Taking
Sides
by Chris Dashiell
What is the responsibility of an artist living under tyranny?
Hungarian director István Szabó has consistently tackled
such issues, in which ethical problems arise from troublesome political
conditions. His latest film, Taking Sides, returns to
that crucible of moral collapse, the Third Reich, to explore - in fictional
form - the plight of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Furtwängler
was the conductor of the Berlin Symphony when Hitler came to power.
Although many artists fled the country, Furtwängler stayed in Germany
during that period, and throughout the war. In fact, he was Hitler's
favorite conductor, and was honored by Goering and Goebbels. Although
he lent his name to the Nazi regime, he never joined the Party, and
managed to help many Jews to escape from Germany.
In the film's first scene, we see Furtwängler, played
by Stellan Skarsgård, conducting Beethoven's Fifth in a Berlin
concert attended by numerous German army officers,. When air raid sirens
come on, he keeps conducting, and doesn't stop even when the audience
can hear the sound of bombs falling. The concert ends only when the
power in the hall goes out. This striking sequence lays out the movie's
themes of the tension between art and politics.
The
film then cuts to the immediate postwar period. A tough, determined
American major, played by Harvey Keitel, is given the job of investigating
Furtwängler. After viewing films of the carnage discovered at the
death camps, Major Arnold proceeds on his mission with fierce, vengeful
energy. He sets up his office in Berlin, with a typist (Birgit Minichmayr)
whose father had been one of the executed officers in the plot to assassinate
Hitler, and a young Jewish aide (Moritz Bleibtreu) whose family had
fled Germany before the war, and has now returned as part of the occupying
American army. The major then sets to work interrogating witnesses,
looking for proof of Furtwängler's complicity in Nazi war crimes.
Eventually he confronts Furtwängler himself, and the remainder
of the film is, for the most part, a duel between the brash officer
and the artist.
The major does everything he can to break the conductor
down, confronting him with his agreement to play for Hitler's birthday,
his antisemitic comments, and his acceptance of an official post from
Goering. Furtwängler says that he stayed in Germany out of loyalty
to music, and to try to make a difference in his homeland from within.
He asserts his belief that art should be separate from politics, a notion
that becomes the focus of his adversary's attack. After digging up some
incriminating 
material,
the major counters that Furtwängler was in fact afraid to lose
his prestige and position, was jealous of his young rival Herbert von
Karajan, and therefore went along with the Nazis, who used this rivalry
to manipulate him. As far as his helping Jews, the major (who was an
insurance man back home) considers it merely Furtwängler's way
of hedging his bets, so that he can claim a noble purpose after the
war, in case the Germans lose. Finally, art was never separate from
politics, as can be seen from the Nazis' use of Furtwängler as
their poster boy for the supposed superiority of "Aryan" culture. The
major delivers a psychological blow by playing a recording of Furtwängler
conducting Bruckner's Seventh, the same recording that was chosen to
be broadcast on the radio when Hitler's death was announced.
The
picture is adapted by Ronald Harwood (who recently wrote the Oscar-winning
screenplay for Polanski's The Pianist) from his own play, and
it has the limitations of filmed theater: a sense of being confined
to one room, a surfeit of talk, and an unconvincing subplot concerning
a budding romance between the major's aide and the typist. Attempts
to open the play up by occasionally taking it outside are not very effective,
but despite the film's rough edges, the issues that are brought up are
fascinating.
Harvey Keitel's character is so brutal and obnoxious that
we tend to sympathize with Furtwängler. And yet - to Szabó's
credit, and Keitel's - the American's arguments, and his righteous anger
about the German's passive 
acceptance
of the status quo, becomes quite forceful, so that our ideas and assumptions
begin to shift as the film goes on. Keitel, with his one-pointed intensity,
dominates the film, and it's a memorable piece of work, although not
always completely believable. Skarsgård has less screen time,
but it's his performance that is truly brilliant, portraying in his
face and body language an almost titanic struggle between denial and
torment. We witness on what seems a visceral level the agony and the
crumbling reason of this proud, self-deluded man.
Taking
Sides treats the horror of the Nazi mass murders with the seriousness
that it deserves, daring to ask some really hard questions. At one point,
Furtwängler asks if he's supposed to be sorry that he wasn't hanged.
To which the major answers, in effect - Yes. At first glance this seems
incredibly unreasonable, but there is an element of higher justice in
it that the picture has taken care to prepare us for. Still, in the
end, the truth is not black and white, but painfully ambiguous, and
Szabó wisely leaves it that way, the better for us to face the
moral dilemma ourselves. The very last scene is a bit of actual footage
of the conductor shaking Hitler's hand after a concert. We see Furtwängler
secretly wiping his hand with a handkerchief a moment later, and Szabó
rewinds the film and shows it again, just so we won't miss it. On this
sad note, the film seems to be saying: if only things were that easy.
Most
narratives try to make sense out of our lives, but at the cost of simplifying
the random and often contradictory details of experience. Gus Van Sant,
who after a period of directing relatively mainstream fare such as Good
Will Hunting, has emerged as one of the more daring mavericks in
American film, deliberately goes against that grain in his visionary
new work, Elephant.
You may have heard that Elephant is based on the
Columbine school shootings, and that's true. But if you're expecting
an examination of the phenomenon of school killings, or some kind of
explanation of it, you can forget it. Van Sant is after something different.
With
an audacious style that often feels like a dream or a trance, the film
follows different fictional students through the halls of their high
school, going back and forth in time, with an intense focus that evokes
an experience of eerie loneliness and premonition. The most mundane
places and events seem strange under Elephant's gaze, and with
the quietly mournful music (notably Beethoven's Für Elise)
and the ever-flowing camera movement, the picture creates a weird sense
of being right there inside someone's field of vision.
By the time we meet the young killers and watch them planning
their murder spree, the film has gotten under one's skin in a way that's
extremely compelling and hard to shake. If Elephant is about
anything,
it seems to be describing the way death hovers over even our most ordinary
moments. Van Sant takes a cosmic "eye in the sky" view of the lives
of his teenage protagonists, with a style to match, and at the same
time he treats the experience of being a high school student with a
gravity that feels very intimate. All the young people are played by
actual high school students in Oregon, and there wasn't a false note
that I could see -- a tribute to Van Sant's genius with actors.
I believe the title Elephant refers to the proverbial
elephant in the living room that no one wants to acknowledge. In this
film, the elephant is more than just violence, it's death itself, and
the secret inner world we all share. This is a bold, scary riddle of
a movie, and its images still haunt me.
©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
