Watch out, spoilers! —----------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------- Once upon a time, many years ago, I saw Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto, 1981, and it made a strong impression on me. Some time ago I decided to revise it, as well as the entire German trilogy of I. Szabo, which I did. I realized that my impressions over the years have not changed, the film is very strong. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann), and the prototype of the character was Mann’s former son-in-law actor Gustav Grundgens, who bears the name Hendrik Hoefgen (Klaus-Maria Brandauer) in the film. Starting his acting career in the provincial theater, Hoefgen tried to make a more successful career, performing in all possible roles and roles, even organizing a theater for the people of the Bolshevik orientation. He is eventually spotted in Berlin and invited there. Soon he married a wealthy girl, and then his career began to go uphill, largely due to his acquaintance with an actress living with a high-ranking official. Some time later, the Nazis come to power, which may turn into big trouble for him because of his previous hobbies, but even then he gets out, despite the fact that his wife and her family emigrate. He seems to sometimes think about emigration, but is unable to give up the unexpectedly loud glory that has fallen on him, and meanwhile the Nazis begin to sculpt their star from him, make him the head of state theaters. Sometimes he even thinks that he is in charge of the process, he is already completely immersed in all this, slightly consoling himself with the fact that at times he helps some acquaintances who without him might have been killed, but does not disdain completely vile actions, reporting on a colleague who was formerly a Nazi, but disappointed in their ideas, who is simply killed as a result. And his moral decline continues, although it looks like a great rise, he is almost on the theatrical Olympus, when he gets into a situation that finally tramples him, he is not really Mephistopheles, he is Faust. Klaus-Maria Brandauer is great in this role, but I like him as an actor.
I didn't like the movie. Medium film. For a large-scale statement about good and evil, Szabo chose a novel by Klaus Mann, but there was no large-scale statement. It turned out Hollywood “art house”, a kind of allegedly artistic product. If I'm not mistaken, the academics appreciated and gave Szabo an Oscar.
Myths about the great Brandauer, in my opinion, are just myths. Yes, he is a good artist, plays well, albeit somewhat straightforwardly. I don’t see anything great in this role.
Klaus Mann's novel, unfortunately, I only had time to watch. But even at a cursory glance, the differences between the film and the book are striking. The point is not that the film should be independent (you want to be independent write your own script), the point is in essence. First of all, it's a personal affair. Mann wrote about an actor he knew. Szabo's film is a general humanitarian place a la Leopold's cat monologue. The second novel is a reflection on talent. In the finale of the book, the hero prepares and plays the role of Hamlet and, alone, the unfortunate frightened actor. It is important, of course, that Hamlet and all reasoning are also important. Of course, the movie throws it away. It's a movie. There's something dumber. The finale of the film is something from another opera.
The film’s biggest flaw is the lack of talent. In myth, it is fundamentally important that a talented person sacrifices his soul. In the film, this is a Komsomol krasnoy, originally focused not on art, but on slogans. The Nazis, by the way, are very good. And if the hero is not talented, then what is there to watch? Everything collapses like a house of cards and you sit there watching 2 and a half hours of boring. I barely looked at it.
How does Szabo try to beat tediousness? An unusually glib scenario. The scenes last for two and a half minutes. Sometimes a minute. There is no need to talk about any deep dialogue or development of dramaturgy here. Instead, meaningless dynamics and Komsomol briskness. It was Hollywood that liked and Szabo’s Americans took the job of filming passing secondary biopics and melodramas. By that time, the director had already ruined all his poor art reserves, which in Mephisto are still not, and are visible. Simply put, Szabo after Mephisto turned into mediocrity.
In addition to all that said, one structural reflection of the film still led me. But this is not the merit of the film, but Klaus Mann, who in his own way shifted the myth of Faust. There is no Faust in the film, there is Mephisto. Who sells the soul and why? Or what's on sale here? It turns out that the soul is generally sold by an ordinary average person (which is the book of Hannah Arendt), but not for the sake of Faustian knowledge. It's about being Mephistopheles. A little play at Mephisto. In fact, a person does not give even a soul, he has no soul, he sells his rhetoric, his speech, as a source of seduction and receives in return some illusion of power and permissiveness. I must say that this totalitarian project to recreate the myth of Faust then turned out to be a failure for both parties (the authorities and the artist). The authorities quickly become convinced that art is an unreliable mouthpiece and, however you turn it, it always betrays its own lies. It only survives by this frankness of lies, by lying so much that it is forgotten in lies. On the other hand, the artist receives power quite caricatured, not diabolical and at the slightest attempts to influence something, he is rigidly put in the framework. The last scene in the stadium is an act of hopelessness. The actor as an unnecessary record, for which money was paid in vain, is chased around in vain. It is clear to the director that art is turning into a kind of sport. There is no such thing as an art, no one can be fooled by it. And Mephisto suddenly turns, at last, into something resembling a Luceferian spirit, when he swells (flying), like a fooled without a goal through an empty stadium. I remember Kafka and his ending of the Prometheus myth. The eagles are tired, Prometheus is tired, the rocks are tired. The world is tired of art that emerged from the Faustian myth of the great personality and its avatar, the Mephistopheles myth of mediocrity.
6 out of 10
P.S. Today is Szabo's birthday on February 18. It is a coincidence that the review was written on this day.
The first great films that attempted to make artistic sense of the images and chthonic nature of Nazism were the preventive paintings of Fritz Lang. The post-mortem question seems to have been asked by all the great directors. But only the Hungarian Istvan Szabo, continuing the Lang concept, tried to open the capsule of the zeitgeist to reveal the contents in the laboratory of national German archetypes.
And just like Nibelungi, Mephisto Szabo is based on a monument of national literature, which, in turn, is based on an equally canonical legend, as well as real events. Significantly, it was Klaus Mann, the author of the novel and the son of Thomas Mann, who set the leitmotif of the reinterpretation of Faust from the perspective of the fateful events in Germany of those years. His father will later develop the theme in the monumental “Doctor Faustus”, but that’s another story altogether.
The hero of Klaus Mann and István Szabo is far from the grandiose theoretical constructions of the emergent Zeitblom. Not close to him and the style of the genius reclusive Leverkün. Hendrik Hofgen is a theater actor, like Klaus Kinsky. Equally unstoppable in his expressive impulses, he is obsessive and unrestrained. Unbeknownst to fatigue, his rebellious spirit constantly demands the continuation of the carnival. But at the same time, deep down, he is painful, almost defenseless. Deeply experiencing failures on a small stage in his native town, he decides to try his hand in Berlin.
Klaus Mann, describing Hofgen’s performance, writes that his performance was considered imperfect, but impressive. The actor’s affective manner really makes him a name – alternating images, he, in the end, finds himself in Mephistopheles, charming the ordinary public and the Nazi elite. But here is the paradox - the seducer on the stage, in life he is in the role of the seduced. And it's not so much about vanity. The complex triumvirate combines the facets of temptation—national pride, hypertrophied ego, and psychological self-actualization. The hero does not just manage the image of Mephistopheles, even his party patron called the most important for the German mentality. He personifies him, fully identifying with the role that he had secretly played before. In Mephistopheles, his phobias dissolve, his dreams of a “revolutionary theater” are realized. Only now, the boundaries of the theater are expanding, and Hofgen suddenly finds himself weaving diabolical intrigues on an international level. Thus, without leaving his native image for a minute, his already unstoppable temperament, fueled by an abyss of inspiration, makes Hagen for his fellow tribesmen a real personification of the era.
Goebbels then, Hollywood now, will not be allowed to lie - the cultural program plays a crucial role in awakening the mass national consciousness. This is not about suggestion or innate human cruelty - here for details contact Stanley Milgram. After all, it is one thing, the penultimate cog of the mechanism, pulling the trigger, and quite another – the centrifugal force accumulated from the depths of collective consciousness. Nothing is easier than killing a man when the act of killing is sanctioned from above. One sharp move - and ready.
From such rapid, impulsive movements, Hofgen’s shockingly spontaneous play is formed. To become her and the editing manner of "Mephisto" - the hero is so unstoppable that as if trying to get ahead of the development of the plot. So Hitler’s team took only 6 years to prepare the largest act of destruction of their kind in the history of the biological species of Homo sapiens. At such times, the fatum, embodied in tragic reality, always absorbs the individual, and, more impressively, even great art changes its role and serves as an accompaniment to the awakening spirit of ragnarok.
The corresponding epic pathos is maintained by Szabo through the suggestiveness of the figurative series, in which the expressionist theater of shadows comes to life. But the infernal center of which, of course, is the obsession with Hofgen, brilliantly played by the German Klaus Maria Brandauer. The psychological transformation of a person surrendering to the will of a personal and higher destiny, together with the timid attempts of consciousness to stop the process - all these nuances, worked out at the level of the script, were embodied by Brandauer without a hint of falsehood. The visual layer of Mephisto is also meticulously detailed. The color palette, then pressingly gray, then painfully bright, as if blurring - is it not from the proximity of hellish boilers?
"Mephisto" is a work of art, possibly summarizing attempts to determine the outcome of the war period and corresponding to the final stage of acceptance of traumatic experience. Without exploiting the horrors of death, it addresses the root causes. He also states the predestination of the catastrophe, making interesting conclusions about the human nature and essence of art, transformed by the spirit of time, supporting them with an exciting plot and a unique pictorial manner. It is a masterpiece for all time.
The iconographic representation of fascism is always “listen, look and be silent.” It doesn’t matter if you’re dancing in a nationally-socialized variety show in the ’40s in Berlin or if you’re watching the cancan from a monitor. Hendrik Hoefgen was chasing a confession that popped out of the snuffbox, and in the process took up curious arithmetic: the six disappeared. Wife, comrade, enemy, mistress, art, himself. In return, there is a blinding room with a swastika and six hundred new friends. And the shootings. Black skin. An open nation and a cannon of applause. In the end, there will be only an empty stone field, beaming rays from everywhere and agonizing symbolism at the maximum point. In eighty-first will be “Mephisto”, seven years later “Hanussen” will mark the end of the German trilogy of Istvan Szabo, and then the twenty-first century will appear in the arena with its information gluttony, dull omnivorousness and the beginning of the whistling on the bones. Memory is erased very quickly, people throw their knees out and build hotels on minefields, life rolls on. But in such (not) distant summers, Germany still revelled in pathetics, put an Aryan faithful "Hamlet" and polished hooves.
Mephisto is not Mephistopheles, because it is immense, inhuman and invariably attractive. In my own way. The collective consciousness of the German people, conformity at will and at will, spiritual search, the eternal “to be or not to be” and the inconspicuous evil of philistine nature – all this the Hungarian director put into his anti-totalitarian parable, and then crucified and left hanging in the air with a mute question. The main character is a gifted actor Hendrick, who suffers, tears his hair, sobs, hungers for fame and puts his strength on the altar of the new regime. And the regime, he is nearby, sliding a dark Shakespearean shadow along the walls of the provincial theater, smiling with the lips of the new prime minister and ominously minting words from radios. There was something about talent: ah, yes, because it is part of the power that wanted good, and it turned out, as always, only evil. It was also about illusions: talent wanted the impossible, eternal life on posters, in minds and a little in hearts, wanted to tempt, taste and throw away human souls, but he is only a small demon, a grain of sand, an ant - he is nobody, he is a simple man. But a person with a true devil cannot make friendship, as the Nazi leader will explain to him in paraphrase. It tramples, uses, disfigures you, a people whose nine circles of soul are so twisted that you do not understand who its spirit is - in Dr. Faust or the creator of Mein Kampf. He's ethnically many, and you're alone. Therefore, in thinking about people, the director puts a confident point, and the restless beast remains with nothing.
Every totalitarian begins with a retreat. He will push his mad mass, put sticks in the wheel of time, turn stagnation into fanaticism, throw off all the Old Believers, put new idols on each shelf and significantly spit into eternity. And corrupt. It will certainly corrupt the body, the soul, or all at once, so that later it will be easier to cast out the demons of the past. The film begins with a pastoral scene from a German opera, where we hear a tongue that is not barking yet, and see the most important thing - the eyes of the people in the audience. Everywhere they are: spiritual, happy, sad, tender, furious - alive. Each has its own and each has its own, but they are all united by something stronger than xenophobia. But the otherworldly force will prevail, and tears of delight will be replaced by a drunken anthem and a coven with a dozen mephistopheles dancing at a ball at Hendrick's house (and it's good that not Woland). Medieval people do not need much: occultism mixed with orthodoxy, less moralism and a piece of land from the feudal lord. There is only one depravity here, and it is in art. In the slender legs of dancers, covered with cheap stockings, in tasteless pompous statues of fresh heroes, in the ideology and oily eyes of the elite sitting in the national theater. Culture, on the other hand, is a fallen woman, a Fräulein of dubious skin color, who has been cut, stripped, and placed under the squeamish gaze of the new government. Hitler loved women with large breasts, and now a culture that is mother to the purebred race; lush, juicy, material for its carnal beauty and feeding a whole generation of identical Aryan boys in black shorts and girls with chignons of Slavic hair. For procreation, for the strengthening of faith, and further down the list. The Nazis did the impossible: for cheapness and racist indulgences, philosophical souls were deceived so much that literally everything remained vassals under the feudal lord.
But every great dictator is a little bit of an actor playing the life of a crowd, and finally watching his city burn down. Every great actor is always a bit of a loser, because sooner or later he burns out with the city and throws a metaphorical bullet into his temple. The whole life is one continuous theater, full of props. Only Szabo stressed the main difference: in reality, the storyline de facto demands certainty, kills all the prompters and dismisses all conformism. If you don’t play today, the theater will play you tomorrow. March clearly: ain-zwei-drii - and now you are sitting under the hood of the wretched present. Hoefgen himself, with his soft handshake and delicate complexion, is just another archetypal ambiguity, evasiveness of existence and adaptability, which, together with blunted eyes and a sweet smile in the face of the powerful, sometimes works witchcraft miracles. Or at least prolongs the life of the earth for an indefinite period - and we will later deal with the heavenly one, because someone already loudly conveys that Gott ist tot, without listening to the original to the end. No matter what century you are in, when people talk about Germany, it is better to keep silent: it is either dangerous or meaningless – everything has been said before you. Or maybe the story of one actor just says: don’t be silent. Maybe not. Hendrik and his friends still cooked a cauldron, evil spirits are preparing to scratch their heels with tridents, and lava boils.
Bull-bowl.
Hendrik Hofgen is a provincial actor with great talent and huge ambitions. He is not indifferent to the fate of his homeland and close people. He sympathizes with the Communists and makes theater for the workers. Then, with the help of patronage, he gets a place in the Berlin Theatre, where he already has to cooperate with the Nazis. But in fact, his whole life is on the other side of the ramp. Like any genius, he is completely devoted to his art, all he wants is to have the opportunity for self-realization, for the embodiment of creative ideas. He is obsessed with it, and that is his truth, his sublimity. The whole world is constantly pulling him — politicians, prime ministers, wars, parties, you are with us or you are with them — and Hendrick twists as much as he can, while still trying to save those close to him as possible. And when Hendrick’s family invites him to escape from the Third Reich, again pressing him from all sides with the question “are you with us or with them?”, no one understands that for Hendrick to escape means betraying the most important thing in his life – his art, his theater. And let his life be cut short at any moment, he will remain devoted to the cause of his life until the end.
One of the best movies I've seen about Nazi Germany, even though it's not about her or even about Faust and Mephistophile. This is a film about the fate of a creative person, a person of the right hemisphere, a person of art. This is a film about a man who has not sold his soul to the Nazis or the Communists, but has devoted his whole life to the theater, the only and main love of his life.
Why would a man want freedom? Does he need it? It is much easier to live, thinking that there are those who know better than you about how to behave. It is very easy to make one compromise after another, to do one little meanness after another, to drown out the voice of your conscience with a thunder of applause. When I see famous actors on TV lining up for a state award, I think about it. After all, they all say that they serve the arts or do charity work, that their charitable foundations save the lives of children. It doesn’t matter if the money is dirty and bloody. You can always justify your own lowness with higher goals.
The film Mephisto was filmed in 1981. In the same year, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay and the 1982 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This film tells the story of one talented but very vain actor named Hendrik Hevgen. This role was perfectly performed by Klaus Maria Brandauer. Hendrick is a pragmatic man, but infinitely false and false. You can’t tell if he’s good or bad. He's nothing. When he talks to someone, it seems that he is flattering and servile. He sympathized with communist ideas and wanted to create a theater for workers. But was he sincere, or was it one of his endless masks? Why did he need a working theater? Just for self-assertion. His communist beliefs did not prevent him from marrying Barbara Brückner, a liberal woman from high society. He plays righteous anger and seeks the dismissal from the theater of one of the actors, Hans Miklash, for his association with the National Socialists. But it was just one of his many masks.
Having received a place in the Berlin Theatre with the help of patronage, he quickly forgot about his working theater, and began to make a career in a new place. His high point was the role of Mephistopheles in Faust. His Mephistopheles is a black jester who tells unpleasant truths about people. They can put on any mask, stand on stilts, but still be what they really are, and nothing more.
In Germany, the National Socialists came to power. Barbara convinces her husband to emigrate before it's too late. She tells him that no matter how much he tries to isolate himself from life by Shakespeare or Goethe, he will still have to make his choice. To which he replied that he was a German, and that whatever happened, he must share the fate of his people. Can it exist in emigration? His place is here in Germany. Does that remind you of anything? Wasn't that what the Soviet writers said when they justified their collaboration with the communist regime? They could emigrate, but they didn’t want to. You just have to make a little compromise with your conscience and everything will be fine. In fact, you can negotiate with any authority. You just have to really want it.
Barbara and her father emigrate from Germany and begin to engage in antifascist activities. Hendrik is going to film in Hungary. He can become a non-returner and be reunited with his family. But he's returning to Germany. One of his acquaintances wrote him a letter in which she said that she had spoken about him with someone from the NSDAP leaders, and she was told that there were no obstacles to his return. Back in Germany, he played Mephistopheles again. But this is another Mephistopheles - a vicious and ruthless cynic, ready for any crime. This is exactly what the Nazis wanted. The Prime Minister himself is delighted with his performance! He's paying attention to Hendrick. He says that Mephistopheles lives in all of us, and that's wonderful. The role of Mephistopheles in world culture must be reconsidered. Hendrik becomes one of the leading German actors. It promotes the new German art.
The Prime Minister despises the intelligentsia and culture. At the word culture, he is ready to grab a gun. But he needs a rotten intelligentsia for propaganda purposes. Therefore, even cultural workers who are fond of the authorities should not forget their place. They're just clowns, and they don't always. Hans Miklash, an actor from Hamburg, had faithfully served the ideas of National Socialism, but became disillusioned with them when he saw what the government was doing to the people. He began to protest, for which he was immediately taken to the forest and killed. But before that, he came to Hendrick for support. But Hendrick sent him home. He didn’t want to ruin his relationship with the government. Take it easy. And when he was told that Miklash was in an accident, he willingly believed it.
The Prime Minister appoints Hendrik as head of all German theatres. Hendrick, without much hesitation, accepts the offer. His mulatto mistress, Juliet Martens, is to be killed as racially inferior, but Hendrick negotiates with the Prime Minister to expel her, saving her life.
Hövgen travels to Paris, where he is to make another propaganda of Nazi values. There he meets his wife. There is a final explanation. Hendrick justifies his collaboration with the Nazis by allegedly helping the actors defend themselves against Nazi tyranny. But did he help many? Spouses are separated forever. Everyone stayed with their opinion. But before that, he's dating Juliet. She notices that there is no more fire in her eyes. They're dull and lifeless.
Mephistopheles turned out to be Faust and paid for the glory with his soul.
9 out of 10