claudine_c

I've seen three films in cinemas in less than a week, which is highly irregular behaviour for me -- I blame a combination of last week's heatwave and the early start to semester (I started a two-week intensive subject today) which meant that my cinema-going will be pretty limited for the rest of the year.

I saw Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, Milk and Doubt and I wish I had time and mental space to write more about these, but I have more urgent homework...

I'd give them all 4-5 out of 5, though.

Quite by coincidence, my first two sessions at the Melbourne International Film Festival have focused on keyboard music and on different aspects of the presence of Asian cultures in Western societies.

( Piccadilly )

( Sorceress of the new piano )

It seems to me that while the Melbourne film festival remains, naturally, focused on screen culture – digital media, multimedia and games as well as film – events like the Corpus and Tan performances acknowledge links between film and other art forms. It would be great if MIFF, while remaining a festival of film, gave audiences more exposure to other kinds of artistic innovation. (Especially as the film festival ticket prices, and the free forum sessions, compare favourably with the prices for Melbourne Arts Festival events. $120 for a Philip Glass concert? Not for me.)

The name of this film comes from a Berlin street on which stood a prison where Jews were held in 1943. Many of these prisoners were married to Gentiles or were the children of such “mixed marriages”. The film’s central characters are Lena, an aristocratic German married to a Jewish musician, and Ruth, the young Jewish girl whom she adopted. The film shifts between the days following the imprisonment of Jews in Rosenstrasse, and the present day when Ruth’s daughter searches for the history that her mother has kept from her family.

While the individual characters are presumably fictional, we are told at the start of the film that the prison and the nature of the prisoners are historical facts. The film focuses on just one of the many horrible policies of the Nazi regime: a policy which condemned mixed marriages, encouraged the Gentile partners to seek divorce, and sought to punish those who stayed loyal to their spouses. The film concentrates on Lena’s and Ruth’s stories while also highlighting some of the other families affected. One of the film’s powerful dramatic devices is the gradual accumulation, over a few days, of women who crowd outside the prison to demand their husbands’ release.

Rosenstrasse makes emotional appeals to family loyalty, contrasting the behaviour of the women gathered outside the prison with those men and women who abandoned their Jewish families. The story of Ruth’s later life is also, ultimately, an argument in favour of a generous acceptance of family ties. I sometimes feel uncomfortable when apparently historical or political stories (whether fictional or documentary) turn out to be more focused on personal relationships. My mistake here is to think that grand historical narratives are more important than individuals and their relationships. Many of the films I have seen about the Holocaust are about families and relationships, precisely because these are examples of how a political ideology had such a devastating impact on people’s personal lives.

I couldn’t help drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Australian government’s contemporary treatment of refugees. I wouldn’t claim that Australia’s asylum seeker policy is of the same nature or scope as the Holocaust. The Australian government and its representatives do not deliberately murder refugees, and while it is shameful that thousands have been detained in harsh desert prisons, this still does not come close to the six million Jews and thousands of Romany, homosexuals and other minorities who were imprisoned and killed during the Holocaust. Yet it doesn’t make sense to me to compare one atrocious regime with another: cruelty towards other people is cruelty. Sixty after Hitler, I think it is pretty well accepted by people in general that the Holocaust did occur and that it was unbelievably monstrous. But in Australia at least, compassion towards asylum seekers still seems to be a minority position, even if the minority is large and includes government backbenchers and businessmen. The literature of the Holocaust began in the concentration camps, and its cinema followed soon after. Many Australian artists and writers have taken up the cause of asylum seekers, but will it take fifty or sixty years for the general Australian public to take notice?