not the motorcycle diaries

I went to see the Best-Foreign-Film-winning Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others on Sunday night, and it prompted some fast and furious obfuscating from me (whilst Johnny Guitarri tried to steer me unnoticed past the moist-eyed ladies in linen suits). It left me convinced that, when films deal with matters in modern western historical memory (colonisation, the Holocaust, the Stasi), they only succeed when they establish a bearable distance between The Present (the audience) and The Past (the foreign, finished thing that the audience spectates upon). This was particularly striking for a subject matter that is so recent - these Others who had their Lives monitored are my parents and grandparent’s age.

I’ve been contrasting it, in my mind, with Michael Hanecke’s Caché. The past is in the present, in Caché, and the question of complicity in the recent horrific past is raised and left open. The French colonial past is not over for Algerian orphan Majid; his bourgeois adoptive brother Georges is not completely free of complicity either - and nor, perhaps, is the audience.

Certainly, in my present, grey suits run a technocracy that adheres, slavishly, to a set of ideas based on a hierarchy of race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender and sexuality about how people should be governed and what their lives and deaths are worth. The Stasi were a most extreme face of governmental/regimental technologies that can and will be deployed by any state, and these days the technologies of surveillance, censorship, torture and incarceration-without-trial are being used across the liberal-democratic world. Suspected ‘terrorists’ in capitalist liberal democracies are treated in comparable ways to ‘enemies of the people’ in socialist totalitarian states.

These technologies are not the province of a pathological socialist regime, they are not the province of foreign men in black and white with subtitles, they are the province of anyone who wants to hold on to governmental power and especially when it is being questioned by those who don’t think that surveillance, censorship, torture and incarceration should be part of governance. But The Lives of Others suggested nothing of this; instead we are asked to swallow (like in La Vita é Bella/Life is Beautiful, another Best Foreign Film winner) a transcendant, redemptive humanity which is the exception to every nasty system created by evil non-humans. Can’t do it, even if it is just because I’ve been thinking/reading too much.