© 2020 by James Clark
I seldom remark upon the actors in the films I touch upon. Of course, many of them are geniuses in striking the tones to propel a cinematic vehicle. My interest, however, is the entirety of the work; and that is the domain of a screenwriter/ filmmaker.
Why I cite the actor, August Diehl, a protagonist in the truly majestic film here, namely, A Hidden Life (2019), is his resemblance to long-departed star, Henry Fonda, and specifically the Henry Fonda of the film, Twelve Angry Men (1957), directed by journeyman, middle-of-the-road, Sidney Lumet. That latter melodrama is light-years distant from Terrence Malick’s production of uncanny hiddenness; but they share the format of a solitary investigation daring to negate a fondness that is catastrophically wrong. The film today, however, casts Diehl not merely casting umbrage about the Nazism of Adolph Hitler, but (only feebly understood), all of world history. That a hidden life transcending the news could obtain here characterizes this film as a communication far from moralistic and sentimental dogma. (Fonda, bucking relatively simple odds, wins over the hearts and minds of his fellow jurymen-detractors. Diehl, far from eliciting expertise in face of his challenge, tears apart not only himself, but his family and an encouraging cosmos.)
Before he became a filmmaker, Malick, as a young philosophical academic, had impressively attempted to deal with the disarray which was the edifice of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). In his, “Translator’s Introduction,” to the Heidegger essay, The Essence of Reasons (1969), Malick underlines the peculiar difficulty of the sense of “world.” In the text therewith, Heidegger comes to a showdown of sorts with the phrasing, “The decisive origins of ancient philosophy reveal something essential to the concept of world. Kosmos does not mean any particular being that might come to our attention, nor the sum of all beings; instead, it means something like “condition” or “state of affairs,” i.e., the How in which being is in its totality. Thus, Kosmos houtos does not designate one realm of being to the exclusion of another, but rather one world of being in contrast to a different world of the same being, eon (being) itself kata kosmon (in relation to the cosmos). The world as this “How in its totality” underlies every possible way of segmenting being; segmenting being does not destroy the world but requires it.”
Malick, well aware (as was Ingmar Bergman) that speech and its writing can be dramatic, primordial action, mounts (from an actual account) the earthy, volatile vicissitudes of a young couple tested to fathom the “how” of discord and harmony which comprises the paradox of problematic creativity itself. Two statements at the outset find them at their heyday. The first is by Diehl, known here as Franz, powering along a dirt road in the ravishing Austrian Alps with his black motorcycle and all-black leather and all-black helmet and all-black visor. He’s shown from behind, and at a mid-distance, with bits of ornamental flourish flapping in the wind—being a vision of warning that the old won’t do. (We never see this prized beauty again; nor do we ever see anyone else with such a disturbance.) He drives up to an outdoor café to be admired by a girl named, Fani, whom he will soon marry. The second involves, first of all, a black screen with a faint church bell and then Franz’ voice-over, musing, “I thought I might climb to the farthest mountains where others could not reach… Fly away like birds… above the clouds…”
Also coveting the airways were the crazy broadcasts of Hitler, with an accompaniment of tens of thousands of troopers, marching in insectile precision, with others waving swastika flags with wild abandon, not to mention hordes of traditionalists dressed in apparel from centuries past. The frosting on this cake would be nighttime pyrotechnics; though the real payoff would be the spectators, moving in great numbers in unison to the Nazi pledge. The aerial shot of this migration, with its sharp unities gives way to the lovebirds, now a couple, sharpening their scythes in a meadow. Soon we see them at work, a vision of youthful energy and harmony. Even more to the point, though, is their next chore, planting potatoes, on hands and knees, with the stunning highland all around, and finding mirth in the exercise, as if they were not quite on side with the neighbors, and rather smug about their surety and whimsy, with a barn full of livestock nearby. On that occasion when Franz crashed the bar and stole her heart, he showed a preference for smoking a pipe, a rather odd, cosmopolitan pursuit in a remote farming village. (Later we’ll have a flashback of their wedding, dancing with wild enthusiasm to the bemusement of the invitees. We’ll also have, along the way, a newsreel of Hitler in his mountain redoubt, doing a dance step so rococo feeble as to be a sign of derangement.) Has Franz carefully measured the distance between his audacity and the long-term, homogeneous valley farmers?
Seen along the paths linking the farms, they seem to be fully in their element, smiling to passers-by. Out of this whimsy, a baby already appears. Fani notices the rumble of military planes, almost invisible, way beyond the mountains. Another step into a tight weave involves Fani’s sister augmenting the family, in the aftermath of her husband’s abandoning her. “You’re our family.” (This episode elicits a sweet violin motif on the soundtrack.) In a flash, that little girl now has two more sisters to play with. Consequently, we observe a moment of play for the whole family, an action with a dark dimension lost in a somewhat valid idyll and hunger to thrive. In the uneven meadow by the house, the little girls have reached the point of being fleet of foot, perfect for a game of blind man’s bluff. The optics of Franz floundering like a blind man portents a mood swing.
While the going was quite easy—his strong commitment to the village church (cleaning the floors and ringing the bell) giving the appearance of healthy assurance—Franz could sublimate his and Fani’s wild streaks (Soon the presiding mayor will recall, “You were a wild one, fighting with the policeman!”). His being called up to military service causes him no pain, showing clearly no strong political interests. (That his father died in the trenches of World War I had not sparked any pacifism.) There he is, bedecked with a swastika and Axis-grey, practicing bayonet thrusts into straw-men. Within the recruits he finds a sort of soulmate, a guy being so bold, under the eyes of career warriors, to use his rifle as a juggling show. And therewith, Malick brings onboard Ingmar Bergman—another expert of slight-of-hand. The all-in-black, top-hat, pasty-faced apparition, being the master of the guillotine, who eventually kills Franz, becomes a kin to the figure of Death, in Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal (1957; the year Fonda became a hero). Also resident in The Seventh Seal is an itinerant circus clown whose sense of dignity involves juggling (now popping up in today’s rifleman). It also involves acrobatics; and—what do you know!—our Franz is on the hook to live up to that. He does, sort of, gets started in that métier, inasmuch as the rapid success of the Germans in crushing France finds our protagonist redundant; and he’s sent back home. (Fani’s letter to Franz, before the good news, is a study requiring reading between the lines. “My dear husband. They say that France has surrendered…” (We see her not only relieved but with a touch of hubris. She pounces into a field along with her sister, as if watching a sporting event going well.) “We’re burning the bad wheat,” she tells him, unaware of what such cleansing might denote.
At this turning point we should realize that the breathtaking surroundings are not merely nice furnishings, but instead an elicitation to wake up. Not only the symphony of startling minerals, rushing streams and flawless forests, in ranges from blazing sunlight to arresting darkness, make their moves; but the ancient structures of wood and brick, often in semi-darkness, become a deluge of stunning mood. (Even as Franz is about to be executed, the very high-ceilinged cell comes into its own, its low-wattage lamp and dark blue dash too much, as always, for a figure, as we shall study extensively, missing the point.)
While still officially a Nazi soldier, Franz partakes of an outdoor newsreel of the victory over France. We share with him a glimpse of corpses, human and livestock, in the streets, and a grandmother attempting to find for a naked child in winter some snow to drink. The beaten French military are up for display. Also onscreen, we see a German pilot at the controls, sneering and congratulating himself and his regime. Franz asks himself, “What’s happened to our country, to the land we love? How could we massacre the meek?” (A cut to Fani, finalizing a pig to market.) Though the redundancy persists, he must remain doing “maneuvers,” while Fani works the farm, along with her sister, in pure-white snow. The whiteness all around becomes, not only part of a physical treasure, but a motif of purity now raging with irony.
Their lusty but uneasy reunion does come with lovely spring foliage. But also it coincides with a quixotic war effort. (Malick perhaps distinguishing poetic Austrian Nazism from prosaic German Nazism.) Soon a crew of older German emissaries filters among the villagers. Just before their actions were widely known, Franz joins many of the men in scything a large field. The harmony of the work and the cordiality of their emotion become the end of an era. Also before the battle lines had fully formed, there was a night at the beerhall (the funding demands not yet overt) where Franz, along with a few others, refuses to join the alcohol-frenzied campaign he had just recently been bruised from. Now that the point had been made, the first step toward treachery became huddling with a few men thinking along the lines of Franz’ humanitarianism. An elderly man is driven to poetry to express his dismay: “This is what happens when the world dies…” With Hitler’s men in uniform going door-to-door for money to brace the cause, that whisper-campaign dwindles to Franz alone. (The atmosphere of thunder and lightning at this juncture—a rather trite shout-out—serves to dilute the derring-do.) He confronts their easy job with some shock. “I don’t have anything to give. I wish you a good day.”
The arrogant heresy floods the folks in a flash. From the movie night in the army to the dissing of the meek at home, Franz had undergone a sea change. Though the optics of great courage and sterling lucidity seem to take over here, with a follow-through of near-biblical purity, we must curb our enthusiasm. The sea change instrumental now, for this cinematic mood-poem, had exchanged a spirited goof into a pedantic lunatic. Generous, though mediocre, gutsiness, once having undergone a pinnacle of violence, Franz has become far more than an anti-fascist. He has, in fact, extrapolated the military enemy to all of world history, in its shallowness and fecklessness. So while he puts on superior airs in face of the immediate filth, his sea of massive turmoil is far beyond his didactic resources. From here on in, he is intent upon a holy death, hopscotching the lovely and manageable sea he now stands to completely ignore. As such, Malick’s great film here, derives the reflective treasures of the work of Bergman, a master of grasping the poison of pedantry, by which religion, humanitarianism and science become such a pain in the ass, rabid to nail down what can’t be nailed down.
In a flash, the heart-felt fealty has become hatred. The fun in the common fields becomes deadness of tone and flash-point attack, by word, by fists and by small scythes. (This being a refrain of the beating of Jof, the circus guy, in The Seventh Seal, canny enough to keep on the move, who runs afoul of a pack of nasty drunks in a 12th century beerhall with the plague raging. Jof’s having a friend there, an earthy squire to bail him out, spells a great difference from the nightmare of Franz.) One of his detractors suggests, “Show a little humor…” Immediately from Franz’ denunciation of the Folk, the village mayor, feeling the heat with a subversive running around and knowing that the powers that be would not be showing a little humor, takes in hand the traitor’s trajectory. He begins with the measured speech, “I’m not your friend, I’m your Mayor!” The latter, now seen always to be drunk, after knocking over Frans’ beer stein, races around the nocturnal outdoor tables, attempting, with German soldiers increasingly visible, to sound like his boss. Someone else unnerved by the vision of Franz (who tells a morose Fani, “We must be strong…”) is the village priest, who counsels, “Free will obliges duty to the people. The Church tells us so. Every man subject to the power above him. Don’t you think you should consider the consequences? Your sacrifice will amount to nothing.” On seeing Franz so reluctant to change, the priest tells him, “I’ll speak to the bishop. He has far more wisdom than I.” He and Fani submit themselves, silent and strained, to the near-by cathedral, now in such a limbo that a paradox might fill the bill. (The mayor, aghast in face of Franz’ negating “the land we love,” needles, “You refused the family allowance! Why?”) The opulence of that out-of-the-way structure—huge, richly designed and bidding to be part of the final solution—hits us palpably before the wise-man opens his mouth. (The blazing stained-glass-windows ironically recall the modest home of Andreas, a weak artisan lost in action by way of a manic jurisdiction, in the Bergman film, The Passion of Anna [1969].) In fact, the bishop, in an office full of the “right” books and beautiful, if rather ponderous, woodwork, has nothing more to say than the priest—hardly surprising in view of the standard dogma being de rigueur. The sprinkling of the idea of “free-will” affords some dark amusement. Franz sprinkles his own kind of dogma, “I won’t have my life spared through lies.”
There’s another functionary in this time of trouble, namely, the local church painter of edifying vignettes of biblical inspiration. That he happens to care not a fig for such doctrine links him back to the church painter in The Seventh Seal, where the entire congregation has perished from the plague, and a former clergyman now passes the time by stealing jewelry from corpses. That skeptical squire (to a religiously maniacal knight) rallies the quixotic painter there. And it is oddly devout, Franz, who comes to bear now, listening to the market of the day, courtesy of the disillusioned and still hopeful seer. “I help them to dream… show a life of suffering. I show the ordinary… You don’t want to see what really happens. I paint a tame Christ, a comforting Christ, with a halo. Someday I might have the courage to paint the true Christ… A dark time is coming, and we will be more clever…” Closely following this resolution, we see Fani in her dark barn where, at its doorway in bright sunlight, the resident donkey looks in. Filmmaker Robert Bresson’s Balthazar, the donkey, eliciting the epithet, “saint,” the real deal, being true depth, and not put off for someday in a convenient future. Also, in this passage we have one of the frequent bicycle riders zooming down the path by their barn. Balthazar’s taking the trouble to maintain equilibrium-dignity, while the people’s choice would be inertia.
Not nearly as resolved as Balthazar, Fani veers toward fear and resentment; but her veer is far more contested than that of the rider. And, in the shadow of the “saint,” she begins to eclipse the careless showoff. Given a little sendoff in the dynamics of domestic crash, that painter with Franz hopes to avoid censure by pointing out, “How can I show what I haven’t lived?” That is almost word-for-word what the lady, headed for a divorce, in Bergman’s film, Scenes of a Marriage (1973), argues. Fani, though, soldiers on, with no schemes for a big show. Soon a biker/ postman comes down the path, and he presents to Franz the letter which demands him to rejoin an army that he now must refuse.
The interval between the bishop and the draft notice sets the stage for Fani’s becoming a bona fide adult, which is to say, a kin to mystery. Franz’ weeks’- long dust-up was him to a T. But there was nothing in it for her. While, his “You must be strong,” speaks to kicking ass, she remains wanting to find, in all this, some magic. There were several encounters along the paths with women glaring at her; and soon one or two of them spat upon her. While she did have a lively and supportive sister, very useful during the bullying, Franz’ mother had taken the hostile error that Fani had led him to rebellion. (On one occasion the mayor blurts out, “Who changed you? Your wife?”) While Franz was quick to say to his mother, “I’m sorry, your life was hard enough already,” Fani had to speak for herself as to her hard life. Their life had become largely silent passing ships in the confines of their cavernous house. Franz had taken to considerable body language of stress and self-pity. “I don’t care,” she tells him [I don’t care about the war and I don’t care about your hang-up], being very aware that her horizons were dead in the water. “That’s pride, that’s what it is!” And yet they could, in one instance, still bring their arms and hands together in silent passion, seen with a perspective of those limbs alone. (Malick reaching back to Bergman’s film, Summer Interlude [1951]. The precedent involving a first and last moment of lovemaking. Both men die young. That leaves the women, and particularly, Fani, and her ongoing reflections.) More magic ensues: three of their sheep in close order—a Bergman trope as to dialectic, with inertia, its rally and the synthesis. How acutely does she engage this lifeline? That her campaign does not look good has been emphasized by the sight of her sitting in the yard covered with coils of fencing. He mutters to the poetic old crony, “A life without honor…”/ The priest, elsewhere, mutters, “We must not bring suffering on our self…” (Her sister, gauging the end of Fani’s marriage, spits out the bitter irony of another abandonment—“You don’t know [yet] what unhappiness is. No one left you…”) Fani in the barn on a sunny day, has in her orbit a series of hair-like pristine shafts on a wall, due to the structure’s formation. An invitation to play seriously. Coming to her: “… the secret things…” While the now-unloved couple try to digest their misery, the agrarian patriots more-or-less try to digest their new role of being part of a deadly menace. The mayor, shifting gears, tells Franz, “I’m your friend… You still belong to our people, the Fatherland… You’ll be hanged! I’m responsible… You’re worse than the enemy! You’re a traitor!” Fani has to rout a group of young children throwing stones at the three girls. The old man, trying to rise to oracular heights, comes out with, “This is the death of the light!”)
The end of their limbo—“I’ve been called up”—begins with her now very brittle bride suggesting, “You could hide in the woods.” (She, in fact, sights, a couple of times, a deserter in the forest. He looks, for all the world, sub-human. Here we should mention that Fani has a relative, namely, the inconsequential little girl, “Fanny,” ironically put in a spotlight, by the Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander [1982]. Our Fani’s trajectory will easily surpass the Bergman drone; but that she has a hope should not be cause for easy celebration.) Franz, his marching paper still in-hand, tells of an inertia-dream about a runaway locomotive, its rails flashing ominously. She maintains, hopelessly, “Our happiness is in your hands… We have been granted the gift of good friends. You don’t know how unhappy I am. The girls will never have this again. No one can lift us… We can’t change the world… They are strangers. I need you. You could work in a hospital, nothing wrong with that, is there? (She begins to cry.) Then a thunderclap intervenes, to imply that melodrama is here; but this is not a crisis of melodramatic proportions. Fani reasons with, “You would have our girls without a father…”
The departure of Franz brings Fani ascendant for the balance. “Your father is going away for a long journey.” As the train takes off, it is from her perspective that she reaches to his hand and runs along the platform with noticeable poise. This moment commences Franz’ being more or less delirious. The actual killing becomes only the peak of an iceberg of the protagonist enjoying, if that is the word, being seen to be “noble,” while many Nazi functionaries accord him their own “nobility,” a series of lawyering to urge him to play, for a few seconds, at fealty toward Hitler, while getting the hell out of their hair. True, he endures much abuse from the jailors; but by then he’d be following in the footsteps of another stubborn celebrity-rebel having overshot his aim and undershot his power.
Therefore, much of this back and forth can be ignored, while the endeavors of Fani can be traced to their roots, their hidden life. The heavy bureaucratic input serves to maintain the remarkable forces of entanglement; but the vectors of the film demand the last player standing, namely, Fani, to tell us something we don’t already know. One way of surviving the wreckage comprises listening between the lines of the local priest: “He wants us to have peace, happiness. He won’t give us more than we can bear…” Another way, is an exchange of letters, by which, while he generally talks about himself and what she should be doing, she attempts to bring the moment to its utmost. “My dear wife, I know you are troubled. But I must tell you that my troubles are slight in comparison with those around me” [most of them insane and like frightened beasts]./ “Dear husband, believe in God who makes everything right again.” (A scarecrow is prominent.) “Spring has come, and we work very hard on the crop. The children are demanding…” (The voice-over links to one of the girls being bitten by a rabbit, and much disarray.) “They always need to sleep with me… Your loving wife.”/ (At this moment, he is being interrogated. “Are you better than the rest? No one is innocent. You must know that your defiance will not accomplish anything. No one knows what’s behind these walls. Your suffering is pointless. No one is concerned.”) “Dear Fani, I leave for Berlin. Don’t worry about me… Pray for me.”/ (Being driven in the back of a truck covered with tarp, he, in the course of regarding the City, suddenly feels needing to put out his hand to feel the breeze, to feel alive. And, in that, he nods to filmmaker, Claire Denis, and her film, White Material (2009), where a headstrong farmer loves the breeze she touches, in the course of being devoured by a civil war.)/ “Dear husband, many thanks. The well became dry on Thursday. There is no one to assist…” (As she writes, a man steals an armful of her vegetables.) “I hear nothing but your voice.” (She caresses one of the cows.)/ “Husband, the well is gone.” (She is seen down the slimy hole that used to be their water supply, digging by hand to fathom the source, with scant water left in the house; but with some hope in her heart. . Then she brings out an armful of the muck.”/ “Dear Fani, the girls must have looked lovely in their white dresses for the Corpus Christi procession.” (Actually, the family was banned and many of the lily-white girls attempted to injure Fani’s daughters.)/ “Dear husband, how are you? We’re all concerned about you… No harm can happen to a good man. Every father wants his child to be happy…” (At this point, Franz asks, “Why did You create us?”) The couplet here is Fani, her sister and the cow hurling into the work of seeding. All three are at the ends of their strength. The sister [wonderfully anonymous] pulls up Fani where she fell. And she declares, “We’ll do it ourselves!” A Samuel Beckett moment, in the key of Bergman, especially, the Bergman of The Passion of Anna [1969]—Anna being an alpha fascist.) How do our farmer siblings fare? Fani tells us, “We need a good rain.” The donkey gasps, due to slight water supply. A vision of unshaken constancy. “The new hay gives me hope.” (The children and the ladies happily leap into the hay.) The minor priest is iterated once again, unveiling a major take-off: “He won’t give us more than we can bear.”/ Franz steals food from another prisoner. He prays, “Lead me. Show me.” (Why not find out by oneself?) “Have the mercy to reveal the kingdom of heaven.” Franz reunited with the quixotic juggler from the first draft, the boys play a form of soccer with a bit of stone./ At that time in the village, Fani loads on the donkey’s back her grain to be processed at the small mill with the pounding apparatus. She smiles in the cordiality of the miller and the presence of the “saint.”
Following these contrasting vignettes, we see a visit (in the jail’s courtyard) from the apparition of Death, now satisfied by how the prisoners simulate a procession. Somewhere in the procession of numbing sadism directed at Franz, a smart alec jailor has the idea of introducing the prisoner to sitting down, while pulling away at the last second the chair, ending him on the floor. Many repetitions of this occurs. That stupidity does carry a deep side. In the Bergman film, Summer Interlude, little glitches presage another dimension of life which we need to know, but tend to ignore.
The leader of the military tribunal, asks Franz, “Do you have anything to say in your defense?” The prisoner says nothing. But what he should have been thinking is that instead of standing pat as a normal scamp in a normal home, he had the wherewithal to make some moves. (“He won’t give us more than he can bear.”) Franz never gets it. Fani does, sort of. During the recess of this formality, he’s ushered into the bigwig of the justice machine, a very old soldier from the first defeat. In his patented goody-too-shoes delivery, Franz enjoys telling the boss, “I can’t do what I believe is wrong.” (That he’s been doing wrong all his life never gels.) “Do you judge me?” the quiet little man asks. “I don’t,” Franz maintains. “I’m not sure I know what’s wrong.” Too little, too late. But a seminar, nonetheless, having by his studious body language introduced the one-track mind to see something he had been too lazy to attend to. After Franz returns to the nonsense in the next room, the rather special bureaucrat returns to his appointment with reflection.
Fani, with that priest with a way of phrasing, is allowed to see Franz before he dies. She, after breaking down, pulls herself together and tells him, “I love you. Whatever comes, I’m with you always…” That being far from predictable, when you realize how wide a gulf the two represent at this point. That Bergmanesque drama constitutes another bizarre little seminar, whereby, “I’m with you always,” doesn’t mean “with you being lucid,” but a reservoir of verve to cherish and maintain, notwithstanding. (Though the ironies are Bergman-like, the delicate weave is all Malick, a master, like Bergman, of syntheses, but less punishing than the elder artist.)
The last step we see, is, aptly, Fani’s. Returning home, along that path by the barn, the madness of Franz, and the madness of the era, become horrific. Throwing down her suitcase he begins to smash with her foot an area of the wooden fence. Then she claws out, with both hands, a pitch of the turf, a pitch of the day they played blind man’s bluff. Though the reflexive cliché, “We’ll come together on the other side,” (not to mention, “Someday we’ll know what all of this means…”) has been used by her, the last we see of Fani blows that away, like bugs in a stiff wind. Sitting alone in dim light, she’s seen from a distance eating slices of an apple from her farm. Try as one may, this action can’t be seen from familiar initiatives.
Perhaps the crowning irony of this blizzard of disconnect occurs with its epilogue, seemingly a tribute to folks like Franz. Here we confront a manifesto, from the heart of the 19th century Romanic furnace, pretending to be a solace for restless virtue in our darkening times. “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
That Cliff, the restless protagonist, in Quentin Tarantino’s film, Once upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), confronts the same powers that be for our two protagonists here, does not constitute a constant wisdom trailing along from more than 150 years ago. Tarantino and Malick do not, in fact, take their marching orders from George Eliot. They are, in their diverse methods, very uniquely attending to a crisis of pedantry and advantage—long in the careless making, and now deranged with a vengeance.
Malick’s vehicle attempts, with remarkable dramatic and physical design, to convey a priority of the sensual to a degree hidden (a hidden life) to temper the historical decadence. As with Cliff, but with much more hesitation, the Austrian couple proceed to rebel. Franz becomes dysfunctional early in the battle. Fani, despite unhelpful baggage, finds the field, as does Cliff, to have a hope, not as a private genius, but a partner in creativity.
You could say that Tarantino manages to rock more effectively than Malick. But Malick elicits more effectively the weight of the matter. It’s tough, no doubt. By the end of each saga, the significant other is gone. But there’s a big world to make links, and a pace of welcoming solitude. May such work continue.