Who am I (Kein System ist sicher, 2014)

Who am I? A nobody. A nobody superhero whose secret power is to be invisible.  Baran bo Odar's latest film had two screenings recently at TiFF 2014. I only had the chance to make it to the second one and the director was conspicuously absent. He gave "missing his daughter" as an excuse. It's hard to be disagreeable with such an excuse and really I didn't have too many questions.

I haven't seen his first film Silence yet and now it has made it onto my list of to be seen. Not because his latest is particularily brilliant, but rather that it is a solid piece of rather unusual filmmaking from Germany. Instead of the often slow and contemplative pieces coming from the Berlin School like The State I am In. Odar's Who am I? has more in common with Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer's 1998 film about a disenfranchised rebellious daughter, and the neat tricks you can play with time and film. Like Tykwer's film, Obar explores the Berlin landscape in a fast pace of filmmaking more in tune with the Berlin electronic dance music scene than with emo.

Obar's film latches on to the theme of young alienated masculinity with power and parallels the hardship of the protagonist, Benjamin, with his comic book heros, who all inevitably lose their parents to a violent death. Obar however casts a wide social net beyond the question of "belonging" that touches on the effects of alzheimer's, suicide, the absent father figure, social alienation, racism, consipiracy theories and also love.



The film is centered on genius hacker Benjamin who belongs to a small group of activist hackers known as CLAY. They escalate their pranks, seeking recognition (and ultimately a sense of belonging) from the "big players" until they come up against a group involved with the Russian mafia. This could have been another movie on an almost worn out trope, but its playfulness and the fast pace keeps it going, even tricking the audience at the end into believing the authenticity of the reveal.



One of the curious turns of the film involves its emphasis on reality. The internet, the dark net and so on are all composed eventually of real people sitting in real coffee shops. Forgetting that this reality exists is portrayed of the potential problems of the immersive virtual world we are in the midst of creating. No system is safe because no person is infallible. But also because each virtual system is interwoven with a dynamic and changing reality. At the heart of this film is the recognition that the immaterial and the material cannot be separated.

Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I'm In, 2000)

After having finished school, I can now expand my view. As a part of the process, I've decided to move beyond Weimar cinema and New German Cinema to the Berlin School.  So, I've entered the quasi modern state of film. Finally.



The film was released in 2000, which can hardly be called recent, but compared to my focus on films from the 1910s and 20s, it was released yesterday. Christian Petzold directed the film and wrote the screenplay along with Harun Farocki, a director in his own right.

What struck me most about the film was its focus. Instead of concentrating on the terrorist parents and telling the sensational back story, the rather mundane problem of their fifteen year old daughter's, Jeanne's, first relationship is at the center of the film. The criminal activity of the parents remains at the periphery and is never fully explained, yet plays a central role in the generational conflict and the girl's rebellion. Instead of forbidding her to see him for the usual parental reasons (bad influence, too old for her), she is not allowed to see him because it might reveal their secret.

Keeping secrets through silence is one of the main threads throughout the film and shapes the aesthetics of the film as well. Jeanne initially keeps her relationship to the boy, Heinrich, from her parents and only does so after they question her. Later on, after they return to Germany, she returns to seeing him and is once more forbidden from contact. Her parents teach her how to keep a secret while under interrogation. Remaining silent, giving the interrogators no ground, makes them unbalanced, nervous, and Jeanne uses this tactic with Heinrich, when he asks her about herself. As her parents predict, she later tells him all her secrets. Heinrich pays back Jeanne by ringing the police, perhaps selfishly unable to keep Jeanne's secret - she won't leave with them, if her parents have been caught.

Visually, the film is keeping secrets through its focus on Jeanne. The nature of her parents' criminal activities are revealed through brief visual clues that in no way reveal their violence. They are shown digging up caches of money and passports under bridges and other hidden spots. The violent extortion of an old friend occurs off camera as Jeanne talks about music with the other man's teenage daughter. Similarly, Jeanne's initial scoping out of the bank and her parents' later violent robbery are mediated through what appears to be surveillance footage. Images, which are not secret - publicly accessible and visual proof of the truth of Jeanne's initial report and how that reality can change. The side exit was open for Jeanne but not when the parents rob the bank. The choice of surveillance footage also maintains the integrity of the film's aesthetic by differentiating between the private world of Jeanne's life and the public knowledge of her family.

Jeanne's private life motivates what is shown and not shown in the final sequence of the film. The drivers of the mysterious black vehicles remain hidden behind dark windows and their identity unknown. They surround the white station wagon and drive Jeanne's mother off the road as her father sleeps in the back and Jeanne rests on her mother's lap. We see the station wagon roll over again and again, landing upside down. Jeanne is thrown out some meters away. She gets up and the final shot is her looking at the wrecked vehicle. It remains unknown to us if her parents have survived, but it is critical to the film to show her fate. She survives.

The last scene is emblematic of the film's feeling of nowness. What is important for the story is also important for Jeanne, which is why her parents' criminal activities are downplayed. It may be true that Jeanne will have other relationship, but the one she's having with Heinrich is more real and present for her than any of those other hypotheticals. In this sense, the film captures a particularity of being a teenager - my life right now far outweighs any other.