Movie: Closely Watched Trains — Ostře sledované vlaky (1966)

This movie is based on a novel by author Bohumil Hrabal—who wrote the original story of the Czech movie I Served the King of England—and was adapted into a movie by director Jiří Menzel—who also did the movie adaptation of I Served the King of England. In other words, I Served the King of England and Closely Watched Trains were written by the same original author and adapted into a movie by the same director. At first I thought that the evasive satire and dark humor seen in I Served the King of England was only possible after the communist regime collapsed, but Closely Watched Trains is equally a shamelessly satirical tragicomedy. Considering that this movie was made while Czechoslovakia was still under the Communist Party, and also that Jiří Menzel was just the young age of 28 when he made this movie, all I can say is that Jiří Menzel is amazing. Or maybe it’s Bohumil Hrabal who is amazing.

Jiří Menzel was one of the young movie writers that participated in what could be called the Czech New Wave that was emerging in the 1960s. Closely Watched Trains received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Due to the Soviet Army suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring, which occurred soon after this award, many movie directors took refuge abroad, but Menzel stayed in Czechoslovakia. Following this, he was once again nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1986 for his My Sweet Little Village, but otherwise there was a long blank in his career until 1989, when the communist regime collapsed.

This movie is about the people working at a small station in a small village in Czechoslovakia, which was occupied by Nazi Germany, during World War II. The stationmaster is crazy about keeping pigeons. Train dispatcher Hubička is envied by the stationmaster for being for some reason popular with women, but he doesn’t have any other skills. The elderly station attendant is no longer useful at all. Miloš is the protagonist of the movie. His grandfather was a hypnotist, but when he tried to defend Prague by hypnotizing the invading German army, he was crushed by a German army tank and died. Miloš’s father was a railway worker, but retired early; because of his father’s retirement, Miloš replaces his father at the station by working as an intern. Miloš secretly has a crush on a cute, young conductor, but when he is unable to become a man sexually in front of her, he is distraught and attempts suicide.

So the story goes, and on the surface it appears to be a story of quite flawed men lazily working, but actually, at that time, the shadow of the defeat of the German army was creeping in; also, trains fully loaded with dead people and weapons pass through this station every day, but this is hidden from viewers initially. And then what?!! Hubička, Miloš, and the old station attendant—three people everyone thought were incompetent—heroically blow up a heavily guarded “closely watched train” that is carrying the war equipment for the German army. However, the movie finishes with a sad ending.

Closely Watched Trains, like I Served the King of England, reveals the surrounding heavy reality as we follow the actions of the careless protagonist and laugh.

This movie is very much told from the perspective of a man. This movie shows that, in order to become a man, a man questions himself, suffers, and tries hard. For Miloš, experiencing sex and participating in resistance activities seem to be proof of his value as a man. This movie makes me cynical about the idea of a man casting away his virginity and going to war as a rite of passage because he feels that, although the unknown world is scary, he will not become a man without going through this. A woman may not understand this rite of passage completely, but she may want to say, “Relax! A woman doesn’t judge a man by that!” A woman may find herself being attracted to Miloš, who is timid and refuses to go to war, but does outrageous things as part of the resistant partisans.

The story advances by constantly balancing contradictory concepts—innocence and scheming, fun and sadness, optimistic serenity and cruelty of war, youth and maturity—and the movie makes the audience wonder, “What’s going on?” or “What happens now?” or “What on earth is true?”; by doing this, the movie hooks the audience until the very end of the film. It is incredible.

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Movie: The Tin Drum — Die Blechtrommel (1979)

The Tin Drum was based on the full-length novel by the German author Günter Grass that was published in 1959, and director Volker Schlöndorff adapted it into a movie in 1979. It is said that the movie leaves out the second half of the original work, but the reproduction of the first half is fairly loyal to the original. Günter Grass received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 for his achievements as an author, such as this book, while the movie won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since I have not read the original, I wish to write only about the movie.

This movie is an unpleasant movie, like listening to a nail scratch on glass. The movie’s protagonist has for some reason stopped growing and is stuck in the body of a young child, but his mind and feelings are that of a grown adult. The catchphrase of this movie—“This movie is about the pacifism of the protagonist who stopped growing in order to oppose war”—is outrageous. To say it briefly, the protagonist of this story takes advantage of people thinking that he is a child due to his small body to do whatever he pleases, and instead of taking responsibility for his actions, he shamelessly avoids responsibility by pretending he is a child. Because of the peculiar state of the protagonist, he can easily sense when an adult lets their guard down around him or an adult’s cunning when they are trying to take advantage of him. Also, it feels like the protagonist is reflecting a part of the author Günter Grass.

Günter Grass—unlike Oskar, the protagonist of this movie/novel—is not a little person; however, like Oskar, Günter was born in the Free City of Danzig, a territory that has been fought over by Poland and Germany. Also like Oskar, Günter was born of a German, Nazi-supporting father and an oppressed minority, Kashubian mother. Oskar participates with fellow little people in a dwarf circus that entertains and is treated well by high-ranking Nazi officers; Günter Grass also actually enthusiastically took part in Nazi activity in his youth. It may be a part of his past that he does not want to talk about much publicly, but when Günter confessed it, readers around the world who had idealized Günter Grass—a Nobel Prize author and advocate for peace—were shocked.

Of course being a successful author does not equal being a perfect person, and a reader with this expectation would be being selfish. Since there were many youths who thought seriously about how to live and became captivated by communist thought as a way to change the ugly world, it is conceivable that there were also many good-intentioned people who joined the Nazis with the passion of idealism to make the world a better place. It may not be possible to judge past earnest decisions simply from a modern point of view. Because the movie ends abruptly in the middle of the novel, the audience is made to think, “I am unpleasantly dragged around to have it end here?” However, the original continues on after that, and it is said that it ends with the protagonist continuing to escape reality, but achieving some growth and looking back on the past. Compared to the movie, which ends at the height of his escapism, my guess is that the original has some depth that the movie does not when the protagonist looks back with a point of view different than his selfish and immature one.

This movie was made in the 1970s, which was a confusing time across the world. Although the Cold War was becoming more serious, the majority of people had started to become disillusioned with the notion that socialism was the only salvation to change the world. In addition to the antagonism between liberalism and socialism, there was a new antagonism sprouting between Christian and Islamic fundamentalist nations. It was a time when people were at a loss, which was very different than things starting in 1980, when America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union chose pragmatic leaders—President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and General Secretary Gorbachev, respectively—to look for pragmatic solutions. Even Hollywood—which always chose to have pleasing happy endings—started to make movies that left the audience in desperation and provided no solutions or salvation, which the audience thought was profound and depicted reality; this movie was made during these times. Now, 40 years later, I wonder what viewers think when they watch this movie. It seems that the current audience desires more emotionally consoling movies, thoroughly entertaining movies, or informative movies that positively influence how viewers live. Due to the change in times, it is no longer easy to understand the enthusiastic response to this movie when it was released.

Danzig is a harbor city that faces the Baltic Sea, and is at the northeast edge of the Polish Corridor that divided Germany. Since ancient times, Germany and Poland fought to control the land in the Corridor, but due to Germany’s defeat in World War I, the area was separated from Germany and transferred to being under the control of the League of Nations. With the Treaty of Versailles, Danzig was incorporated as Polish tariff territory; though not physically neighboring Poland, the city developed strong ties with Poland. The Free City of Danzig’s railroad that connected it to Poland was controlled by Poland; there was a Polish naval port; and of the two post offices, one post office was the city’s while the other was Poland’s. Residents of this area were mostly Polish and German, while a small number were Kashubian and Jewish.

At first, Danzig was established with the objective to protect the interests of Poles and to extend the power of Poland; however, the influence of Germans and Nazis gradually strengthened, and after the Nazis won the election in 1933, anti-Jew and anti-Catholic laws (meant to target Poles and Kashubians) were passed. In 1939, the Nazi government in Danzig started to severely oppress Poles living in Danzig. Then on September 1, 1939, the German battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein, which was anchored at Gdańsk Bay in Danzig, began a severe bombardment on Poland’s military base in Danzig without proclamation, and thus World War II began.

The Polish army resisted by using the Polish post office as their fort. The Polish post office was considered to be Polish territory, rather than within Danzig city limits, and there was a direct phone line to Poland. It is said that workers had received rifle training before the war started. Also, some say that Poland’s anti-Germany intelligence organization secretly operated there. Despite their hard-fought defense, the Polish civilian army in the post office could not compete with the offense of the German army, and in the end, they surrendered.

In World War II, most non-Jewish Polish citizens in Danzig were killed by German paramilitary organizations such as the Selbstschutz (“self-protection”), while the Jewish citizens were targeted by the Holocaust and were sent to concentration camps. In March of 1945, Danzig was liberated by the Soviet Union Red Army. In this movie, the way Oskar’s Kashubian mother goes back and forth between her German husband and her Polish lover seems to symbolize the race conflict in Danzig. There is a strong possibility that Oskar’s real father is the Polish man, but because he is the child of a German on the family register, Oskar barely escapes alive to Germany after the war. However, his grandmother remains in Danzig, and she is separated from Oskar for the rest of her life; since his grandmother is Kashubian, she cannot enter Germany.

Nowadays, Danzig is a Polish territory called Gdańsk. It was mostly destroyed in World War II, but it is said that due to the great efforts of current citizens, the historic streets have been rebuilt, and it prospers as a beautiful town for sightseeing.

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Movie: Outside the Law — Hors-la-loi (2010)

After the success of the masterpiece Days of Glory that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2006 Academy Awards, the sequel Outside the Law was made with the hope of being another great success, but unfortunately it does not live up to the previous work at all; seeking success using the same seed did not bear fruit.

The actors who won Best Actor Awards in the Cannes Film Festival for their performances in Days of Glory, the previous work by the same director Rachid Bouchareb, appear again. Three actors that played soldiers in the previous work appear in the sequel with the same names (Messaoud, Abdelkader, Saïd), but this time the three men are brothers from Algeria. The actor who played the slightly quirky Sergeant Martinez in the previous work appears as a French police investigator who chases the three men. One key actor who won an award for Best Actor at Cannes, Samy Naceri as Yassir in the previous work, does not appear. This is probably due to the fact that before and after his appearance in Days of Glory, this actor was found guilty for the possession of cocaine a few times and at last in 2009 he was arrested on charges for assault with a knife.

When these three male actors with different facial features and body types are in the same unit as soldiers, it is believable; but when performing as brothers, it looks weird. The various events that happen to them as soldiers in the same unit are believable, but the things that happen to the three brothers one after another is too much of a coincidence. Furthermore, because this movie depicts a long period of time—from before World War II until 1962—in 2 hours, the movie gives the impression of just scratching the surface instead of digging deeper. After the success of Days of Glory, director Rachid Bouchareb seems to aim more strongly for an entertainment component, throwing in action scenes, to be a financial success. In fact, it felt like this movie was strongly influenced by the legendary Hollywood movie The Godfather. However, these action scenes are lacking something. Even though Hollywood movies may be criticized in various ways, Hollywood hasn’t spent all this time developing action movie techniques for nothing. These action scenes still have a long way to go to achieve a similar level as those in Hollywood.

This movie begins with the land that is owned by the father of the three brothers in an Algerian village being confiscated by an Algerian man with a connection to a French official. And so the family leaves their home town. The movie itself is fiction, but it draws upon actual historical events such as the Sétif massacre. On May 8, 1945, after Germany surrendered, Algerians in Sétif—where a French military base was located—and neighboring areas demanded independence and performed a demonstration, but the demonstration transformed into a riot when the police intervened and many people were killed in the process of suppression. In the movie, the brothers’ father is killed in this riot, and the second son Abdelkader is arrested and sent to a French prison.

The eldest son Messaoud is dispatched to Vietnam as a soldier of the French military. This movie shows mainly soldiers from French colonies being sent to Vietnam. The First Indochina War was fought by France primarily with people from Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and other French colonies; the morale was low and there was a strong anti-war feeling. Eventually, France withdrew from Vietnam after the Geneva Accords in 1954.

The third son Saïd kills the Algerian landlord who stole his family’s land; he then goes with his mother to Paris where his older brother is imprisoned and devotes himself to money-making by opening a bar and boxing gym. Before long, the eldest brother returns from Vietnam, the second son is released, and the family finally reunites in Lance.

The second son Abdelkader and the eldest son Messaoud participate in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Paris. The two assassinate government officials by using Messaoud’s former war comrade—an Algerian that Messaoud had met in the World War II resistance movement and Vietnam War, now working within the French government. As the FLN movement becomes more radical, the actions of the two men become more violent.

It is said that director Rachid Bouchareb decided to make a sequel because a lot of people asked him what happened afterwards to the main characters from his hit Days of Glory. It is not clear whether this movie approves or disapproves of the violence of FLN. I think he probably disapproves, but it is very difficult to keep watching these violent scenes. Also, I cannot see hope for Algeria’s future in this movie. It is regretful that the long-awaited sequel to the magnificent masterpiece was extremely violent and leaves a dark feeling after watching it. This may reflect the heavy price paid for independence and the sad reality of the current political instability in Algeria it led to. Furthermore, it is said that many people objected to how the contents of this movie are not historically impartial. This movie has received mixed reviews in many ways. This movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

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Movie: Butterfly’s Tongue — La lengua de las mariposas (1999)

When you watch this movie along with Belle Époque (1992) and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), you can understand the painful and silent times after the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and the fascist administration superseded the Second Spanish Republic that was established in 1931. Belle Époque depicts the establishment of the republic, while The Spirit of the Beehive depicts the silent times of the 1940s. Butterfly’s Tongue depicts the arrival of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Because this movie was made in 1999, the Franco administration had collapsed and democracy was restored, so Spanish artists could break the silence, cast away the symbolism used to protect themselves, and express their message frankly.

The movie is set in a remote town in Galicia, Spain in 1936. Moncho is a young boy with asthma entering elementary school one year late. The teacher Gregorio is kind to Moncho, who is shy and has a hard time fitting in. Gregorio teaches the children about various things beyond the curriculum, including life, literature, and love. The teacher takes the children on a fieldtrip in order to study living things. Gregorio promises Moncho, who is interested in the story of the butterfly’s tongue, that he will show him with a microscope. Moncho’s older brother Andrés joins a town band and expands his experience by travelling around for concerts. Moncho’s father supports the Republican Party, while Moncho’s mother does not believe in the Republicans, but it does not hinder their married relationship. There is friendship and respect between the father and the teacher Gregorio.

However, the day that the town is seized by fascism at last arrives. In order to protect his family, the father, who had until then made it clear he was a supporter of Republicans, goes to the town square with other townspeople in order to participate in humiliating the arrested Republicans. In order to protect the family, the mother boos and jeers the people arrested, while the brothers watch silently; Andrés is surprised to see his bandleader who had been kind to him among the arrested, while Moncho is surprised to see his close friend’s father. At the end of the line of people who were arrested is the teacher Gregorio. The father, with pain, also starts to insult. At the urging of his mother, Moncho insults the teacher that he loves with, “Communist!” and “Atheist!” while throwing rocks.

What is most frightening in this movie is that the people who had peacefully lived together in this town completely divide into friends and enemies because of the Civil War. Before the Civil War started, there were small problems or disputes between married couples, within families, at school, or in church. However, the town was able to overcome these small differences by working together as a community. As the struggle for central power gradually becomes more extreme, however, the faces of the townspeople change, and in the end, the community is destroyed by hatred, fear, fighting, and stone throwing. The fight between Fascists and Republicans is not an abstract battle performed by the distant central government. Here, it is the terrifying reality that your neighbor yesterday becomes your persecutor today.

Another scary thing is that children sensitively notice their parents’ fear for their family’s safety, and the children’s actions become more radical than their parents. In this movie, the parents do not wish for war and don’t want to hurt others, but they know that if they support the arrested Republicans, tomorrow it could be them, so they insult the Republicans to protect themselves. However, the children sensitively perceive the fear, and go beyond their parents’ actions. It is scary that the children cannot control their actions because they don’t understand the consequences.

However, this movie doesn’t blame Moncho for throwing stones at the teacher Gregorio who cared for Moncho dearly. The times that forced the child to act in such a way are to be blamed; the child doesn’t understand what is happening, but senses that something is happening. As in China’s Cultural Revolution and with Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, children were the ones who cruelly persecuted adults, but someone else was in the background to make the children act this way.

Franco died in 1975, and Spain established a truly stable democracy in 1981, but those who opposed Franco had to wait until 2008 for their honor to be restored. There must be many people in Spain like the teacher Gregorio who had their honor snatched away and died.

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Movie: Ivan’s Childhood — Ivanovo detstvo (1962)

This movie is director Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie adaptation of Russian author Vladimir Bogomolov’s short story Ivan. Ivan—a young boy who became an orphan after losing his whole family including his parents in the Eastern Front during World War II when he was 12 years old—joins the partisans out of his hatred for Germany, and he later participates in the Soviet Army as a reconnaissance soldier; in the end, he is executed by the Nazis, ending his short life. There isn’t a particularly dramatic story development, but the movie keeps making a clear contrast between the beautiful and poetic scenes that flashback to the young boy’s memories of the peaceful days, and the harsh reality of the war spreading in front of the boy.

This movie’s characteristic is the beauty of the objet d’art (art object). Neither actual battle scenes nor German soldiers appear, and war is only symbolically expressed with gunshots and lights, like toy fireworks. Every objet d’art—water, darkness, light, lamps, ruins, the swamp, the beach, the well, horses, white birch trees, birds, apples, etc—is placed effectively and sometimes in a surprising location; also, the movement of people is shot from unexpected angles.

When Stalin died in 1953, the people under Soviet Union control in those days finally gained peace of mind, and Western culture rapidly flowed into the Soviet Union; new theories on movies and art were introduced into universities, and this movie was made during the period when a new generation of movie directors was being brought up. Andrei Tarkovsky was one of the young men of this new post-war generation. It is said he fawned over America, to the point of being criticized for it; he was very interested in modern America and obsessed with jazz. Also, he enthusiastically studied the directors that were considered great by Western countries in those days such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, and Ingmar Bergman.

Rather than story and subject matter, this movie seems concerned with novel objet d’art and angles for filming; it seems that it was greatly influenced by La Nouvelle Vague (“the new wave”) swelling in France at that time. La Nouvelle Vague was a movie movement that happened in France in the 50s, and was led by French movie critics who bitterly criticized existing movie directors as being “dull,” and who enthusiastically declared, “We can make more interesting movies.” François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were central figures.

In France, which was still scarred from the war in the 1950s and 60s, the youth tended to rebel strongly against adults and the establishment that caused the war. New movements were rising in many cultural areas, such as communism in politics, existentialism—led by Jean-Paul Sartre—followed by structuralism in the realm of philosophy, and La Nouvelle Vague within movies. The themes of these new movements included a feeling of decadence, eroticism, destructive acts, or nihilism without solutions. French culture heavily influenced Japan in the 60s, and a group called “Japan Nouvelle Vague” was even born in Japan, representative movie directors being Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, Susumu Hani, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Yasuzo Masumura, and Koreyoshi Kurahara. They made movies with themes that had until then not often been the subject—such as juvenile delinquents, crimes, uninhibited sex, women living unnoticed in society, or bottom class people; also, they made movies that seemed to forsake the audience by being difficult to understand, and the audience began to consider them as “artists.”

La Nouvelle Vague movies were fresh in those times, but how are they when you watch them today? The novel techniques were imitated one after another by directors that followed after, and since everyone uses these methods now, viewers today may not understand why La Nouvelle Vague movies are considered revolutionary. Also, I wonder how many people today know the names Sartre and François Truffaut? Young Japanese people today might say about Sartre (pronounced “Sarutoru” in Japanese), “Sa-ru-to-ru, who? Is that someone who leaves (‘saru’) and takes things (‘toru’)?” But back in the 1960s, Sartre was so well-known in Japan that even a Japanese TV comedian referred to his name in a joke (“catch the monkey,” since “saru”=monkey, “toru”=catch) because the name “Sarutoru” sounds funny. I think it is certainly great that those of this movement pursued fresh methods and ideas 60 years ago, and since their methods are still kept alive in modern movies as mainstream methods, we could say that the core of La Nouvelle Vague is still alive today after all. Even now, we express the generalization, “French movies are difficult to understand, and they coldly cast aside the hearts of viewers.” Many modern French movies have a tone that is not La Nouvelle Vague, but there are also many French movies that are still based on the spirit of La Nouvelle Vague. We can say that La Nouvelle Vague was so influential that the basic tone of postwar French movies was defined by it.

As a result, this movie, Ivan’s Childhood, seems to raise interesting issues that Andrei Tarkovsky probably didn’t intend for.

Ivan is a war orphan and, due to the murder of his family, changes from an innocent young boy to nihilistic young boy. The only emotion he believes in is “hatred.” He is not scared anymore, no matter what happens. He hates German soldiers, but can’t trust any adult anymore—German or Russian—because it was adults that caused this war.

Ivan is killed in the war, but I wonder what would become of him if he survived? Maybe he would become an adult who hates the people in the generation above him. Germany and France, cruelly affected by the war, broke out in a violent anti-establishment movement in 1950s and 60s. Central to this movement was the generation who were children during the war, and this generation conveyed the feeling of hatred for the establishment to the generation born after the war. The change in the boy playing Ivan from being an innocent young boy with a happy smiling face to one with a dark face full of hatred—like an omen for the future—is very impressive in the movie.

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