As part of an ongoing effort to bring lesser known films to light, The Projector, in conjunction with The Dark of the Matinée, introduces a new feature entitled Being There.
Several films set in the aftermath of WWII feature the natural landscape as mise en scčne, an idea that has its foundation in Rosselini’s neorealist visions in Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero, their grainy portraiture depicting hopelessness and loss in tragic, human form, engendering sympathy for the innocent and vanquished, in much the same manner De Sica does with his neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief.
As equally complicated artistically are the films that capture the difficulty of international resistance, notably Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, in which Alain Delon plays an apolitical art merchant who finds himself betrayed in a case of mistaken identity. Identity figures centrally in other WWII dramas and mysteries, wherein primary characters believe themselves immune to the political drama unfolding around them, such as Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and William Holden in George Seaton’s The Counterfeit Traitor.
In these films, the central character finds himself torn between two selves, and its the duality that tests his will throughout the film, resulting in a dichotomous relationship between the physical and the metaphysical realm in which authority renders self-identification meaningless. For Delon and Welles, it means their roles are those of fugitives from themselves, whereas Holden as Eric Erickson is imprisoned by his position as a wealthy American expatriate, an industrialist who’s being manipulated by Allied intelligence to break Hitler’s oil supply. It’s Erickson who is pressed into service as an agent for trading oil with the Nazis; as a neutral Swede he is free to do so, but clearly not without consequences. Instead of allowing him an easy release from the blacklist, the Allied agents insist that he use his status and seeming Nazi sympathies to their advantage, providing them access to the highest echelons of the Nazi administration, including the location of refineries and infrastructure, as well as the research and development of weapons that could win the war for fascism.
Holden’s performance is one of tortured, quiet anguish. Unable to reveal his intentions to his closest friends and wife, he finds himself alone, a convention of the genre. Unlike Mr. Klein, who leads a life of denial and despair, or Harry Lime’s psychosis as a lesson on how to disappear completely, imperfectly estranged from his own lived reality, yet unable to assume a new identity, Holden is present to all those in his life and must find ways to vacillate between his agnosticism on free markets and morality and his determination to maintain his dogged loyalty to his German friends, who like him, find themselves complicit in the machinations of Realpolitik. Like the torturer in Kafka’s penal colony, Erickson’s epiphany costs him dearly, and understanding the horror of war requires risking everything to be human.
Since many cultural critics mark the end of World War II and the start of the nuclear era as the locus of the post modern turn, it’s interesting to find that the themes of these films are so quintessentially modern - found in the struggles of individuals against the political and economic imperatives that dictate their living conditions, regardless of their class position. In fact, it is that these films cast their protagonists as ciphers insulated by virtue of money and mobility, only to resort to their basest instincts in an effort to survive, to say nothing of any attempt to preserve their status. Stripped of those luxuries, they find themselves pitted against the classic modern struggle of man against man, and a test of their Being against the nihilistic Void.
For a major studio film, The Counterfeit Traitor has its subtle moments. As Erickson’s transformation from disinterested capitalist to encumbered fugitive is completed, the film trends toward themes of collective action, including a short-lived strike at a Polish labor camp to a Danish bicycle blockade in the Copenhagen streets. Finally, Erickson learns his fortune when a sickly Jewish refugee (played by Klaus Kinski) dies to spare the life of his fellow man. The poignancy and quiet dignity with which the film concludes is a virtuous display of humanism. As we find ourselves today in an era dominated by free market doctrine, genocide, and the conglomerate strength of the global power elite, one would hope that the liberal capitalists like Soros and others would make a similar sacrifice that extends beyond policy critique.