Above: Captain Dabač.
This fall, just over a month after the 80th anniversary of Germany’s declaration of war on Poland that began the second world war, the Vienna International Film Festival, or Viennale, boldly launched this year’s central retrospective, “O Partigiano: Pan-European Partisan Cinema.” A 41-film series extraordinarily shown in sixteen different languages, all projected on 35mm and a large number shown for the first time outside their native countries, the show continues the Viennale’s tradition of partnering with the Austrian Film Museum to stage ambitious retrospectives in tandem with the new features, director profiles, shorts programs, and smaller retrospective focuses going on at the festival.
“O Partigiano” as a focus for the Viennale serves as its own kind of resistance: Behind the lines of new cinema, digital cinema, streaming cinema, and vain attempts at apolitical cinema, this show fights for the values it holds dear: Understanding personal and national history through film; exploring complex morality through popular storytelling; valuing the differing perspectives of other countries, ethnicities, and languages; showcasing cinema that fights for a common cause and against fascism; and, it should go without saying, projecting films in the format they are intended to be shown on: celluloid. This is “behind the lines” in the sense that most people no longer watch movies in the cinema; a film festival is not where most people who do go to the cinema watch movies; and when people are going to film festivals, the retrospective showcase is the first stop only of a minority. Nevertheless, as countless stories in the partisan retrospective proved, it takes the collective efforts of the brave and willing to make changes that can resonate beyond any one pitched battle.
This is not a retrospective shown in a vacuum, serving as an academic consideration on a free-floating theme. It is no accident that in 2019, several years into a new era of resurgence in nationalism and ultranationalism around the world, showcasing dozens films that embody local fights against 20th century fascism are intended to resonate in the 21st century. As nations change, old battles may need to be re-fought. Many countries featured in the series used movies about their partisan struggle during World War 2 as tools for national myth-building. Lending the series a sense of the uncanny was that several of those governments, like those of Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., no longer exist.
Additionally, for an outsider unfamiliar with the particulars of each nation’s engagement with or against German occupation and collaboration, navigating the nuances of local histories and tensions, as well as the differences between, say, the Croatian Home Guard and the fascist Ustaša militia, proved daunting but also essential when so much of film production dedicated to the war is centered on the Allied nations and traditional battlefields. In seeing these stories of different countries’ responses to German occupation, we experience the founding of cinematic myths whose purpose was to envision and buttress national pride in the ruins after the war, and to assuage tricky questions of collaboration and guilt. In the present, we watch the stories countries told themselves in the past not only to justly celebrate their resistance fighters, but also to consolidate power and ease the pain of war, whatever that may mean to citizens and those in charge.
Above: Ballad of the Trumpet and the Cloud
Perhaps the most vivid example of the films I saw, which was but one third of this large retrospective, was France Štiglic’s Ballad About a Trumpet and a Cloud (1961). An expressionist Yugoslavian mood piece, its spartan story is about an old Slovenian man wrestling with his conscience about whether he should warn a group of wounded partisans in the hills that the fascist Home Guard are coming to kill them. Starting on an eerily fogged and dampened Christmas Eve, the man already hears a haunting partisan trumpet in his mind as he putters around his cozy family, echo calls of guilt ringing even before the Home Guard shows up to warm their bellies with a tipple before their murderous task. Much of the rest of the film is a mental landscape of the man’s roiling and flip-flopping decision about whether or not to hike up a shortcut on the wintry mountain, risking not just his own death but repercussions against his family—he imagines and we see rape, torture, execution—over the fate of anonymous fighters. While some of this active visualization is tawdry and overwrought and the dilemma seems to stretch to infinity with little variation, Štiglic is nevertheless doing something extraordinary: His film is imagining the moral anguish not of partisans, who made up a minority of the population, but of everyday people who lived throughout the war, the people who at the very least did nothing, and at the worst, collaborated. That this phantasmagoric torture is focused on an old man is additionally exceptional, as it would be all too easy to dramatize a sensitive young man or woman quickly being whipped up into doing the right thing; instead, the film dedicates itself to a person older and settled in life, inherently more conservative and less likely to resist. Released in 1961, it is difficult to imagine a young Yugoslav audience being at all interested in the moral hand-wringing of an elderly man, but it is very easy to imagine an audience of his peers in age remembering what they did during the war.
Pal’o Bielik’s Captain Dabač (1959) also brings to life the dilemma of whether to take action, and if so, how. A strapping captain in the army of the Czechoslovakian puppet government, Dabač first gets disillusioned with his task when he returns home from the Ukrainian campaign to find his wife cheating on him—an action that is later revealed not to be an impropriety on her part, but rather the world punishing him for being on the wrong side of the battle. Asked by his superiors to wipe out a village, Dabač refuses and turns partisan, eventually joining with the large-scale Slovakian uprising that was briefly successful in 1944. But this hard-drinking and egotistical man has little patience for joining a collective resistance or following orders. This resistance was eventually put down, and the film visualizes the counteroffensive in an anguished sequence of executions, with people being dragged from the crowd to an off-screen horror whereupon we hear them shot. Bielik soon reveals their fate, a simple concrete hole in the ground, and we shockingly see the captain’s wife shot in the head. In a macabre touch to an already ghastly sequence, the German executioner, exhausted after so many killings, hands his gun to a Czechoslovakian soldier, needing to take a break from the slaughter. Dabač later takes revenge into his own hands by gathering these collaborationist murderers in a bar and machine-gunning each and every one. Made in Communist Czechoslovakia, Bielik’s film remarkably devotes itself to an example of heroic individualism amid communal action, celebrating a charismatic and talented man using his inherent skills for the good of the people, but doing so in his own brazen manner and for his own reasons.
Above: Valter Defends Sarajevo
In Captain Dabač, there is one major collaborator, an elegantly unctuous Czechoslovakian officer in the fascist military, given lines, motives, and a part in the drama and not just a black uniform with which to anonymously shoots citizens. This singularity of the collaborator was common across nearly all the films shown the series: The depths of each country’s population working with German occupiers and their puppet governments is whittled down to single emblematic scapegoats. To watch most of these films, you’d think it was only the Germans and a handful of anomalous slimeball opportunists were doing anything evil; the war is over and it’s time for celebration, not denunciation or culpability, was frequently the implicit message.
One of the Yugoslavian classics, Valter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac, 1972), has good fun complicating this blushing avoidance. The Valter of the title is a famed but unidentifiable partisan fighting in Sarajevo that the Germans have been ordered to eliminate. For the film’s first half, Krvavac keeps everyone in the drama, and us too, guessing with a lot of smoke-and-mirrors, hidden identities, fake Valters, German Valters, lists of these or those names, mysterious new partisans, and viscous group betrayals. Efforts to make the film look like its 1940s setting are minimal, with hairdos, sideburns, and short skirts purely 1970s; in fact, most of the partisans feel closer to the protesting students and hippies of the late ‘60s than guerrilla fighters, and with the Germans resembling establishment grown-ups, the drama takes on the aspect of a contemporaneous generational conflict. The second half switches to an extended set-piece involving hijacking a German fuel train, with the partisans mowing down German after German with an ease in a manner reflecting the action cinema of the James Bond era. Despite a solitary rat in the group—later vividly betraying the partisans in front of her German handlers, and then being left by the Germans to die—and despite a wonderful sequence of townspeople standing up to the occupiers to claim the bodies of their dead, Valter Defends Sarajevo is one of the few exuberant and positive partisan pictures shown in the retrospective.
Above: The Four Days of Naples
Krvavac’s film ends with what assuredly must be an iconic line in Yugoslavian cinema, when a German officer realizes that the ever-resisting partisan Valter isn’t a person but rather the city of Sarajevo itself. But the film for the most part is about a small group of fighters; a better example of this idea of mass urban resistance is Nanni Loy’s extraordinary docudrama, The Four Days of Naples (1962). It takes as its subject the four days in 1943 when the populace of Naples fought back and successfully pushed out the German army that seized and began to abuse the city after the Italian capitulation to the Allies. Loy reenacts the uprising on location with swathes of people, huge crowds that teem the frame, spilling from buildings to the streets, first in the German roundup—men were dragged from their homes in a plan to send them to camps—and then in bold and bodily resistance. Inevitably, Loy zooms into smaller moments which are painted more in brushstrokes of wild-eyed melodrama than the grand scale realism of re-staging everything on the streets, but generally the film brazenly and satisfyingly asserts the idea of Naples as a mass organism responding to and rejecting its occupiers: “We are all giants!” shouts a resistance fighter, as he charges German tanks.
Another Italian film, Francesco Maselli’s The Abandoned (1955), has a far more pessimistic view of its countrymen. It is one of the few films, along with Ballad of the Trumpet and the Cloud, dealing with a wafflingly population in occupied territory, in this case the milieu of a rich family’s mansion who have fled dangerous Milan for safety, relaxation, and luxury in the countryside. The three young men of the family are posh and completely disconnected from reality, spending their days wearing crisply ironed leisurewear and flirting with local girls by the river. Inevitably, the war catches up, here in the form of refugees that their small town needs to house, spreading them around with local families. A gorgeous Lucia Bosè is among one group, and catches the eye of one of the rakes; he suddenly invites her disconsolate family to stay on the family estate. His mother, of course, is horrified; as, in fact, is Lucia Bosè, once she realizes how little the young man, in whom she’s not uninterested, cares for anything outside a fling. When local partisans show up wounded after a nearby battle with the Germans, the need to take sides comes to a head, which splinters the three young men of the family along obvious but no less potent lines of a resistor, a fascist, and our hero, who can’t make up his mind. The scenario is a rich one and Maselli only just makes something out of it—though to be fair, the print screened had been trimmed of twenty or so minutes of footage deemed unnecessary by the film’s cinematographer in the 1990s—but the finale, where our vacillating pretty boy has to choose between his partisan beauty and his mother, who brings along her good friend, the fascist police chief of Milan, is brutal and one of the retrospective’s hardest-hitting conclusions.
The failings of the Italian gentry was but a rare instance of dark morality in the series, which generally underlined valiant efforts by groups as well as individuals. František Čáp’s Men without Wings (1946), made in a brief moment in Czechoslovakia before the Communist coup, is a generic example of this impulse, featuring a sloppily constructed story of airport mechanics subtly sabotaging the German war effort. That subtlety gets pushed to the extreme when survivors from Lidice—the town the German army wiped off the map in response to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by British-trained Czech partisans—arrive and are barely able to suppress their identities and their thirst for vengeance among the airport workers. These escapees lash out with explosive results, but the threat of repercussions—and the scorched earth nightmare of Lidice—lurks behind every minute of this film, made just after the war concluded. A sole Danish entry in the series, The Red Meadow (Bodil Ipsen & Lau Lauritzen Jr., 1945), was also made immediately after the war and is about a group of saboteurs, but carries with it a more expressive mood with its threadbare night actions and moving emphasis on the psychological angst of betrayals, imprisonment, and torture. Almost ten years later, and now in Yugoslavia, Cap made a better if still somewhat simple film, Moments of Decision (1955). It follows a doctor whose decision to help an injured partisan leader escape his guards results in the killing of an Ustaše in the process, sending the doctor and his professional ethics out of the safe confines of his hospital and into the partisan struggle. Mostly perfunctorily told, the film is rejuvenated in a final, powerfully straightforward act where the ferryman who can take the fleeing partisans across the river to safety turns out to be the father of the collaborationist guard the doctor killed. The confrontation is as unsubtle as the rest of the movie, but here it obtains a fierce and unavoidable directness regarding the same population on two sides of the occupation and the possibility of overcoming the gulf between them.
Above: Nine Lives
By far the best flight across the landscape in the series was in Nine Lives (Arne Skouen, 1957), a Norwegian classic that soberly reenacts the real-life struggle of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando whose entire team was eliminated during a mission gone horribly wrong, to make it from the North Sea coast all the way to the Swedish border. Soon fatigue, a bullet injury, frost-bite, and snow blindness beset the man one after another—not to mention the German army in frigid pursuit—and after a mightily physical struggle across the landscape he essentially becomes an unmovable body. He is helped along the way by a Norwegian population that is good-hearted and courageous, asks few questions, cares little about the details of this strange, increasingly helpless man, and gives it their all to get him to freedom. The first third of the film suggests a rote adventure despite the exceptional source material, with dry interior dialogs and stiffly directly exteriors, but as Baalsrud’s journey drags on, slows down, gets worse, more painful, arduous, and absurd, the film’s basic approach to reenacting his story becomes increasingly moving and otherworldly. Beset by a repeatedly extreme weather that leaves him stranded for days on end until the next Norwegian can help and he somehow ends up stranded alone yet again, the extremity of his story and its physical and spiritual inconceivability, when paired with the film’s unshowy but nevertheless impressive location shooting, turns the soldier into something greater than a man, a mythic figure of survival, and the people around him as those good souls of faith and sacrifice who will do their all to see someone, any one person, just another human being, survive the horrors of war.
The metaphysical quality achieved by Nine Lives is entirely practical and material, the accumulation of a no-nonsense approach transcending modest means. One of the great masterpieces of the retrospective sees things a different way. Greek director Tákīs Kanellópolous’s 1962 debut, Glory Sky, is splendidly metaphysical from the first moment, where it blends scenes between a group of soldiers hanging about, glimpses of pre-war love, and the men’s lyrical memories. Soon, the Italians invade, the Greeks march north and the reveries fade, but Kanellópolous maintains a dreamy atmosphere underscored by Grigoris Danalis and Giovanni Varriano's high contrast photography and Argyris Kounadis’s score, which is reminiscent of Maurice Jarre’s plaintive theme for Eyes without a Face. Along with The Story of G.I. Joe, Battleground, and The Thin Red Line, this is one of the great films about the terrific weariness of war; despite being interspersed with newsreels declaring great Greek advances of the army, the men we see are sad, desolate beings, trudging with dwindling spirits all evoked through a polyphonic voiceover and a focus on different, but communally beleaguered and demoralized men. They advance; they are told to retreat; they know not why. Grace notes of beauty and commiseration abound, but are poor sustenance for these souls. Not exactly a partisan film, it is a hushed movie feeling of losing a war, of powerlessness, isolation and the dimming of the meagre hopes—a sister, a new pair of boots, a loved one, a cool drink of water, a glimpse of home—that keep one going through a meaningless fog.
Above: Kozara
Made before the military coup in Greece, Glory Sky clearly bares little traces of the ideological agenda of many of the films in the retrospective whose stories bolstered ideas about nations and people that postwar countries wanted to tell themselves. Kozara (1962), one of three epic battle films Veljko Bulajić made under the auspices of Tito’s government in Yugoslavia, is entirely made of this agenda in telling the story of a small partisan army and thousands of civilian refugees surrounded by, but fighting against and standing up to an immense German army. It celebrates personal valiance and sacrifice, as well as communal suffering, so that the communism of the makeshift hilltop population can live to see another day. Bulajić has a great touch with the scale of the battle, the sprawling landscape infested by the Germans and Ustaše, the vivid flight of regular people across the hills, the ragged but brave partisans throwing themselves foolishly at German machine guns. A scene of citizens singing mourning hymns in the face of armed German soldiers had many members of the audience crying. Films from the former Yugoslavia are not frequently shown in Austria and it was not only fulfilling but frequently made for a very emotional energy in the Film Museum when it became clear that many from the Balkans were watching these films in Vienna for the first time ever.
Like Kozara and Valter Defends Sarajevo, 1956’s Don’t Look Back, My Son is considered a local classic but doesn’t seem to be well-known outside Yugoslavia. Branko Bauer’s film is a father-son drama of a concentration camp escapee who boldly travels to fascist Zagreb to try to reunite with his son, whom he discovers has been abandoned by his mother (currently involved with a German officer) to an Ustaše school where he is taught to bayonet combat dummies and to hate Jews and partisans. The opening scene, of several partisans on a train to the camps desperately digging up the floorboards in order to drop beneath the moving train, is terrifyingly evoked. Like The Informer and Odd Man Out in entirely different, but equally politically charged contexts, Bauer’s film analyzes a city’s response to an outcast individual; in their help or hindrance lent to the escapee we see Zagreb’s reaction to German occupiers and the fascist collaborationist government. An elderly family friend offers boundless support while his wife accidentally reveals the man’s escape but later more than makes up for her slip; and in a classically telling detail, their son is an adamantly loyal officer in the fascist army, all too eager to betray his old acquaintance. The film also has a wonderful surprise up its sleeve: Throughout we glimpse a sleepy-eyed police agent, a Yugoslavian brother to Peter Lorre, chasing our escapee, using city informers, setting his trap, closing his net. At a checkpoint requiring papers, he lets the man and boy go—so that they may lead him to another escapee, a partisan leader. Or is that his actual aim? While these films consistently feature far too few regular people giving into the evilness that has occupied their countries, in this clever twist, those we assume are the scum of the war in fact are fighting the good fight. It’s a nice idea, a great cinematic volte-face, and I only wonder how true it really was—and what unspeakable stories this neat trick is covering up.
Above: A Good Lad
Joyfulness was little and far between across the majority of these films, for obvious reasons. Which makes the charm of Boris Barnet’s A Good Lad (1942) all the more surprising, for this is a partisan film that was made during the war, after Stalin evacuated Soviet film production to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Suppressed upon release, barely shown after the war, and only recently re-discovered post-Glasnost, A Good Lad is a jaunty and exceptionally beautiful tale of a French scout pilot who gets shot down in the Russian forest. When he’s captured by an armed group he thinks they’re Germans, and they think the same of him. The group’s pert young woman, realizing the man is French, strips off her apron to reveal on her breast a pin of her great leader. “Stalin!” the Frenchman cries, joyously. He and the Russian partisans work together to discover a pesky and cleverly hidden German airfield and work to repair the Frenchman’s plane so that he may warn Soviet high command. All the while, of course, he and the young woman flirt, neither understanding the other. (In fact, broken German is the only shared language between them.) Barnet’s mobile photography through the dappled forest is gorgeous, creating an idyl of a threadbare but passionate pocket of resistance. Outside the forest, all seems devastated and burnt to the ground under the German torch. Strange touches abound: A tuxedoed man is found in a nearby swamp and reveals he is a famous singer who escaped the Germans after intuitively belting out a patriotic poem, which subsequently reveals the movie to be a quasi-musical (-comedy, -war film), as he gets two rousing numbers and the Frenchman breaks out in a happy, weirdly accented chanson. Ultimately, the Frenchman has to leave to do his duty and report the location of the Germans, sacrificing the cross-country romance with the female partisan but accentuating the brief moment when the Russians, like their American counterparts in Hollywood, where encouraged to make movies about international cooperation fighting fascism. As the Frenchman flies overhead, the partisan waves her white handkerchief at her brief amour fou in goodbye, and the wind accidentally strips it from her hand—fade out. The personal loss is sharp, but the partisan struggle continues on: Our lady is left alive, on the ground and with her comrades, eager to fight for the liberty of her people.
Such difficult to organize, expensive to mount, and impressively researched series as "O Partigiano" are all the more precious with the film industry on the cusp of tremendous change: the recent and impending launches of multiple streaming services of similar scale to dominant players Netflix and Amazon. Whether any of these services will provide robust access to older films—to say nothing of non-American films—is still to be seen. One of the world’s great film festivals due to the sharpness and range of its curation but still under the radar in terms of the international press or industry that is courted by larger, world premiere-oriented events—a fact that nevertheless grants it a much improved and personal atmosphere compared to those festivities—the Viennale shines all the more brightly because of its dedication to this yearly retrospective. To my knowledge, Locarno is the only other film festival emphasizing new movies that is willing and capable of mounting significant and extensive retrospectives projected on celluloid. As I have often written, the approach to festival curation that focuses solely on new films implies that its audience can independently place new work in the context of history, so they can understand why the new films were worth programming. It is impossible for such events to encourage new generations of filmgoers, filmmakers, and cinephiles if a festival is devoted only to new work rather than representing pictures of the past.