Of 'slickness' And Suffering: Examining Director Stefan Ruzowitzky's Call For A New Holocaust Film Aesthetic

OF ‘SL IC K NESS’ A N D SUFFERI NG Examining Director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Call for a New Holocaust Film Aesthetic

Sonny Sidhu Fall 2008

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OF ‘SLICKNESS’ AND SUFFERING Examining Director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Call for a New Holocaust Film Aesthetic Sonny Sidhu Swarthmore College German Literature 054: German Cinema Professor Sunka Simon Fall 2008

Director Stefan Ruzowitzkyʼs Die Fälscher (USA: The Counterfeiters, 2008) presents an arrestingly novel cinematic vision of the Holocaust. Compared to the great majority of works within the decades-old canon of narrative films and television miniseries about the Holocaust, Die Fälscherʼs story is one with unusual moral scope. The Holocaust victims whose stories Die Fälscher tells are depicted in Ruzowitzkyʼs lens not merely as tragically noble objects of a perfectly aestheticized suffering, meted out by unyielding forces of unimaginable evil, but rather as active moral agents—independent subjects negotiating the ethical demands of life within a system of torture and death as unspeakable as it is arbitrary. In part, this marked difference results from the filmʼs unusual choice of subject: the secret Nazi counterfeiting mission, Operation Bernhard, which was staffed mostly by highly skilled Jewish concentration camp internees and which, between the years of 1942 and 1945, counterfeited Allied currencies on a massive scale to aid the Nazi war effort and destabilize the economies of Germanyʼs rivals. While the Jewish prisoners who worked for Operation Bernhard and who inspired Die Fälscher surely experienced the Holocaust from an uncommonly privileged perspective (in exchange for their work, the counterfeiters received proper meals, soft beds, and recreational amenities from their captors), they were Holocaust victims nonetheless—a fact that never escapes the audienceʼs attention during Die Fälscherʼs often-brutal depiction of their experience. It is the inherent contradiction of the counterfeitersʼ unusual status—their casual, daily elbow-rubbing with their captors as well as their own professional complicity with the Nazisʼ demands—that gives Ruzowitzkyʼs narrative its deep moral and ethical complexity. The counterfeiters are indeed victims, but, uniquely, they are not powerless, and it is the groupʼs collective exploration and negotiation of the boundaries of their cooperation with and resistance to the Nazi counterfeiting scheme that animates Die Fälscher and provides it with its challenging philosophical content. Ruzowitzkyʼs film is as unique for its visual style as for its morally ambiguous content. Unlike the great majority of narrative films and television miniseries produced over the years on the subject of the Holocaust (particularly after the release, in 1993, of Steven Spielbergʼs genre- defining blockbuster Schindlerʼs List), Die Fälscher avoids over-aestheticized, Hollywood-style cinematographic flourish in its retelling of historical events. Instead, the film unfolds within an unstable digital frame, drained almost entirely of color and light, giving Die Fälscher the visual affect of a contemporary documentary production. To audiences used to seeing the subject of the Holocaust filmed with a measure of critical distance, writ always across a large canvas as an epic historical tragedy, Ruzowitzky presents his narrative as a small-scale, personal drama—as if to remind us all that the victims of the Holocaust were not Spielbergian extras in the stories of their own lives, but rather independent subjects whose suffering was both collective and, for each,

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uniquely his or her own. In interviews conducted at the time of Die Fälscherʼs release, Ruzowitzky spoke regularly of his commitment to reinventing what had become an entrenched aesthetic in the treatment of the Holocaust on film. He told the website IndieWIRE, “I felt from the start it would be all wrong to have a slick Hollywood style, like beautiful lighting and lots of dolly movements. I wanted to have a documentary feel that sucks you in and forces you to always have Sally's perspective” (Feinstein 1). In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Ruzowitzky repeated these sentiments, expanding on the role of the handheld camera as an engine of cinematic subjectivity: “I definitely wanted to have this documentary approach and felt it would be completely wrong to have it too slick and beautiful and clean and nicely lit and [with] dolly movements and that kind of stuff. I felt if I had a chance to make the audience come close to what my protagonists went through you have to force them always to be with my hero, always look over his shoulder, always be there, never know what's going to happen next, never have an objective view” (Dawson 1). In a Cineaste interview, Ruzowitzky invoked the naturalist Dogme 95 avant-garde film movement (which, among other stipulations, mandates the use of a handheld camera and forbids the use of artificial lighting techniques) to explain his aesthetic choices as director of Die Fälscher: “The idea was first to have a contemporary aesthetic with a handheld camera, almost Dogme-like. The idea is not to emphasize the historical distance, but to present this as a modern story or a story which raises questions which could affect our life in our world as well. The main goal was to try to have a contemporary aesthetic and not to give it a classical or period flavor” (Archibald 1). Ruzowitzkyʼs insistent rejection of cinematographic techniques he associates with a particular “slick Hollywood style,” such as a smoothly mobile camera on dolly tracks and idealized scene lighting, is interesting because, within Die Fälscher, it is obviously incomplete. While the bulk of the film is indeed filmed in a harrowingly spare style of cinematography characterized by shaky handheld framing and frantic, unplanned lens zooms, parts of Die Fälscher are filmed in the precise, polished style that Ruzowitzky claims to have sought specifically to avoid. The fact that both the Hollywood and Dogme styles of cinematography (to employ Ruzowitzkyʼs own touchstones as a useful shorthand) are present in Die Fälscher implies a certain critical consciousness at work on the part of the director. Why does Ruzowitzky choose the Hollywood style for certain sequences of Die Fälscher, when the rest of the film is shot in the uniformly unpolished Dogme style? What does the director hope to suggest by making this choice, and by juxtaposing one style against the other in the same film? By closely analyzing those few moments of Die Fälscher that are shot in a Hollywood style unmistakably different from the general aesthetic of the film as a whole, one may hope to answer these questions and uncover the critique hidden in Ruzowitzkyʼs simultaneous use of dueling modes of cinematic representation. Die Fälscher takes the form of a frame narrative, beginning and ending in glitzy postwar Monte Carlo. The opening credits appear as a man, later identified as the master counterfeiter Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), arrives in daytime Monte Carlo carrying a briefcase. As Sally makes his way through the cityʼs streets and alleys towards the lavish Hotel de Paris, the camera that follows him is handheld and unstable, characteristic of the style in which most of the film to follow will unfold. However, as Sally crosses the threshold into the hotel, the style of filming abruptly changes, and suddenly he is being followed at shoulder-height into the lobby by a smooth-tracking camera mounted on a dolly. After a swift return to the handheld Dogme style of cinematography, Sally claims a room, deposits his considerable holdings in a safe box, arranges for a shave and trim, and is outfitted for a new suit. But the cinematography shifts again to the Hollywood style once Sally arrives in the casino later that night, and as he sizes up the room, catches the eye of an attractive woman, joins and dominates a high-stakes private poker game, and, in rapid succession, lures the object of his attraction to his bed, his every move is

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documented by slick dolly tracking shots and smooth, tripod-assisted pans. Only in the harsh light of the morning after does Ruzowitzky return to the handheld style of cinematography that will dominate the remainder of the film. As the audience later discovers, despite his appearance and manner in the early scenes of Die Fälscher, Sally is no pleasure-seeking tourist. He is a survivor of the Holocaust, stricken by grief and guilt, who has come to Monte Carlo after the fall of Berlin to intentionally gamble away stacks of Nazi-tainted counterfeit American dollars that he had a hand in producing. Therefore, the opening scenes of Die Fälscher must convey both Sallyʼs outwardly apparent glamour and his excruciating internal turmoil—a feat Ruzowitzky accomplishes by oscillating between, respectively, a slick Hollywood cinematographic style and a tumultuous Dogme-esque style of filming. Inherent in this dual mode of address is a valuation of the latter style as somehow intrinsically suited to the representation of subjective emotional states on screen. While a slick Hollywood camera that seems to float through the scene can only capture the objectively apparent ʻrealityʼ of a suave and mysterious millionaire arriving with a splash in Europeʼs most notorious playground for the rich and famous, the more penetrating gaze of the no-frills Dogme camera reveals the hidden truth of this wounded characterʼs inner state of anguish. By cutting between the Hollywood and Dogme styles in these early scenes, Ruzowitzky is able to first invoke, then complicate and interrogate the extant cinematic cliché of the casino-dwelling playboy, introducing his audience to the challenges that await them in uncovering his complex protagonistʼs many layers of emotional nuance. Ruzowitzkyʼs blending of cinematographic styles in the early shots of Die Fälscher is not merely a stylistic choice, but a critical one, establishing a comparative rhetorical leitmotif early on that for the rest of the film will invite viewers to compare the methodology of Die Fälscher to that of the body of Holocaust films that preceded it. There is no better illustration of this explicit, comparative framework than a pair of brief, symmetrically matched scenes that appear in the first half of Die Fälscher. In the first scene, Sally arrives at Mauthausen concentration camp and, as part of a group that includes other new arrivals, is marched past a group of prisoners watching idly as one of their number beats another to death with a club, and a leering Nazi guard who does nothing to stop it. In the second scene, which takes place some years later, a better-dressed Sally and his group of cared-for Jews working for Operation Bernhard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp are marched through the campʼs open main thoroughfare, past the hungry eyes of unprivileged fellow prisoners, to a shower complex. Both scenes are very brief—under twenty seconds, in each case— and mirror each otherʼs blocking dynamics. In the first scene, Sallyʼs group trudges from right to left within the frame, and alternating long, medium, and close-up shots of their movement are interspersed with shots of their mud-soaked feet and shots from Sallyʼs perspective of the savagery unfolding before their eyes. In the second scene, Sallyʼs group moves either from left to right or directly towards the camera, and once again their movement is shown in alternating close-up, medium, and long shots, interspersed with glances from Sallyʼs perspective of the Nazi guards and their dogs, and the hungry-eyed fellow prisoners gazing out at the group from other prison blocks. Despite their similarities in blocking and framing, these sequences are made opposites by the fact that Ruzowitzky uses wildly different cinematographic styles to capture them. The Mauthausen marching sequence, unlike any other in Die Fälscher, is filmed through a dreamlike soft focus filter, which is itself applied to a camera that coasts smoothly over dolly tracks rather than interacting with the same foundation of dirt and rubble upon which Sally and the other prisoners tread. The Sachsenhausen marching sequence is filmed, with unflinching visual clarity, in the high-intensity, handheld Dogme style that dominates much of the

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film. Clearly, Ruzowitzky is inviting his audience to compare these two sequences, but to what end? The earlier, dreamlike sequence detailing Sallyʼs introduction to the undifferentiated suffering of Mauthausen, much like the Hollywood-esque casino sequences of the filmʼs opening, seems intended to problematize the ʻobjectiveʼ viewpoint of the stationary or smoothly mobile camera. Just as it had in the early scenes in Monte Carlo, the Hollywood style camera here obscures Sallyʼs emotional state, rather than revealing it. Though Sally is shown reacting to the prisoneron-prisoner violence on display, the audience can make little of his emotional response to it. If anything, Sally seems to be straining to register no response whatsoever—an undertaking in which he is assisted by the fuzzy, obscuring, detached gaze of the too-perfect Hollywood camera. The audience is detached, too, as a result. Rather than attempting to capture and transmit to the audience the visceral feeling of being mired in muck and mud and marching to the point of bloody soles, the camera merely documents Sallyʼs hardship from afar, aestheticizing his suffering and rendering it, if tragic, also sublime and beautiful. In contrast, the Sachsenhausen march sequence, framed mostly in jarring, hand-held close-up, practically inducts the audience as members of the marching group by placing them within its ranks and transferring Sallyʼs particular subjectivity onto them. When the camera cuts briefly to show a group of unprivileged prisoners staring in disbelief at the Operation Bernhard members, with their secondhand jackets and neat pocket squares, the camera itself shrinks in disgrace, losing a few, almost imperceptible inches of elevation above the ground. Far from the epic, desensitizing sweep of the Mauthausen march sequence, the later Sachsenhausen sequence renders Sallyʼs suffering palpable by making it human-sized, relatable, even universal. Again, Ruzowitzky seems to be explicitly critiquing the Hollywood mode of cinematographic address as an engine of false objectivity and contrived, second-hand emotion. However, in this instance his critique has taken more explicit shape as an interrogation of the moral effectiveness of non-naturalistic, Hollywood-style (both pre- and post- Spielbergian) Holocaust cinema. By allowing his audience to directly compare the effectiveness of both his Hollywood and Dogme modes of cinematography in representing the experience of marching, as a prisoner, through a concentration camp, Ruzowitzky is challenging all viewers to explicitly reject the Hollywood style in favor of a new “contemporary aesthetic,” where the task of representing Germanyʼs Holocaust history onscreen is concerned. In a sense, the effectiveness of Ruzowitzkyʼs methods is all the proof this point requires. The alienating effect of the Mauthausen march sequence is undeniable, when compared against the emotional immediacy of the Sachsenhausen march sequence. That is not to say that the earlier Mauthausen sequence has no emotional effect upon the viewer; rather, the emotional response it creates is divorced from the emotional state of the protagonist as it is depicted within the scene. While Sally feels (one is left to assume) confusion and fear, the viewer feels only a detached sense of pity (for the prisoners) and anger (for the Nazi system). In contrast, the ability of the Dogme style to capture the specific emotional state of Sallyʼs subjective reality (for example, by physically withdrawing in shame at the other prisonersʼ gazes) causes the audience to share the same emotional response with Sally: a conflicted feeling of guilt, mixed with the justifiable moral inertia of the universal human instinct for self-preservation. In all three of the post-release interviews cited for this paper, Ruzowitzky speaks of the new challenge of representing Germanyʼs Nazi past for generations of Germans not directly related to that era in history. “In Germany, people of my generation don't know how to deal with this situation,” he says (Feinstein 1). It seems that, for Ruzowitzky, the challenge is to transport these young audiences into a historically specific emotional mindset to foster a greater understanding of the lived experience of Germanyʼs past, particularly the Holocaust. While for previous generations, more directly ac-

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quainted with Germanyʼs wartime and immediate postwar history, evocative Hollywood-style images of the war and Nazi atrocities may have been all that was necessary for them to be fully transported into this historically specific mindset, Ruzowitzky believes that the only way to foster such a reaction among historically detached generations is with the subjectivity-displacing engine that is the Dogme cinematographic style. In other words, Ruzowitzkyʼs directorial strategy for Die Fälscher relies not on a preordained emotional response from its audience, but rather from an emotional experience imparted directly to the audience through the filmʼs aesthetic content. While highly aestheticized Hollywood productions like Schindlerʼs List may speak more lyrically to those generations who saw the ugliness of the Second World War firsthand and require the mediation of art to understand it, the raw immediacy of Die Fälscher allows generations who have seen World War II only in media images to begin to understand the emotional experiences of those who lived through the Nazi era and its atrocities. Die Fälscher is a highly effective Holocaust film for a new generation, as well as a thoughtful critique of Hollywoodʼs history of aestheticizing one of mankindʼs ugliest hours and rendering the suffering of millions abstract and emotionally distant. Because Die Fälscher makes the tragedy and the moral uncertainty of the Holocaust once more immediate and indisputably relevant to 21st century emotional subjects, this film truly heeds the call “NEVER AGAIN.”

Works Cited Archibald, David. "An Interview With Stefan Ruzowitzky." Cineaste Winter 2008. 1 Dec 2008

. Dawson, Nick. "The Director Interviews: Stefan Ruzowitzky, ʻThe Counterfeiters.ʼ" Filmmaker

Magazine Winter 2008. 22 Feb 2008. Accessed 1 Dec 2008

. Feinstein, Howard. "indieWIRE INTERVIEW | ʻThe Counterfeitersʼ Director Stefan

Ruzowitzky." indieWIRE 14 Feb 2008. Accessed 1 Dec 2008

. Die Fälscher. Dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky. Perf. Karl Markovics. DVD. Sony Pictures Classics,

2008.

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