Alemanha, Mãe Pálida

It's right before WWII in Germany. Lene is a rather plain pensive girl and her dark hair makes her less desirable in the race obsessed country. She meets kind Hans and they get married. Hans is conscripted and sent to the front. Lena gives birth to their daughter Anna. Life is a struggle in war-torn Germany. The couple struggles to remain connected. After the war, they try to return to normal but then she suffers a facial paralysis.

The movie is much too slow at the start. It doesn't really pick up the pace but at least, there is a bit more tension with the war going on. The leads are not terribly charismatic but that's kind of the point. The production and the old war footage leave the movie with a slightly unreal feel. It's a depressing movie.

This movie reminded me of a caricature by Sempé: a crowd leaving a cinema, an utterly depressed look on all their faces. Seeing this, a young man cueing at the box office says to his girl friend: "wow, this must be a really good movie!".

"Deutschland, bleiche Mutter" is a very bleak movie, more interesting as a document of the generation born around the war years than of the war years themselves. If that's what you're looking for, you have struck gold. Otherwise be warned, it is not a movie for the easily depressed (or easily bored, for that matter).

Originally showcased at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival, this was initially criticised for being far too long – that being 151 minutes. So it was edited down to just two hours and has become seen as a German classic in the intervening years. It tells the story of Hans and Lene who meet before the outbreak of World War II and fall in love – both are not pro Hitler and so are not Party members. It opens with the poem of the title 'Germany Pale Mother' by Berthold Brecht and it is read by his daughter. It was penned in 1933 but to hear it today it would be easy to mistake it being about Hitler and the War.

When Germany invades Poland Hans is called up and so begins the long years of separation. In the meantime they have a daughter – Anna – who is the narrator of the film and tells their story through her eyes and the experiences of a child. The war is cruel and then when it is over the cruelties seem to get worse. This film spans many years and the heartbreaks and travails of just existing – let alone surviving.

This is not a war film – it uses archive footage (which looks very aged indeed) interspersed with the later material to try to place the story better in the historical context. The acting is all superb –but the story is depressing. It is meant to be depressing I think to ram home the cost of war and what it does to the body, mind and even the soul. There are some very hard to watch scenes here and at the full length this does need some commitment. There is a line that is possibly meant more as a plea than a statement and that is when Anna says 'who am I to judge, I was just lucky enough to be born later'. German speakers will not be impressed by the sub titles though – pretty average as far as they go. This though is a great film, it is one that the BFI have helped restore and it is a difficult watch, but it is also a film that needs to be seen if only for its message and it needs to be preserved in the hope that such folly will never be repeated.

This was probably one of the few foreign films I couldn't sit through. Talk about dreary. This must have been one of those films which helped establish the boring-foreign film stereotype. While the story was very strong and the pacing was excellent, it feels like a long, drawn out version of people waiting to commit suicide. However, the acting in the film was amazing, fully delving into the uneasy silences of two people who are torn apart by war and different views of marriage. Tough to inhale at most times, but a perfect example of the tragedy.

I had been wanting to watch this for quite a few years. The director, Helma Sanders-Brahms, was born in Germany in 1940, and is credited as both writer and director. So I'm surmising that, if not directly autobiography, this is drawing on the early life of some specific woman of approximately her age. The very last scene, intensely personal and very harrowing (to me), is surely taken from someone's life story.

Further suggesting that this is autobiography, the narration is given from the "I" perspective of the adult who had been the young girl, here born in 1942-43 in Germany. But everywhere I look people describe it as "semi-autobiographical", whatever that means.

As (auto)biography, it's rather lacking in narrative completeness, or a recognisable overall narrative trajectory, but to me that makes it more compelling if anything: this does have the appearance of scenes from someone's mother's life.

The people in it, such as the mother, Lene, played by Eva Mattes, are flawed and damaged, and also come across as helpless victims swept up in a tide of an impossibly tragic and epic period in history which is always there in the background as something unpredictable, incomprehensible and monolithic, a bit like the weather.

It's difficult or impossible to know whether Sanders-Brahms is trying to say "this is what a war like this does to people", or whether it's primarily "about" the sadness and trials which a dysfunctional family imposes on small children.

However, the film starts with a recitation, lasting quite some time, of the angry poem of the same name by Bertolt Brecht, written in the fateful year 1933. The flavour of that poem might be given by the final verse:

"O Germany, pale mother!

How have your sons arrayed you That you sit among the peoples A thing of scorn and fear!"

For that reason, if for no other, there's no doubt an idea of conflating of the mythic with the personal: maybe in some ways Lene *is* Germany of that period.