Remembering the Nightmare

...On Screen REMEMBERING THE NIGHTMARE BY MARCIA CAVELL Movies permit us to indulge our visual curiosity to a degree that would make us afraid or ashamed in ordinary life As adults we usually don't stare at other people As children, we were less inhibited Knowing that the real taboos concerned what we saw, not what we said, we discovered keyholes Those films that particularly gratify our urge to look often do so because their subjects are ones we are allowed to study only in the dark—sex and violence Unfortunately, since a director has the same inhibitions as the rest of us, he is apt to lose himself as an artist when he turns to this material Not since the beautiful Ride the High Country, for example, has Sam Peckin-pah managed to contain violence, thus making something of it Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien is in this sense a subtle and controlled investigation of the horrors of Nazism Unlike most other explorations of the topic, it lets us witness depravity, not to implicate us but to reveal something important The film opens with Santayana's familiar lines "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it" Malle tries to insure remembrance in the heroic hope that even those of us personally untouched by the events he depicts will make them our own (Indeed, of all the arts, movies, with their temporally ordered scenes and incidents, are the most like memory ) His subject is French collaboration during World War II Of course, in the last 25 years we Americans have acquired a past we would alternately like to obliterate and understand In the latter mood, we can be grateful for the character of Lucien (Pierre Blaise), on whose expressionless face the director focuses frequently, it is the moral center of his landscape Malle sees Lucien very much as Hannah Arendt saw Eichmann In fact, both the filmmaker and the philosopher have made themselves unpopular m their own countries by insisting that while there are people who do horrible things for horrible motives, there are also people who do horrible things because they cannot make the appropriate connections between knowing, feeling and acting Lucien's problem is not a matter of choosing evil over good He simply isn't very smart Although he has the basic skills necessary for survival, his world is never more than a series of discrete impressions In one frame, he bids a loving and forlorn farewell to a dead horse, and in the next, he knocks off the head of a live chicken with his bare hand At the beginning of the movie, Lucien asks Labont, his former schoolteacher and one of the local leaders of the Resistance, if he may join Labont says NoLucien is too young, and by implication, too dull Motivated only by the need to belong somewhere, he is then easily recruited to the other side, and his first act of collaboration is to give a drunken recital of everything he knows about the Resistance As a result, Labont is brought into Gestapo headquarters and tortured Lucien does not actively participate, but the total lack of surprise on his facelet alone painwhen he sees what is happening, is almost as disturbing He can watch as easily as the dog continues to sleep, the children to play on the Starrs, through the sounds of Labont's screams Later, after Lucien has himself helped round up the Jews, he wakes one morning to the whistle of a train We think of cattle-cars and crematona, of the many whistles the good people of those outwardly peaceful towns had to disconnect from the other things they heard and knew For Lucien it is merely the signal to get dressed Possessed of emotions neither very intense nor very complicated, he is the embodiment of the mob sentiment that abhors genius and individuality He feels pleasure in a new suit that sets him above the rest of the village, he resents being pushed around, he is envious During the arrest of another Resistance leader, Lucien and a companion are shown a model boat by the man's son How long did it take to build?, they ask When the boy proudly answers a year, they slowly tear it apart Lucien may be puzzling, but as the Jewish tailor Horn tells nun, he is not hateful Hatred would be easy, and Malle guarantees against our settling for it by having Lucien fall in love with Horn's daughter, France (Aurore Clement) She is a gifted pianist whose music Lucien does not understand but whose official status as The Outsider, he does Finally, he decides to try to escape with her and her mother If this is the film's critical moral juncture, however, it is also the point where the picture begins to fall apart The idyll of France and Lucien is important for his redemption, yet it renders her incomprehensible, their relationship does not flow from what we have seen before and strikes us as a separate story Malle has created over an hour of value Ethically, his vision is tactful and discriminating Still, these virtues make Lacombe, Lucien only a good film about a difficult subject not a great one Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, on the other hand, makes us rue the camera It by-passes Malle's sadist-victim analysis of evil to present the "victim" as "masochist" That would be all right were the movie only about the 1957 love affair between Lucia (Charlotte Ram-pling), a former concentration camp inmate, and Max (Dirk Bogarde), her Nazi torturer But it isn't The film centers squarely on a kind of Nazi encounter group whose members' raison d'etre is to rid themselves of their past and their guilt In addition, there are several flashbacks (all in green) to mass scenes in the camp The Night Porter therefore takes on the responsibility of saying something about Nazism m general, and although it tries, what comes out is as muddled and befuddled as the plot Lucia's husband is a conductor on tour, hence, the story asks us to beheve, she winds up at the Hotel zu Oper in Vienna where Max is—ah, symbolism's—the night porter His chief task is ministering to the fantasies of the guests, who are, naturally, members of the SS cabal Max is gifted at this, as one of his "friends" remarks, recalling their mutual past, "Max had imagination " Damned if Cavani doesn't seem bent on proving, as unreflectively as possible, Peter Viereck's contention in The -Roots of the Nazi Mind that the evil Germans (and she has them all stereotyped down to the black leather coat and monocle) were artists manque How else account for the long flashback to a ballet in the concentration camp performed for the officers by one of their own, or for the tact that the music through much of the film is Mozart's The Magic Flute, or for the footage of the scene from that opera which has always been thought of as the supreme musical "essay" on the imaginations—Papa-geno's piping to the enchanted beasts of the forest...

...Viereck's thesis would be an interesting idea for a film to take up, yet it can't be done by forgetting the distinction between private illusion and historical reality Because movies can visually play around with our notions of space and time, they are peculiarly good at replicating not only memory but also dream and nightmare This facility, though, like any other, is more readily abused than used One of the things that made Last Tango in Paris such a poignant work was its rendering of the world of fantasy, with all its power, at the same time that it presented the world fantasy was attempting to shut out The Night Porter, by contrast, does not know the difference between what is inside and what is outside, between art and perversion between Mozart and the Grateful Dead...