This week, “Phoenix,” Christian Petzold‘s noirish investigation into identity, loyalty and guilt in immediate post-war Germany, arrives in cinemas (our rave review from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival can be found here). It’s a heady, beautifully shot and deeply mysterious story, but perhaps more than anything, it’s about the unknowability of a person’s heart and the deceptiveness of appearances. These are particularly resonant themes given the film’s fascinating setting in place and period: within this richly evocative environment, people become more than characters in interpersonal dramas — they become metaphors for Germany’s guilt, shame or resentment about the recent Nazi past or symbols of the desire to simply forget.
For anyone interested in the points at which the history of film irrevocably intersects with world history, World War II marks an abrupt caesura, a before-and-after moment in time that fundamentally remade the world, as well as cinema. The films of and about the war itself are a category unto themselves, but the films that came just after 1945 or that deal with that immediate post-war era are perhaps even more vital and fascinating. The certainties of war-as-it-is-being-waged and the life-and-death struggles that dwarf all other considerations into unimportance are gone. Here instead is the long, long hangover from the costliest conflict in human history, and the sudden dreadful knowledge that as the dust settled, everyone had to reckon with their own part in it, no matter which side they’d been on, or however much they’d fought or lost.
READ MORE: 10 Great Lesser-Seen World War Two Movies
It was a period that forged some of the most important, influential cinematic movements of the twentieth century, and which saw some of the greatest directors of all time produce extraordinary work. So to celebrate the release of “Phoenix,” and taking our cue from the film in terms of time period (the years just after 1945, before the Cold War had really begun to take hold) and in terms of the experiences of countries on the losing side — Germany, Italy, Austria, Japan — we’ve compiled this selection of related movies. Out of the many, many more that exist, here are 15 films that deal, overtly or tacitly, with the legacy of guilt and destruction left in the immediate aftermath of the most devastating war in human history.
“The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979)
Locating one of his most classical and accessible melodramas in the post-war years (actually three of them: ‘Maria Braun’ was the first in a thematic trilogy of films set in the new Bundesrepublik Deutschland which conceived Germany as a desirable yet morally ambiguous woman, both manipulator and manipulatee), Rainer Werner Fassbinder found a perfect melding of seedy content, lurid style and a desperate, dramatic setting in this film. His trademark shopworn lushness comes through in the ruined buildings and tatty train compartments, amid which Maria (Hanna Schygulla) preens and pouts in hats and heels and scarlet lipstick. It’s the contorted story of a Berlin woman who eventually gives her soldier husband up for dead, and embarks on a series of affairs for which the promise of good food, fine clothes, money and sex are overt, unapologetic justifications. When her beloved eventually does return alive and ends up going to prison for her, she continues this vacuous behavior in the name of building a life for them both, only for him to enter into a secret contract with her current lover that will keep them apart even longer. The film was an extremely troubled shoot, and like all of Fassbinder’s work, bears the hallmarks of intense (cocaine-based) hurry: little coverage; an amateur-dramatics feel to the acting at times; an artificial, sometimes tacky gloss in the images. But it also bursts with inventive filmmaking and commentary: on the warped post-war German spirit in which all interaction is merely transaction; on the untrustworthiness of behavior as an indicator of feeling; and on the impossibility of happiness in such an atmosphere of moral disaster. Even if the energy is synthetic and chemically induced, the erratic, splashy grandeur of ‘Maria Braun’ can’t be denied; it would become one of the basic gospel texts of New German Cinema.
