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Film: Das Experiment
Release date: 4th May 2009
Certificate: 18
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Stephan Szasz
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Studio: In2Film
Format: DVD
Country: Germany
Oliver Hirschbiegels’ debut film, Das Experiment, caused a sensation on its release in 2001. Based on Mario Giordano’s book Black Box, the story draws its influence from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The film gives a chilling account of the susceptibility of ordinary people to violence and corruption.
Since losing his job as a journalist, Tarek Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu) has become a taxi driver. When he finds an advert in a newspaper offering 4000 Marks to participate in an experiment in a simulated prison, he uses the opportunity to write an undercover exposé of the experiment for his former boss.
A car crash on the way home from work unexpectedly brings Dora (Maren Eggert) into his life. When Tarek offers to take her home, the two spend the night together. Despite their instant attraction for each other they part ways - Dora to her house in Canada, Tarek to the lab.
Upon arrival at the simulated prison, Tarek meets the men he will spend the next two weeks with. Amiable and relaxed, they are all normal people from different backgrounds, with unremarkable jobs ranging from a chief executive to a school teacher. The scientists, Dr Thon (Edgar Selge) and Dr Grimm (Andrea Sawatzki), inform them they will be randomly separated into two groups: guards and prisoners. The guards must exercise total control over the prisoners but are prohibited from using violence, despite being provided with truncheons and hand cuffs. The prisoners are stripped of all their clothes, which are replaced with smocks, and they are assigned numbers before being taken to their cells where they are confined for the duration of the experiment.
The initial camaraderie among the men is quickly replaced with paranoia and hostility as the two groups struggle for dominance. The lines between reality and their own fictitious roles become blurred beyond distinction as the film reaches its shocking conclusion…
Despite its harrowing and unyielding nature, Das Experiment is a profoundly brave and challenging film. A number of the punishments inflicted on the prisoners – such as being locked in solitary confinement and being stripped naked - were actually performed by college students in the real Stanford Prison Experiment which took place in 1971 in America. The more extreme violence that appears towards the end did not actually occur in Philip Zimbardo’s experiment. Rather, Das Experiment is a representation of what could have happened if it had lasted the full two weeks. In actuality, psychologists terminated the experiment in just six days after the students began to show signs of depression and disturbed behaviour. The film should not therefore be seen as a factual account of the events that took place at the Californian University (a mistake which is often made) but as a much more complex tale about human nature.
Unlike many filmmakers, Oliver Hirschbiegel rejects the redundant approach of portraying characters as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and leaves the audience to determine the answers for themselves. He faced harsh criticism after the release of Downfall – about Hitler’s last days in his bunker - which also refused to depict its major characters as two dimensional or simply evil. Hirschbiegels’ unflinching ability to shine a light in dark places by showing the reality of people who commit horrific acts is what makes him unique. A poignant link to Nazism it blatant from the outset, at one point Schütte (Oliver Stokowski) accuses Berus (Justus von Dohnányi) of being a Nazi pig. The speed at which the guards adapt to treating the prisoners as the enemy also suggests a parallel. But the director’s goal is not to demonise Germans. Rather he is intent on communicating a universal susceptibility human beings have of losing their moral judgment. Confronting the truth head on without self deception is the only way to safeguard against atrocity.
It’s not all bleak, however. The love scenes between Dora and Tarek are genuinely beautiful - their sensual tenderness, which appears in flashbacks, the only comfort to Tarek when he’s locked in his cell. Some scenes, where they appear to each other in dreams and visions, while Tarek is confined, are only made plausible by the actors on-screen chemistry, and might otherwise look like devices to move the plot along. Tarek and Schütte’s relationship is equally moving - Stokowski’s performance is positively heart-warming.
What stands out most in this film is the subtle little hints into the characters’ personality, flaws and insecurities that are inconspicuous in their everyday lives, but become inflated and dangerous in the setting of the prison: Eckert (Timo Dierkes) letches on Dr Grimm and later tries to rape her; whilst guards laugh at Berus’s body odour, taunts later repeated by Tarek which results in Berus dragging him from his cell and urinating on him, mockingly asking him, “Now who smells?”
There is not a great deal of music in the film, however the Linkin Park track ‘One Step Closer’ played at the beginning sounds very misplaced as a sort of inelegant attempt to foreshadow the coming tensions. The swelling emotive music in the last scene somehow detracts from the utter devastation - the closing moments would have been much more poignant if they had been silent. These, though, are small imperfections in what is a well crafted film.
Thought provoking and utterly engaging, Das Experiment dextrously sweeps between moving, terrifying, life affirming and back again. Essential viewing for all film lovers. JMA
Film: Downfall
Release date: 19th September 2005
Certificate: 15
Running time: 149 mins
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler
Genre: Biography/Drama/History/War
Studio: Momentum
Format: DVD
Country: Germany/Italy/Austria
In films portraying Hitler, representation of the man himself ranges greatly across genres, from comedic parody to the manifestation of evil in the flesh. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, however, presents Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in his final hours within the confines of his bunker in Berlin, as Russian tanks lurch ominously towards the last remnants of the Third Reich. There is a man behind the monster, where Hirschbiegel and Ganz as Hitler reveal an uncomfortable and, at times, horrifying portrayal of the worst in human nature, amidst the uncertain chaos in Germany as Nazi rule came to an end.
As the title suggests, Downfall examines the last days of Hitler’s regime in Germany in 1945, and his own being. The account of events comes from Hitler’s final secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), a woman who was in the bunker with Hitler, and his closest cohorts, experiencing the horrors therein.
The real-life elderly Junge appears at the beginning and end of the film, adding a sense of historical authenticity to the terrible events that unfold. As Hitler’s secretary, Junge is privy to many of Hitler’s final private moments, including his interaction with his lover, blind follower and eventual wife Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler).
Like the Fuhrer himself, and many of those around him, Braun appears initially in denial that the end is nigh. However, as the Russian tanks continue to roll in to Berlin, Hitler’s despair increases rapidly as his most trusted generals begin to question his strategic sanity. As the terrifying inevitability of the end of the Third Reich becomes clear for its followers, including the grim and icy Joseph and Magda Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch), Hitler’s brokenness seeps throughout the bunker amidst scenes of death, despair and shocking brutality as Berlin burns outside...
In the midst of events in Downfall, Bruno Ganz’s physically uncanny portrayal of Hitler is unquestionably one of the great film representations of the notorious dictator. For months before filming his role, Ganz reportedly studied recordings of Hitler’s movement and voice, and it shows; authentically showing Hitler’s sudden mood swings from quiet tones to violent outbursts to the involuntary shaking of his hands from the onset of debilitating Parkinson’s disease. This is not the public grandstanding or mythical view of Hitler we have seen numerous times before, but rather a man coming to terms with the fallibility of his own (and a nation’s) God complex, even if it ultimately is something he cannot face up to.
Ganz’s Hitler looks increasingly fragile during his crazed outbursts towards his generals in the bunker, where true to the dictatorial nature of his regime, he cannot accept that the abundance of troops he imagined would combat Allied assault largely exists in his own mind. To emphasise the Fuhrer’s desperate delusions, Hirschbiegel reveals glimpses of Berlin outside the bunker; a city war-torn and scattered with the final stand of surrounded Nazi death squads, and misguided (doomed) members of the Hitler Youth amidst burning debris and human remains.
Downfall is a bleak and inevitably downbeat film, where a deep sense of tragedy and futility pervades throughout in contrast to, say, the crowd pleasing wish-fulfilment of Inglourious Basterds. For instance, when a Nazi general (whom Hitler had at one point sentenced to death upon incorrect accusations of abandoning his post) is promoted to become Berlin’s Commander of Defence, he exclaims: “I would rather have been shot than have this honour.”
There is a very enclosed feel to the film, suitably encapsulating the feeling of Nazi paranoia and panic, as the high command await their fate. There is also a purposeful drabness and dim lighting to the cinematography inside the bunker and the Nazi headquarters, again highlighting extreme levels of Nazi despair and confusion. Indeed, as the bunker begins to shake under the weight of explosions and mortar fire, the supporting characters around Hitler begin to echo his despondency. In one scene, Juliane Köhler’s Eva Braun attempts to dance in a final party in the muted opulence of Nazi headquarters in Berlin, before a Russian bomb explodes directly on top of the building.
For Hitler’s closest followers in Downfall, there is a growing and foreboding sense of a terrible finality to their own existence, where life without the Third Reich and Nazism is simply unimaginable. This is all the more horribly evident in Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch’s portrayal of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. As two of Hitler’s closest associates, both choose the ultimate destruction of themselves and, most tragically, their children, with a terrible coldness that lives up to their beloved leader’s philosophy that “compassion is for the weak.”
As Hitler’s individual downfall is cemented, Hirschbiegel’s film does not end as one might expect, but rather continues amidst further misery as the young and naive Traudl Junge leaves the bunker in order to cling on to survival. At times, this is an emotionally draining section of the film to watch (as Hirschbiegel intended it to be), where the final death throes of the German military machine and the self-destruction of those within it are shown unflinchingly. Yet Hirschbiegel’s portrayal of Hitler and the fanaticism of Nazism as a whole in Downfall is a brave one. It is much more effective (and frankly more chilling) in the sense that it reveals Nazi followers to be complex and fallible human beings capable of horrendously misguided acts, rather than larger than the life baddies often portrayed in countless Hollywood productions.
With a particularly mesmerising central performance from Bruno Ganz as Hitler, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is an unflinching and bleakly enthralling account of the demise of the Third Reich. There is a dark sense of historic intimacy to events in the bunker, where the viewer witnesses the destructive capabilities of human beings and becomes immersed in the shocking true events as they unfold. An exceptionally made German-language film, Downfall has a sense of fearless authenticity that adds to its importance as a study of Hitler and Nazi Germany’s final days. DB
