of his two picks for the big win, the UK’s Blue and Vorobyov, fared well, as both finished well out of the top ten.

It’s notable that when points were awarded to certain countries, the audience in attendance loudly booed their disapproval. Not wanting to ignite international warfare over pop music, the Blogger will simply attribute the placement of each entry to each country’s preference. The number of points any one entry gets in one nation will not necessary get points in another country. Some quarters have also accused nations for voting for their neighbours. One example is the perennial mutual awarding of top points between Greek and Cyprian entries, as well as those between Portugal and Spain. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in my previous article, despite the hand-wringing at this practice, what Eurovision succeeded in doing was bringing countries together. And unlike FIFA, there’s no four-year wait for the contest as it’s on every year! 

For those of you who missed it, here is the order of finish for Eurovision 2011 and the videos of each respective country’s entries, after the jump:

Guilty Pleasure: Eurovision Song Contest, 2011

UPDATE: the results of the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest are in and the recap is available here.

Eurovision 2011 Logo

Disclaimer: despite his proclamation and adoration for high art, the Blogger, like everyone else, has a guilty pleasure. His is the Eurovision Song Contest. Think of it as Martha Stewart having the occasional cheeseburger after eating healthy all week. No judgment.

 

Originally conceived in the mid-1950s by the European Broadcasting Union to unite a warm-torn, still-divided Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest was meant as a one-off light entertainment program. Fifty-five years after that first contest in 1956, the program has evolved into an annual international celebration of song showcasing the best Europe has to offer. It has also, in several corners of Europe, been met with much derision due to the rather, shall we say, extraordinary song choices. What may be considered hip, cool and cutting-edge in one part of Europe may be considered to be déclassé or outright vulgar. In North American urban nomenclature, one denotes this with the scathing words “Try Hard”. 

ABBA winning with "Waterloo" in 1974

Nevertheless, the Eurovision Song Contest has been indomitable and survived the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Prague Spring of 1968, international incidents at the Olympics, Perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the formation of the EU and the rather alarming albeit mercifully temporary ubiquity of Fabio. The contest introduced the world to ABBA and showcased a teenaged Quebecois singer named Celine Dion who competed and won for Switzerland in 1988. The show has also, with the inclusion of several former Soviet republics, expanded to become more inclusive and focus less on the western part of the continent. Individual countries spend the winter months choosing their entries via popular vote, and this is undertaken with considerable seriousness and a surprisingly high degree of gravity. It is this writer’s opinion that the contest may be taken more seriously than many actual elections. In the end, the winner represents the nation to the world at large.