Venezia 71 – The Council of Birds (Zerrhumpelt Herz)

29siczerrumpeltherz03Germany 1929. After receiving a letter from his friend and composer Otto Schiffmann, Paul Leinert leaves Berlin accompanied by his wife Anna and friend Will.

The plan is to pay a short visit at Otto’s country chalet, but once they arrive the three discover that their host has disappeared, lost, or so it seems, in the woods that stretch quietly all around.

While waiting for his return they find among his papers the pages of the symphony he had been working on for quite a while. A still unfinished work, just two movements long, showing evident signs of a labored struggle with a form that can no longer contain the author’s deep yearning for the infinite.

The plot of Zerrhumpelt Herz (The Council of Birds) is just as the woods the protagonist wanderers walk through: full of echoes.

The pictures of this graduation movie contain a little compendium of german culture: Music as a cognitive experience, Nature as the source of a philosophic and existential loss, the Wanderer as the archetype and symbol of a continuous overcoming of one’s limits.

The narrative structure points to several references to the musical and symphonic culture of the german area: the composer seeks inspiration in the natural sounds like a novel Mahler, has a bourgeois familiarity that recalls Schubert, albeit with an additional transcendental yearning that is more decadent than romantic.

At a visual level moreover, it is almost impossible to count all the pictorial references. They are neither obvious, nor taken for granted, nor invasive (which is a great thing).

Striking, in Zerrumpelt Herz is the odd attrition between this Goethian story of a continuous “zihet uns inhan”, this always going forward, and the highly supervised form with which it is returned to its public. It’s as though the enormous gamut of references that make up the story turned into a corsage full of ribs, like golden threads weaving together to build a piece of tapestry. In a sense it’s as though the director was trying to restrict Faust in the finitude of a narrow and closed novel. As in Elective affinities, where the feeling forces in from a thousand places and from the inside the composure of the 700’s narration, without being quite as disturbing and problematic. The movie seems to have missed the rendez-vou with the demonic component of overcoming the bourgeois conventions. It’s a Doctor Faustus without syphilis, a Death in Venice without the plague. That’s probably out of an attempt to cast a more rationalist look, coinciding in Anna’s waiting ashore as her husband swims away, or in the doctor’s and Will’s swift departure when the certitude of solid habits begins to slip away with the temptation of an elsewhere that seems so close at hand. And yet this very lack of vertigo gives the impression that things are more expressed than faced up to.

Thus the long dolly shots following the characters along the woods, the precise organization of the individual shots, the shrewd organization of the sound background, seem to contrast with a sense of mystery that floats more on the surface of the narration rather than sit at its center.

Is this a weakness or a strength? A disequilibrium or a stubbornly sought after choice? Too early to say. We will need to defer to the director’s second work when he will maybe have more freedom to say and to show, once he is less conditioned by the understandable need to demonstrate his acquired command of the medium.

 

(Translated from italian original by Maurizio Izzi)

From: Close-up