This film was warmly received by the more discerning film critics at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019. Writer-director Angela Schanelec won the Silver Bear for best director. She is one of the trio of directors who attracted the collective title of the ‘Berlin School’ in the early 2000s. The other two were Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan. All three have been film festival regulars for many years but only Petzold has broken through to regular international distribution on the arthouse circuit. They are all perhaps more honoured abroad than at home so the festival success at Berlin was no doubt welcome. I think this might be the only Angela Schanelec film to get a UK release and I watched it on a DVD from Second Run.
What do we look for when we watch a film? How much do we already know and how do we apply that knowledge? These are the kinds of questions that interest Schanelec. In an interview on the DVD the director tells us that the image that came to her before she started shooting was of a young teenage boy, rather dirty and dishevelled as if he has just emerged from the forest. He is now walking along the street. Schanelec wondered how this image might appear in her film. She didn’t want it to be the first image of the film, so how to start her narrative? The boy comes out of the forest and that must mean he moves from ‘nature’ to society. She then set out to find a ‘natural’ beginning and she found it in Croatia with a dog chasing a hare and catching it and then eating it in an abandoned building, watched by a donkey. The same images (the dog asleep and the donkey seemingly standing guard) open and close the film. Two points arise from this. One is the lengths to which the director is prepared to go to find her image and to stage it – all the images in the film are meticulously composed and often held for some time. The camera is often static. The second point is that she is asked about a possible reference to the work of Robert Bresson (Bresson made Au hasard Balthazar in 1966, a film about a donkey which is passed on through a succession of owners, some of whom treat it very badly). Bresson is one of the directors who is often mentioned in discussions of her work. Her response is that such seeming references are about the audience’s need to find meaning. Schanelec has been seen as holding similar views to Bresson in relation to acting as well as the supreme importance of the image.
It is also possible to think of the donkey and the dog as a form of family. In her story, Schanelec introduces first the school where the boy turns up rather than heading home and then briefly his younger sister. Finally his mother arrives at the school and takes him home. We presume, from some of the image sequences, that the father of the family has died and that this is a family experiencing grief in different ways. Nothing is spelt out, however. In fact, much of the dialogue in the film is provided by Shakespeare in the form of Hamlet which is being rehearsed by the boy’s year at school. We only see the teachers at the school in the staffroom, not in the classroom. As Schanelec says, “We know they are there, I don’t need to show them”. So she focuses on the child actors. But in fact the children are not actors and the whole cast includes relatively few professional actors. I recognised Maren Eggert, a regular contributor to Angela Schanelec’s work, and Franz Rogowski in a secondary role as a teacher. Some of the other actors have also appeared for Schanelec before.
I’ve watched several previous Schanelec films, all on MUBI which featured her work in 2018. You can find four blog posts via this tag: https://itpworld.online/tag/angela-schanelec/. I always find her films fascinating but as is clear from this posting I struggle to articulate what it is that I get from the films. But I am clear that the image is everything and I should point out that on this film the cinematographer is Ivan Markovic (who also photographed the next Schanelec film, Music in 2023). Schanelec herself is writer, director, producer and editor. Markovic is Serbian and the film credits suggest a German-Croatian-Serbian co-production. Schanelec did in fact switch to Markovic from Reinhold Vorschneider, who had shot her five previous films, but the imagery still reflects Schanelec’s concerns.
The film has a couple of music moments but largely the emotional components are only accessible through focusing on the images – which in this case do seem to challenge us to think about grief. Although ‘narrative’ as such is not the main feature of the film, there are several sequences presenting moments of conflict and other forms of interaction, but in each case it is arguably the image and the stillness of the actors that conveys emotion rather than dialogue and action. I’m not particularly interested in Shakespeare so I didn’t attempt to link the themes or characters in Hamlet to the family in the film. Perhaps there is a connection? I remember another Schanelec film with a theatrical performance element so it didn’t seem that unusual. Some critics have also tried to connect the film to Ozu Yasujiro’s I Was Born, But . . . (Japan 1932) and there is certainly a resemblance in that Ozu’s film has two young teenage boys involved in a family melodrama (and comedy), but in this case the father is present, though diminished in the eyes of his sons. In a fascinating interview in ‘The Film Stage’ (which also discusses the Hamlet scenes), Schanelec refers to “the deep kindness and mercy” of Ozu. I’ve only touched on a few aspects of Schanelec’s work – there are many interviews and discussions about her work online.
Here are two trailers. The second re-edits the images and lays over dialogue to try to make the narrative appear more conventional:
itp Global Film 