Kluge, Not Clooney: Two Movies to Watch Instead of "The Monuments Men"

When Matt Damon spoke at Harvard via Skype this February, he didn’t come as a repressed math genius or the talented Mr. Ripley, but rather as an American in WWII set on saving pieces of art from Nazi destruction. But the movie he was promoting, “The Monuments Men”,has been struggling to gain critical acclaim. Reviewers have complained that it tries to be Goldilocks, striking a balance between funny and serious, but ultimately comes across as inauthentic.“It’s been a bit of a dance,” director George Clooney told the online media news site TheWrap. “You don’t want to do a replica [of other films], you have to do a new version.”Part of his challenge, of course, is that “The Monuments Men” is joining a conversation that has already been going on for decades. From “Schindler’s List”to “Inglourious Basterds”, it’s easy to get the feeling that all we can say about the Nazis has already been said.

Clooney isn’t the only filmmaker who has had to contend with a constellation of blockbusters. In a very different context, German cinema after WWII had to face up to the mammoth propaganda productions of the Nazi regime itself. How was it possible to make honest movies about WWII when so much of postwar life was about forgetting and moving on?

It was in response to this national mood that Alexander Kluge’s “Brutality in Stone” appeared in 1961 at Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage, an Oberhausen film festival. Unlike earlier films, which projected simple messages of “never again,” this 12-minute short contains neither romantic heroes nor concentration camps. Instead, the viewer is confronted with over 200 spliced shots of former Nazi buildings, one after another: stairways, corners, walls ridden with bullet holes, windows shaped like arrow slits. Set against the rousing soundscape of SS mass rallies, the grand and brutal visions of the Third Reich suddenly come into sharp focus, refracted through the ruins of a failed dream.

Kluge did to Nazi history what Germans would later do to the Berlin Wall, breaking a fallen system into ever smaller shards. The emptiness audiences feel during Kluge’s film cannot easily be explained––nostalgia for the Third Reich is certainly not the way to put it––but it captures with painful clarity the kind of loss that a nation feels after a war. To compare an experimental German documentary with a 21st century-Hollywood comedy-drama seems a little unfair, but “Brutality in Stone” gives us the kind of searing honesty that “The Monuments Men” seems to miss.

Fast forward to 2009, when Quentin Tarantino's “Inglourious Basterds” hit the silver screen. By this point, “The Sound of Music,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “Schindler’s List” had already spent years at the top of the movie watch list. Where Kluge had to face the mammoth architectures of Nazi history, Tarantino had to film for an American mass market that was reeling, not from postwar trauma, but from an excess of good movies about Nazi history. Tense, witty, and utterly gory, his Jewish revenge fantasy plays nothing like “Brutality in Stone,” but it is still as much a historical investigation as it is a Hollywood blockbuster.

Like all Tarantino movies, “Inglourious Basterds” makes an absurd number of allusions to other films, making it impossible for the audience to fully immerse themselves in the world of Nazi Germany. Viewers are so constantly bombarded by the references to King Kong, Cinderella, and Scarface that they cannot forget that this is a film about film. It does almost everything it can within its limitations as a movie: it tells the tale of the persecuted Jew, it highlights American heroism and British ingenuity, it provides comic relief, it shoots Hitler in the face and then blows up all the Nazis. In its excess, it tells viewers outright: “I’ve already said everything there is to say about Nazi history.”

Tarantino is not responding to the legacy of WWII, but rather to its afterlife in movies. In making its limits as a film so obvious, the movie’s blatant fantasy suddenly becomes its most honest aspect. By making its historical inaccuracies so explicit, “Inglourious Basterds” reflects the film industry’s tendency to turn Nazi history into redemptive story telling.

The truth is, film can never be completely honest. Movies are meant to entertain us, to give us therapy, and to help us work through our most difficult histories, but because history cannot literally be repeated for the camera lens, they can never show us history as it really was. “Brutality in Stone”responds to the propaganda of the Third Reich by showing us its unadorned ruins. “Inglourious Basterds”takes on a whole canon of Hollywood blockbusters by mimicking them and taking them to their logical extremes. Unfortunately for Clooney, the greatest flaw of “The Monument’s Men” might just be that it’s five years late. In spinning yet another tale about American saviors rescuing civilization from the Nazis, Clooney steps on ground that has been trodden one too many times.