I've seen The Lives of Others twice, and highly recommend it. I'm haunted by Sebastian Koch's face, a face that holds, that withholds, so much. And by his manner, which is such a canny mixture of caution and innocence. Canny's the wrong word: it seemed completely unconscious, an aura of divine favor. Consider, for example, the way so much of he said was not really offensive to the regime, and at the same time not hypocritical either. He was always honest, and he never compromised himself.

The face of Ulrich Mühe also gained depth at a vertiginous rate, even though his expression never changed. Depending on where you let your eyes focus, you saw in their faces a blank wall, or infinitely complicated reserve.

And the first time you see them you think you have their measure: smug egotist; sadist.

I was reminded of:

Divided We Fall: the man whose job it is to spy and persecute turns by imperceptible shades, almost without knowing what's happening to him, into a saviour.

The White Rose: for the chessboard interrogations in German.

and, maybe because I'm reading We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Hotel Rwanda, again for the tightrope negotiations with an evil power.

Recommendation:

Cluny Brown, Lubitsch's 1946 film. More playing with forms so familiar that they can be stretched and parodied to ridiculous extremes. Here's the premise:

Lovely Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is the niece of a London plumber; when her uncle is indisposed, Cluny rolls up her sleeves and takes a plumbing job at a society home, where she meets a handsome refugee Czech author (Charles Boyer). Hoping to cure her of her unladylike obsession with plumbing, Cluny Brown's uncle finds her a maid's position in a fancy country home, where she once more meets the Czech author, who is a house guest.

This is accurate, but it doesn't hint at the film's high silliness. Here's an exchange between two men in love with the same standoffish woman and commiserating:
__What are you going to do?
__I'll propose to her once or twice more, and then I'm washing my hands of her!

Many of the jokes revolve around the freedom to be outrageous rubbing against convention, and what happens when convention allows or requires one to be outrageous. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson:

It has been observed, I think, by Sir William Temple, and after him by almost every other writer, that England affords a greater variety of characters than the rest of the world. This is ascribed to the liberty prevailing amongst us, which gives every man the privilege of being wise or foolish his own way, and preserves him from the necessity of hypocrisy or the servility of imitation.

I had to root around in Johnson for a while to find that, and it occurred to me that "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage" attempts the same kind of trick that Erasmus tried in In Praise of Folly, but is more successful (funnier, more coherent).

In fact it's brilliant, everyone should read it! I hope this link works.

More on Sunrise:

In a self-service café in the city, the husband is trying to win back his wife's trust: he goes off to the counter and comes back to their table with a plate piled high with pastries for her. He sets it down before her and waits, anxiously, hands clasped, for her to eat. She puts a pastry in her mouth mechanically, but before she can bite down she bursts into tears again, and soon she's sobbing, with her mouth full of cake.

That moment rang so true I thought, "Why haven't I seen that before in a movie? This is what life is all about!"

There were so many wonderful scenes and sequences like that in Sunrise, some funnier, some more tragic, none so perfectly balanced in complicated innocence.

More on Murnau’s Sunrise. It reminded me of Gabriel Josipovici’s thesis in _On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion_. I started reading it a few years ago, then stopped in the middle, just before the chapter on Proust, because I hadn’t read Proust (am about to do so). Here’s what the dust jacket says: “In this wide-ranging book, an eminent novelist, playwright, and literary critic explores the question that has troubled artists and philosophers (though not critics) since the time of the Romantics: is it possible to create art today with the freedom of earlier ages and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commerical? Such a question, argues Gabriel Josipovici, is not timeless; it has a history, and a relatively short one at that. Why is it only with the Romantics that suspicion, not just of motive but of the very tools of art, language, and form, has become so insistent? Why could Shakespeare depict suspicion with such power and insight in the figures of Hamlet and Iago, yet himself work with such apparent ease within the conventions of his time?
To understand Romantic suspicion, the author argues, we need to understand what it supplanted and why. To that end he turns to the work created in what he calls cultures of trust, to Homer and the Hebrew Bible, to Dante and Shakespeare, before examining the interplay of trust and suspicion in a number of Romantic and post-Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Beckett.

This seems to me far more convincing than Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility, or the fatuous notion that the “self” (whatever that is) was invented in the Renaissance — one might as well go back to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden for the original, fatal self-division. (I haven’t read “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.”)
I heartily recommend the first half of _On Trust_, and by the end of the year I hope to be able to recommend the whole thing. Anyway, it seemed to me that the power of _Sunrise_ comes from its combination of artfulness and unself-consciousness, of delicacy, and straightforwardness and confidence in the tools of its art (it won an Oscar for cinematography in 1927).

_Sunrise_ presents absolutely uncompromising versions of city and country life, and this whole-hearted endorsement of opposites is one reason, I think, for the film’s vitality. (Much as I love trolleys, I couldn’t help thinking, “It’s no ordinary trolley that goes from that village to that city!” But I suppose in Germany it’s possible.)

The other day Kaveri and I went to see Murnau's _Sunrise_. I didn't know what to expect, and I was blown away. I wasn't the only one: at one point a moviegoer in the back row started exclaiming, in a loud monotone, "Stunning... A genius... Perfection in film..." And so on, until the soundtrack drowned him out.