The darkness
Politics as human destiny
This documentary film by Thomas Tielsch, based on a fragment of Louis Ferdinand Céline's Germany Triptych, is chronologically examined from its historic center. It has at its basis, a quote written by a mystic during the war, "from a look on the other hand of time'", and that is completely literal, because it means 'trapped in time'. Much is gathered from it, above all are the natural conditions in the mirrors of these mirrors, or the physical points of land. The Hohenzollernschloss castle in Southern Germany occupies a place in the 'sigma rings', which conceive all human destiny. Being placed at the Hohenzollernschloss castle, Céline experiences a sense of mystifying episodes, as it is an esoteric place where the German leadership was at that time. Having escaped from his own country, France, Céline wanders with the pathetic remnants of the endangered Vichy government, witnessing the decline of the regime.
The physician and writer Céline discovered the last troops of Berlin marching away from him, and he knew the situation for him was becoming too dangerous. Céline had scandalized the literary world by his so-called "anti-Semitic" caricatures, appearing since 1937. In fact, they were really nothing more than humorous cynical tracts but he knew he would be tried by self righteous Frenchmen and blamed for the war.
At the Hohenzollernschloss castle, collaborator discovers collaborator. On the bridge, Céline hopes to discover La Vigue, the well-known French actor, with whom he had already first encountered on his involuntary journey to Germany made in 1944 and whom he had lost in the northeast of Germany from the air attacks on the convoy. Céline is a prominent personality in the film, certainly an honor may reside in our recognizing his precarious situation.
The text carries the film. Beside Céline's text are places and memories of time, witnesses to the horrors of war. They are always aesthetically treated with great care by strange images as well by facts from the local war annals and records, to which much is featured in operation reports, war wounds numbers, and shots of dead men in heaps, both in the hospital and in battle, this is where the hardest pictures of the film are to be seen.
This movement of the text tries to arrange the film together by the grouping of the pictures, one actually sees at least two realities, which always hold themselves in our gaze and are then elsewhere continuing to mix and be replaced as time merges together. Photographs from the time past are blended with those from the present, which affect another kind history, because one receives the impression that we are really in no place at once.
Atter sixty years Céline is left in doubt about everything, especially the war, and he views it as an almost absurd, also most ridiculous form of comprehension.
The film is a good entrance into the work of Céline. One wants to read more, and go ahead and read more.
Politics as human destiny
This documentary film by Thomas Tielsch, based on a fragment of Louis Ferdinand Céline's Germany Triptych, is chronologically examined from its historic center. It has at its basis, a quote written by a mystic during the war, "from a look on the other hand of time'", and that is completely literal, because it means 'trapped in time'. Much is gathered from it, above all are the natural conditions in the mirrors of these mirrors, or the physical points of land. The Hohenzollernschloss castle in Southern Germany occupies a place in the 'sigma rings', which conceive all human destiny. Being placed at the Hohenzollernschloss castle, Céline experiences a sense of mystifying episodes, as it is an esoteric place where the German leadership was at that time. Having escaped from his own country, France, Céline wanders with the pathetic remnants of the endangered Vichy government, witnessing the decline of the regime.
The physician and writer Céline discovered the last troops of Berlin marching away from him, and he knew the situation for him was becoming too dangerous. Céline had scandalized the literary world by his so-called "anti-Semitic" caricatures, appearing since 1937. In fact, they were really nothing more than humorous cynical tracts but he knew he would be tried by self righteous Frenchmen and blamed for the war.
At the Hohenzollernschloss castle, collaborator discovers collaborator. On the bridge, Céline hopes to discover La Vigue, the well-known French actor, with whom he had already first encountered on his involuntary journey to Germany made in 1944 and whom he had lost in the northeast of Germany from the air attacks on the convoy. Céline is a prominent personality in the film, certainly an honor may reside in our recognizing his precarious situation.
The text carries the film. Beside Céline's text are places and memories of time, witnesses to the horrors of war. They are always aesthetically treated with great care by strange images as well by facts from the local war annals and records, to which much is featured in operation reports, war wounds numbers, and shots of dead men in heaps, both in the hospital and in battle, this is where the hardest pictures of the film are to be seen.
This movement of the text tries to arrange the film together by the grouping of the pictures, one actually sees at least two realities, which always hold themselves in our gaze and are then elsewhere continuing to mix and be replaced as time merges together. Photographs from the time past are blended with those from the present, which affect another kind history, because one receives the impression that we are really in no place at once.
Atter sixty years Céline is left in doubt about everything, especially the war, and he views it as an almost absurd, also most ridiculous form of comprehension.
The film is a good entrance into the work of Céline. One wants to read more, and go ahead and read more.