{"id":12088,"date":"2019-02-08T14:12:10","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T18:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12088"},"modified":"2019-02-08T14:15:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-08T18:15:47","slug":"i-believe-the-correct-term-is-worlds-war-ii-short-movie-book-reviews-on-a-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/02\/i-believe-the-correct-term-is-worlds-war-ii-short-movie-book-reviews-on-a-theme.html","title":{"rendered":"I Believe the Correct Term Is “Worlds War II”: Short movie & book reviews on a theme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Arts and entertainments from four nations caught in the catastrophe of the century of progress. Or, four very different World War IIs.<\/p>\n

First, the book: Andrzej Szczypiorski\u2019s The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman<\/strong><\/em>, which I read in Klara Glowczewska\u2019s translation. This is a fractal portrait of Poland, in which every chapter follows a different person from prewar life to death. All these people get caught up in one microcosm event: the arrest of Irma Seidenman, who is living under an assumed name on the Aryan side of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The novel\u2019s form makes the case for Poland as a reality, \u201cPoland is a thing\u201d as the youth of today would say. The novel\u2019s events make the case that, as most cultures are defined by their characteristic conflicts, Poland is defined by the dichotomy of innocent suffering (it is \u201cthe Christ of Nations,\u201d or so the Poles tell us) vs. complicit villainy, the victim or the henchman.<\/p>\n

This is a more easily-intelligible book than A Mass for Arras<\/em><\/a>, though it shares that book\u2019s concerns with home, homelessness, and complicity. Szczypiorski gives many of these characters flights into lyricism, though they\u2019re flights in different directions: nostalgia for the age of the Habsburgs, betrayed socialism, Jewish belonging and Polish nationalism and Christian faith. Toward the very end we even inhabit the mind of a Nazi officer and get a taste of the kitschy lyricism of the Reich\u2013although Szczypiorski does this character the kindness of sending him to a Soviet prison camp, where his mind goes animal-silent and numb with hunger. There are bafflingly sad trajectories, like the rebellious Jewish kid who turns into a hidebound anti-Semitic elderly Pole; a doctor has a vision of his dead father while his home is being raided. (The noises of soldiers ransacking his home come to him like \u201cthe ticking of an enormous clock, which was measuring his own time as no other clock had until now.\u201d) All of it is part of a portrait\u2013or a shaggy-dog tale, \u201ca farcical anecdote told to the world by God, whose title is Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n

While I was reading Mrs. Seidenman<\/em> I watched Green for Danger<\/strong><\/em>\u2013a jarring contrast! Green<\/em> is a slight mystery, starring Alistair Sim as an unnervingly chop-licking detective, set in 1944 and punctuated the explosions of Nazi flying bombs. I don\u2019t even know what else to say about it. It\u2019s okay, as a movie, its final twists came a little too fast and twisty for me, its main interest is that it\u2019s a cozy old-fashioned whodunnit where everybody\u2019s sort of embarrassed at how they flinch at loud noises because they might be V-1s.<\/p>\n

Il Generale della Rovere<\/strong><\/em> is (heart emoji) Roberto Rossellini\u2019s tale of Nazi-occupied Italy, about a scrambler, a schemer, a con man (played with soiled charm by Vittorio de Sica) who would be easy to love if his current scheme weren\u2019t squeezing cash from desperate families by pretending he can get the Nazis to free their imprisoned relatives. When this guy gets what\u2019s coming to him and winds up behind bars, he agrees to be part of a farcical plot to pretend a dead Italian resistance leader is still alive. This Weekend at Bernini\u2019s business is played with a perfect mix of vivacity and conviction. There\u2019s a frothiness to it, a lightness, lent by the seedy character of our hero and the office-politics, don\u2019t-tell-the-boss nature of the Nazis\u2019 scheme. And yet the prison feels very real and raw, with the last testimonies of executed prisoners carved into the walls. The symbolic, somewhat willful ending (does the lowlife\u2019s final choice actually protect the person he\u2019s trying to protect?) allows our louse\/hero to be changed by his experiences, to drop the only goal he\u2019s ever had: survival.<\/p>\n

The movie looks great, crisp high-contrast ruins. (You can rent it on YouTube.) I would like to say a special word for the lowlife\u2019s moll (Giovanna Ralli), who turns up in the first scenes looking spectacularly louche and foxy. You can feel her performing her disappointment in her man. She\u2019s actressy in a way that really works for this story of the mask sinking into the skin.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t watched many \u201cHolocaust movies.\u201d So I don\u2019t know to what extent Fateless<\/strong><\/em>, adapted by Imre Kertesz and director Lajos Koltai from Kertesz\u2019s novel, is actually unusual. It did several things I hadn\u2019t seen before, starting from very early, when one of the effects of Nazi repression is to complicate the already difficult balancing acts of a \u201cblended family.\u201d Gyorgy (Marcell Nagy) is the child of divorced parents, and his father, who has custody, warns him that his mother may try to work on his affections while the father is at a forced-labor camp.<\/p>\n

Fateless<\/em> is like the book in having a pretty clear thesis\u2013the Holocaust exposes the meaninglessness of life; no choices really affect things, not even the choice to hope or despair. It feels about as good to watch as that description would suggest. Gyorgy ends up in a concentration camp by chance, though it was probably an inevitable chance\u2013it would\u2019ve happened soon, even though there was no particular reason it happened on that day or in that way. The film, which is a little over two hours long, captures the endlessness of life in the camps, the endlessly repeated days and labors and inspections. It conveys a feeling of exhaustion. Mist drifts through the camp, lending a beauty which does not point to any meaning or goodness, a kind of drained beauty.<\/p>\n

Gyorgy survives, is liberated, and returns to his native Hungary. The people from the early scenes return\u2013and they\u2019re weirdly, horribly unchanged. They want to pick up the thread of their lives whereas Gyorgy can\u2019t. He\u2019s filled with hatred, anger and resentment toward people who can still act as if what they\u2019re doing has some purpose\u2013people who have suffered, but not as much. They still find meaning in their suffering, they can call certain things \u201cdreadful,\u201d whereas Gyorgy no longer knows what that word means\u2013what is dreadful and what is just normal, just a thing that exists? They are still the selves they started out as, whereas Gyorgy is, or at least can only feel that he is, a familiar skin from which the old self has been extracted and a kind of active emptiness poured in as a replacement. He does continue, though, and heads out into a future, because what else can you do.<\/p>\n

Somebody on IMDB seems to have added this film to a list of \u201cinspirational movies\u201d so maybe it is true that nothing in life makes sense.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arts and entertainments from four nations caught in the catastrophe of the century of progress. Or, four very different World War IIs. First, the book: Andrzej Szczypiorski\u2019s The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, which I read in Klara Glowczewska\u2019s translation. This is a fractal portrait of Poland, in which every chapter follows a different person from prewar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[102,83,79,1396,86,527],"class_list":["post-12088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-a-shandeh-for-the-goyim","tag-complicity","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-poland","tag-the-dark-continent-europe-in-the-twentieth-century","tag-viva-litalia"],"yoast_head":"\nI Believe the Correct Term Is "Worlds War II": Short movie & book reviews on a theme<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Arts and entertainments from four nations caught in the catastrophe of the century of progress. Or, four very different World War IIs. 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