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Cinema: The German lesson, the homework in question

2022-01-11T14:23:41.363Z


CRITICAL - Adapted from the bestseller by Siegfried Lenz, the filmmaker Christian Schwochow signs a strong and poetic film which features a child torn between the authority of a policeman father and his affection for a painter to whom the Third Reich has banned to work.


The first sequence of

The German Lesson

works like a slap of cold water right in the face.

The shrill sound of a siren tears the silence of a reformatory for young delinquents.

Prisoners dressed in white are taken to an amphitheater to work on a writing: “The joys of duty”.

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All of them are working. Only a boy looks up, petrified. Not because he lacks inspiration but because he has too much to say, Siggi Jepsen remains frozen for a long time. The title of the essay awakened a deep trauma in him. Put in solitary confinement after having made a blank copy, it is in a monk's cell that the terrible memories that turned his life upside down will come to the surface.

In 1943, Siggi was 10 years old when his father, a police officer at Rugbüll station, got on his bike with him. Their tiny silhouettes stand out against the horizon on the German moor which merges with the Elbe at the mouth of the North Sea. Wrapped up in a raincoat, the zealous sergeant braves the storm to deliver a letter to his childhood friend, the painter Max Nansen (wonderfully played by Tobias Moretti). The child attends the scene. The Third Reich definitively prohibits the exercise of painting to this artist whose art is qualified as "degenerate". Torn between submission to paternal authority, and his affection for a free artist (directly inspired by the expressionist painter and watercolorist Emil Nolde), the young Siggi loses himself in abysses of reflection and suffering.

SEE ALSO

- The trailer for the film "The German Lesson"

Trailer: The German Lesson - Watch on Figaro Live

Poetry, beauty and violence

After having painted in

Paula

(2016) the portrait of Paula Modersohn-Becke

,

described as

"Camille Claudel from beyond the Rhine"

, Christian Schwochow adapts the German bestseller by Siegfried Lenz

The German Lesson

appeared in 1968, and has become a classic in post-war European literature. It is without a doubt his most ambitious film to date. The most pictorial too, so much the ultramarine hues, the controlled frame, and the sought-after compositions of plan, prove that the seventh art can sometimes be confused with painting. We will remember in particular this incredible dreamlike image of a row of paintings aligned on the beach, the easels half sunk in the sea, between dog and wolf… and the flames which lick the canvases with the gusts of wind!

Bathed in poetry, beauty and violence, the film first asserts itself as a terrible family story.

Literally torn between his father and his painter godfather, the young Siggi highlights the conflict between the sense of collective duty and our own individual responsibility.

All bathed in a grandiose, relentless setting, which perfectly symbolizes oppression in the open.

But beyond this visual scale,

The German Lesson

is given as a vibrant indictment against blind obedience, as well as a deep meditation on the guilt of the German people indoctrinated by the Nazi regime.

Art is highlighted there as a symbol of resistance and freedom.

It is also this lesson that we will remember ...

Source: lefigaro

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