EUROPA EUROPA: RUNNING FAST THROUGH TRAGEDY
OUR RATING FOR EUROPA EUROPA: ✰✰✰✰✰
“In this film, Holland’s editing and camera work create a style of film wherein events occur so fast as scenes are made up of shots which take place in such short bursts, that one barely has time to register what is happening. . . This chaotic style of filmmaking parallels the whirlwind of the sudden takeover of Naziism across Europe, a narrative further destabilised by telling its story through the perspective of a child who is unsure of how to process the rapidly changing, violent, and turbulent world around him. Akin to Solomon, the viewer does not have time to process the frightening reality underlying the narrative because it happens in a garbled flash, a sentiment Holland relays through her rapid editing pace and hazy imagery.”
In Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film, Europa Europa, the atmosphere created by the pacing and rhythm of the editing mirrors that manifested in the camera work. In this film, not only are scenes incredibly fast paced, shifting from one subject and tone to another, Holland also disrupts the viewer’s sense of reality by utilising close- to extreme close-up shots and obscured camera placement at integral segments of her film.
Holland marries unclear visuals with fast-paced editing to create a sense of slipping time. One of the sequences in the film which best exemplifies Holland’s use of marred visuals is in the opening scene of the film, wherein initially, the camera is set to an extreme close-up, so that all the viewer is able to discern are moving blobs of unfocused colour. Later, the camera cuts to a close-up shot, wherein vague shapes are discernible. Eventually, the camera cuts to a medium shot, wherein there are multiple possibilities for how the shot could be read; one possible reading is that two young men appear to be under water as one almost drowns. Although this is an abundance of information for the viewer to process, Holland edits this sequence so that it happens in the span of approximately 50 seconds. The result of these unclear visuals and the rapid pace of the editing creates a fascinating experience: the viewer is unsure of what is happening and what they are watching, no matter how closely they watch or how many times they replay the sequence.
Another sequence in which Holland brilliantly alters the audience’s sense of time through both the pacing of her editing and her camera work is the scene in which Kristallnacht occurs. In this sequence, the audience is given an overwhelming amount of information to process in an extremely limited time frame of approximately four minutes and 10 seconds. Day transitions quickly to night and happiness morphs into tragedy as at the beginning of the scene, the family anticipates celebrating Solomon’s Bar Mitzvah, and by the end, their home has been attacked, leaving Solomon’s sister killed.
In Holland’s dream sequences, rather than look for clues to allow myself a reading or interpretation, I was, and still am, fascinated with her way of obscuring many of the shots in her film because I argue that they are such an apt representation of what was happening in Europe as Naziism took hold of the landscape and cultural zeitgeist.
Although World War II is an event which seems so definitive and has able to be broken down into a linearity of dates and events in our modern culture, for someone, especially a child, to experience it at the time was as if being in the eye of a hurricane. The reason why I find Holland’s film so revolutionary as a film about the Holocaust is that it is a film which occurs during the Holocaust rather than it being a Holocaust film. I argue that if you removed Solomon as a character and moved him and his cloudy and tenuous interpretation of his reality, as shown by the camera work, into a different film, he as a character would still persist because he is not defined by the events which surround him. It is wonderfully stated in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing that in Holland’s storytelling, the Holocaust “becomes something more than an episode with a single, hermetically sealed interpretation. . . [s]uddenly, the treatment of the Holocaust expands from the depiction of an impersonal massacre to an analysis of the psychology that could allow such a massacre to occur” (Levitin et al. 103). Holland creates a multi-faceted and sympathetic character in Solomon, and many of the other characters in the film, beyond what happens to him as a consequence of history; in other words, “by moving the film’s discourse away from the traditional depiction of the Holocaust as a communal event, it allows it to become an experience to be interpreted by the main character and, through his eyes, by the viewers” (Levitin et al. 103).
Something that is important to consider when analysing this film is that a female director should not have to be a feminist. I argue that the label of “feminist” is just that, a label, and that what is most important as a director of any gender in film is to show through your projects, especially through your camera work, what your true intentions are when portraying a character of any gender.
I argue that it is important in any artistic endeavor to fully explore every avenue of interpretation of humanity, whether at its most pure or most ugly or the grey areas in between. I find it highly commendable when a director focuses on this muddy area between good and bad and chooses to explore the humanity of someone, even when they commit horrific acts.
This is something which Holland does terrifically through Europa Europa with specifically two female characters: Leni and her mother, simply named, Leni’s Mother. Leni as a character, taken out of her context as a child in a Hitler Youth School, initially seems to be a sweet, though troublesome girl. Further fascinating is that Solomon cries when he is invited to eat dinner at Leni’s home and when Leni’s Mother says kind words to him, he responds that it has been a while since he has been in a nice home. Although the audience being unaware of Leni and her mother’s political leanings at this point of the film, Holland has made sure to indicate just how important the war is to their family, as Leni is portrayed as a dedicated student in school and reveals that her father died fighting in the war. Despite these revelations, this is the first time Solomon has been at an intimate table setting in the film since Kristallnacht, wherein he saw his father sitting at the family’s kitchen table, beating his head against its surface as his sister lay dead on top of it. In this powerful visual moment, these two female characters, despite their obvious threat to Solomon, are visually presented as a remedy of the familial hole in Solomon’s life.
Later in the film, when Leni’s Mother reveals to Solomon that Leni has become pregnant in order that she fulfill what she believes to be her duty, handing over her baby to Hitler, Holland thrusts the audience back into the reality of the time period and mars her depiction of Leni. It is this event, and the comment Leni makes to Solomon that she wants to kill a Jewish person if she ever met them, which blemishes, though makes well-rounded, Leni’s character. Though instead of Leni being punished later on in the film, she is never re-visited.
Rather than have Leni suffer narratively because of her anti-semitism and her obsession with Hitler, Holland simply leaves her story. Holland does not rebuke Leni narratively for her beliefs; the only condemnation comes from Leni’s Mother, who, while holding a crying Solomon after he reveals to her that he is Jewish, states that she does not understand her daughter anymore. Both Leni, a symbol of innocence corrupted, and Leni’s Mother, the suffering single mother who tried her best to care for and understand her daughter, are multi-faceted characters despite the role they play as, at the very least, Nazi sympathisers in the film.
While a different film may have glossed over Leni and Leni’s Mother as characters because of the dangerous and threatening role they play in Solomon’s narrative, Holland generously crafts for both of these female characters an empathetic and troubling story. This is what I argue makes Holland a feminist filmmaker, despite feminism not being something which is important to her. Holland displays feminism in that she looks at even the most objectively unsympathetic female characters and makes them well-rounded and able to be understood.
Additionally crucial to discuss is the misguided idea that some have that because a filmmaker belongs to an “outsider” group, or a group that is excluded from the mainstream, that they are morally obligated to create films which focus on topics which affect those “outsider” groups.
The idea that the people who belong to the various “outsider” groups are cornered into focusing on films which are specifically about their perspective on life or casting people which belong to their groups is something which I find disheartening, as I find it totally misses the point of cinema and the human experience. Rather than make it beholden on one group to focus their life’s work on portraying their experiences, it should be equally expected that filmmakers who do not belong to the “outsider” groups should at least dip into an area outside of their comfort zone or subjects which directly impact them.
The issue with having a filmmaker defined by their “outsider” groups, or their “otherness,” is something which can easily lead to pandering. For instance, Crazy Rich Asians and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, are films which I can imagine sprung out of a genuinely pure intention, to better represent underrepresented groups and narratives in the Hollywood discourse, but which became a mess of pandering to the “outsider” groups the films wanted to drive ticket sales. Not only is this abysmal trend damaging in the portrayal of “outsider” groups in film, but also it further encourages the mass public to believe that films which address “otherness” ought to be made by those filmmakers who belong to said “outsider” group. Furthermore, it is an issue in today’s popular discourse that if someone maligns a film made by a filmmaker who belongs to an “outsider” group which addresses “outsider” issues, then it can quickly lead to someone being labeled as racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other sort of label which discourages many to provide their legitimate criticism to films such as these.
To best represent my point that filmmakers outside of the “outsider” group are able to make films focusing on those subjects which directly affect those who belong to groups outside of their own is the work of David Lynch. The overwhelming majority of his work, especially Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks (the film and the television series), focus extensively on strong female characters and the female experience. Although David Lynch is a white American man, this does not mean that he is unable to tackle the concept of what it means to be a woman any better than a female filmmaker is able; rather, he just approaches it from his own unique perspective wrought from an amalgam of his personal experiences as a human being and a man. Filmmakers such as David Lynch prove that it is not necessary for a female filmmaker to produce feminist films; rather, it is the equal responsibility of every artist to consider the ways in which feminism influences their work and their perspectives.
In this film, Holland’s editing and camera work create a style of film wherein events occur so fast as scenes are made up of shots which take place in such short bursts, that one barely has time to register what is happening. What distinguishes Europa Europa from other films about the Holocaust is that it presents “the insanity of the Holocaust. . . in terms of a Bakhtinian carnivalesque model” (Levitin et al. 105). This chaotic style of filmmaking parallels the whirlwind of the sudden takeover of Naziism across Europe, a narrative further destabilised by telling its story through the perspective of a child who is unsure of how to process the rapidly changing, violent, and turbulent world around him. Akin to Solomon, the viewer does not have time to process the frightening reality underlying the narrative because it happens in a garbled flash, a sentiment Holland relays through her rapid editing pace and hazy imagery.
Bibliography
Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing about Film. 9th ed., Pearson Education Ltd, 2015.
Holland, Agnieszka, director. Europa Europa. 1990.
Levitin, Jacqueline; Raoul, Valerie; Plessis, Judith. Women Filmmakers : Refocusing. UBC Press, 2002.
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