An essay, which appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, on Luis Trenker’s 1936 Der Kaiser von Kalifornien.

An essay, which appeared in Cineaste, on Helmut Käutner’s 1961 Schwarzer Kies.

The work of Michelangelo Antonioni was often criticized by those on the left, particularly during the 1960s, for its inward-looking focus on the seemingly petty problems of the bourgeoisie, on the ennui and torpor of society’s wealthiest rather than the concrete hardships facing its less privileged members. As the political and cultural tumult of the sixties raged on, however, Antonioni turned his camera directly toward the revolutionary fervor of the period with his eleventh feature, Zabriskie Point, released in 1970. In its look at American police brutality, racial injustice and social unrest, albeit of a half century ago, the film feels painfully relevant to America’s current cultural moment in the wake of the George Floyd murder and similar killings. 

At the center of the film are two twentysomething members of the sixties’ counterculture, Mark and Daria. Mark is a college student in Los Angeles who, early in the film, attempts to shoot a police officer during a student protest after the officer shoots down a young, black protestor in a tense, murky encounter. Mark, having been identified by the police and media as the shooter, steals a small plane at a local airport and literally takes “flight” eastward into the desert. There he encounters Daria, who is driving from Los Angeles to a business meeting near Phoenix where her employer (and possibly lover) Lee Allen awaits. Mark and Daria explore Zabriskie Point, a striking expanse of desert in Death Valley, where they eventually make love before parting. Mark flies the stolen plane back to Los Angeles, where he is killed in an unprovoked barrage of police gunfire. Daria, saddened by the news of Mark’s death, finally arrives at the modernist desert mansion where her employer’s meeting is taking place. Rather than settle into the room set aside for her, however, she abruptly decides to leave the house. From the road below, Daria looks upward back at the mansion as we watch it repeatedly explode in a lengthy and radical sequence that concludes the film.

While Zabriskie Point’s interest in leftist politics and social injustice might seem at odds with the themes of Antonioni’s prior films, notably his famous trilogy La Notte, L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, it is actually an extension of some of his earliest cinematic concerns. His very first films were two neorealist shorts, People of the Po Valley (1947) and Department of Sanitation (1948), which documented the hardships and poverty of Italy’s working class. Both made use of on-site shooting and featured actual members of the working class in place of professional actors, a practice to which he would eventually return some twenty years later in Zabriskie Point. Even in his later films focusing on the lives of the bourgeoisie, social and political issues are always present, even if they are often relegated to the periphery. 

Perhaps the most obvious precedent for Zabriskie Point’s interest in radical politics is Antonioni’s second feature, The Vanquished (1953). Although Italian censors forced a major overhaul of the film after its initial screening in Venice, the original version featured as its centerpiece the story of the young Marxist Claudio, reminiscent of Mark, who bombs a factory in the name of workers’ rights and inadvertently kills some workers in the process. Although the film’s opening sequence begins with a voiceover added by censors condemning Claudio and other violent youths as merely self-centered and wicked, the footage that accompanies it—riot police beating peaceful protestors agitating for causes like women’s admission to universities—runs counter to the simple, black-and-white moralizing of the narration. Similarly, when Claudio, now a cigarette smuggler in the bowdlerized version of the film, attempts to flee the police, they wantonly open fire on him, much like the police who will kill Mark toward the end of Zabriskie Point. The film even features a shot of an aircraft flying dangerously close to the heads of some characters who must suddenly duck, a shot expanded upon in Zabriskie Point when Mark repeatedly flies his plane dangerously close to Daria. With Zabriskie Point, Antonioni was finally able to reprise much of The Vanquished without having to worry about the censors. 

Anchoring Zabriskie Point’s narrative of radical politics is its opening scene, a Black Panther-led meeting of students planning a strike on a Los Angeles campus. Returning to his neorealist roots, Antonioni used actual Black Panthers and college students instead of professional actors. Much of their discussion revolves around the urgency of taking action for black Americans suffering from police brutality and economic injustice, and the contrasting lack of urgency felt by many white students. When someone asks what can be done to politically activate more whites, the leader of the meeting, Black Panther activist Kathleen Cleaver (whose husband at the time had fled to Algeria after a shootout with the police that led to an attempted murder charge), optimistically declares that many white Americans only need time to be activated. 

While Mark (who is white) appears all-too ready to take action for the cause, Daria is one of those whites with whom students at the meeting are frustrated. When she tells Mark that she heard a cop was killed in LA, she is quick to point out that she isn’t really interested in politics and only inadvertently heard the news while surfing the radio to find a rock station. Daria later tells Mark she wishes she could have only happy memories and that “nothing’s terrible!” When she smokes weed in the desert, Mark declines to join her, noting that he and his group of politically active friends are on a “reality trip” rather than a drug trip. Although much of this dialogue is jestful, it underscores the chasm between Mark’s apparent commitment to revolutionary action and Daria’s more hedonistic, escapist lifestyle. 

As in many Antonioni films, the romantic encounter in the countryside at the heart of Zabriskie Point sets in motion a change in at least one of its protagonists. Although Mark leaves Daria behind in the desert, he has planted the seeds of a burgeoning political awakening in her during their brief encounter with his talk of embracing the “reality” of injustice and using whatever means necessary to fight it. Whereas before meeting Mark she only listened to music stations, after he leaves we see her repeatedly listening to the news. Similarly, Daria’s decision to leave her boss’s meeting behind and her final vision of the meeting house exploding can be read as the expression of this new political awakening, seemingly validating Cleaver’s declaration that white Americans will be politically activated given time.

That Daria has reached a new level of understanding is underscored by the cinematography of the final sequence. When she first arrives at the meeting, we are never presented with an establishing shot of the mansion. It is only when she decides to leave and views the house from the road below that we, and by extension the newly-awakened Daria, are able to finally take in the full scope and meaning of this building, which is nothing less than everything that is ill in American culture. It is a realization that the entire film has been preparing us for. 

Daria’s boss, Lee Allen, is a wealthy developer who throughout the film is selling a new desert development, presumably not far from the mansion where the final meeting to pitch the project takes place. It is not clear if she and Lee are having a romantic relationship, but it is clear that Lee’s firm does not subscribe to a vision of liberated and empowered women. A television ad for the new development reassures women that its homes will contain “plenty of space for cooking for junior and that man of the house” and depicts mannequin women spending their days relaxing by the poolside. During the meeting at the mansion, Daria stumbles upon a group of cookie-cutter women remarkably like the ones in the commercial, lounging by the pool and gossiping while their men conduct business inside. This patriarchal vision of America starkly contrasts with the opening scene of the film, where the revolutionary students applaud a woman for telling one of the male students to “make your own coffee.” This ethos is also echoed by a Roscoe Holcomb song Daria listens to while driving to the meeting, “Single Girl,” which warns of the dangers exploitative men and married life pose for women. In rejecting Lee and the stultifying, patriarchal culture to which he belongs, Daria avoids the fate of other Antonioni heroines who languish idly at home while their husbands take a more active role in the world. 

If abandoning, and indeed blowing up, the house represents a rejection of “the house” as a woman’s proper place, it also represents a negation of everything else for which Lee and his company stand. As in L’Avventura, which opens with a man examining a new development while lamenting the overdevelopment of Rome (“soon there’ll be nowhere left to run,” he sighs), Lee and his fellow developers appear to unleash all sorts of harm in Zabriskie Point. Their desert development, where they’ll be “blasting the rock slopes,” threatens to despoil the untouched beauty of the land as we see it captured in the film. The point is driven home when a tourist viewing Zabriskie Point tells his wife someone should build a drive-in on the preserved site since “they’d make a mint.” 

The heavy smog we see over LA when Mark takes to the skies, not to mention the “official smog inspection” sign he stands by before taking off, suggest that profit-driven overdevelopment has urban as well as rural consequences. Indeed, we also see LA’s burgeoning freeways from Mark’s aerial vantage, hearkening back to a scene in which Lee and his business partner, driving through LA, discuss how many centimillionaires California has compared to New York and Texas while ignoring the radio’s discussion of the 50,000 people, homes and businesses newly displaced by the recent construction of a freeway. That the urban communities displaced by the building of highways across America—highways in service of the development of white suburbs—were largely lower income and of color is not a fact the film shies away from. In the scene immediately before we learn about the development Lee is selling, Mark and his roommate visit a gun store where the owner only agrees to sell them guns, bypassing a legally mandated waiting period, after they tell him that they “live in a borderline neighborhood” and need to “protect their women.” The owner then eagerly sells them weapons, warning them to drag any dead (presumably black) people they shoot in the backyard into their house to ensure they’re legally indemnified. The film then immediately cuts to Lee’s office, where an ad for their development attempts to sell wealthy white people on a life away from “that miserable, crowded city,” thereby fully linking both the racist source and deleterious effects of white flight to Lee’s own work. 

Black Americans are not the only marginalized people seemingly at odds with Lee’s work. Daria’s decision to abandon Lee and her subsequent vision of the meeting house exploding, while set into motion by her encounter with Mark, is most immediately triggered by an encounter with a Native American housekeeper. Running into the woman in a narrow passage, Daria—unlike the many characters who scarcely pay any attention or merely condescend to domestic workers in Antonioni’s other films—stares intently into her face before fleeing the house. Daria’s affinity for the Native American woman is emphasized by the Native American-style belt she herself wears throughout the film, and fully seeing the reality of the Native American’s subordinate position—when Lee is turning a profit on what is actually her people’s land—brings Daria’s political awakening to fruition. As if to underscore the point, in the mansion the developers are repeatedly framed against walls full of firearms, emphasizing the legacy of white violence against native populations that secured this land for them (a reprise of the gun-filled apartment walls of Marta, a racist English colonist in L’Eclisse). Similarly, Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s only American film, repeatedly plays with the Western genre (Mark and his roommate buy their guns at a “Western” gun shop, Daria visits a lone-town Western bar where she meets the Western actor Paul Fix, much of the film is shot in the Western desert, etc.), historically extremely racist in its portrayal of Native Americans as mere “savages.” With Daria’s realization of the Native American’s full humanity, then, the film itself also inverts the Western’s traditionally racist mode of representation. 

If Zabriskie Point ends on a note of political optimism, however, it is a decidedly cautious one. The explosion is presented as a hallucinatory vision: we first see the explosion at the same time as we impossibly hear a developer still speaking inside the house, alerting us that we have left behind realism. The film then cuts to Daria crying in her car and fondly stroking the red shirt Mark gave her, which unpromisingly reads “Member Championship Sleeping Team.” Daria then exits the car and turns toward the house before the film cuts to a bravura POV shot, from Daria’s perspective, of the house repeatedly exploding in flames for over five minutes to the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd. When the explosion is over, we see Daria smiling in the sunset before driving off, without any indication that the house was actually destroyed. Although her vision has an undeniable political charge to it, it is at present no more than a daydream or psychedelic vision, calling to mind her earlier tendency to retreat into the irreality of drugs rather than the “reality” Mark by contrast espouses. 

The explosion, although merely hallucinatory, also represents an incredibly destructive force. Just as the Marxist youth in the original version of The Vanquished inadvertently killed the very workers he was trying to aid in blowing up a factory, presumably Daria’s massive blast kills not only Lee and his partners, but also their wives and the Native American housekeepers that moved her to action in the first place. The house itself, even though it is so clearly tied to the ills of Western capitalist culture, is also a strikingly beautiful work of modern architecture that most immediately recalls the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, further rendering its destruction a particularly coarse gesture.

The act of “blowing up” the house is also a sort of visual pun that evokes Antonioni’s immediately prior film, Blow-Up. The connection between Daria’s explosive vision and this earlier film, however, is much deeper than the pun might initially suggest. The “blowing up” of the prior film refers to the English protagonist Thomas, a young, callous and egotistical photographer, enlarging a photograph he took that thereby reveals evidence of a murder. Whereas Thomas’ discovery offers him an opportunity to escape from his solipsistic existence and exercise his civic duty, he instead refuses to alert the police and tries to exploit his finding for his own artistic and personal, rather than public, benefit. His publisher, who is simply too stoned to care about the killing, fares little better than Thomas as a model citizen. The film ends with a group of Swinging Sixties youth playing an imaginary game of tennis, once again underscoring the disjunct between youthful absorption and the real world (in an earlier scene, the same group runs cheerfully around London while oblivious to a nearby group of downtrodden men leaving a homeless shelter). Thomas and his peers in many ways recall Mark, who more often seems fundamentally motivated by personal rather than political ends (despite what he professes to the contrary), but Thomas’ absorption in “blowing up” the images also clearly connects him to Daria. Whether or not Daria will move beyond the thrilling spectacle she has created for herself to the real, outwardly political and public action that Thomas cannot take is a question the film leaves unresolved. Both films, however, suggest the danger of becoming absorbed in images and spectacle while the urgent dictates of reality take a back seat—a warning that resonates strongly in our own politically turbulent and media-saturated present.

As Terrence Malick’s first feature Badlands (1973) comes to a close, its protagonist (played by Martin Sheen) has been arrested for his spree of killings and is being extradited back to South Dakota. The final, magisterial shot depicts the heavens as seen from the perspective of the plane taking him there. Some forty-six years later, A Hidden Life, Malick’s newest film, opens with a resumption of this same vantage. This time, however, the majesty of the original strikes us as pared down. The wide, richly-colored canvas of Badlands has been narrowed and drained of color. We are viewing the opening to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), that supreme work of Nazi propaganda, wherein Hitler descends from the clouds onto his annual rally in Nuremburg. If Riefenstahl’s film was intent on selling Hitler to its viewers, Malick’s is devoted to commemorating the life of one of his victims, Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter.

The true story is a relatively straightforward one. Franz, played by German actor August Diehl, lives in the Austrian Alps with his wife Fani (played by Austrian Valerie Pachner), three little daughters, widowed mother and Fani’s sister Resie (Maria Simon). Their pastoral existence is quickly encroached upon by Hitler’s rise. While the Nazis idealized farming and rural living as the sacred domain of all things properly German (note the glorified peasant farmers marching in the film’s Triumph of the Will excerpt), Franz does not fit their “Blood and Soil” mold. His mountains are not those of Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain films, not the bastions of German nationalism the Nazis made them out to be. A devout Christian and man of principle, Franz does not hide his opposition to Hitler and consequently suffers, along with his family, increasing ostracization from his small community. The decisive moment comes when he is called up for military service and must swear a vow of allegiance to Hitler. Refusing the vow, despite being repeatedly warned from the beginning of the film that to do so will surely mean death, he is imprisoned and tortured at length before finally being executed. Franz, his family and the audience watch and wait in agony throughout the film’s almost three hours as this terrifying and near-certain finality draws ever closer. 

Although work on the film began before the election of Donald Trump, it is hard to view A Hidden Life without seeing in it a warning to our own historical moment, with its rise of xenophobia, authoritarianism and illiberal democracy (“Blood and Soil” was itself chanted at Charlottesville in 2017). The film is similar in this respect to Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), a work that merges historical fascism with our own perilous present. (Transit’s lead actor, Franz Rogowski, also stars in A Hidden Life, delivering a masterful performance as Waldland, another victim of Hitler’s regime who becomes a close friend to Franz.) If Leni Riefenstahl used cinema to bring a narrow, fascist vision to the masses, Malick’s film is an earnest attempt to show us something wider, more colorful, more fundamentally compelling. When Franz is forced to view a Nazi propaganda film during military training, he looks away in disgust while those around him rally with enthusiasm. The stakes of culture, the film would seem to suggest, are high. Malick challenges us to reflect on these connections during a scene in which the local church painter speaks to Franz about their congregation. While the townsfolk like to think they would have been among the “good ones” if they could travel back to Christ’s time, he declares, in actuality they would “have murdered whom they now adore.” Would we have been as heroic as Franz? Are we being as heroic now? 

While the townsfolk enjoy seeing representations of “the comfortable Christ,” the painter tells Franz that someday he’ll paint “the true Christ.” Jägerstätter, who was declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church, incarnates Christ’s own suffering repeatedly throughout the film. Malick’s work, which has always had a numinous hue to it, is at its most explicitly Christian here. Religious art and music populate the film, which begins with an excerpt from Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt: a fitting introduction for a work that is itself an oratorio of sorts, similarly focused on dramatizing the sacred and saintly. Malick uses music frequently to conjoin Jägerstätter and Christ’s suffering: excerpts from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion describe the “bridegroom,” Christ, being slaughtered, Wojciech Kilar’s Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”) accompanies Franz’s final refusal to save himself from execution, and his execution sequence begins with Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, which itself weaves together Christ’s death with those of World War II victims. Characters quote from the Gospel of Matthew throughout the film, and the story of Franz—a man in his thirties who from the beginning knows he will soon be killed—parallels that of the Gospel in many ways.   

The film’s Christian framework also extends to the various women in Franz’s life, all of whom must repeatedly suffer and endure the persecution brought on by his choices. Over Franz and Fani’s bed hangs a painting of the Virgin Mary tending to the child Jesus, playing alongside his (symbolically sacrificial) lamb. When Fani visits various Nazi headquarters in an attempt to aid her imprisoned husband, we are repeatedly met with variations of this painting. As in Malick’s Song to Song (2017), in which a da Vinci drawing of the Virgin Mary appears in connection to Rooney Mara’s character (“Doesn’t she look like you?” says Patti Smith to a lovelorn Mara), the figure of Mary stands in for female loss and suffering. A Hidden Life is every bit as interested in tracing this female suffering as it is in following Franz’s own. As if to make the point, Fani writes to an imprisoned Franz about his “three little women,” aligning the film with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, another work about the trials wives and children must endure when men are absent during wartime. All of this is not surprising, given that most of Malick’s films have traced the travails women must undergo at the hands of distant (To the Wonder), absent (Song to Song) or deceased (The New World, Days of Heaven) male lovers and relatives. The film’s religious-tinged music—particularly Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, whose text conjoins Mary’s suffering over Christ’s death and the suffering of mothers who have lost children in the political violence of the twentieth century, and Arvo Pärt’s Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, which similarly evokes the prospect of female suffering over a lost son—further serves to accentuate the women’s hardship. 

Apart from its music, imagery and biblical allusions, A Hidden Life also operates as a Christian film in more subtle ways. The local painter—perhaps the closest any figure comes to a stand-in for fellow artist Malick—declares that “we create sympathy, not followers.” This is in keeping with Franz’s outlook, as he continually refuses to cast the first stone against his compatriots for their choices. When hauled before the chief Nazi magistrate, played by legendary German actor Bruno Ganz, Franz professes that he is not judging him nor anyone else. The film itself follows Franz’s lead, even briefly showing members of the Nazi bureaucracy in private moments of torment or doubt. After Franz leaves Ganz’s chambers, for instance, a troubled Ganz sits in the chair where Franz formerly sat, the same medium shot that framed Franz now framing Ganz. [This entire military tribunal sequence, as well as the final point-of-view execution scene, are both visually and narratively strongly evocative of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957).] In its relentless empathy for its characters, A Hidden Life calls to mind one of the central themes of Middlemarch, that other “study of provincial life” from which the film takes its name. 

In creating “sympathy, not followers,” Malick’s film avoids the simple dogmatism and moral pontificating that other works of religiously-infused cinema can often convey (take the first episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, for instance). While it venerates Jägerstätter, his righteous wife and family are left to wonder aloud why suffering has come to them. In this respect, the film echoes much of Malick’s earlier work, most notably Tree of Life (2011). That film begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, a work that explores the extreme suffering God unleashes upon his devout servant Job. Halfway through the film, a pastor sermonizes that sorrow could find any of us at any time, as it did Job. “Job thought he could build his nest on high and he’d be OK,” he preaches. These words are closely echoed by comments from Franz and Fani: “I thought that we could build our nest up high in the trees—fly away like birds into the mountains” (the opening lines of the film, delivered by Franz) and Fani’s declaration that “it seemed no trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds.” As in Tree of Life, in which a family must reckon with the horrifying loss of a child, the central questions at the heart of Job are once again wrestled with by Malick’s characters. There are no easy answers here as to why suffering happens to good people, no religious balm for unthinkable loss. 

Amidst all the terror in A Hidden Life are also images of stunning natural beauty. (As Franz tells us, “nature does not notice the sorrow that has come over the people.”) Malick worked with cinematographer Jörg Widmer, who has been with him since Malick’s 2005 film The New World. Shot primarily on a mix of Steadicam and handheld camera, the film is marked by a peripatetic visual style in keeping with these earlier works. When the camera does stop moving, the resulting frames evoke masterful painterly compositions, ranging from still lifes of fruit (think early Dutch painting) to stunning landscapes framed through narrow doorways (think German Romanticism). These worlds are further brought to life through a rich sonic landscape (sounds of animals, wind chimes, running water, footsteps in the mud and snow) that pervades the film. 

Malick is famous for his emphasis on authenticity. In The New World, to take just one example, a linguist was brought on to teach his actors to correctly speak an extinct Native American language. It is this commitment to authenticity that lends A Hidden Life one of its most haunting aspects: much of it was filmed on the actual locations where the story took place, including Franz’s home and some of the prisons where he was held. Since the court where Franz was condemned has been converted into apartments, Malick filmed the trial at a nearby court, the Berlin Kammergericht, which has a similar history to the one where Franz was tried. Watching a reenactment of Nazi persecution on the same grounds where that persecution took place is absolutely chilling, calling to mind Claude Lanzmann’s practice of returning to these same sites to film. Haunting period footage woven into the film achieves a similar effect, including a shot of a train pulling into Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof, the (now demolished) station from which the city’s Jews were deported to the camps. Adding to the authenticity are the voiceovers, an ongoing dialogue between Franz and Fani drawn primarily from the real letters they wrote to one another when Franz was imprisoned, letters to which Malick purchased the rights when planning the film. 

While the story of A Hidden Life is told in large part through the aid of its voiceover, that most characteristic Malickian feature, it relies more on direct dialogue than his most recent slate of films (Song to Song, Knight of Cups, To the Wonder). Whereas shooting for these earlier films was often only tangentially tied to their scripts, with ad-lib footage only later worked into a coherent whole through Malick’s characteristically painstaking editing process, for A Hidden Life Malick returned to his earlier practice of sticking more closely to the script. Gone also are the dream sequences, hallucinations, temporal play and frequent opacity of those earlier works. The result is a film that, while lacking none of the found wonder and spontaneity those other films captured, nevertheless remains more narratively driven and cohesive. 

The care with which Franz’s story has been plotted is evident in A Hidden Life’s subtle but powerful narrative use of sound and mise-en-scène. Franz is portrayed as a doomed man from the first shot of the film (following the Riefenstahl excerpts): we see him standing before the mountains with his back to the camera, like a Rückenfigur out of Caspar David Friedrich, reaping the harvest with a large scythe. It is an image at once beautiful and ominous, like the bell that tolls repeatedly throughout the film, eventually to be rung for Franz himself after he finally meets the guillotine blade. In a judge’s chambers in Berlin, Franz’s death sentence nearly certain, a painting on the far wall, just to his left in the frame, shows Franz’s increasingly distant Alpine home. An empty crib always sits alongside Franz and Fani’s bed, a placeholder for the next child that will not come. When Fani asks Franz if he would like another child in a tormented attempt to convince him to save his own life, the image only takes on more poignancy. Such a refined level of artistry strongly argues for the success of Malick’s return to form.   

Franz’s story is also brought movingly to life through the outstanding acting in the film. August Diehl delivers a visceral performance, relaying Franz’s dueling determination and inner anguish, particularly through his facial expressions and body language. The same is true of Valerie Pachner and Franz Rogowski as Fani and Waldland. Rogowski in particular has an almost uncanny ability to evoke humor and pathos at the same moment. The only time the performances are weakened is when the film rather awkwardly mixes German and English (no doubt more striving after authenticity), which renders certain interactions downright ludicrous. It is, however, one of very few flaws in the film. 

For a director of his age, Terrence Malick has made relatively few films, but undoubtedly many masterpieces. A Hidden Life is one of them.