some kind of diary film that i don’t know anything about or have much context for. about growing up in nazi germany. it is quite fascinating to put this into conversation with digital cinema: there are some quite interesting formal techniques that i can’t really recall seeing in other documentary films: hand-written intertitles and on-screen text looks like it was scratched into the celluloid. these texts are unstable, shifting slightly as each frame moves past the shutter—somewhat in the style of animation. as a visual signifier of moving image technology, the shifting intertitles have something going on around concepts of time and duration. it is not simply that the truth content of the moving image is brought into relation with the truth content of the narrative, a very basic reading about how truth and images are malleable. i think it’s more interesting to think about how truthhood is used as an aesthetic element; its malleability is acknowledged, brought to the surface, and used for aesthetic effect. another aspect of the intertitles, which are quite important as they are the filmmaker (the film, a diary) speaking to the viewer, is that they use the third person perspective of literature, another formal element that sorta relates to ideas about the truthfulness of images. there is a lot more in this film that bears deeper consideration: the use of silence; the performance of the image associated with the audio track in the montage; and importantly, the diaristic, first-person perspective of the film itself. i have been quite curious about diary film-making for a while now (idek if this is considered a “diary film”), but i’m not sure when i will have time to properly begin a survey of it.
i don’t give this film the heart because as interesting and unique certain aspects of it are, it does not provoke a single emotional glimmer in me.