Since its inception in the late 19th century and early 20th, film has been an art form that sought to appeal to both the rich and the poor, allowing the educated rich to appreciate its high art aspects of mise-en-scène and the less educated poor to appreciate its entertainment value and storytelling. Due to this shared interest, filmmakers were able to present themes and commentaries to the masses that both the rich and the poor would be able to understand. This, by nature, allowed these artists to use current events to portray their beliefs through film. As a result, political events or societal traumas were directly addressed in film, as well as the commentary attached to them. Certain genres are able to address these, such as science fiction beginning with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which addressed Lang’s fears of industrialization. Science fiction allowed auteurs to create hypothetical future societies that either exaggerate, eliminate, or exploit aspects of society in order to draw attention to them and comment on them directly. Directors such as Hayao Miyazaki or Jonathan Glazer use the conventions of science fiction as a genre to comment on environmentalism and gender expectations, respectively. These conventions blend with German expressionism to form magical realism, which synthesizes the fantastic and the grounded in order to convey themes about mental states or inner emotions. Magical realism is a subset of a much larger umbrella of realism, which also includes biological realism and Italian neorealism, embodied by Isao Takahata and Vittorio de Sica in order to comment on life in their societies, respectively. Biological realism, as defined by Marc Steinberg in Animating Film Theory, is reflective of the aspects of a “fleshly, physical body that can bleed, die, and have sexual relations,” (Steinberg, 291). By this, he defines it as a body in film responding to stimuli in a way that a natural, real human body would. He defines biological realism in the realm of anime; however, it carries over into live-action films to a lesser extent, traditionally through emotional responses. Italian neorealism as a subgenre of film is characterized by on-site filming, largely unprofessional actors, but generally is defined by a documentary-like depiction of real life in a real place, though the events on film are fiction. These events are, by genre convention, impacted by the outside stimuli of the location in which they are filmed, allowing the viewers to feel natural and incorporated into a scene.
The combination of these forms of realism are generally used to comment on fictional or real societies that suffer from similar problems to the auteur’s society. By extension, these films tend to reflect political traumas that occurred in a country. The easiest of these traumas to find in film is war, which impacts a wide variety of cultures and peoples over generations. The consequences of war are placed upon the backs of the bystanders, and film represents this using realist techniques. Two populations whose film best embodies the impact of war on their way of life are the Japanese, bearing the burden of the nuclear bombings and the other Allied air raids; and the Germans, whose way of life was changed drastically through the imposition of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent wealth disparity. Regardless of the deplorable actions of the two countries’ governments, their population faced hardships as a result of war, and this must be considered on a human level. Although these traumas were defined by specific dates, the impact is not, allowing for films long after the actual events occurred to address its impact. Through the use of realist techniques, Japanese and German auteurs sought to convey the national traumas they experienced as a result of war, and to urge their public or their governments to address these appropriately.
Japanese postwar film is heavily focused on the cultural identity crisis that arose as a result of the nuclear bombings, which established a divide between the generation that lived through it and the generation that was born after it. This divide between generations is further fueled by the rapid change from what can be seen as traditional values to the new industrialism of the West imposed on Japan. Many films, like Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters or Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House therefore focus on this departure and the resulting difference between generations, calling for a return to these values. Films such as Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha focus on this generational divide and seek to rectify it by showing the consequences of this departure through poignant imagery. While these films address the human cost of the bombings, many films choose to focus solely on it, such as Shohei Imamura’s adaptation of the Masuji Ibuse novel Black Rain. Due to the graphic nature of the subject material, however, these themes are easiest to accomplish in anime. Anime, as described by Bruce F. Kawin in his revision of Gerald Mast’s A Short History of the Movies, “meant giving Japan an epic cinema charged with conservationist messages while deepening their treatment of character” (Kawin, 326). These films largely focus on the bombs’ impact on children, and by extension subvert the perception of innocence. Examples of this would be Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, or Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Though the subject material connects the films through a focus on generational divide, the connection between them is primarily the use of realism in depicting the tragedy and its effects on the Japanese public. In Tokyo Story, it is the meditative stillness through which the viewer sees industrialization and its toll on family relations, contrasted by the brusqueness and allegory of Kagemusha. In anime, it is the varying degrees of literalizing the events, from the abstract symbolism of Princess Mononoke, some shared by Kagemusha, to the grounded heartbreak of Grave of the Fireflies. No matter how literal, however, Japanese film uses realist technique, or a subversion of it, to examine the effects of the nuclear bombing on the postwar development of Japan.
In the case of the science fiction Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki chooses to subvert realism, preferring to instead focus on symbolism to tell the story. Rather than abiding by the confines of biological realism, certain characters are imbued with powers or other attributes while injured, with expectations of how a body will respond to stimuli being intentionally avoided to make a point about anger. The story revolves around the character of Ashitaka saving his village from a boar god, becoming injured and cursed with a physical representation of rage that grows as he traverses the increasingly violent and selfish world in search of a cure. As he travels, he encounters a war between the modern warlord Lady Eboshi and samurai Lord Asano, who war over iron and gold. In this war, they seek to behead the Great Forest Spirit to gain immortality. They succeed in this endeavor, using a gun to do so, but this action causes apocalyptic damage to the environment until its head is returned to its body.
In this film, beheading and other physical ailments do not result in death for Ashitaka and the Great Forest Spirit. They result in vengeance. In Japanese film, guns are used to represent Western weaponry, or more specifically the atomic bomb. When this weapon is used against the spirit of nature, it results in massive damage to the environment and those who live in it. This intentional defiance of realism is used to comment on war’s devastation of the environment and the consequent impact on humanity. In the wake of its death, the Great Forest Spirit ventures out of the forest into Lady Eboshi’s town, destroying it and the livelihood of everyone that lived within it. When the head is returned, the Great Forest Spirit is appeased and reverses the burning of the city and of nature, but replaces it with overgrowth, representative of a society being unable to be made whole again in the wake of such a large-scale tragedy. In regards to the atomic bombings of Japan, specifically, Miyazaki uses the vengeful essence of the beheaded Great Forest Spirit as a symbol for the devastation of such a weapon and the unintended consequences of using it. Although the Spirit’s burning stopped, the remains of Eboshi’s town are fundamentally altered and cannot be rebuilt the same way. Through Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki presents an intentionally unreal representation of Japan after the bombing and its inability to rebuild itself in the image of traditional values, or cope with the bombs’ lasting impact on its environment.
Similarly to Princess Mononoke, Otomo’s Akira focuses on the lasting impact of the nuclear bombing, specifically in this case on the youth of the post-bombing generation. The main characters of this film are teenage members of a biker gang. One member, Tetsuo, becomes psychic as a result of an accidental encounter with a psychic child while out on a raid with the gang leader, Kaneda. He is captured by the government of Neo-Tokyo and experimented on, becoming increasingly power-hungry and mutated in the process. Eventually, he frees himself and seeks out Akira, the source of the initial explosion. He mutates into an all-consuming mass before being drawn into a singularity to create a new parallel universe, while this singularity destroys Neo-Tokyo, floods its remains, and causes more people to become psychic mutants.
Throughout the film, Otomo focuses primarily on the negative effects on the youth of Neo-Tokyo, those who have been given psychic abilities as a result, subjecting them to discrimination and endless testing. This is a deliberately unreal choice, like that of Princess Mononoke, done to make the physical effects of the bombings easily understood. In Akira’s case, the explosion that devastated Tokyo irradiated children, causing their government to kidnap them and run tests on them. These children’s quality of life, through no choice of their own, had been permanently altered by a devastating event that they weren’t old enough to remember. The result of the first explosion was a rebuilding of the city, but one permanently stunted by the devastation it experienced and the need to come to terms with the impact it had on the citizens of Tokyo. The second explosion that devastated the city is shown both irradiating another young generation and, like in Princess Mononoke, causing irreparable damage to the city that would have to be overcome. Otomo uses the example of mutated children in Akira to present a poignant view of the effect that war has on children, not just governments. Unlike Princess Mononoke with its limited realism, this film uses a form of biological realism to show the effects that radiation have on the human body, while the effects on the mind are not biologically realistic. In relation to the nuclear bombing, he presents a partially unreal examination of the effect that radiation has on younger generations over time and the socioeconomic issues that result from needing to rebuild a society.
Like both Princess Mononoke and Akira, Kurosawa’s Kagemusha is focused on the division of Japan between generations as a result of the bombings; however, unlike both, this film is not science fiction, preferring to draw a parallel between the postwar generational divide and the division of feudal Japan, as well as the parallel between the bombings and the Battle of Nagashino. In Japanese Cinema: texts and concepts, D.P. Martinez writes that one of Kurosawa’s other films, Rashomon “seems to reflect his own personal experience with the censors as well as the more general Japanese post-war experience, when much of what they had been taught to believe before was overturned by the new US-backed government” (Martinez, 114). This reflects Kurosawa’s tendency to focus on the postwar experience, doing more so in films like Kagemusha. Virginia Wexman writes about him in A History of Film, stating that “in his historical pieces,” such as Kagemusha, “he is always commenting on contemporary life, and the concerns are profoundly social and moral”(Wexman, 181).This film is a historical drama, focusing on a warring feudal lords Takeda Shingen, Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Uesugi Kenjin. The former is killed by a sniper, prompting his generals to place his peasant double in his position, who is eventually usurped by Shingen’s jealous son Katsuyori. At the end of the film, Katsuyori leads the Takeda Clan’s samurai army into battle with Nobunaga, who is equipped with Portuguese weaponry. Katsuyori is quickly defeated and the double sacrifices himself, dying in the ocean while clutching their banner.
Written on this banner is an excerpt from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which reflects a balance of leadership: a belief held by the traditionalist Shingen. Katsuyori’s youthful vengeance disrupts this balance and ultimately leads to their army’s destruction at the hands of Western weaponry. For Kurosawa, the destruction of Japanese identity will be at the hands of not only the West, as was the case in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but will be at the hands of a cultural movement away from Japanese traditional values as a result of these events. This film, made in 1980, reflects Kurosawa’s concern for Japan’s identity after seeing the results of its westernization. Kurosawa’s treatment of the decisive Battle of Nagashino served to evoke a powerful image of the nuclear bombings, as the viewers see waves of samurai attacking, but do not see the result until the battle is over. This sudden, jarring image of mass casualty served to bring the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the mind of the viewers. In addition to a movement away from traditional values, Kurosawa also emphasizes the need for class unity, as Katsuyori’s refusal to bow to a peasant ultimately leads to his decision to engage in battle with Nobunaga. By grounding this film in reality and a historical event that the Japanese public would recognize, Kurosawa was able to compare the feudal division of Japan during the Sengoku period to the generational divide after the nuclear bombings. Through this focus on reality rather than allegory, he argues that a divided Japan–whether between class or age–leads to a dissolution of its tradition and its national identity. This, for Kurosawa, is as much a tragedy as the nuclear bombings.
Unlike the brash approach to the subject material that Kurosawa takes or the science fiction of Otomo or Miyazaki, Ozu focuses on using realism to show the impact that this generational divide had on the family dynamic of postwar Japan. This divide between traditional views of balance and patience, and modern busyness and industrialism is handled with delicacy, conveying its message using mise-en-scène and the dynamic between the elderly parents, their children, and their grandchildren. Ozu has a reputation for this, focusing much of his body of work on the modernization of Japan. Writing about another of his films, Alastair Phillips writes in Japanese Cinema: texts and concepts, “[It portrays] the modernity of the milieu of material fabric of the nation […] in one of the growing suburban landscapes that were becoming a feature of the peripheries […] due to the rise in [labor]-intensive heavy industries“ (Phillips, 29). In addition, Wexman writes that he “was concerned with the relationships between the traditional ways and the newer ones in a changing Japan […] not on a broad scale but within the intimacy of the family unit” (Wexman, 183). Due to the divide in generations between pre-industrial and industrial, Tokyo Story is the easiest to analyze by viewing each age group of the family unit by their generation rather than as individual characters, though they each have their own character arcs. In Tokyo Story the two grandparents decide to visit their children, which interrupts their busy schedules and prompts them to send their parents to a spa or sequester them upstairs rather than spend time with them. The pair decide to return home, at which time the grandmother passes away, causing the children to visit them to conduct their funeral rituals.Though the film’s plot is sparse of events, the meaning behind what happens on screen is told by its mise-en-scène, or as defined by Ed Sikov in Film Studies: An Introduction, “the expressive totality of what you see in a single film image” (Sikov, 5). One example of this is the height of the camera, positioned at kneeling height to simulate being in the scene. About this, Wexman writes that “his camera sits at seated eye level, as if taking part in a formal tea ceremony, unblinkingly observing two of his characters reacting to each other” (Wexman, 183). The “kneeling” camera, therefore, evokes the likeness of a Japanese tradition, fundamentally anchoring his films in familiar traditional values. Furthermore, characters look into the camera when conversing to incorporate the viewers into the conversation, and to allow the viewer to read the characters’ faces in addition to interpreting their words. When the grandparents are at their children’s home, the first floor is reserved for their businesses or otherwise closed off, with walls or shutters taking up the majority of the screen. The grandparents’ home, however, has an open floor plan, with a camera position in the dining room revealing the entirety of their home, concluding in an open window that they speak to their neighbor through. This contrast between reservation and openness is intercut throughout by shots of industrial parks and other representations of societal change. Moreover, this film does not outright address the nuclear bombings, instead holding it inside. The main tragedy in the film, the death of the grandmother, is not mourned by her husband. Instead, although the audience understands that he is hurt, he is shown stoic and unchanged, gazing into the sunset at the end. This film is layered with hushed disappointment, reflecting the peace of the older generation and refusal to let their inner turmoil negatively affect those around them. This decision critically impacts the tone of the film, instilling within the viewer a profound sadness for the elderly generation, who are disconnected from their tradition and their families due to the rapid pace of a newly industrialized Japan. Unlike films like Princess Mononoke or Kagemusha, this film chooses to forgo feelings of anger for the loss of traditional Japan in favor of nostalgic sadness. This film focuses on various disappointments hidden by the members of each generation, using this feeling of disappointment not to comment on the bombing and its generational divide outright, but rather to express the sun setting on the Japan that Ozu knew and loved in favor of a Western Japan. For both Ozu and Kurosawa, the tragedy of the bombings is equal to the loss of Japanese identity, though Ozu handled this with the stillness embodied by his generation’s values.
While Miyazaki and Otomo focus primarily on the destruction caused by nuclear weaponry, and Kurosawa and Ozu primarily focus on the shift away from traditional values as a result of the postwar westernization of Japan, Takahata combines the two philosophies through Grave of the Fireflies. The focus of this film is two siblings, Seita and Setsuko, who lose everything to Allied firebombing and struggle to survive alone in the ruins of Japan. According to Daniel Haulman writing for Air Power History in Winter 2018, Americans had developed napalm, or “jellied gasoline,” to use in firebomb raids against the Japanese, which he notes was effective due to Japanese cities being constructed more of wood and paper than masonry. According to official Army Air Forces and US Strategic Bombing Survey statistics he cites, 310,000 Japanese were killed in these raids, 412,000 were injured, and between 9.2 and 15 million were left homeless (Haulman, 41). Among the homeless were the two fictional main characters. This film opens with Seita starving to death and meeting his sister in the spirit world, before cutting to a scene of him and his sister alive, gathering their belongings and fleeing to a bomb shelter. Their hometown is firebombed, mortally wounding their mother. Seita, much older than his sister, sees his skinned mother die in a makeshift hospital before he and his sister move in with their aunt. Due to a shortage of rations, she kicks them out to fend for themselves, and they resort to theft in order to survive. Before long, their food runs dry and Setsuko dies of starvation on screen before the scene is immediately cut to show Seita cremating her, concluding the film.
Taking after Tokyo Story, this film uses grounded realism to focus on the tragedy of Allied bombing particularly its effect on children. Nothing about this film is dramatized, based entirely on a short story of the same name written by a firebombing survivor, Akiyuki Nosaka, detailing his experience and rarely deviating from it. The siblings’ mother was shown killed by napalm early on in the film, the first instance in which the children have to rapidly move on from tragedy in order to survive. Her death was not initially revealed to Setsuko, only later revealed by her aunt. Throughout the film, humans are compared to insects in order to scale down their actions in the wake of the devastation of their hometowns. In one scene, Setsuko is shown toying with ants carrying food into holes, symbolic of the survivors digging up the food they had stored for after the raid and moving from underground bunker to underground bunker. In a later scene, Setsuko is shown burying a large quantity of fireflies, which they had gathered earlier to light up their bunker. Although she is a toddler, she explains this act by comparing it to a mass grave, in which their mother is buried. This comparison of human carcasses and dead fireflies presents a stark image of lights of hope and potential snuffed out by something beyond their control. This is further elaborated on later in the film, when Setsuko is shown dying of starvation. In this scene and the scene of their mother dying, despite this film being animated, it employs biological realism to show how bodies react to certain stimuli. This realism results in a haunting image of tragedy and human suffering, not to argue against war, but to simply show the human cost of it. This cost is shown in the other films as well; however, this film primarily focuses on the loss of human life rather than a way of life or environmental factors that would impact generations over time.
Overall, Japanese film is imprinted with the lasting effects of the nuclear bombings, whether literal or symbolic. Their effect on the environment, as shown in both Princess Mononoke and Akira is made clear, shown as a devastating event that will inevitably last beyond the present generation. In these, due to being animated, this is largely done through symbolism and allegory, with Akira increasing the realism to show radiation’s effect on the human body. The bombings representing the causes of a rapid cultural shift in Japan from traditional values to western industrialism–as shown in Akira, Kagemusha, and Tokyo Story–is clear, presented traditionally as a conflict between generations or as a lasting stain on the development of these generations. In Akira, the effect of an explosion is shown as a rebuilding of Tokyo marred with violence and corruption, representative of a fundamentally changed cultural identity. In Kagemusha, this is shown as a difference between older values of stillness and younger values of rapid change causing Japan to essentially self-destruct, perpetuated by the dropping of the bombs. Because Kagemusha focuses on a historical event as an allegory for the bombings, this realism presents a poignant image to the Japanese public that calls them to unite under traditional values rather than lose who they are as a nation. In Tokyo Story, the realism is primarily present in the pacing, purposely using long shots to present a more real-time sequence of events, in addition to placing the camera at kneeling height to incorporate the viewers into the scene. This allows the commentary of the film, the feelings of silenced loss for the Japan that Ozu grew up in, to resonate with the viewers. This loss is elaborated on in Grave of the Fireflies, the film that is most focused on using realism to convey its emotional impact. The biological realism of the film, as well as it being a true story, absorbs the viewer into the tragedy, showing realistically how humans were impacted by Allied air raids.
Like postwar Japan, postwar Germany was marred by widespread political turmoil and human suffering, particularly due to the imposition of the Berlin Wall separating Germany into, essentially, prosperity and poverty. The Wall is the subject of much of postwar German political film, which is largely devoted to calling on Germans to tear the wall down and reunite. As is the case in postwar Japanese film, postwar German film is primarily focused on national division and the need to unite to overcome the consequences of war. These consequences in many films are embodied by the wealth disparity between West and East Germany, with many East Germans living in poverty. Many of these films, like Heiner Carow’s The Legend of Paul and Paula and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run execute this through magical realism, a juxtaposition between the ideal and the neo-real that, like science fiction, serves to remove or exaggerate issues in society in order to draw attention to them. Films such as Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Among Us or Gerhard Klein’s Berlin: Schönhauser Corner take after Italian neorealism, the former being filmed in the rubble of Berlin and the latter using nonprofessional actors and location shooting in East Germany, in order to highlight the impoverished ruin that East Germans lived in. Films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, or The Legend of Paul and Paula use characters to represent different countries or portions of Germany in order to simplify the issues present in a divided country and solve them on a symbolic level. On the whole, German film tends to use Italian neorealism, magical realism, or synecdoche in order to convey a message about unifying Germany and the impact of the Wall on the economic status of those who live in each side.
With The Legend of Paul and Paula, Carow uses the two main characters to represent East Germany’s bourgeoisie and its impoverished, as well as to represent East and West Germany. While it was banned upon release due to its criticism of East Germany’s inability to cope with its impoverished or non-conforming public, the free-spirited Paula allowed the East German public a figure to identify with, forcing its release to be made public. Paul is a well-to-do businessman, representing wealthier East German society, while Paula is an impoverished worker, shoveling coal and recycling bottles to make a living for herself and her children. The two live across from each other, Paul living in a high rise and Paula living in a derelict apartment, soon to be torn down and replaced. They meet and fall in love until her love for him distracts her from her children and one of them is killed in a car accident. They fall out and Paul actively pursues her, resulting in him breaking down her door and embracing her. She conceives a child with him ignoring her doctor’s warning that doing so will kill her, concluding the film with Paul as a widowed father to her two children.
The film’s use of the two titular characters works on both a small and large scale, applying both to wealth disparity in East Germany, and in Germany as a whole. On the East German level, Paula is the haunting image of a failed socialism, the thorn in East Germany’s side. She represents the worker that socialism left behind, living in a derelict building from before the war, which is soon to be destroyed. Their history is being erased and rebuilt, but her poverty forcing her to live in it keeps it at the forefront of the new Germany. It represents a stagnation for Carow, as Paula ultimately sacrifices herself and her free spirit to fit the “normal” image of a German woman. Throughout the film, she has surreal visions of life with Paul, a staple of magical realism, used to show the yearning for her familial tradition as her future through the lens of someone with an imagination. Reinhard Zachau writes about this film in German Culture through Film, stating that while East German women’s emancipation had been required by socialism, including that of Paula, “East Germans were yearning for normalcy, as the eager reconnection with West Germany in 1989 showed” (Zachau, 152). Though this is the case, the reunion of Paul and Paula symbolizes the new, well-to-do Germany uniting with a freedom of expression that was echoed across the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was Carow’s ideal East Germany, accepting the modern socialist economic policies and imbuing them with freedom of expression. On a larger scale, especially within the context of German reunification film, The Legend of Paul and Paula also functions to suggest the reunification that was favored by the public at the time. The wealthier Paul breaking down the door between them and forcefully embracing Paula despite her poverty suggests the wealthier West Germany breaking down the wall between them and embracing the impoverished East Germany, further synthesizing their cultures and their freedoms. Ultimately Paula’s building is torn down and she dies in childbirth symbolizing not only the symbolic death of poverty, but the creation of a new life, a living synthesis of both halves of Germany at both the micro and macro levels.
Similarly to The Legend of Paul and Paula, Tykwer’s Run Lola Run uses magical realism in the form of Lola’s voice, which can change a series of events in her favor, symbolizing the ability to create an ideal outcome using willpower. For Germany, Tykwer uses montage to connect parts of Berlin from former West and East Germany, spatially connecting them in order to convey a message of German unity to ensure a future that benefits them all. In this film, Lola and her boyfriend Manni lost 100,000 marks that they owe to their drug dealer, and have to come up with it in twenty minutes. In the first segment, she asks her banker father for money but doesn’t succeed, leading Manni to hold up a store, getting Lola killed in the process. Through her willpower, she is able to relive the previous twenty minutes and change the course of events, leading to her holding up the bank and Manni getting killed in the store. Again through willpower she relives the previous twenty minutes, goes to a casino, and uses her will to win 100,000 marks, Manni trades his gun for the original bag containing his money, allowing both to survive.
In The Legend of Paul and Paula, the realism is used to show only Paula’s poverty, in an Italian neorealist fashion. In this film, it used to unify Germany by showing geographically distinct areas across Berlin as one straight route that Lola takes on her run. Discussing this, Margit Sinka writes in German Culture through Film that Tykwer “forcibly merges areas scattered throughout Berlin, creating […] spatial unity where none exists.” Furthermore, she likens Lola to Tykwer, stating that like Lola’s journey showing her ability to use her voice “to create a world pleasing to her, Tykwer creates a Berlin pleasing to him” (Sinka, 263). Unlike the magical realist fantasy sequences in The Legend of Paul and Paula, the magical realism of Run Lola Run is toned down, exclusively using her voice to represent her human willpower. Through this will, she is able to not only reach a future that benefits both herself and Manni, but use a legal channel to earn the money. In the film, it is never established which portion of the Berlin population each character is, but thematically they represent one half of the formerly divided Berlin. By making morally and legally “wrong” choices, each one is killed to represent one side of Berlin’s still-divided population being politically subjugated by the divisive decisions of the other. In the third segment, Lola is shown using her voice to get her way, symbolic of her using her voice as a voter to make the morally just decision. Discussing this, Sinka writes that Lola succeeds “because of her ability to make decisions and her talent to forge ahead, exactly the ability her banker father and many other Berliners lack” (Sinka, 265). She is able to legally obtain her money, with this morally right decision committed through her willpower as a citizen. In addition, Manni was able to trade a gun, violence, for his money from the man who found the lost bag. Again, through a legal barter, they were able to obtain the money and survive. Through this act of will, both sides of Berlin are able to prosper, concluding the film with a shot of the two arm-in-arm walking away from the meeting place with 100,000 marks.
The magical realism of The Legend of Paul and Paula and Run Lola Run is further toned down for Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun; however, it follows in their tradition of using characters to represent sides of the Wall and countries as a whole in order to tell German postwar history and convey his views on the ails of West Germany. Like films such as Peppermint Candy and Forrest Gump for South Korea and America respectively, this film centers on a character that represents their home country and its character arc, in this case West Germany. Maria is shown marrying her husband, Hermann, during an Allied bomb raid before he returns to the front where he is supposedly killed. After the war, Maria works as a bartender in an American-populated bar where she falls in love with an American man. While they have sex, Hermann appears and she kills the American in favor of him. He takes the blame for the murder, going to prison. While he is in prison, Maria works to save up for their house, becoming the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman. She becomes a ruthless businessperson, obtaining a large sum of money and buying a house. When the Frenchman dies, she and her recently-arrived husband inherit his wealth, but she leaves their gas stove on and lights a cigarette, killing them both with questionable intent.
Maria’s love life after her husband’s disappearance in the war represents West German reliance on Western powers for help, with each character a synecdoche for their country of origin. When her husband returns and she has her own house, an independent German nation, she finds that she is unable to sustain a life with him, making a decision that kills them both. Her identity through the course of the film had changed so drastically that she found that when she reunited with her other half, she was unable to make a decision that benefitted the both of them, though she had been able to with the other Westerners. This is symbolic of Fassbinder’s fears of reuniting, though he was in favor of it. He was afraid that West Germans had lost their identities, forming emotional coldness at the expense of economic success, and would not be able to recover it when East Germany came to rely on it, afraid that the leadership of his country would be unable to support them. In addition to this, it is also suggested that the explosion was accidental and a result of her newfound forgetfulness, symbolic of Germany forgetting its past, causing Fassbinder to show German history for the public through Maria. Her death is a victory for Germany in Fassbinder’s belief that the forgetful or emotionally cold West German is better off dead, which he conveys through using a German soccer victory on the television set in the ruins of their house. He concludes the film with still images of politicians, encouraging the West German public to take action to reclaim their German identity. Discussing this in German Culture through Film, Zachau writes that “this ambiguous ending also seems testimony to Fassbinder’s own admission that if there were no hope to permanently changing Germany’s political system, he would give up trying” (Zachau, 192). This film is not only a rumination on West German politics but, like Tokyo Story, a political warning that German culture will be lost unless their public reclaims it in time for the reunification.
Like The Legend of Paul and Paula, von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others focuses on the process of disillusionment within East Germany regarding their government, a sentiment reflected by his parents in East Germany. Von Donnersmarck uses expressionist techniques in order to convey the paranoia of living in Communist Berlin, incorporating the viewers into what East German life was like. This film centers on a Stasi officer, Wiesler, tasked to spy on a Socialist writer that the government believes to be working against the state. This film opens with Wiesler teaching a class on interrogation techniques before he shadows a playwright, Georg Dreyman, and is tasked to spy on him because he’s suspiciously Socialist. While spying on him, he falls in love with Dreyman’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria. After the suicide of a friend, Dreyman publishes an article about the government covering up their high suicide rate, leading the state to investigate further. Christa-Maria, a Stasi informant, sees him hiding the typewriter he used to write the article, leading the police to the hiding place later and causing her to kill herself over the guilt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dreyman investigates his case and finds that Wiesler never told his superiors about their activities or about their feigned defection, which they used to test whether the apartment was bugged.
In expressionist fashion, Wiesler’s apartment is barren and angled to reflect the emotionally constrictive paranoia he has built his career upon; however, Dreyman’s life is filled with color and openness, though overshadowed by grey to reflect the freedom of thought present in his life being repressed despite him retaining purely Socialist sympathies. Discussing this, Zachau notes in German Culture through Film that “the entire movie looks as if the Stasi gray overshadows all aspects of life” (Zachau, 308). This color choice and duality is crucial to the film, as Wiesler’s projection of his philosophical insecurities onto Dreyman causes him to become aware of his position in the government and disillusioned to its prying nature, furthered by von Donnersmarck setting the film in 1984. This parallel runs throughout, as both focus on the downfall of an overbearing government and its impact on the freedom of the public. Despite being a slight exaggeration of the surveillance tactics used by the Stasi, as noted by various auteurs cited by Zachau, he states that it “will be the definitive portrayal [of East German life] for most people” (Zachau, 311). The grounded realism of this film, focusing primarily on silent surveillance activities and the lives of not only those living under surveillance, but those doing the surveilling, allows the viewer to become incorporated into the emotional tension of the time, despite it being a slight exaggeration. Though this film is fiction, the tension is not stylized but found in otherwise mundane tasks, echoing the impact of films such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles which uses differences in minutiae to comment on the repetitive nature of life as a housewife. Films such as this allow the pacing to become deliberately slow, using real time to portray tedium in order to make social commentary, notably the opposite of science fiction. In this film, the social commentary is made through several instances in the film introducing tension by characters engaging in tasks such as having a simple conversation. Though having a conversation is relatively mundane, the image of Weisler listening intently in his apartment provides the suspense, allowing again for the viewers to understand the high stakes of any small task in an overbearing, seemingly-omniscient surveillance state.
In the neorealist fashion of Grave of the Fireflies, Staudte’s Murderers Among Us is filmed in the ruins of 1946 Berlin. This film, through its expressionist depiction of the reality of life in Berlin, represents a character study of an alcoholic veteran, Mertens, riddled with personal convictions and post-traumatic stress disorder, doing so to depict the mental state of the postwar German public as a whole. Staudte’s belief that the German public bore the burden of those who actually perpetrated the genocide is expanded upon in this film, using the character arc of the damaged Mertens to represent his ideal healing process for the bystander public. The secondary protagonist, Susanne, returns home from a concentration camp to find that her apartment had been bombed out, and like all apartments in postwar Berlin, inhabited by someone else. She and this inhabitant, Mertens, reluctantly decide to live together while he attempts to find work as a surgeon. He finds that his commanding officer, Brückner, lives in Berlin and seeks him out in order to kill him for the murders of dozens of innocent women and children. He meets him and goes for a walk through the ruins, and as he is about to murder him, he saves the life of a choking woman and has an epiphany, causing him to return to his previous employment as a surgeon. Despite this, he goes to Brückner’s Christmas Eve party, the anniversary of the massacre, and attempts to kill him but is stopped by Susanne. Due to this, he was able to return to himself and move on from his past involvement in the horrors of war.
This return, much to the chagrin of the later Fassbinder, represents Germany’s ability to move on from its war crimes. Although Fassbinder sees this with cynicism, as he believed that Germany hadn’t addressed them thoroughly enough, Staudte sees it as a necessary step in the healing process for the public as a whole. The poverty that the German public lived in after the war is shown in detail, with wide-angle landscape shots depicting the rubble of Berlin with haunting black-and-white color contrast, in classic German Expressionist fashion. In addition, the shots of Berlin’s rubble reflect the inner devastation of those that lived in it and the struggle to survive. Writing about this in German Culture through Film, Sinka writes that Staudte “linked the first postwar German film with the golden age of German cinema, resurrecting for the present the best German cinematic tradition” (Sinka, 120). This bridge across Nazi film represents Staudte’s wishes for the German public: to return to pre-Nazi German tradition and for the German public to forgive their own trespasses and move on. Due to this, the film’s ending with Mertens backing away from Brückner rather than killing him is a subject of controversy. Staude was unable to fund this film in West Germany, and resorted to seeking funding from East Germany. The Soviet government required him to change the ending from Mertens killing Brückner to the new ending in order to avoid the possibility of vigilante justice. Rather than being killed in vigilante justice, Brückner was brought to trial and arrested for his crimes. This reflects the German public’s self-forgiveness, accepting that their government committed war crimes, and allowing the new government to handle punishing the guilty parties. Appropriately, this film was released fourteen days after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, symbolically aligning with Brückner’s arrest and Mertens’ epiphany. The traumas plaguing the German public were guilt, disunity, and crippling poverty, echoed through German film over decades. This film, unlike many German films since the end of World War II, focuses on all of them in detail through the two main characters and their struggles throughout the film. Due to this, Murderers Among Us presents a haunting foreshadowing of the divisive Wall that furthered these traumas and embedded them in each side, which films of both sides seek to rectify, including films long after its fall.
Due to its historically wide variance in ideology and traumas, the themes presented in German cinema are largely disconnected. Despite this, German film tends to reflect a disillusionment with their government, whether in West German film such as The Marriage of Maria Braun or in East German film such as The Legend of Paul and Paula. These films both focus on their respective governments’ inability to synthesize the two halves of Germany, represented in each through the use of characters as synecdoches. In the former, Fassbinder believes that West Germany had not addressed their history thoroughly enough and had become too emotionally disconnected to fully rejoin the East. In the latter, Carow believes that the two halves of both East Germany and Germany as a whole should be synthesized, but that they should address the wealth inequality first and return to societal progression in order to permit both self-expression, shown through Paula’s fantastical dream sequences and prosperity through the destruction of the past. This divide lasted long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, represented by Run Lola Run and The Lives of Others from 1998 and 2006, respectively. In Run Lola Run, Tykwer uses montage and a form of magical realism, in Lola’s voice, to spatially connect disconnected areas across Berlin to forge a Berlin that pleases him: one of unity and free-willed, forward-thinking Berliners. Unlike the magical realism of Run Lola Run, the blend of neorealism and expressionism allows the viewer to step into the lives of East German citizens and understand the repression they lived under. These two themes of disunity and repression are both incorporated into the 1946 Murderers Among Us, which uses Italian neorealism in order to show the poverty and destruction that East Germans had to live in. Not only does it address the poor living conditions of East Germany over time, echoed 27 years later in The Legend of Paul and Paula and 60 years later in the historical fiction of The Lives of Others, but it addresses the disunity among East Germans. This is shown through the concentration camp survivor and the guilty veteran haunted by his convictions, and this veteran is used to further address the disunity between postwar Germany and its past, shown 32 years later in The Marriage of Maria Braun. Overall, German film uses magical realism, a carryover from German expressionist prewar tradition, and Italian neorealism in order to show the cost of war on those that lived in Germany through the economic and societal impact of the Berlin Wall on Germany over time.
Both German and Japanese postwar cinema have historically used realist techniques in order to convey the living conditions of each society, often aligning in the handling of the subject material. The Italian neorealism of 1946’s Murderers Among Us and its depiction of living in inhospitable ruin gave way to the use of the same techniques in 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies. Magical realism and science fiction share many common techniques used to critique society and the ails of those that live in it, with films such as The Lives of Others representing in 2006 the lasting impact of events decades prior, akin to Akira or Tokyo Story. Generally speaking, these films represent vital aspects of film as an art form. It is the true embodiment of Richard Wagner’s term “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, a synthesis of all other art forms–music, canvas art, theater, etc.–in order to bridge the gap between traditionally divided groups of society. Due to this, film has traditionally been able to convey important themes for its auteurs, especially wartime trauma. Fundamentally, war is between governments while their populace bears the burden of it. Although the crimes of both Japan and Germany during the Second World War are unforgivable and undeniable, their film culture reflects something deeper than this: the human cost of violence, independent of national allegiance. Justification of these penalties aside, film from these countries depicts the aspects of their lives that transcend the guilty governments and impact their ways of life for decades after. Through the use of realism directors like Ozu, Staudte, Kurosawa, Carow, and countless others were able to impact audiences within their countries to inspire change and progress. And by extension of this, their impact transcends time and resonates with modern audiences to understand their pain and to make changes relevant to today’s world. Their effect on art and on the world is undeniable, and it represents the beauty and importance of film as an avenue of self-expression and political activism.
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Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Princess Mononoke. Studio Ghibli Inc., 1997.
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Tykwer, Tom, director. Run Lola Run. Prokino Filmverleih, 1998.
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