Thursday, October 09, 2003

 
Taking Sides

There's a scene in Taking Sides where, in a bombed out shell of a building, an audience breathlessly witnesses a performance of Schubert's String Quintet in C. The place is Germany, sometime around 1945, and there is no rooftop, chandeliers, or heating - just some makeshift spotlights mounted on the walls and folding chairs organized into tidy rows. Somewhere in the delicate Adagio, it starts raining and a canopy of umbrellas mechanically opens; the musicians keep playing and the audience barely blinks. When it comes to Germans and their Schubert, we gather, the show must go on.

It is hard to imagine what one is to do after their homeland has been utterly obliterated, but Taking Sides makes a strong case for listening to chamber music. As the camera dollies across the rows of faces held in rapt attention, we feel that this makeshift performance of Schubert is no cultural extravagance but a matter of necessity, of validating survival, of proving that beauty and genius still exist after a people's buildings are leveled and a family's loved ones gone.

Across town, in the light of day, Harvey Keitel is an American major interrogating members of the Berlin Philharmonic in an attempt to ensnare conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (played by Stellan Skarsgard) in the Allies' De-Nazification effort. "He was Hitler's Bandleader!" says Keitel's boss, an American southern-twang two-star General. "Deep down inside, we're all Nazis; Hitler just tapped into something and unlocked it."

The implication, of course, is that Furtwangler and his Berlin Philharmonic were keys used by the Third Reich to unlock the evil stored in mens' souls, that Furtwangler was a frontman for a party preaching the superiority of the mythical Aryan warrior artist. "Find him guilty," says the General. "He represents everything evil that we're fighting against."

And so Keitel ventures into Germany, setting up shop in his own bombed-out building with the help of two young assistants: an American lieutenant and a female German typist. And the dramatic pendulum is set in motion. Keitel begins by interviewing all the members of the Berlin Philharmonic who played under Furtwangler, warming up the pan in which to fry his big fish. Then, finally, after several days of preheat, he summons the conductor for grilling and lets the sparks fly.

Most of the interrogations - and thus, the movie - revolve around the question: can art and politics be kept separate? Can an artist, searching for universal truth and beauty, ever truly isolate himself from the political milieu in which he functions? In an evil regime like Nazi Germany, is it ethically allowable for an artist to play along with evil men in order to bring beauty to the people? Isn't art itself a kind of authority for taste and intellect - an autocratic force emanating from the canvas or stage? And isn't the orchestral conductor - dictator of a force of 120 musicians - the ultimate embodiment of such authority?

Taking Sides makes a perfect companion to Max, last year's film about a young Adolf abandoning art school to pursue politics. The tagline for Max was the equation: Art+Politics=Power. In the movie, young Adolf shouts to Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer who has rejected his work, "Politics is the new Art!" and after seeing how he conceives of the Third Reich in graphite on sketchpads, we wonder if he's onto something.

It's quite possible that the thing that made Nazi Germany unique - the thing that set it apart from other fascist regimes - was in how it so masterfully merged Art and Politics through its use of the New Media. How television and radio and offset printing were used for propaganda, that new science-art of making people not just hear a message, but feel it in their bones, bypassing all the rational better-judgement circuits of the brain. Building on the long-held view of war as art, Hitler realized that mass media allowed art into the battlefield of mindspace, a force that arguably brainwashed so many Germans into an ethnic-cleansing frenzy.

How exactly Furtwangler, an orchestral conductor, fits into all this is hard to define and the viewer, on watching Taking Sides, will have a hard time doing just that. In addition to the subtle philosophical questions of art and politics at hand, there's a sense that the American prosecutors are in some ways as bad as the men they're going after. Keitel's American Major is so brutish and terrifying in his relentless pursuit of a cowering Skarsgard that his German typist asks to resign, saying that "she was once questioned by the Gestapo just in the way you question him." And watching all this, we wonder if Keitel, like all the Nazi officers standing trial, has himself fallen victim to the old psychology 101 experiment wherein people in positions of authority are inevitably found to abuse it.

The emotions in this film are high-octane, radiating primarily from Keitel and Skarsgard who inhabit the talky script with all the intensity of a stage play. In fact, the movie feels like a broadway production as seen under the magnifying glass of the camera lens. Some people will find this off-putting, but the thing is that Taking Sides works. It isn't at all awkward in its stage-bound feeling; it’s in fact quite charming in how the claustrophobic quarters concentrate our thoughts. The movie brings its own cinematic angle to the proceedings and is a beautiful thing to look at, warm light pouring through the windows of the interrogation room and subtle camera moves maintaining tension during otherwise static scenes. Ping-Pong dialog notwithstanding, this movie knows how to tell a story visually.

But the big treasure is just how many thought-provoking questions can be raised in two hours of sitting screen-faced in a dark room. How people at midnight on a Saturday poured out of a theatre in La Jolla heatedly discussing Art, Politics, and Psychology and wondering aloud how these concepts apply to America's current Media-Political environment. The days of seeking refuge in Schubert may have never existed for Americans, but maybe in times of darkness we are rather to be found in the halls of the cinema.

**** (out of four)

posted 1:29 AM