Fratricide

Brudermord (Fratricide) 2005 Luxembourg/Germany/France (94 minutes) written, directed and produced by Yılmaz Arslan; cinematographer, Jean-François Hensgens; editor, André Bendocchi-Alves; music, Evgueni Galperine; sound, Laurent Benaïm.

This fast-paced drama shows ages-old ethnic enmities and cultural practices gussied up with urban hip-hop culture that bleed into the developed world along with globalization’s cheap labor, goods and services.

Director and writer Yılmaz Arslan starts with strong impressions that tie in the characters’ backgrounds with the end of his story. This catches a viewer’s attention right away. It also gives insights into his characters such that once the story gets rolling he doesn’t have to brake his narrative pace with distracting exposition.

The violent scenes are effective because they are edited in series of shots that let a viewer know what is happening and suggest how it feels, but leave the most lurid images to the viewer’s imagination.  

The result makes for a well-designed mosaic: all the pieces come into clear focus by the end of Arslan’s telling. The young Kurdish-German director dedicated his film to Italian great Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The plot goes something like this.

Ibrahim ‘Ibo’ Denizli (Xewat Geçtan), a young ethnic Kurd, witnesses his parents’ deaths in a massacre in rural Turkey at the hands of government troops.

The Kurds are an Indo-Iranian people whose traditional tribal areas are in adjacent parts of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Historically, they were a force for Turks, Persians and Arabs to reckon with. The region’s twentieth century governments reduced them to resentful minorities in modern Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

Ibo arrives in a home for refugee minors in an unidentified, German-speaking, European city, sustained by folktales he learned from his parents and grandfather.

At the refugee home Ibo meets Azad Karaman (Erdal Celik), a Kurdish teenager of similar background. Azad’s immigrant older brother Şemsettin ‘Şemo’ Karaman (Nurettin Celik) had sent for Azad to join him in the Promised Land.

We first see Azad herding sheep alone on a vast Anatolian prairie. The prosperous Şemo, who supports his parents in rural southeastern Turkey (and may also be on the run from Turkish authorities for political activities in Turkish Kurdistan), turns out to be a pimp running Russian prostitutes.

Shamed by his older brother’s ‘business,’ Azad stays in the refugee home. He shaves Turkish immigrants in the men’s room of a tavern in an immigrant quarter—a technically illegal but honorable activity to provide extra income. The younger Ibo becomes his assistant.

The film opens with people mourning a young man and preparing his body for burial. This turns out to be Ahmet (Oral Uyan), a second-generation Turkish resident of the same European city, in which his immigrant parents own and operate a grocery store. 

Ahmet and his brother Zeki (Bülent Büyükasık), in their early 20s, work in the family grocery by day. Away from their conservative parents’ home and business, they strike the attitudes of the guns ‘n’ pit bulls urban hip-hop lifestyle.

The street clichés of Power and Violence are little more than style accessories in the hands of bullies against the business edge of a knife or straight razor. Though in the end, a hip-hop style ‘sideways shooter’ manages a wildly fired hit home.

Ibo and Azad cross paths with the older Ahmet and Zeki in a ‘respect’ incident on an urban railway car. This leads later to a knifing that escalates to a blood feud, the ‘fratricide’ of the title.

And a body on the pavement brings in European law enforcement with its due process, interpreters, social workers and ethnic Turkish officers. True to form, a German-speaking police official raises his voice as he loses his patience, but the police do not abuse or beat any prisoner. European instrumental authority is more like a pale shadow.

In fact, most of the action takes place in an as though immigrant inner space or parallel universe within and yet far removed from the everyday life of this generic European city.

Apart from the grocery, young non-Europeans in this story do not display the least desire or illusion about integration into European life or society. Life comes down to acquiring money, Şemo tells his brother: ‘Europeans’ figured this out and immigrants must learn how to master it.

Being in ‘democratic’ Europe also gives minorities a voice unthinkable in their home countries. When a Kurd dies in police custody, Zilan (Taies Farzan), an émigrée Kurdish activist, bull-horns in to exploit the tragedy for her own political ends. Zilan tries to inflame the local population against officialdom’s purported ‘racism.’

Erdal Celik resembles a young Al Pacino, but his Azad is a character more like James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause (1955).

Like Jim, Azad knows little about the world. What he sees, what adults tell him and how they act don’t add up. He just wants to do the right thing. Azad’s situation is the more difficult because he speaks a language understood by few outside the Kurdish community; his accented Turkish marks him as a Kurd, and he speaks and understands practically no German. Azad can rely on no one but himself.

In his almost inevitably ill-fated end, Azad, like Jim Stark, tries to right the world and make his own little family with Ibo and Mirka (Xhiljona Ndoja), an Albanian girl his age from the refugee home.

Most of the action takes place in the spring, from shortly before Kurdish Nevruz, or New Year, celebrated at the spring equinox, to after Easter. Mirka first approached Azad after a Christian Easter service in the refugee center.

No animals were mistreated in the making of this film, though the squeamish should be warned that the most graphic scene occurs after a character is gutted in a knife fight. As the victim groans to contain his exposed entrails, his leashed pit bull gets the idea that he is offering her a treat.

Naked among Wolves

Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves) 1963 German Democratic Republic DEFA (119 minutes) directed by Frank Beyer; cowritten by Beyer and Bruno Apitz, based on Apitz’s novel of the same title; cinematography by Günter Marczinkowsky; editor, Hildegard Conrad.

It is April 1945. The organized madness that had been the Third Reich’s ‘security state’ is unraveling, among which its immense internment and slave labor system.

Nazi officials fearing war crimes prosecution for their treatment of the Third Reich’s ‘undesirables’ work to hide evidence of their misdeeds as they evacuate prison populations ahead of advancing Allied troops.

In the midst of this chaos, a small boy turns up in a suitcase in Buchenwald concentration camp.

When inmates find the boy, the largely self-governing prisoner administration must decide whether to jeopardize prisoners’ lives and their underground organization by hiding him in the camp, to keep him moving through the system to an uncertain fate, or to turn him over to the Nazis.

This beautifully shot, superbly acted 1963 East German tour de force set at Buchenwald in the final weeks of the war was the first German film to take on the subject. It is said to have captured prison camp life as well as Billy Wilder’s popular Stalag 17 (1953) about Allied prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.

DEFA director Frank Beyer filmed the movie on the actual location from a novel by Bruno Apitz, a former Buchenwald political inmate. A number of the actors, including Erwin Geschonneck, one of the leads, also were former prisoners.

Erwin Geschonneck and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Frank Beyer's Nackt unter Wolfen.

The film sketches personalities and relationships among the diverse inmate population and Nazi camp personnel, as well as interactions between the inmates and their Nazi overseers. (Notes at the end provide details concerning the variety of ranks, duties and badges of the SS personnel and inmates which appear in the film.)

The Nazis constructed Buchenwald in the mid-1930s in virgin forest near Weimar, the heart of classic German romanticism. The camp held mainly political prisoners; chief among these were German Communists.

Many of the inmates had been in the system since the mid- to late-1930s. There were professionals and academics, tradesmen, technicians, and artists of all skill levels and ability; Jews and Gypsies, suspected political and religious opponents of the regime, and a full complement of criminals and ne’er-do-wells.

In short, the Nazi SS [Schutzstaffel] which ran the camps warehoused the Reich’s undesirables and left it to the inmates to organize their own survival through self-government.

The SS appointed a hierarchy of inmate trusties to administer prisoner needs, though generally the inmates first picked or recommended them. Communist party members vied with criminals for control of the inmate administration. The SS reportedly preferred to work with criminals—many of its members shared the same lumpen background and outlook—but the well-organized, disciplined party won out in the long run.

Inmates also maintained an intelligence network which kept tabs on camp authorities and monitored international news broadcasts, particularly the Allied advance, on contraband radios. In addition, they collected arms and trained personnel anticipating their takeover of the camp.

At the center of this story is Walter Krämer (Erwin Geschonneck), the Lagerälteste, or senior camp inmate whom SS camp authorities put in charge of the inmates’ administration. (This fictional character may be based on a heroic Buchenwald inmate of the same name who was not a lagerälteste.)

The story opens with Krämer crossing the empty, nearly four-acre Appellplatz, Buchenwald’s actual mustering area. Behind Krämer is the camp’s distinctive tower with its motto below on the main gate, Jedem das Seine, ‘To each his own.’ The crematorium chimney belches ominous black smoke off to his right—and throughout the film.

Krämer, a German Communist party member with a decade in the system, must balance his fellow inmates’ best interests against the SS camp authorities’ requirements and the instructions of the Communist party apparatus within the camp. 

SS personnel ranged from cynical bureaucrats to fanatic ‘chicken hawks’ dodging dangerous line duty, to uniformed criminals looking to enrich themselves and bullies and sadists who enjoyed abusing defenseless inmates.

Standartenführer Schwahl (Heinz Peter Scholz) is the SS bureaucrat in overall command of the camp. The splenetic Hauptsturmführer Kluttig (Herbert Köfer) is Lagerführer, or officer-in-charge of the prisoners. Untersturmführer Reineboth (Erik S. Klein) is Kluttig’s cynical right hand as the Rapportsturmführer, or roll call officer.

Erik S. Klein, foreground, and Herbert Koefor, background, search for 'das judiche Kind' in Nackt unter Wolfen.

In the movie, once the inmate population of Buchenwald’s main camp assembles for morning roll call, Reineboth orders them several times to remove and replace their caps en masse. This typically was done at the whim of the rapportsturmführer until he was satisfied that the inmates had executed his order with the proper respect. 

German officials characteristically raise their voices as they lose patience. Along similar lines, at several key moments in the film, inmates are more focused on the toes of the SS officers’ highly polished boots than their faces.

André Höfel (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Kapo, or inmate work detail foreman, here in charge of the personal effects intake depot, and coworkers Rudi Pippig (Fred Delmare) and Marian Kropinski (Krystyn Wójcik), find the child (Jürgen Strauch) among the personal effects of prisoners force-marched from Auschwitz in western Poland.

Fred Dalmare and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Nackt unter Wolfen.

Zbigniew Jankowsky (Boleslaw Plotnicki), the Pole who brought the boy in the suitcase, tells them that the boy came with his parents to Auschwitz from the Warsaw Ghetto at the age of four months. His father and others concealed him in the camp. Jankowsky looked after him after both parents went to the gas chamber.

Jankowsky tells this tale after a reverent pause over a piece of bread they have given him, a poignant detail that would not have been lost on camp survivors.

The three Communists decide to hide the boy. (Jankowsky subsequently is evacuated to Dachau.) Their SS overseer, the venal Hauptsharführer Zweiling (Wolfram Handel), catches them red-handed, but they give Zweiling a morsel for thought.

Later at home, Zweiling boasts to his wife Hortense (Angela Brunner) that saving ‘das jüdische Kind’ will put them in the good graces of the approaching American forces. Hortense, busily packing the Zweiling household beneath the portrait of SS commander Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and expecting the order—or last-minute necessity—to flee, dismisses this as nonsense. They hatch another plot.

Meanwhile, Herbert Bochow (Gerry Wolff), a Communist party official, orders Krämer to get rid of the boy so as not to jeopardize inmates’ lives and the underground network. 

The SS tries to find the child. The inmates’ self-government, brought about by Nazi disdain for lesser orders of humanity, and Communist party discipline, has rendered the population nearly inscrutable to them.

The prisoners keep the boy one step beyond SS reach. The search for the boy becomes a desperate, ruthless hunt to expose the suspected—and feared—armed resistance network and the names of its leaders.

The inmates also stall to resist evacuation as Allied planes roar overhead and the U.S. Third Army draws closer. Kluttig wants to liquidate the ‘troublemakers’—if not the whole camp population; many of his colleagues anxiously work out their own exit strategies. And some inmates burn to avenge years of unanswered indignities. 

Background notes on Buchenwald concentration camp and the ranks, duties and badges of its officials and inmates which appear in the film:

The Third Reich’s concentration camps were operated by the Schutzstaffel, or SS, a military and police formation under Himmler’s command. The SS Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units), an independent formation within the SS, oversaw the camps.

The Nazis established the camp system with the intent to ‘purify’ German Aryan society by isolating all political and moral opponents, criminals, homosexuals, and so-called ‘asocial elements,’ as well as ‘inferior’ ethnic groups such as Jews and the Roma. Many prisoners had been in the system going back to the mid- to late-1930s.

In general, inmates had not undergone a judicial process nor received a sentence. The ultimate aim of the camp system was to eliminate the Third Reich’s undesirables by attrition or extermination.

Each category of prisoner wore an identifying triangular ‘badge.’ The best known now of these badges are the superimposed yellow triangles which made the Star of David which Jews wore in all Nazi-ruled areas inside and outside the camps, and the inverted pink triangle worn in the camps by homosexual internees.

Buchenwald held mostly political detainees. ‘Politicals’ wore an inverted red triangle and a prisoner identification number. Single letters inscribed on the triangles indicated an inmate’s country of origin, such as a ‘P’ for Poles. A number across a red triangle indicated a person arrested in a round-up of suspicious people. Criminals wore an inverted green triangle. A line sewn above a triangle indicated a repeat offender.

The camp command designated a hierarchy of trusties to administer the inmates’ daily needs and to help insure order, beginning with the Lagerälteste or senior camp inmate. Under the Lagerälteste were Blockältestes or senior block inmates in charge of barracks, Kapos, inmate foremen in charge of work details, and Lagerschutz, inmate police, among others who wore black armbands with their designation in white lettering.

The SS was an ideological military and police organization separate from the German armed forces, though both organizations carried out the Third Reich’s policies. The SS wore the same rank insignia as German army personnel, but their ranks had different, ideological names, like the ‘dragons’ and ‘wizards’ of the Ku Klux Klan, but with a lot of sturms [storms] and führers [leaders].

Thus the film’s Standartenführer Schwahl, the installation commandant, wears the rank of an army oberst (colonel). Schwahl has a pair of subordinate sturmbannführers, or majors. Below them is Hauptsturmführer Kluttig, with the rank of an army hauptmann (captain). Kluttig also is called Lagerführer, ‘camp leader,’ the officer directly in charge of the prisoners.

Untersturmführer Reineboth has the rank of an army leutnant (second lieutenant) and also is called Rapportsturmführer, or ‘roll call officer.’ This officer conducted roll calls and personnel training and oversaw the disciplining of prisoners.

In the film, Kluttig commands the inmate population; Reineboth is his right-hand.

Under Kluttig is Hauptsharführer Zweiling with the army rank of oberfeldwebel, or master sergeant. Zweiling is a Blockführer, or block leader, an SS official in charge of a block, or unit of barracks. Oberscharführer Mandrill, the torturer, wears the army rank of feldwebel (sergeant first class).

MP consulted Eugen Kogon’s classic The Theory and Practice of Hell: the German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them (Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager) to compile these notes. Kogon, an anti-Nazi Roman Catholic, survived six years in Buchenwald.

Getting off

Reversal of Fortune 1990 U.S. (112 minutes) directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Nicholas Kazan, based on the book by Alan Dershowitz.

A darkly glib titled European convicted of trying to murder his American socialite wife hires a brilliant, passionate and media-loving lawyer to clear his name.

This entertaining feature film based on the Claus von Bülow case makes legal research sexy and comes with a moral which underlines the touchstone of the American criminal justice system: everyone gets a defense. 

The victim, Martha ‘Sunny’ von Bülow (Glenn Close), is an extremely wealthy and spoiled American socialite who chronically abused drugs and alcohol.

The defendant, her husband Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons), is a charming German with a title, a great deal less money than his wife, and a stygian sense of humor. Irons received a Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for his role.

The defense attorney, Alan M. Dershowitz (a schlubbed down Ron Silver), is a brilliant legal practitioner who, self-deprecating in manner, knows damn well in his heart of Harvard Law School hearts that the criminal justice sun rises and sets on him. This may be an occupational hazard.

In other words—and to paraphrase Minnie (Felicity Huffman), one of the movie’s law students involved in the case—everyone’s a stinker.

The defendant probably ‘did it’; nobody liked the smug rich bastard to begin with. But the court blew it. Vindictive family members hired a private investigator and fed the state prejudicially selective evidence upon which its prosecution relied.

This is the thing that Dershowitz, through gritted teeth, tells his law students ‘really pisses me off,’ because regardless of who this defendant happened to be his prosecution unfairly prejudiced the trial outcome.

‘It’s the basis of the whole legal system. Everyone gets a defense. So the system is there for the one innocent person who is falsely accused,’ Dershowitz says.

The case is The State of Rhode Island v. Claus von Bülow. Made for the tabloids, it produced a pair of high profile trials in a decade of glitter and excess.

Sunny van Bülow inexplicably went into a coma in her Newport, Rhode Island, ‘cottage’ Clarendon Court just before Christmas 1980. This event turned out to be ‘suspiciously’ similar to an incident that happened almost exactly a year before from which she recovered. Insulin was the suspected substance—and alleged link.

In the first trial, a Rhode Island jury found von Bülow guilty on two counts of attempting to murder his wife by insulin injection. The state supreme court vacated von Bülow’s guilty verdict and thirty-year sentence, sending the case back to a new jury which subsequently acquitted him.

Sunny von Bülow remained in a coma for 28 years, from the time the second incident occurred until her death in December 2008. Close’s character, who gets the first and last word, often speaks reflectively from beyond in a voiceover.

Since the movie is based on a lawyer’s book, it loses a lot of the celebrity frisson that surrounded the case as one of the 1980s ‘trials of the decade.’

Dershowitz came into the case when von Bülow hired him to appeal the first verdict. The screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, structured on the issues Dershowitz argued before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, dramatizes the case from court records and trial transcripts as Dershowitz, his law students and lawyers working with him research, argue and shape their appeal.

But all work and no play would make Alan’s a dull story.

The leaven that makes this rich play rise and shine is the odd couple at its center: Irons’ coolly sharp and sardonic Old World patrician, and Silver’s energetic, inspired lawyer whose smarts compete bodily with his New York chutzpah.

The character Dershowitz is as nonplussed by von Bülow’s Newport-Upper East Side world of opulent privilege as is von Bülow by Dershowitz’s democratic, communal life in Cambridge among his students. The film has fun playing these contrasts. There also is a hint of the [anti-Semitic] high and mighty hiring ‘the Jew’ to ‘get Von Bülow off,’ while Dershowitz struggles not to see a ‘Hitla’ in the haughty German.

‘Is he the devil?’ Dershowitz wonders. ‘If so, can the devil get justice? And all this legal activity, is this in Satan’s service?’

But von Bülow, incidentally also trained as a lawyer, gets the best lines.

While first discussing the case with his client over ‘a proper lunch at Delmonico’s’ (where von Bülow points out that Dershowitz’s star power got them a better table than his elite social connections ever did) Dershowitz notes that von Bülow has one thing in his favor.

‘What’s that?’

‘Everyone hates you.’

‘Well, that’s a start,’ von Bülow replies, not missing a beat.

Later, when first meeting Dershowitz’s highly skeptical law students, von Bülow tries to break the ice with light humor:

‘What do you give a wife who has everything?’ he deadpans, pausing to regard the curious young faces: ‘An injection of insulin.’

Uh-huh…

Irons, Silver and Close inhabit their roles so convincingly that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these were actors playing living people less than a decade after the events occurred.

Maybe the best ingredient of Irons’ role is his character’s guardedness. In preparing and playing the role Irons said he got a sense about what really happened; but his von Bülow is an enigma. It is hard to know what he thinks or feels about anything.

Irons, who said he once met von Bülow through a mutual friend, noted in an interview that von Bülow had objected to details of his portrayal and groused that he is much better known to the world from Irons’ character than who he is himself.   

Who were these people, then, and what really did happen?

In Sunny’s words, ‘If you could just go back in time and take a peek, you’d know. And all this would be unnecessary. Then again, everyone enjoys a circus.’

Jannie soet wees

Searching for Sugar Man 2010 Sweden/U.K. (87 minutes) written, directed, edited and co-produced by Malik Bendjelloul; filmed by Camilla Skagerström.

The voice and lyrics of an American pop musician inspired disaffected 1970s Afrikaner youth and others who opposed authority and apartheid in South Africa.

Most Americans never heard of him.

Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American Detroiter, became best known in South Africa for his first album Cold Fact. His acoustic guitar tunes swing and his lyrics have an edge. Americans who grew up at the time or are familiar with its popular music easily will recognize Rodriguez’s period sound and his lyrics’ period slang and attitude.

The artist cut three albums in the early 1970s. Despite the expectations and high hopes of local supporters and record company cognoscenti who were sure they had discovered another Bob Dylan, the records were, in the words of former Motown records chairman Clarence Avant, ‘monumental flops.’

After this, Rodriguez got on with his life in Detroit. In his quiet self-deprecating manner, he said, ‘I pretty much went back to work.’ This work is the hard manual labor he has done most of his life to support his family.

Meanwhile, unknown to Rodriguez and just about everyone else in the U.S.—though someone somewhere had to have been making a lot of money—Rodriguez became ‘monumentally’ popular in South Africa.

‘To many South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,’ said Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman, who said he got his nickname when army comrades found it easier to refer to him as ‘Sugar Man,’ the lead song on Cold Fact, than Segerman. They later shortened this to ‘Sugar.’

The besieged police state that was the apartheid-gripped, internationally isolated 1970s Republic of South Africa could not have been more different from the U.S. at the time. Rodriguez’s catchy tunes with lyrics that referenced sex, drugs and young peoples’ angst had passed Americans by but were a new thing to young South Africans.

Rodriguez and his music captured their imagination.  

‘Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently,’ said South African music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom.

South African authorities controlled the country’s radio airwaves at the time and everything they did to limit Rodriguez’s exposure—including manually incising ‘offending’ tracks which made reference to sex and drugs on vinyl record albums produced locally or imported from abroad—just enhanced the singer’s popularity.

South Africans only had heard his records. In the political climate of the day, it would not have been unusual for an artist like Rodriguez to be denied entry or to refuse to come to the country. When it became apparent he no longer was producing songs, young South Africans began to believe rumors that Rodriguez had died or killed himself, like Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

And like those legends, he stayed young in people’s minds and also became popular to younger listeners.

In the 1990s Bartholomew-Strydom turned his journalistic skills to the task of figuring out what actually became of Rodriguez. He was joined in his effort by Segerman, a self-described lifelong Rodriguez fan.

Music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and lifelong Rodriguez fan Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman.

Segerman created a Web site, ‘The Great Rodriguez Hunt’; he put Rodriguez’s image on milk cartons. Bartholomew at first tried to ‘follow the money.’ The songs are filled with references to places. Bartholomew-Strydom traveled the globe trying to track him down. He finally hit pay dirt when he followed up a name in Rodriguez’s song ‘Inner City Blues’:

‘Met a girl from Dearborn,

            Early six this morn’,

A cold fact.’

This South African wondered whether ‘Dearborn’ is a place. It turned out to be a place in Wayne County, Michigan, not far from Detroit.

He located Mike Theodore in Detroit and reached him by telephone from South Africa. Theodore has known Rodriguez since the 1960s; he had co-produced Cold Fact. Bartholomew-Strydom asked Theodore for specifics about the purported theatrical death that Rodriguez’s South African fans had imagined. Did he set himself alight or shoot himself on stage?

Rodriguez dead? Theodore asked rhetorically. ‘The principal artist known as Sixto Rodriguez is alive and kicking, and living in Detroit,’ he said.

Bartholomew-Strydom had found his quarry, solved the mystery, and could finish his Rodriguez story, ‘Looking for Jesus.’

Malik Bendjelloul’s AcademyAward and BAFTA-winning documentary tells the incredible tale of how Bartholomew-Strydom and Segerman tracked down this obscure music legend whom they and many other fans believed to be long dead.

Even more extraordinary is the calmly centered, unassuming man Searching for Sugar Man reveals behind the legend and the life his tale took on in the U.S. and South Africa after Bartholomew-Strydom’s story ran.

As Rodriguez’s Detroit employer and friend Rick Emmerson said:

‘Even if his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained. And he had to keep finding a place, refining the process of how to apply himself. He knew there was something more.’

The Fifth Horseman is Fear

A Páty Jezdec je Strach (The Fifth Horseman Is Fear) 1964 Czechoslovakia Filmové Studio Barrandor (100 minutes) directed by Zbyněk Brynych.

The Fifth Horseman is that rare ‘Holocaust film’ which has not a single yellow star or jackbooted German.

The movie’s title adds a Fifth Rider, ‘Fear,’ to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the New Testament Book of Revelation, in which ‘War’ rides a white horse, ‘Famine’ a red horse, ‘Pestilence’ a black horse, and ‘Predation’ a pale horse.

The new rider, the face of which is fear-inspiringly anonymous policemen in plain black suits, gets about town in an open automobile with a telephone connected to an anonymous tip line. As such, the Fifth Rider delivers a near hallucinatory paranoia equal to that of the French existentialist dramas set in Nazi-occupied France.

The main plot is straightforward. Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček), a middle-aged Jewish doctor banned from practicing medicine and forced to compromise himself morally and spiritually to survive, risks his life simply to do his ethical duty as a doctor. Dr. Braun saves the life of a neighbor’s friend, a resistance fighter—Panek (Karel Nováček)—shot by police; he obtains morphine under the table to ease his patient’s pain and hides him.

The film opens—and closes—with a montage of Prague’s streets and passages. Drawn into this series of well composed day lit images, one becomes aware that there is someone in the background keeping an eye on him. Wherever you go in the city, someone watches you with suspicion.

Wherever you go in fascist-occupied Prague, someone is watching you, in Brynych's 1964 classic The Fifth Horseman Is Fear.   

The camera at first tentatively nears, and then returns several times to a printed notice pasted across Nazi-published lists of Czech names: 

RYCHL‎‎ÝM A PRĚSNÝM UDÁNÍM CHRÁNÍTE SVOU VLASTÍ BEZPEČNOST

VOLEJTE 448 11

‘Promptly and accurately reporting information ensures your safety. Call 448 11.’

In other words, ‘If you see something, say something.’

This film would say through an assortment of characters that one’s worst enemy most often is himself: bad conscience, willful moral or ethical blindness, or self-preserving myopia.

Authority induces an atmosphere of corrosive paranoia. It isolates people by informing a sense of self-preservation that alienates them from each another. Like the Old Testament God, its restless, ruthless, capricious gaze falls upon real people, often with devastating effect. Its black suited agents conduct intrusive searches of private apartments.

A police inspector (Jirí Vrstála) investigates the cleavage of Věra Šidlak (Jana Pracharová) during an apartment search in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964. 

Meanwhile, each person’s ego paces endlessly inside his head, gripped by the enormity of its own smallness, shortcomings, powerlessness and sense of personal guilt. And while everyone believes he is maintaining his self-preservation by assuming that someone is watching him and keeping an eye on others, few have the time, energy, or independence to see what actually is going on before their own eyes.

The plot and action center on Dr. Braun, but a boy who watches and knows the principal characters the way children do witnesses key plot points and his view links the broader narrative together. Honzik Veselý (Tomás Hádl) does not always understand what he sees, but the camera needs his vantage point to tell the whole story.

The boy Honzik (Tomás Hádl) does not always understand what he sees, but the camera needs his vantage point to tell the whole story in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

The drama takes place among the residents of an Art Nouveau apartment building. A character itself in the story, this structure with its grand spiraling staircase, dramatic lighting and long shadows, makes for ideal expressionist shots.

A character itself, the Art Nouveau apartment building makes for ideal expressionist shots in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

The residents appear to be ordinary middle class people. There is the well-to-do Dr. Karel Veselý (Jirí Adamíra), apparently a lawyer, his luxury-loving wife, Marta (Zdenka Procházková), their son Honzik, and Anička, the nanny (Iva Janzurová).

There is Vlastimil Fanta (Josef Vinklár), an anxious middle-aged tattletale; an elderly music teacher (Olga Scheinpflugová) with a pet dachshund, who worships the composer Franz Haydn; Mrs. Kratochvílová (Eva Svobodová), the middle-aged female concierge. There is Mr. Šidlak (Ilja Prachar), a butcher, his young wife Věra (Jana Pracharová) and their baby.

And there is Dr. Braun, a trimly fastidious and apparently cultivated, well dressed middle-aged man who lives alone in the garret. The doctor lives quietly above the racket of a football field, with a violin he tunes and fingers but does not play, and a very different, not so distant past.

Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček) compartmentalizes the frighteningly disparate parts of his life in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Dr. Braun was a physician until the Nazi race laws banned him from practicing medicine. He now lives somewhat incongruously among these Gentiles. Everyone in the building knows he is a Jew; everyone knows he was a doctor; everyone knows that the authorities have sanctioned him to live in the building; but no one associates with him.

The former doctor makes a living as ‘a kind of warehouseman,’ he says. He works at the Registry of Appropriated Jewish Property [Registrace židovských konfiskátů], where the story begins.

The ‘warehouse,’ the lovely and unwarehouselike interior spaces and ornate trimmings of which indicate a once prominent synagogue, is an Ali Baba’s cave of former Jewish household goods and property. Every item is primly ‘marked and ticketed.’ There are shelves stocked with food preserves and fine china, stacks of antique books and beautiful furniture, a floor of carelessly parked pianos. Countless musical instruments neatly line stairwells. There is a high wall of confiscated clocks.

Dr. Braun (Miroslav Macháček) inventories items among ‘a high wall of confiscated clocks’ at work in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Ghostly moving vans on empty streets collect everything to the last bird cage. They also evidently make deliveries. Privileged people phone Dr. Braun at the registry to requisition apartments and furnishings as needed, including towels. The efficiency and workaday normality of this operation, if not the whole city, underline madness beyond the banality of evil. 

Dr. Braun occasionally recognizes the former property and street addresses of old friends as he goes through the warehouse with his ledger. He fends off the stressful anxiety dream his existence has become by compartmentalizing the frighteningly disparate parts of his life, often with exteriorized interior monologues:

‘You’ll always find somebody who doesn’t think at all. And so he wants to think for the rest and decide everything for them. Life, death—no problem. Death’s not a novelty if not my own. No one is screaming. He’s transferred, marked and ticketed. It’s really an act of mercy. The reason is I cannot tell. I do not like you, Doctor Fell. You’ve got such a strange nose. But not to complicate matters. I’ve made a dividing line, and it’s bad luck you’re on the wrong side.’

A medical emergency seeks the doctor out and makes him decide which role is most important. It takes him into the streets to get morphine, to a night club where he seeks out a former medical colleague among people partying to drown their anxieties, to a ‘Jewish sanatorium.’

Police agents respond to the ring of a dime dropped in the apartment building.

Honzik, puzzled by the events he witnesses, asks, ‘Daddy, who is a real hero?’

‘A man who dies unnecessarily, as opposed to those who live unnecessarily,’ his father replies.

The ‘warehouse’: Each person’s ego paces endlessly inside his own head, gripped by the enormity of his own smallness in The Fifth Horseman is Fear 1964.

Shot in Prague in the mid-1960s on the crest of the Czech New Wave, the movie does not claim to be ‘based on a true story.’ Nor do the filmmakers make an effort to create the illusion of the city under Nazi occupation twenty years earlier. Policemen wear plain black suits and non-specific reference is made to devotion for a ‘beloved leader’ in a repeated propaganda formula without further elaboration.

What director Zbyněk Brynych tried to do was to recapture the fraught psychological atmosphere of everyday life in Nazi-ruled Prague of twenty years before.

In the ‘Prague Spring’ of the 1960s, this served as an analogous commentary on contemporary Soviet rule. Within the context of that time, the ideological nuance that Josef Stalin was much more a ‘beloved leader’ than ever Adolf Hitler was purported to be would not have been lost on Czech viewers.