The kids ain't alright (and they have guns): student revolt in Antonioni and Bresson

Watching a lot of films from the late 60s and early 70s it's clear that something is going on, but it's equally clear that the directors don't really know what it is and are struggling desperately to work out what it is. Society is fragmenting, the youth are disaffected, they want something but nobody knows what. Both Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni were experienced directors with distinctive styles by the late 60s, and both attempted to turn their wise older eye on revolting youth.

Even before then, there was a long history of films and other media exporing juvenile delinquency: in literature the thread European Romantics like Goethe and Byron through stories of Russian nihilists in Turgenev and Dostoyevsky to Joyce's tales of disaffected young aesthetes. In the 1950s there were several American movies on similar themes. But Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause and Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life focused on rebellions against parents within the family: the former also described a crisis in American masculinity and the latter behind its melodramatic sheen considered the effect of racial discrimination on identity. Ray was popular with the French new wave, but youthful rebellion in Europe ran from the juvenile delinquents of Trouffaut's 400 Blows and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, to the young crooks and would-be gangsters of Godard's Breathless and Fassbinder's Love is Colder than Death, or by the 1970s the enigmatic anti-hero of Pasolini's Theorem bringing destruction and liberation in a ratio that was hard to calculate.

Throughout his career, Bresson often focused young heroes, from the new priest in Diary of a Country Priest to the existential anti-hero of Pickpocket and Au Hasard Bathazar with its young lovers up against juvenile delinquent on mopeds torturing the ass. His films typically have a simple message in Christian terms, about the redemptive value of suffering and the possibility of rebirth, but they develop richness from the conflict between Christian morality and conventional forms of life, which include secular morality: from the sensuous celebration of criminality in Pickpocket to the dissection of the Arthurian myth in Launcelot Du Lac. Bresson's work has always possessed a certain religious quality, a focus on finding a deeper, transcendental quality to human life, typically expressed through music. His characters may be heroes or villains, and they may find redemption through suffering or simply die.

Antonioni's films were initially attacks on the complacent materialism of upper strata of Italian society - the same people Fellini satirises. Early films like L'Avventura feature glamorous people being self-involved and lacking in any concern for others - or as in L'Avventura lacking an interest in others. Later, in Blow-Up he extended his critique to Swinging London where somebody might be murdered (it seems it might be a nasty, pathetic lover's tiff rather than anything political or symbolic, but it's not clear) and nobody really cares except the photographer-antihero who is too busy making representations of the crime to solve it. By the time of The Passenger, in which Jack Nicholson disappears once or twice in the desert, it seems Antonioni's main enemy is the audience, teased with confusing plots and ambiguous endings.

Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) brought Antonioni and legendary producer Carlo Ponti to the USA, where he collaborated with younger, more counter-cultural figures like playwright Sam Shepard (a co-writer) and for the soundtrack Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd. As Mark (Mark Frechette) flees from a campus shooting he had no involvement in, the plot takes us from university, a hotbed of radical intellectual debate, into wide empty spaces devoid of human life. As with many of Antonioni's movies, this is not a case of encounter with nature leading people to re-evaluate their lives and become better people, but more like an encounter with nature that reveals the irrelevance of human existence. On the run in the desert, Mark meets Daria (Daria Halprin); they visit the titular landmark, a lunar landscape in the badlands of Death Valley National Park, western California, where they have sex in a hallucinatory scene. They separate and he returns home to a symbolic ending in a flower-painted plane. She expresses something we don't have direct access to by getting wet, and watches or imagines her boss's trendy modern house exploding. For a while it fits in the contemporary series of drug-like or dreamlike road movies like Easy Rider, Vanishing Point and Two Lane Blacktop, despite its lack of interest in travelling. There is no pretence here that you will get anywhere, whereas the characters in Easy Rider at least seem to believe in a kind of utopia even if they can't reach it on America's roads.

Bresson's The Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement, 1977) also focuses on students toying with protest and violence, with the addition of sex and drugs. The central character, Charles (Antoine Monnier) explores politics, religion, psychoanalysis, and drugs, while struggling to choose between two women; the first scenes of the movie reveal that he will commit suicide. In contrast to Zabriskie Point, which soon leaves behind its campus debate, Bresson shows us a world of constant discussion and a desire for assimilation of information. Characters watch footage of environmental damage (oil spills, sea clubbing) and visit a logging site. There are meetings in which people are interrogated about politics and religion; Charles is interrogated by police and a psychoanalyst; in one outstanding central theme, people on a bus debate the source of the evil around them, blaming not the youth of today but the devil. All the other scenes of debate seem more interested in presenting the image of debating than propounding real ideas, it's not certain this explanation is meant to be serious. But religion is not far away: another scene shows Charles briefly finding tranquility in a church, record player at his side.

In this sort of film the leads are always glamorous, and that's true both for Antonioni, who has a long history of glamorous actors, and Bresson, whose films often show a wide range of interesting faces but who likes to have good-looking leads. Bresson employed a special acting style, whether working with amateurs or professionals, which avoids emotion and makes all characters look blank, shallow, parrotting lines written by the screenwriter, and in The Devil, Probably his beautiful, stylish cast give the impression of bored models speaking words they have no connection to. This is accentuated by the faded palate of the film, the often glamorous interiors, and pastoral interludes such as a bathing trip to a cadmium-polluted river comically interrupted by policemen. Antonioni gives his lead characters the same name as the actors; this also gives the sense that we are watching something less than a performance.

Ultimately in both films, what lasts is the mood. Zabriskie Point, if you can get past the longueurs, is a bleak fatalistic world where destruction is the only thing that means anything. The Devil, Probably is equally depressing, also ending with the death of a lead character, while it offers glimpses of hope, indicated as so often in Bresson through classical music. Another comparison can be made with Lindsay Anderson's If...: more youth in revolt (schoolchildren this time), more guns (lots more guns). Again, youth rebellion is largely aestheticised, as in the early scene where boys returning from holiday post up pictures of black African soldiers. No film has any idea of what people are rebelling against. All three suggest it might have something to do with sex (Charles' romantic triangle; Antonioni's scenes of desert copulation; Anderson's excursion to a diner where his hero meets a young waitress). Bresson suggests it might have something to do with the Devil, but that is even less credible. Doubtless this aestheticisation reflects the approach of its heroes, but it shuts off the prospect of real solutions, just as it does for the characters.

What matters, when you are young and miserable, is lying around and feeling morose. The blank-faced casts add to this: the film doesn't show us emotion through their performance, it immerses us in experience. These filmmakers know the power of music, the telling image and even a little wry humour to communicate information without long speeches of "What I Feel". Zabriskie Point is about the cutting off of physical escape, while The Devil, Probably cuts off any intellectual get-outs: the comically inept psychoanalyst who Charles visits has a drawer full of money, assumes Charles is talking about fees nothing deeper, and even suggests how to successfully commit suicide. Both films end with a bang. The achievement of the best portrayals of juvenile delinquency is not the positing of social causes, or still less the offering of solution; it is the description of how it feels to be hopeless, to look at the world clear-sightedly and see only death, destruction, the devil.

Banality

For 40 years Margarethe von Trotta has been making films about recent German history and contemporary Germany. Although not as well known as fellow New German Cinema directors Rainer Maria Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, films such as The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The German Sisters (aka Marianne & Juliane, Die bleierne Zeit) tracked the troubled story of Germany in the 1970s and its wider attempts to come to terms with its past.

Her latest film is Hannah Arendt, a biopic of the philosopher who left Germany in the 1930s, eventually settling in the USA and becoming a successful academic known for her analyses of fascism. The film takes a similar format to Bennett Miller's Capote, structured around a famous writer undertaking a particular reporting assignment, but in this case Arendt is investigating not the murderers Hickock and Smith but German wartime bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, who played a key logistical role in the concentration camp system and Holocaust. The film begins in sinister fashion with Eichmann's kidnapping by Israeli agents, and the film explores the moral complexities and wider political function of his trial. Is it really possible to put one man on trial for murders perpetrated by a state, or is it primarily a show trial designed to lecture young Israeli Jews about their past?

In particular, two issues raised by Arendt cause controversy. The first is Arendt's claim that Eichmann's evil lay in a mindless bureaucratic obedience, a desire above all to do his duty and get the trains running on time even if they were running to the concentration camp, rather than any innate hatred of the Jews. This criticism is based on two questions that are simple to pose if not answer, one philosophical and the other historical: whether quiet bureaucratic wrongdoing is worse than more overt evil; and whether Eichmann himself was motivated by bureaucratic ideals or actual anti-semitism and other hatreds. Arendt seems to associate evil with what French existentialism would call mauvaise foi, action without considering the consequences of your deeds.

The second controversy is more complex, because it does not relate to questions of fact or interpretation. is the question of Jewish leaders' complicity with the Nazis at the time of the Holocaust, which Arendt alleges made it easier for the Germans to exterminate Europe's Jews. This is seen as victim blaming (as much a controversial issue today as in Israel in the 1960s). Arendt suggests they leaders may have found a form of resistance somewhere between passive obedience and active rebellion. However, this is not clearly fleshed out in the film: a little testimony is shown from the trial, and Arendt speaks about it only in general terms.

She suggested the Holocaust could have been better, slightly less damaging to the Jews. This of course also implies that the Holocaust could be worst. It removes the Holocaust from its status of unique event and places it in a continuum of possible holocausts of different qualities. Clearly it is true that certain Jews could have done more to save themselves or other people from Nazism, though often they had legitimate reasons for not helping (uncertainty about how bad things would get; the dangers of breaking the law and risking one's own life to help another; worries about unforeseen consequences), but it is not clear that this has any relevance to Eichmann and his trial.

Although Arendt's actions are questioned in von Trotta's movie, she is the clear heroine of the day. Other characters exist in relation to her, including her loving husband, to her friend the writer Mary McCarthy. The film has been criticised by Michelle Dean for presenting McCarthy as a dim-witted figure interested only in stereotypically female trivia (New Yorker). Arendt is criticised by others for her cynicism and lack of humanity, but this is celebrated in the film as a desire to get to the truth.

Hovering behind all this is Arendt's relationship with her mentor the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, a figure of hatred to some Jews for his vague endorsement of Nazism, but a major influence on Arendt's thought and possibly her lover, certainly a great love of hers. Drawing on Heidegger, Arendt emphasises the importance of thinking, of mindful engagement with the world. But this is a very vague concept to base any philosophical system upon (did Hitler not spent quite a bit of time thinking, particularly in his prison cell? How is his thinking different from that Arendt? Or from that of Heidegger, who even if he didn't embrace Nazism was certainly prepared to superficially embrace its systems and institutions? Was he practicing some form of subtle resistance? Is there any evidence for that?) The main impression given is of the enormous distance from pre-war Germany with its strange mustaches and shy young Hannah and the cynical,
hyper-intelligent older Arendt. Perhaps she has greater sympathy for Eichmann because of her relationship with Heidegger? But are the cases remotely similar, especially as almost everyone, even the most liberal Jews, seem to believe that despite the imperfections of his kidnap and trial Eichmann deserves to die?

Centrally, there is Arendt's claim that Eichmann's evil is the greater or worse because it is unthinking, unmotivated, bureaucratic. Ironically, by the show trial format, Israel seemed to be promoting Eichmann as uniquely or archetypally evil. But his form of passive evil cannot exist without active evil. Again, ironically from a filmmaking point of view, the active evil of for example Amon Goeth in Schindler's List is much more cinematic than Eichmann's passive evil - which is only really demonstrated in an emotional way when the possibility of Eichmann arranging Arendt's death during the war is mentioned (Goeth is intrinsically wicked, but Eichmann's evil is only manifest in its consequences).

As a piece of filmmaking, some critics have found it a little boring or even banal. Mark Lilla notes that while the film features Arendt's claims about the importance of thinking, a film cannot easily show her actually thinking (NY Review). The film unsurprisingly has a lot of expository and didactic elements, as it explains Arendt's personal history and ideas, but it arranges them well within her daily life, from debates within her social circle to an impromptu Q&A with her students about her wartime experience.

It does however offer a strong portrayal of Arendt's contemporary intellectual life in the USA and in Israel, the passionate debates within her social circle, and her ability to generally separate intellectual disagreement from personal affection. Also, there is an affectionate portrayal of her husband Kurt, the two of them still very much in love despite their foibles.

Where possible, von Trotta inserts moments of drama: a scene where Arendt is approached by sinister Israeli intelligence figures could be out of Homeland, though it's alleviated by a touch of humanity. Everybody's point of view is given respect; even the anonymous figures who send Arendt vicious obscene hate mail are acknowledged for the hurt they have suffered. This is only fitting for a film whose main theme is the virtue of continually questioning received narratives.