USexile

Another fine Ken Burns documentary - akin to a 400-level undergraduate course at a good university. Speaking of universities, at least half of the professors on camera were from Harvard. For subject matter that has deep meaning for all the USA, to have that one school almost monopolize air time is wrong. Really, just that one school? Even the other Ivy League schools known for their history departments: Penn, Princeton, Yale were not tapped, much less any state university.

This otherwise wonderful film suffers greatly from being in English. Although the actors were all German or Austrian, the English language forces the moral struggle to come from a predictable Anglo-Saxon point of view, rather than the quite different Central European one. The voice-over of the lead actress is particularly detrimental, as it is such a US English accent. And lastly, the film sacrifices the aural and cultural interest of German spoken with Austrian dialects and pronounciation that would underscore how Austria was subsumed within a Greater Germany.

The camera work, while poetic, is clautrophobic. The camera is often too close to the subject.