Old Yorker

  • Alice in the Cities

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alice in den Städten

    Wim Wenders (1974)

    Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), a thirtyish German writer visiting America, is due to hand in a commissioned article about his impressions of the country.  He has seen various places on his US travels and taken many Polaroid photographs but barely put pen to paper.  He tells his editor that he’s struggling to find inspiration; his editor informs Philip that he’s missed his deadline and won’t be paid a cent.  Looking to get a flight from New York to Munich, Philip learns there are no planes to West Germany because of a strike by ground crew staff.  He and Lisa van Dam (Lisa Kreuzer), a young woman also trying to get back to Germany, with her nine-year-old daughter, Alice (Yella Rottländer), are told their best option is a flight to Amsterdam the following day.  At Lisa’s request, Philip agrees to look after Alice while her mother goes to see the emotionally fragile boyfriend in New York whom she’s splitting with.  Next morning, Philip receives a note from Lisa, asking him to take Alice back to Amsterdam; Lisa says she’ll follow shortly.  That doesn’t happen and Philip, already low on funds, finds himself saddled with a bigger responsibility than an article deadline.

    Alice in the Cities is the first part of Wim Wenders’ ‘Road Movie Trilogy’.  Planes, boats and trains feature, too, but Philip, first on his own in the US, then with Alice in the Netherlands and Germany, spends much of the film behind the wheel of a car.  He often finds his sparky companion funny but, in her mother’s absence, Alice is increasingly demanding and tries his patience:  it doesn’t help that she’s well aware he wants rid of her.  When Lisa doesn’t turn up at Schipol Airport on the expected flight, Philip decides to leave Alice with officials there; when the little girl, distressed, locks herself in a toilet cubicle, it moves him to change his mind.  Alice’s grandmother lives somewhere in Germany but she can’t remember where.  Philip reels off an alphabetical list of German cities – all the way through to Wuppertal:  Alice decides that’s the place.  They catch a bus to the city and drive round it, one street at a time, in a rented car – until Alice announces that Wuppertal isn’t where grandma lives after all.  Exasperated, Philip drops her off at a police station.  As he wanders through Wuppertal, he sees a poster for a Chuck Berry concert.  He goes to the concert and enjoys himself.  He’s feeling more relaxed when he returns to his hotel.  Alice is waiting outside.

    It’s sometimes easy to write about a film’s themes and style without needing to give much plot detail.  Alice in the Cities isn’t one of those films.  The discursive series of events, some of them aimless, is essentially connected to Philip Winter’s temperament and circumstances.  The locations keep changing but Philip’s feelings of alienation, at least when he’s on his own rather than with Alice, don’t.  Robby Müller’s black-and-white cinematography is in two ways moody, suggesting Philip’s prevailing mood and a melancholy sense of mystery.  The often languorous tempo of Wim Wenders’ narrative also seems part of Philip’s mindset but this, like Müller’s lighting, never feels overstressed.  Alice and Philip first meet as he enters the NYC airport building; she’s mucking around in the revolving doors – they go round and round a couple of times.  The image is instantly to amusing; in retrospect, it foreshadows very nicely what their relationship will be.  Getting away from Alice is easier said than done for Philip; her persisting presence conveys the idea that he’s being pushed, reluctantly, towards becoming more responsible, less self-absorbed.  There’s a lovely sequence where Alice wants a bedtime story, Philip says he doesn’t know any stories, she gets upset and he makes one up – and finds that he enjoys doing so.

    Philip French rightly noted in a 2008 Observer review that Alice in the Cities could no longer be made ‘partly because of the invention of the mobile phone, partly because of our obsessive fear of anything that might be interpreted as paedophilia’ – never mind that even the protagonists’ relationship isn’t at all Lolita-esque.  The basic story – an odd couple thrown together – may be formulaic but Yella Rottländer’s animated, forthright, wilful Alice and Rüdiger Vogler’s irritable, listless yet sensitive Philip are a fine pairing.  (The acting in some of the smaller parts is primitive.)  Although their partnership is the heart of the film, Philip’s relationship with American culture is also explored.  He’s first seen sitting on a beach somewhere in America, under the boardwalk.  He sings to himself the chorus of the Drifters’ song – as if trying to make the reality of sitting under a boardwalk, mean what he thinks it should mean to him but which he doesn’t actually feel.  He seems interested in, or puzzled by, the look of American places but is often infuriated by the country’s soundtrack, especially commercials on a motel room TV that he’s moved to smash.  Is Philip keener on Americana once he’s partaking of it back in Germany?   Hard to tell.  Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’, which plays on a German jukebox, merely sounds, to these ears, as much a drag as it ever did.  Chuck Berry, an amazing camera subject, is a different matter.

    When Alice turns up outside his hotel, Philip isn’t angry.  He laughs, realising how pleased he is to see her, and they resume their road trip.  Alice has a snapshot of what she says is grandma’s house, which she’s sure she would recognise.  She and Philip find what looks to be the house somewhere in the Ruhr but the woman who lives there knows nothing of Alice’s grandmother.  Philip decides to head for his parents’ home, across the Rhine.  He and Alice are spotted on the ferry by a Wuppertal police officer.  He asks why Philip didn’t inform the police that the child was back wih him but doesn’t seem bothered to know the answer.  The officer simply informs Philip that Lisa has returned and Alice’s grandmother has been located, and puts Alice on a train to Munich to meet Lisa.  By now, Philip can’t even afford a train ticket; Alice produces a $100 bill so he accompanies her to Munich.  She asks what he’ll do there; he says he’ll finish his article; Alice, who has seen quite a bit of Philip’s desultory ‘scribbling’ (her word), raises her eyebrows.  They open the window of their train compartment and look out at the landscape together as the camera pulls up and away.

    Wenders wrote the screenplay with Veith von Fürstenberg.  The film’s happy ending seems intentionally willed so much so that you end up prepared to accept as more of the same some earlier bits of plotting that had seemed shaky.  (Getting a ticket for a Chuck Berry concert at the last moment would surely be harder than it appears to be.  It’s unclear how Alice manages to leave the police station without being noticed.)  In the Wenders filmography, Alice in the Cities seems to link not only to subsequent parts of the Road Trilogy (The Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976)) but also to elements of Paris, Texas (1984) – an absent mother, a grown-up and a child on a search together.  Paris,Texas is the more celebrated film but I prefer the simpler, more fluid Alice in the Cities.  (I’d seen it once before, about twenty years ago).  The minimal but effective score is by the German experimental rock band Can.

    28 June 2024

  • Three Minutes:  A Lengthening

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bianca Stitger (2022)

    In 1938, Polish-born David Kurtz, who had emigrated to the US in the 1890s and become a successful businessman in New York City, holidayed in Europe with his wife.  Kurtz had recently acquired a 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera; on a visit to Nasielsk, where he grew up, he recorded a little over three minutes of footage of members of the local Jewish community in the town square.  When Glenn Kurtz, his grandson, came upon the footage in 2009, he didn’t know where or who it showed.  He shared the film with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which did restoration work and made it available on their website.  Seeing it there, a woman recognised one of the boys on the Nasielsk town square as her grandfather, Maurice Chandler, born Moszek Tuchendler.  Over the next few years, another dozen or so names were put to faces in the crowd of some 150 people.  Bianca Stitger’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening tells the story of Glenn Kurtz’s remarkable discovery, of a few of those people and of Nasielsk past and present.

    I’m currently reading Holocaust and the Moving Image, a collection of contributions (edited by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman) to a symposium held at the Imperial War Museum in 2001.  A recurring theme of these pieces is the extent to which screen treatments of the Holocaust – whether from Europe or Hollywood, whether documentary or drama – have stressed or underplayed the anti-Semitic purpose of the Nazis’ Final Solution.  Bianca Stitger begins her sixty-nine-minute documentary by showing David Kurtz’s footage in its entirety, leaving the viewer in no doubt that the people on the screen are Jewish – some of their faces and clothes make that clear.  And as soon as we learn when Kurtz filmed, we know what must have happened to most of these people.  Yet Stitger keeps the audience in suspense as she describes the history of the footage and the various research it generated, which is very interesting but isn’t what makes Three Minutes: A Lengthening fundamentally compelling.

    Kurtz’s film, when it’s first shown, is accompanied only by a projector’s rattle and whirr.  As Stitger returns to the footage and starts focusing on particular sections or frames, voices become part of the soundtrack:  Glenn Kurtz, describing how he chanced upon the material; Maurice Chandler’s granddaughter, who explains that Maurice’s distinctive full cheeks, which she’d seen in family photographs, made him easy to spot in the town square throng; Helena Bonham Carter, who narrates Three Minutes: A Lengthening.  The voices continue to be just voices:  Stitger doesn’t cut away to talking heads to distract from, or reduce the grip of, the footage.  Some of what is said sharpens awareness of the film as film:  the narrator explains its physical degradation and the technicalities of the restoration process.  She also describes, with Stitger’s camera continuing to home in on what the 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera captured, the detective work that gradually built up a more detailed picture of Nasielsk in 1938.  We learn about the button factory that was one of the small town’s flourishing businesses, about the painstaking deciphering from blurry signage of the name of a shop owner whose premises appear in the film, about Lion of Judah symbols engraved on the door of the synagogue.  Voices including Maurice Chandler’s join in to supply their personal recollections of life in Nasielsk.

    We know what’s coming but when it arrives it’s still so shocking that we might as well not have known.  About halfway through Three Minutes: A Lengthening, the frame freezes.  This happens just as the camera has zoomed in so close that the frozen screen is a microscopic blur.  A new, male voice recounts what happened to the Jewish community of the town – some 3,000 people in a total population of around 7,000 – in and after December 1939.  Most Nasielsk Jews were deported to ghettoes around Poland, including the Warsaw Ghetto, and subsequently transported to the extermination camp at Treblinka.  Fewer than a hundred survived the Holocaust.  The film stops moving visually while this particular voice has its say; the whole section is terribly powerful.  It’s rather surprising that Three Minutes: A Lengthening then resumes the testimonies of Maurice Chandler and other survivors.  I must admit I found these slightly anti-climactic.  For example, Chandler – who remained in Poland throughout the war years, using false identity papers – recalls the surpassing importance of religion to his family in Nasielsk before going on to say that the Nazi genocide destroyed his own belief in God.  His feelings are sadly understandable but they have been heard before.

    The films discussed in Holocaust and the Moving Image include, not surprisingly, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985).  Pauline Kael’s notorious negative review of what is generally considered a masterwork isn’t discussed but the reception of Three Minutes: A Lengthening reminded me of the first sentence of Kael’s New Yorker review.  Well aware that her take on Shoah would scandalise, she begins, ‘Probably everyone will agree that the subject of a movie should not place it beyond criticism’.  Stitger’s documentary has a 100% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes; there are only fifty-four such reviews all told but that’s still enough to make the rating worth noting.  I agree this is an impressive film but it’s not perfect and I do wonder if a few of the admiring reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are a comment on Stitger’s subject rather than her  artistry.  The title is apt because her piece, even at little more than an hour, is almost too long.  Helena Bonham Carter, although she reads the narration very carefully, sometimes, puzzlingly, breaks up a sentence’s natural rhythm and occasionally sounds like a teacher talking to the students she is educating.  And Stitger is silent until almost the last minute about a theme likely to be in a viewer’s head well before then.

    Three Minutes: A Lengthening is never so absorbing that you stop wondering how much of what you’re hearing about the disappearance of a community reflects the passage of time as much as the Nazi genocide.  In his closing contribution, Glenn Kurtz compares the Nasielsk footage with family photographs of his grandfather’s life in Brooklyn in 1938; those also, says Glenn, show people who’ve now vanished.  This welcome admission doesn’t, of course, mitigate in the slightest the brutal, sudden destruction of Nasielsk’s Jewish community.  It does make you question why Bianca Stitger, for most of her film, seems content to blur the difference between victims of heinous violence and victims of time.

    27 June 2024

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