Images from Me and Mr. Marshall (top) and The Bridge (bottom).
“Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan” at the Walker Art Center, April 5 – 8.
Tonight, Part One, Out of the Ruins. Featuring: Hunger, It’s Up to You, Between East and West, The Bridge, Me and Mr. Marshall, Life and Death of a Cave City, and Houen Zo. Post-screening discussion by Sandra Schulberg, project director; and Dr. Eric D. Weitz, professor of history and director of the Center for German & European Studies; and Dr. Lisa Disch, professor of political science at the U.
For the next four nights, the Walker Art Center will be showing a collection of some of the most interesting and thought-provoking little movies you could hope to see. Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan are pretty much as the title suggests–these are propaganda shorts, shown at theaters in Germany and throughout Europe (and especially Germany) after WWII to help win the minds of the populace to the Marshall Plan.
Now, one might assume that propaganda films outside their context and without a discussion with prominent historians (which we get at the Walker) would be frightfully dull, that this is really no more than a series of movies leading to a lecture on history. This is far from the case, however: with the exception of Life and Death of a Cave City, the movies are fascinating. Hunger, with its Bernard Herrmann-like score, drives home the difficulty of post-war life, with horrific shots of children and the elderly scraping together enough food to keep from dying (or chewing on bark to hold hunger at arm’s length). This one did not sit well with the Germans who, according to a provocative City Pages review, shouted out that they were well fed under the Nazis. That’s winning the minds!
It’s Up to You asks the German people straight-up: are you going to walk back into the dark past or strut forward into a bright, democratic future? That is, are you going to go back to being Nazis or toe the line? “This,” the narrator bellows, “or that?” We see shots of happy children crossing the street in “this” and children being rushed screaming into basements to avoid bombs in “that”.
The Bridge was my personal favorite, corny though it is. Dually narrated by a soft-voiced German and then a tough guy Yank pilot, the film documents the Berlin airlift, which was no small feat. The German, who sounds like an American with a silly accent, tells us how the airlift feeds and powers Berlin and how grateful he is, while the Yank is learning more and more about those friendly Germans and no good Commies. There are some odd moments in this one, such as the exchange of a musical teddy-bear, culminating in two American pilots waltzing on the tarmac to the bear’s music.
Me and Mr. Marshall is narrated by another German, this one a “Marshall Man” or “Marshallite”, I can’t remember–suffice it to say he’s committed fully to the Marshall Plan. We see him digging coal out of the ground for Germany’s future, and, as with The Bridge, dissing the Communists.
Life and Death of a Cave City, the only color film, is as dull as those old Disney nature shows. But there are some shots, notably a man carrying a spray of multi-colored balloons against the blinding white buildings, that please the eye.
Houen Zo is the most beautiful of the movies, a “symphony of sounds” accompanying film of Rotterdamites (?) rebuilding their town. It’s like David Lynch without the madness–the noise of machinery, of broken buildings being put back together, men pulling in nets with a handful of fish, man wrestling with giant ropes and spinning mops, all in beautiful black and white cinematography. Gorgeous and hypnotizing.
Mostly, though, the films of the Marshall Plan are a night of self-reflection. I came away amazed at the level of forgiveness in these movies–after all, the friendly Germans in The Bridge and Me and Mr. Marshall were evil Nazis just a few years earlier. (Though this also begs the question as to whether or not we would ever have the same scenes with the Japanese; I have not-so-distant relatives back in Michigan who still refuse to buy Japanese cars but won’t hesitate to own German vehicles). And with It’s Up to You, we could ask ourselves some of the same questions: “This” or “That”? Although if you ever watch movies about the rise of Nazi Germany you really see that, no matter what we Bush-haters may believe, we are quite a ways from that here.
More intriguing to me is how quickly we were ready to fight in the years following the second World War. These films are not just about trying to convince a former enemy of the victor’s goodwill, but really, they are about creating a new Nazi, a new oppressor, in the Soviets. And how many wars have we fought since then? And how many peoples have we had to convince of our goodwill?
For the next few days, you could spend your time at home, watching whatever’s on the tube, or at the movies, with the newest Ice Age. Or you could go to the Walker and watch films that will never see the light of television, never find their way into a DVD, films with such beauty and meaning they’ll follow you for days.
