The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy a movie that takes place largely in a concentration camp. It’s based on the memoirs of Adolph Burger, who worked on Operation Bernhard, the Nazi plan to de-stabilize Britain by counterfeiting millions in Bank of England pound notes. The main character is Salomon Sorowitsch, a Russian born German Jew who is also the world’s greatest counterfeiter. When Sorowitsch is arrested for passing forgeries of the American dollar, he is sent to a concentration camp, where he trades on his by doing portraits of Nazi officers in exchange for food. Thus, the theme of survival versus collaboration is introduced.

Eventually Sorowitsch is transferred, along with other useful Jewish tradesmen, to Sachsenhausen, where they will work on Operation Bernhard, run by the  policeman-turned SS officer who had arrested Sorowitsch in the first place. This group is separated from the main population and given better food, their own Jewish doctor, and after the success of the Bank of England operation, a ping pong table. This last privilege is the most perverse -- an ironic symbol of Nazi depravity. As if these men, slave labor coping with the deaths of loved ones at the hands of the same captors who treat them marginally better, could be incentivized by such an offering. As they play, they hear the horrors afforded their fellow prisoners on the other side of a wall.

The rest of the film is a good combination of the prison, caper, and, as crass as it sounds, holocaust genres. You get an oblique sense of the horrors of the camps: One of the men comes across his dead wife's passport; another temporarily loses his mind when he's certain they will be gassed in the showers. Still, a certain cinematic artifice obtains. When the Nazis charge the men with replicating the dollar, the character of Burger (the memoirist and co-screenwriter) sabotages the effort because he believes its success will lead to a final Nazi victory. The commandant then chooses five men who will be killed if the group doesn't produce. In this situation, Burger  becomes a stand-in for the idealism of sacrifice in a cause worth dying for, Sorowitsch becomes an unlikely master at threading a moral needle, and the story  gives itself over to the dilemma: Do you participate in an evil cause in order to save yourself?

That's a timeless quandary played out on a smaller scale by all of us every day. But director Stefan Ruzowitzy tries to subdue the theatricality inherent in such a monumental question by shooting the film in semi-documentary style. The screen bristles with shaky hand held shots, quick cuts, tight close-ups, panicky zooms. To show a secret conversation between Sorowitsch and the commander, the camera zooms in from far away, giving an overt impression of spying on something forbidden. In addition to the problem of using anachronistic techniques in a work depicting an historical event, this sort of "you are there" style combines with the film's more classic elements to produce a confused tone. I mean, here we have an ostensibly real-life event occuring during the worst self-created catastrophe mankind has ever faced, but it's communicated to us through the filming of a screenplay based on the writing down of memories. So let's just take as a given that with each successive traduction, we travel further away from the original event's truth. Do we really need the overlay of fake documentary to titillate us into imagining "we are there"?

Issues surrounding memory and the Holocaust aside (way aside), I wonder at the recent over-use of documentary style in almost all forms of visual entertainment. Look around; it's everywhere. From Christopher Guest mockumentaries to "Battlestar Galactica" to  Cloverfield, we're constantly being told, "This is real!" Watch material even as seemingly non-conducive to cinema verite technique as the "John Adams" mini-series on HBO -- yep, there it is, too. When did faking "real" reality overtake the normal methods for creating stylized verisimilitude so enjoyable to consumers of make-believe for the past hundred years? My subjective view of the culture pegs the trend as gathering momentum with the release of This Is Spinal Tap. (But for earlier examples see Medium Cool, Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles's radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds.”) More recently we've seen the confounding of reality with fiction in the re-enacted scenes of Errol Morris documentaries, TV shows like "The Real World" and "Survivor," fake documentaries like “The Office,” and video clips of almost any Bush administration official expounding on Iraq. Whatever happened to the majesty of cinema? Meticulous blocking, obsessive framing? Swooping crane shots, Kubrickian tableaus? Certainly eminent practitioners of the cinematic arts still abound. (Scorsese and PT Anderson: two dazzlers who come to mind.) But as the proliferation of tools puts the means of visual production more and more in the hands of, well, anyone, I wonder: Will technique become sloppier and sloppier, so that quick-and-dirty, on-the-fly visual capturing becomes the norm, and we'll no longer be able to discern who’s a master of emulating amateurs, and who’s just an amateur? And will it be fucked up when we can no longer tell what was the original visual documentation of an event like that depicted in this film, and what's just a simulation of that record?

Linkateria:

• More Counterfeiters reviews
• Operation Bernhard
• The War of the Worlds - Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre scare the hell out of America