“L’homme n’est rien, l’œuvre tout!” — “Man is nothing, the work everything!” So wrote Gustave Flaubert to George Sand in December 1875. And as aphoristically as this introduces us to the way we ought to approach the aesthetic phenomenon as it emerges through art, it also sets our thoughts in motion when we encounter the works of great filmmakers — as Paweł Pawlikowski undoubtedly is.
In ‘Fatherland’, another of his exquisite miniatures, running no more than 82 minutes, Pawlikowski follows, for a brief period of his life, another major writer — this time of German literature — none other than Thomas Mann. With a body of work ranging from ‘The Magic Mountain’ and ‘Death in Venice’ to the ancestral plunge of the monumental ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, Mann returns in 1949 to be honored both in “western” Frankfurt and “eastern” Weimar. But what is the homeland to which he truly belongs?
Answers do not come easily in the Polish director’s film, which completes an unofficial trilogy — following ‘Ida’ and ‘Cold War’ — while preserving the unified black-and-white texture of his frame, with his regular cinematographer Łukasz Żal, and such painstaking precision in the casting of even the smallest role that the final result carries the scent of a period newsreel. In this sense, Pawlikowski’s status as an auteur is strengthened more and more, without this meaning — and here is the connection to our opening — that the cinematic process turns into egomaniacal self-admiration of the person over the development of the work.
Quite the opposite. It is now clear that, film by film, Pawlikowski is also earning the vital badge of storyteller — no small achievement when one considers that, in Fatherland, he attempts a spiritual descent that has affinities with Bergman’s cinema. Only here, if in Wild Strawberries the surreal element intertwined with the hero’s drama around time, in Fatherland it is the notions of identity and the phenomenon of language that are placed at the very heart of the film.
With an enigmatic performance by Hanns Zischler, the direction essentially asks the actor to render, through the subtlest changes in his face, Mann’s expectations, disappointments, sense of value — or, conversely, his dismissals. It is a performance that searches, and finally culminates, in an unexpected, almost sudden catharsis.
At the same time, the focused and deeply worked study of the Mann family by the screenwriters allows, on the one hand, for a powerful turn from August Diehl as Klaus Mann — stealing the film with just one scene, and indeed the introductory one — while the more talkative and central role of Mann’s daughter Erika finds in Sandra Hüller an actress who seems “ready from long ago.” Through her, the film reveals both the strength and vulnerability of a woman living in the shadow of such a literary magnitude.
And here we see fragments of Aristotelian narration returning: inner shifts, carefully modulated scenes, and passages — such as the one involving the actor who inspired Klaus Mann’s ‘Mephisto’ — that should be taught for the way they “reveal” exposition to an audience.
Formally speaking, ‘Fatherland’ does not surprise us; the framework within which its creator moves is familiar. In terms of writing, however, and in the harmony between direction and actor guidance, here is how one can, by observing only a few moments from the life of a real person, bring forth his literary masks — Jacob, for instance, “frei, beweglich und in Bereitschaft” (“free, mobile, and ready”) — as well as that inner self that cries out: “Wo ich bin, ist Deutschland. Ich trage meine deutsche Kultur in mir.” “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture within me.”
Panos Liakos is a film critic, classicist, and translator. He is a Film Studies PhD candidate at the University of West London and a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts. [email protected]
