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Dark Times
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(notes from a review broadcast live on Melbourne radio station 3RRR in
1981)
Reds, Ragtime, Dark Times: we
are currently seeing a cycle of films about the interrelation of history,
politics and personal life. Von Trotta’s contribution is about terrorism, in
particular: a narrative inspired by and closely modelled on the real-life story
of Gudrun Ensslin, member of the Baader-Meinhof Group, and her sister Christiane.
The film rests upon a rather overheated myth of
sisterhood – something turned on its head in Mark Rappaport’s The Scenic Route (1978). But at least
it’s a modern myth: these women are not closer (than men) to the emotional or
domestic realm (which is the old stereotype of melodrama); they are closer to
the social, to revolutionary upheaval!
These sisters are posited as semantic opposites; and
yet these opposites cancel each other out when framed within the proscenium
arch of the Spectacle.
Here, the Personal registers as an irruption, a dark
underside of History. It’s the terrorist-sympathetic
version of Herstory.
The male characters, on the other hand, are pictured
as apolitical schmucks.
It’s a certain type of Leftist romance, in spectacular-narrative-novelistic
mode; its keynotes are melancholia and trauma.
It is a film of romance – and of pose. It seems
embarrassed by the clichés it takes on, but manages to say nothing much beyond
them: about terrorism, work …
It’s full of undigested political material: on the
Holocaust, the bomb, the sanctity of human life.
Dark Times is the negative
mirror-image of Yvonne Rainer’s radical Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980): because von Trotta is not devoted to spinning a
film which is a web of contradictions and problems.
Basically, it’s an art-film bore, too clean, too
straight: high on atmospherics, ambiguity, cool – but with no real substance.
MORE von Trotta: The Promise, Rosenstrasse © Adrian Martin 1981 |
