What ‘On the Beach’ tells us about COVID-19 in Australia

By world standards, Australia has achieved an enviable insularity from COVID-19, an effective and almost total community elimination protected by our island status, our placid and astonishingly well-behaved populace, and our location in an almost forgotten corner of the world. Yet there is a history of Australian survival in the face of universal annihilation, one that gives us insight into our present claustrophobic moment. 

Few Australians under age 60 recognise On the Beach, the 1956 classic end-of-the-world novel by British soldier-turned-Australian writer Nevil Shute (I know, I recently asked about 30 of them). The book tells of how a nuclear holocaust in the northern hemisphere produced radiation that slowly seeps southward, leaving Australia as one of the remaining locations of human life.

Shute, who also wrote the well-known A Town Like Alice, was a social conservative, but in an odd way also a political radical, as he adamantly opposed nuclear proliferation. The novel is set in Melbourne – and the original 1959 film adaptation primarily shot – where despite the impending doom in the story – Australians appear to live a normal life, albeit without petrol and a few other necessities.

Although overshadowed by the inevitability of their coming death by radiation sickness within months, the book and the film both capture unique Australian claustrophobia – not dissimilar to what we feel in Australia in March 2021, a year into the pandemic, where we cannot travel overseas, and many of us have not been able to travel to other states.

On the Beach captures a sense of Australia’s exceptionalism in the face of worldwide disaster. In the novel, an Australian naval officer comments on the problems of inviting the American submarine commander into his home: “Northern hemisphere people seldom mixed well, now, with people of the southern hemisphere. Too much lay between them, too great a difference of experience. The intolerable sympathy made a barrier.” His wife agrees, pointing out that the British RAF squadron leader they had hosted had cried. How many times have we Australians tried, without success, to communicate our experience during COVID-19 to friends or relatives abroad in the USA, the UK or elsewhere that the pandemic rages?

The characters in On the Beach do not panic: “These talks that the Prime Minister’s been giving have been kind of steadying. The ABC’s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are,” one character observes; what an odd resonance to the present pandemic. The book is still in print; you can watch the original movie version (directed by Stanley Kramer), streaming on Stan, which stars Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner, who reputedly remarked that, “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.”

The end of the film contains two Melbourne scenes eerily reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic: a long queue of people on a footpath, not waiting for COVID-19 testing, but to pick up suicide pills as the radiation inexorably closes in; and shots of Melbourne CBD streetscapes devoid of people, not because of lock-down, but because, well … everyone dies at the end. The film “frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened,” reflected anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott many years later. “I hope it is fiction,” said US Air Force Secretary and later NATO ambassador, Thomas Finletter. “Are you sure it is?”

Shute’s novel remains relevant for new generations. A well-received 2013 feature documentary, Fallout, examines Shute, Kramer and the making of the film. Shute’s writing continues to resonate for a small but devoted group of international fans: the Nevil Shute Norway Foundation has hosted ten major gatherings of “Shutists”, including three in Australia.

Gideon Haigh explains that “Shute languishes in something very like obscurity – for reasons not far to seek. His 23 novels are plain, staid, even chaste: they … contain no bad language, no villains of note and almost no sex. His characters are usually ordinary middle-class people who face extraordinary situations; their customs and conventions are evoked with a clear but kindly eye.”

The plain ordinary-ness of Shute’s characters gives On the Beach so much of its power, says Paul Brians: “Shute directly addresses the most primal fears of the human race which has spent most of its history denying or compensating for the fact of personal death, and does so with a relentlessness which the complex technique of a more sophisticated writer might have muted. For once there are no distractions: no invading aliens, no super fallout shelters to protect the protagonists, no struggle back from a dreadful but exciting postwar barbarism.”

Is the nuclear war analogy with the Coronavirus pandemic too far-fetched? Possibly not. But by mid-March 2021, almost 540,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, easily exceeding the 405,000 American lives lost during WWII; President Biden says the number could rise to 660,000. That’s about 1 in 500 Americans and would close in on the 675,000 Spanish flu deaths in the USA and surpass the 620,000 Civil War deaths – the worst in US history. While UK COVID deaths (more than 126,000) have exceeded the civilian World War II death toll (70,000), they are unlikely to reach the 384,000 soldiers killed in combat. Israel – while leading the world in COVID-19 vaccination rates – has passed 6,000 COVID deaths, a toll that could exceed the total civilian and military deaths (6,373) in its 1947-49 War of Independence, by far its most deadly. By contrast, only 909 Australians have died (and nobody for months), compared to the 39,655 who died in World War II. And yet these comparisons also understate the current pandemic’s death count, because most of these wars extended over many years, not just twelve months.

We live in an age when “the Coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations,” writes Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the science fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. “What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era…. We’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.” When the next calamities arrive, “we’ll be familiar with how they feel.”

While much of the rest of the world waits out the virus and pins hopes on the success of large-scale vaccination, we in Australia exist in an uncomfortable utopia – or perhaps it’s simply a comfortable dystopia. We will only know which when we get to the “other side”, a luxury of survival our compatriots in On the Beach did not have.

(This article was originally published in John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations on 25 March 2021.)

screen shot from beginning of the film On the Beach

Indigenous incarceration in Australia update

The extraordinary and saddening news from the USA about protests and demonstrations in at least 140 American cities in almost every state, focussed on police brutality and the economic deprivation of African-Americans, has illustrated again the unhappy history of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples incarceration.

CCA last highlighted this two years ago, when the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) released its report Pathways to Justice–Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

“Indigenous incarceration is costing nearly $8 billion annually and will grow to almost $20 billion per annum by 2040 without further intervention,” according to a PwC Australia and PwC’s Indigenous Consulting report, quoted by the ALRC.

People as diverse as Indigenous leader Pat Dodson and NSW Bar Association President Arthur Moses, SC called this situation a “national shame”. Yet, as the ALRC report notes, between 2006 and 2016, the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous incarceration rates widened further.

This week brought the unwelcome news that these figures have still not abated. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its Corrective Services, March Quarter 2020 report, which shows, “the average daily number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners increased in the March quarter 2020 by 5% (580) to 12,902, compared with 12,322 in the December quarter 2019; and 12,144 in the March quarter 2019.”

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald points out, “While the general population was imprisoned in the March 2020 quarter at a rate of 220.7 people per 100,000, the state’s (NSW) Aboriginal population was imprisoned at a rate of 2427.4 per 100,000.”

Read that carefully: Indigenous Australians are incarcerated at a rate eleven times (that’s 1100%) that of the general population. And New South Wales, by no means the worse state, reflects the national average:  while Indigenous Australians represent only 3% of the total population, more than 29% of Australia’s prison population are Indigenous.

According to the Pew Research Centre, African-American incarceration rates have improved in recent years, but still run 5.6 times (560%) higher than that of white Americans.

What Community Colleges Australia and adult and community education providers can do

Aside from the massive personal, social and communal costs, Australia pays a significant economic cost by the heavy over-representation of Indigenous Australians in custody. Australia’s inability to deal with this systematic and systemic injustice is a continuing blot on our national reputation.

CCA is committed to ensuring its members maximise the positive impacts they can make in their local Indigenous communities. In doing this, we build on a strong base. For instance, in New South Wales, almost 13% of government-funded VET community education students are Indigenous, a percentage much higher than either TAFE (9.4%) or the for-profit VET providers (6.4%).

Last year, CCA commissioned an Engaging Indigenous Communities Guide for member organisations to support and build their capacities to engage with their Indigenous communities and learners. The Guide was developed by the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre (AILC), shaped by input from CCA members, with funding from the NSW Government. We are currently conducting training for member organisations about the use of the Guide, and will release it publicly soon, for the benefit of the whole Australian vocational education and training sector.

Australia’s not-for-profit community education sector can make immediate and profound differences through innovative programs such as the award-winning Indigenous drivers education program established by Lismore’s ACE Community Colleges. This unique program – undertaken in direct collaboration with local Aboriginal communities and expanded into other communities – breaks the cycle of no-licence- receive-fine-for-driving-illegally, often leading to incarceration. The ALRC report devotes a whole chapter to fines and drivers licenses.

(image below: Uluru, Northern Territory, Australia – photo credit & copyright, Don Perlgut)

(Originally published by Community Colleges Australia on 5 June 2020 as “US protests highlight continuation of high Indigenous Australian incarceration rates”.)

Sustaining Australian democracy through adult and community education

I have written a discussion paper on the role that Australian adult and community education (ACE) providers can play in sustaining Australian democracy and supporting civil society.

The ACE sector provides a great deal of value to support Australian democracy. Given the importance of education to democratic functioning, the ACE sector’s expertise in education and training of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups – particularly through foundation skills of language, literacy and numeracy – means that it has a unique role in ensuring that Australian democracy thrives. Read the paper summary here and the full paper (PDF) here.

Film review of Jojo Rabbit

(This review of “Jojo Rabbit” appeared in the Australian Jewish News on 19 December 2019.)

Directed and written by Taika Waititi, based on the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens; starring Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Rebel Wilson, Stephen Merchant, Alfie Allen, Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson

**********

What do you get when you cross iconic Jewish film-maker Mel Brooks (The Producers) with the late comic actor and film-maker Charlie Chaplin? If the year is 2019 and the film is Jojo Rabbit, it’s Jewish-Maori film director Taika David Waititi, who is also known as Taika Cohen. A 2017 “New Zealander of the Year” and self-styled “Polynesian Jew”, Waititi’s film credits include the New Zealand classic Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Marvel comics blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok.

But Jojo Rabbit is something different. Waititi took a great artistic risk in casting himself as Hitler (yes, you read that correctly) in this black satiric comedy set in Nazi Germany’s final years.

Waititi’s character is the imaginary friend of 10-year-old Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (played by a wide-eyed Roman Griffin Davis), who lives with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), as the finale of the war slowly closes around them.

Jojo has been inculcated into becoming a fierce young Nazi, although his unwillingness to kill a rabbit marks him out as unsuitable for Nazi brutality. His world is thrown into disarray when he discovers that his mother (father is away at war, unheard of for some time) has hidden Elsa, a young Jewish woman (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) in the family’s attic. Thus Jojo is forced to confront his prejudices and shield both Elsa and his mother.

Based on the novel Caging Skies by American-New Zealand writer Christine Leunens, whose Belgian grandfather spent time in a German labour camp, we have to cast back to Chaplin’s 1941 film The Great Dictator – in which he played both a Jewish barber in the ghetto and “Adenoid Hynkel” – to find an equivalent.

The supporting role casting of JoJo Rabbit is inspired: Sam Rockwell plays a Nazi captain, and Rebel Wilson plays a Nazi camp counsellor. Shooting in Prague – not exactly typical German architecture – assists in giving the film an offbeat, skewed feel. Although unlikely to reach the classic status of Chaplin, Taika Waititi offers one of the most creative films of the year.

Read The Times of Israel‘s list of 13 Jewish actors who have previously played Nazis on screen, starting with Moe Howard in 1940, and including Jack Benny, Conrad Veidt (Casablanca), Otto Preminger, Peter Sellers, Mel Brooks, Joel Grey and Harvey Keitel.

Film review of Marriage Story

(This film review of “Marriage Story” appeared in the Australian Jewish News on 21 November 2019)

Directed and written by Noam Baumbach; starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta and Julie Hagerty

Noah Baumbach writes and directs character-driven dramatic films, the type that helped to change American movie-making in the late 1960s and 1970s. Baumbach carries the tradition of those break-through directors (think Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet), and has been called the “spiritual heir” to Woody Allen, “joking in earnest about the big stuff.”

Mike Nichols (“The Graduate”) famously said that Baumbach reminded him “of why I got into movies in the first place. It was for revenge.” Some of Baumbach’s best work has been autobiographical, such as “The Squid and the Whale”. Now add Baumbach’s latest, “Marriage Story”, which has just opened in Australian cinemas, and will screen via Netflix from mid-December.

Netflix put “Marriage Story” in cinemas in November to make it eligible for the Oscars (it’s now on Netflix). And Oscar-worthy it is, being tipped for best film, script, director, actor and actress nominations. It’s that good.

It’s also not easy to watch. For “Marriage Story” is not boy-meets-girl cute and live happily-ever-after; rather the opposite. The story begins in New York City where experimental theatre director Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) is about to split up from his actress wife Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson), who is heading to Los Angeles – where she grew up and her extended family lives – to star in a pilot TV show. The problem is, they have an eight year old adorable son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), over whom they will fight for most of the film – yes, it’s “Kramer vs. Kramer” (Streep vs. Hoffman) 40 years on. With Henry moving to LA with Nicole (“lots of space”, characters keep saying), Charlie must travel there to be with him, providing an undercurrent of New York/Los Angeles and theatre/television tension.

“Marriage Story” starts pleasantly and poetically enough, with voice-over monologues by Charlie and Nicole, each listing the things they love about each other. It’s one of the most affecting openings to a relationship film I have seen in a long time. It’s also a misdirection to the viewer, as the next scene – the two of them with a marriage counsellor mediator – makes clear. Nicole is driving their separation, and it’s likely that many men and women will react differently both to this scene and to the film.

In the lead roles, Driver and Johansson deliver extraordinary performances, enhanced by some of the sharpest – and intentionally hilarious – minor characters, all of whom “own” the screen when present. Three divorce lawyers – Laura Dern as Nicole’s lawyer, and Ray Liotta and Alan Alda as Charlie’s lawyers – appear in tightly scripted and neatly paced scenes you can easily imagine pored over by film students in years to come. Julie Hagerty plays Johansson’s mother, exhibiting the comedy skills she developed in her “Airplane!” (1980) debut role. Screen aficionados will also note the presence of Wallace Shawn, one of the world’s top Jewish character actors (“The Princess Bride”, “Clueless”), as one of Charlie’s New York theatre troupe.

Baumbach remains one of film’s best writers of contemporary “drama with a comedy edge”, with lines such as this one, delivered by Liotta’s character: “Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best. Divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.” Pretty much captures it.

The film does not emphasise its Jewish roots, but they are significant: “Marriage Story” is based on the dissolution of the marriage of Baumbach (who is Jewish) to Jennifer Jason Leigh (also Jewish), played by Johansson (also Jewish). The Adam Driver character’s family background has more to do with Driver’s own family story (mid-west dysfunctional) than Baumbach’s (New York Jewish intellectual), but it’s easy to see how Driver’s character stands in for Baumbach’s own. The result is a complex, brave, affecting, profound, unsettling and often very funny drama, my pick for one of the best of the year.

The long tail of Australian private for-profit VET scandal

Some years ago, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson published a ground-breaking book entitled The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In it, Anderson deftly analysed the impact of the Internet and the digital world on traditional business models.

But Anderson’s introduction of the term “the long tail” has taken on another popular meaning – how certain events continue to resonate in economics or society, long after the initial impact has disappeared.

The much-abused, now (thankfully) closed Australian Government loan scheme for vocational education and training (VET) students, VET FEE-HELP, is a prime example of how the long tail continues to affect us.

The latest manifestation of the long tail came last week, with the news that a now-closed private for-profit Australian VET provider, Unique International College, had “been fined $4.2 million after it was found to have acted unconscionably by enrolling people from remote NSW communities, including a teenager with learning conditions, into online courses costing nearly $27,000 by offering them free laptops.”

According to the Sydney Morning Herald article (31 October 2019): “In six separate cases, it was found Unique International College failed to inform the prospective students of the cost of the course they were signing up to, did not tell them they would incur a debt and did not give them copies of the agreement they had signed.”

The conduct “’involved the exploitation of an uneducated Indigenous person with no understanding of what he was agreeing to in return for a laptop which was worth substantially less than the debt which was being incurred,’ Justice Nye Perram found in his Federal Court judgment.”

The article continues: “Unique made a net after tax profit of $8.2 million in 2014 and $33.8 million in 2015, the ACCC told the court. Justice Perram found Unique acted deliberately in remote communities on a number of occasions, including Walgett in October 2014, Wagga Wagga in March 2015 and Bourke in June 2015 but ‘was ignorant’ to the fact it was contravening consumer law.”

A year and a half ago, the Sydney Morning Herald described VET FEE-HELP (logo pictured below) as “the biggest public policy scandal in Australian history: the systematic rorting of the vocational education and training system.” At times, provider profit margins reached a staggering 80% of income. All of this continues to prove how government funding of privately delivered VET is fraught with potential difficulties.

Although the VET FEE-HELP scheme finished at the end of 2016, almost three years later we are still faced with court cases that continue to uncover the abuses undertaken by for-profit education providers who found ways to rort the system of government payments.

And, sadly, there is another “long tail” to this not-yet-finished story: the replacement Commonwealth Government scheme, VET Student Loans, has significantly under-spent. As TAFE Directors Australia CEO, Craig Robertson wrote on Monday of this week (4 November): “At the same time VET FEE-HELP was scrapped in favour of VET Student Loans, cutting the flow of about $1.5bn per annum in legitimate loans to something like $300m for VET Student Loans. States and territories, let alone decent providers, were left high and dry.”

(Full disclosure: I participated, as a representative of Community Colleges Australia and not-for-profit community-based VET providers, in the Australian Government’s VET Student Loans Stakeholder Reference Group as that program was being established.)

Jewish films at Melbourne International Film Festival

(This preview of the Melbourne International Film Festival -MIFF- appears in the Melbourne edition of the Australian Jewish News on 25 July 2019.)

Now in its 68^th year, the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) continues its record as one of Australia’s leading cultural icons with innovative and challenging films. This year’s Festival (1-18 August) highlighted an under-rated Jewish actor and a European Jewish director, and presented a divergent snapshot of how Jewish life continues to pervade contemporary international film.

MIFF featured what is surely Australia’s first “Jeff Goldblum Marathon” – 7 films and 14 hours of straight Jeff Goldblum programming overnight on 9 August: “Thor: Ragnarok”, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, “The Fly”, “Earth Girls Are Easy”, “Independence Day”, “Vibes” and “The Tall Guy”. Goldblum comes with a strong pedigree: he was born in 1952, the same year as MIFF started. After an Orthodox upbringing in Pittsburgh, he moved to New York City to study with famed Jewish acting coach Stanford Meisner, who has taught everyone from Gregory Peck to Sydney Pollack to Jon Voight to Tom Cruise and Christoph Waltz.

By latest count, Goldblum has played Jewish characters at least 22 times (3 times as himself): 2 of the most important of these characters appear at MIFF: David Levinson the technology expert in “Independence Day”, and Seth Brundle in “The Fly” – the “very image of the Jewish nerd, a scientist with poor social skills.” Goldblum’s Jewish persona is so strong that “Tablet” magazine listed his complete film oeuvre as the “75^th best Jewish film” ever.

Few directors have marked a reputation on dramatic Holocaust film as Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland, one of MIFF three “Directors in Focus”. Born in Warsaw in 1949 to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, Holland has brought an unusual perspective to Polish-Jewish history. Her nine films at MIFF include her three Holocaust classics. “Angry Harvest” – 1985 Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee – tells the chilling story of a woman on the run from the Nazis who finds shelter with a simple farmer, who develops a sexual fascination with her. “Europa Europa” – winner of the 1990 Best Foreign Language Golden Globe – dramatises the life of German-born Solomon Perel, who survives the war through Kristallnacht, the German invasion of Poland, residence in a Russian orphanage and – ultimately and incredibly – by acting as Russian-German translator for a German army unit. The film celebrates Jewish survival by showing the real Solomon Perel in Israel singing “Hine Ma Tov”, a scene that foreshadowed the final images of real-life survivors in “Schindler’s List” (1993). “In Darkness” – also a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, 2012 – is a realistic tale of heroism of a Polish worker who shelters a group of Jewish refugees in the sewers of Lvov.

Other highlights of the Festival included four unusual Jewish documentaries. British film-maker Nick Broomfield’s “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” poetically details the love affair between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen on the Greek island of Hydra that resulted in “So Long, Marianne” and other iconic songs. Broomfield brings a unique perspective: in 1968, he travelled to Hydra, met and befriended Cohen’s lover and muse, Marianne.

“The Amazing Johnathan Documentary”, by Jewish film director Ben Berman, tells a bizarre story of how he shot a documentary on the “Freddy Krueger of Comedy”, John Edward Szeles,

The Israeli documentary team of Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam has again stepped out far from home in their documentary “Leftover Women”, examining the stigmatisation of unmarried young women in China. Other Israeli films included “Parparim”, a short comedy-drama Israeli film about butterflies; “Working Woman”, an Israeli drama feature about sexual harassment; and “Shhhh”, an short Israeli comedy-horror film about putting a baby to sleep.

In “It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story”, tells the story of how two Jewish refugees from Germany – Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff – founded the New York-based legendary jazz label Blue Note Records.

The comedy-drama “Benjamin”, by gay British-Jewish director Simon Amstell, is not a documentary, but could well have been: the main character is “a depressed film-maker with a penchant for men” – much like Amstell himself.

Other films of note: “Smoke Between Trees”, an Australian drama starring Jewish actor Tiriel Mora (“Frontline” and “The Castle”), brother of film director Philippe Mora; the 1969 Czech classic “The Cremator”, set in Nazi-occupied Prague; and Jewish director Ira Sachs’ “Frankie”.

MIFF also premiered possibly the biggest film about Hollywood to be released in many years: Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood”. Set in a hedonistic 1960s Los Angeles, the film features lots of real-life and made-up Jewish characters, including Roman Polanski (played by Polish actor Rafał Zawierucha) and fictional agent Marvin Schwarzs played by Al Pacino.

And speaking of Hollywood: MIFF also featured “Untouchable”, a doco about “the fall of Hollywood producing titan Harvey Weinstein is told through the testimony of the women he allegedly targeted”.

Never Look Away film review

(This film review of “Never Look Away” appeared in the Australian Jewish News on 20 June 2019.)

Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; starring Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer and Saskia Rosendahl

*****

This opening of the German language film “Never Look Away” is a major event, bringing a sweeping historical view of German life scanning a three decade period from the late 1930s to the 1960s.

“Never Look Away” is a loose dramatisation of the life of contemporary German visual artist Gerhard Richter (1932-) – named Kurt Barnert in the film, acted by Tom Schilling (“Oh Boy”, “Before the Fall”). But German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”) has much higher goals than a simple biopic for his massive and epic (188 minute) film: he wants to illustrate many of the profound events of this tumultuous period of German history: the Nazi racial exclusion laws and eugenics, the Second World War and subsequent life in a Germany divided between east and west.

Using the refracted experience of an artist provides a personal – and highly visual – scope to what could otherwise be a mundane retelling of events. The film opens in Dresden with a brilliant scene that recreates the traveling art exhibition “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”), in which the Nazi regime attempted to ridicule German modernist art on the grounds of it being “un-German”, Jewish or Communist. A wide-eyed five year old Kurt attends the exhibition with his eccentric and creative aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl, star of Cate Shortland’s film “Lore”), and is impressed.

As the Nazi grip on power tightens, Elisabeth is diagnosed with schizophrenia, institutionalised and eventually euthanised under the orders of gynaecology professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a loyal member of the Nazi SS medical corps. The scenes in Professor Seeband’s hospital are harrowing, and his confrontation with Elisabeth a devastating illustration of Nazi cruelty to its own citizens. The cunning Seeband survives both the war and incarceration by the occupying Russian army, while remaining secretly loyal to his Nazi principles. Chillingly, Seeband later returns to the film’s story through a set of coincidences also based on real life.

The war devastates much of Kurt’s family, but he slowly makes his way in the post-war East German art world, producing made-to-order socialist realist murals of industrial workers. He also meets and weds the beautiful fashion student Ellie (Paula Beer), despite the serious misgivings of her parents. Kurt and Ellie flee to West Germany just as the Berlin Wall goes up, and Kurt lands a position at the Düsseldorf art academy, where he is taught by an enigmatic professor clearly based on the famous German sculptor, installation artist and art theoretician Joseph Beuys. Director von Donnersmarck neatly captures the artistic, cultural and political differences between the two German states, giving the film an extraordinary depth of insight into that period.

“Never Look Away” has received many plaudits, including two nominations at the most recent Academy Awards – for best foreign language film and best cinematography – along with strong audience support at this month’s Sydney Film Festival, a rapturous reception at the Venice Film Festival and an audience award at the Miami Jewish Film Festival.

The film is not perfect: a gas chamber scene in which aunt Elisabeth is murdered jars with its brightly lit explicit presentation – how many films have included similar scenes, and how little the scene actually tells us (have a look at The Son of Saul for a better use of these images). But few recent films have included such an historic – and spectacularly well-presented – epic sweep of modern history. Almost no current dramatic films have the courage to tackle so much, and to give the audience such rich questions to ponder: what is the place of art in society, how do we find the hidden meaning of art, what is the true meaning of ideology, how do we survive during ages of political upheaval and – neatly and fully believably – how can love and affection triumph over adversity.

Film review of Where Hands Touch

(This film review of “Where Hands Touch” appeared in the Australian Jewish News on 28 March 2019.)

Directed and written by Amma Asante; starring Amandla Stenberg, George MacKay, Abbie Cornish, Christopher Eccleston and Tom Sweet

*****

Few film directors specialise in portraying inter-racial couples in historic contexts.  British filmmaker Amma Asante – who is black and born in Ghana – has, first with the award-winning “Belle” (2013), which told the true story of an 18^th century enslaved West Indian woman who married a British navy officer and entered high society. Asante followed with “United Kingdom” (2016), another true story of an inter-racial couple in the immediate post Second World War period: an heir to the throne of African country Bechuanaland meets and marries a white British woman.

In “Where Hands Touch” – Asante’s third inter-racial romantic outing – the director turns her attention away from her home territory of British race relations to one far more fraught: Germany in the last years of the Second World War. She has chosen a small but fascinating part of history: children of colour who were born and raised in Nazi Germany, counter-posing the story to the Holocaust and persecution of Jews.

The film is ambitious, well-produced, earnest, well-meaning and attempts a high degree of sensitivity to its subject. Location shooting in Belgium and the Ile of Man capture mid-20^th century Germany. However, screening the Holocaust – even as a tangential theme – is fraught even when film-makers are steeped in knowledge, which Asante is not.

The film starts in 1944 Nazi Germany: 15 year old Leyna Shlegel (Amandla Stenberg, from “The Hate You Give”) has a German mother, Kerstin, played by Australian actress Abbie Cornish (“Candy”, “Somersault”). Her absent black African father was a French soldier, and Leyna has grown up – uncomfortably – in Germany with dark skin. Kerstin decides to move the family (including her fully German younger son) from their Rhineland provincial city to Berlin, thinking it will be easier for her bi-racial daughter.

Bad move. Berlin – as the headquarters of the German state – is, if anything worse, and Leyna is systematically excluded from school and almost all aspects of public life. Using family connections, Kerstin tries to ensure that Leyna is not jailed or sterilised (or both): the Nazi state has some awareness of not wanting to offend the German parents of “non Aryans”, but it’s not much.

Leyna is forced to start factory work with her mother. Through a series of coincidences, Leyna meets – and yes – falls in love with Lutz (British actor George MacKay), an active and rising member of the Hitler youth corps, whose father is a rising Nazi administrator. What future for these two young lovers?

To its credit, “Where Hands Touch” shows the ultimate destination of minorities in Nazi Germany: Leyna does end up in a concentration camp, dehumanised and abused. Director Asante has countered criticism of her film and been at pains to state that she has not tried to diminish the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, but to illustrate the experience of Romani people, disabled people and other outcasts under Nazi rule. In that purpose she achieves some success. The film tries to raise the questions: what exactly is identity, national and racial, and where do they cross over?

Historically, parts of “Where Hands Touch” don’t add up: it’s unlikely – as this film depicts – that Jews were still wandering around openly in Berlin in 1944 wearing yellow stars. The plot contains too many coincidences, and there’s an element of emotional “clunkiness” to how the story unfolds.

Dramatic acting – particularly by Stenberg and Cornish – is strong, but not enough to overcome an over-ambitious and underwritten film.

Film review of Transit

(This film review of “Transit” appeared in the Australian Jewish News on 11 April 2019.)

Directed and written by Christian Petzold, based on the novel by Anna Seghers; starring Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Maryam Zaree and Ronald Kukulies

Part of our ongoing fascination with the Holocaust on screen is the rich diversity of stories. Relatively few English-speakers may recognise the name Anna Seghers (the pen name of Netty Reiling), a German-Jewish Communist whose autobiographical 1944 novel “In Transit” is the basis for the new German language film “Transit”, directed by Christian Petzold.

Petzold is part of a new generation of German experimental film-makers, and is best known in the Jewish community for directing “Phoenix” (2014), a noir-ish drama set in immediate post-war Berlin, where a disfigured German-Jewish Holocaust survivor tries to recover her life, raising important questions of personal identity, collaboration and betrayal.

In “Transit”, Petzold again turns to a Jewish story, based on Seghers’ escape from Nazi-occupied France via Marseille in 1940. In the film, the lead character “Georg” (Franz Rogowski) is a German refugee in France seeking to flee the country as the “fascists” close in on him. Here is where Petzold’s film takes a creative and extraordinary turn: although his film is firmly a World War Two story of refugees and attempted escape, he has transplanted it to the present day, taking place in a fully recognisable modern France where everything appears contemporary, with exception of an absence of the internet and mobile phones.

In his journey of escape, Georg takes on the identity of Weidel, a German writer who has committed suicide in Paris and whose transit papers Georg has picked up. Weidel was a Communist and the Americans pointedly do not want him, although the Mexicans do; in his political naiveté, Georg travels through these scenes as a damaged innocent abroad. Georg is in fact damaged: actor Franz Rogowski speaks with a pronounced lisp, the result of an operation on a cleft palate in his youth – giving him great similarity to Joaquin Phoenix.

Georg spends his time with other increasingly desperate refugees (some of them Jewish) in a dreary and washed-out Marseille. They visit consulates looking for letters of transit, sullenly wait in endless queues and avoid confrontations with the authorities. Georg befriends an immigrant family, acting as a surrogate father to a young boy, and falls in love with Marie (Paula Beer), the wife of the dead writer whose identity he has appropriated; she in turn is living with a noble doctor who assists the poor and is also planning to leave. Marie thinks her husband Weidel is still alive and wandering Marseille, because people keep telling her that he has been there: the truth is that it’s really Georg.

The film comes across as a twisted form of “Casablanca”, the 1942 Humphrey Bogart film set in wartime French Morocco, with Georg as Rick, and Marie as Ilsa, the doctor as Victor Laszlo. But this is no homage to that film: blurring the time periods results in a mind-bending, time-crunching movie of displacement and deeply uncomfortable resonances to the present day of refugees and an apparent turn to nationalist, “keep them out” governments in Europe and elsewhere.

The Anna Seghers (Netty Reiling) “back story” provides important context for both her book and Petzold’s film adaptation: Born in Mainz on the Rhine in 1900, despite her Communist activities, she maintained a strong Jewish identity, writing her doctorate thesis in art history (University of Heidelberg, 1924) on “Jews and Judaism in the Work of Rembrandt”. Following the rise of the Nazis, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, and fled Germany in 1932, moving to Zurich and then Paris. There she wrote the acclaimed novel “The Seventh Cross” – later a movie starring Spencer Tracy – about seven men attempting to escape a Nazi concentration camp, one of very few movies during the war to depict Nazi camps. When the Germans invaded France, she left via Marseille in 1940 for Mexico with her husband, Hungarian László Radványi. After the war, she returned to Germany, living in East Berlin until her death in 1983 and became one of the most famous East German writers.