berlin express (1948)

Liberation depends upon the uncensored independent rubble film.

Or rather, what's left of Frankfurt. The biggest ghost town you've ever seen. A community of hollow shells, chipped and battered by allied bombings, according to a methodical plan. A plan that would cancel out the city as a tough enemy center, and still retain some choice spots... And then there's headquarters city for the American Occupation Zone. There was no such thing as the casual sight-seeing traveler, for no one was here without a purpose. There were other modern touches in this very ancient city. The architecture for instance; new lines, new shapes; generally referred to as early 20th Century Modern Warfare.

So universal is the destruction that it blends into one continuous pattern.

The term 'rubble film' is one normally associated with a genre appearing in post-(world) war (II) Germany. Author Sabine Hake, in 'German National Cinema' describes the Trümmerfilm as remaining "haunted by the experience of war and defeat and the loss of nation and homeland," offering "individual solutions that extricated the protagonists from the burdens of history." In this context, Hake continues, the ruins visualized the desired erasure of the past and the promise of a new beginning captured in the myth of Zero Hour. Accordingly, the cityscape in ruins provided above all a mise-en-scène for the allegorical staging of agony, doubt, hope, and renewal. However, some of those details are specific to the German mindset under post-war conditions. 'Berlin Express' (1948), as the title card makes clear, was shot by authorization of the Allied Armies. Being of the eye of the occupying forces, 'Berlin Express' is closer to a work of heroic iconoclasm than fatalistic soul searching. The key interest / novelty of the picture is the simple of fact of its permission of photography :: the allowance of staging a fictional narrative in the global political center of all things 1948, the hot spot, the still smoking ground zero, along with the mandate and participation of the militarily superior occupying forces. The acting is lackluster, the plot itself is mild and terse, — all of it is arbitrary in the face of its environment and context. The lesson of 'Berlin Express' should be the conscious cultivation and aesthetic exploitation of such an allowance. The actors in these cases are spiritual mediums, allowing the spirit-of-the-time to intoxicate their gesture and voice, (as when Merle Oberon gorgeously recites in response to the final question of where she can be found in the near future, "Nowhere for very long. Don't you see? There is nothing one can count on. No one's address is dependable. But if ever the War should come to finish, I will see that you know where to find me.") for the sole purpose of being poetically fixed. There should be a constant tension, from the very beginning of the film until the very end, between the exoteric visual composition and the esoteric narrative generated by the story — [i.e.: something like a freer, looser David Fincher]. The landscape of the rubble film in abstract, simply being defined as a cinematic narrative staged in a current or recently devastated war zone, does carry what is arguably a universal, mythological archetype with its image, despite any objectivity of reason or subjectivity of judgement: translating interiority into exteriority, Hake writes, and of articulating social problems through psychological problems. It is the landscape of a new horizon, with a cycle of pleasurable growth and catharsis performed on the physical grounds of trauma; what is allowed to be staged here will also be an ideology allowed to crystallize.

They who stage the rubble film(s), win the war.

Berlin. Well, not quite. The city itself is some fifteen miles off by way of the autobahn. And when you get there you wonder how you can call it a city. Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. The focal point of the rise-and-fall of a dictator is today a monument of ruins. Other cities, like Hiroshima, have been obliterated. But no other city so mighty as Berlin has fallen so low. Less than four years of wind, rain, and sun, has left a drab, colorless dead city in its wake. This was one case where justice had made the punishment fit the crime. Berlin, capital of a world that was supposed to revolve around a building called the Reich Chancellery, around a leader who stood on a balcony and explained how it would last for a thousand years.