The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber - Weimar Berlin’s Priestess Of Depravity

 

Anita Shade Of Pale!

The Seven Addictions
and Five Professions of
Anita Berber - Weimar Berlin’s
Priestess Of Depravity
by Mel Gordon
Feral House
ISBN: 9781932595123

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber-Weimar Berlin’s Priestess Of Depravity is by the same writer, Mel Gordon, who penned an absolutely brilliant book called Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962, which I reviewed here This book about a once famous and iconic... well certainly not a stripper but a dark and erotic dancer... is in some ways a little disappointing.

The book starts off with Anita Berber dying in 1928 from pulmonary tuberculosis. After a brief set up of her death and the reception from a jaded country that had all but forgotten her notorious and iconic presence in Weimar Berlin, during a time called the Inflation, we flash back to her earlier life. The writer sets the stage for someone like Anita... in turn an expressionist poet, iconic fashion model, naked dancer and silent movie actress, against the morally bankrupt backdrop of a country in recession, where the completely devalued German economy of the time was such that the price of a British cigarette was the equivalent of the price of a grand piano only a year before (sounds like the state of the UK under the current government might well be heading towards the same state, by the sound of it... so, a cautionary tale, perhaps).

The book shares small events and also the content of some of her erotic dances, such as the ones she performed with one of her less than upright husbands, Baron Von Droste.. the Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstacy... with sequences entitled Pritzel Figurines, Byzantine Whip Dance, Cocaine, Martyr, Suicide, Vision, Egyptian Prince, Morphine, Lunatic Asylum, Astarte and  Night Of The Borgias. These are all recounted in seven main sections of the book... The Madonna From Dresden (1899-1918), Dance In The New Nineveh (1919-1928), Berlin’s Naked Goddess (1919-1922), Repertoire Of The Damned (1922-1923), Exit Baron Von Droste (1923-1927), A Carrion Soul (1923-1928) and Rites Of Mourning. Following these are a few poems and more notes on the contents of some of the dances.

The biggest problem in this book, well illustrated with photos (from various sources), is that the writer doesn’t seem to have nearly enough detailed information about the woman’s life as you would perhaps need for a proper biography (which would perhaps explain why the leading between the lines of type is so huge... I mean I like a lot of leading myself but this seems to be double the amount you could comfortably get away with). Also, explaining why he keeps deviating and telling dollops of information about other people Anita might have known rather than concentrate solely on her experiences some of the time. And I don’t blame the writer for the lack of information here... it seems clear to me that there probably isn’t a lot of it to be had... which is a pity because, from the stories the writer does share, she certainly seems to be what people, in the modern parlance, would describe as ‘a character’.

For instance, on meeting a family she was drawn to, once the man went away for a while to look for work, Anita seduced both the mother and 15 year old daughter and turned them into her personal sex slaves, often simultaneously and not gently. Another story tells of her fondness for turning up to hotels and restaurants naked but for a fur coat and her pet orangutan concealed inside, clinging to her shoulders, in order to give the right shock value when she asked waiters to help her off with her coat. Alas, this practice stopped one day when she felt the cold, lifeless hands of the orangutan clinging to her, having suffocated under her furs... something which left her heartbroken. And, furthermore, she was certainly no shrinking violet... often she would show dissatisfaction with hecklers at her nightclub acts by urinating on their tables or breaking bottles over their heads.

Ultimately, there is just enough content and certainly some interesting illustrations to be able to hold this thing together as a slim book, double spacing not withstanding. There are even a few colour plates such as a truly gorgeous print of a painting Otto Dix did of the red headed Anita in a red variant of her Cocaine dance dress (it’s even been featured recently as part of a set of German stamps, from what I understand). I can completely sympathise with the author’s intent to put what he could into a tome of this size because, well, the worrying alternative is that people like Anita Berber are in danger of being forgotten to time, much like she was at the end of the Weimar period. And I was, certainly, entertained as much as I was informed by many of the stories within, it has to be said. All in all, if you like hearing about people revelling in their own decadence while trying to fend off a inevitable death in the face of poverty and sometimes persecution, then you might want to give The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber -Weimar Berlin’s Priestess Of Depravity a go some time. While not completely satisfied with the written content, I certainly do find it a valuable resource and I shall certainly be looking to purchase a few others of this writer’s books at some point down the line, for sure.

A Cure For Wellness

At The Mountains Of Wellness

A Cure For Wellness
Germany/USA 2017
Directed by Gore Verbinski
UK cinema release print.

I’m not the greatest fan of Gore Verbinski as a director, it has to be said, although I did like his very first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, at least. I would never had bothered with this one if I’d only heard the title, A Cure For Wellness, which isn’t the most inspiring title in the world. However, I was lucky enough to catch a trailer for this a few weeks ago and what I saw appealed to me very much... looking on the surface like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up if he were alive today and writing screenplays. As it happens, although this film isn’t without its little problems, I was pleasantly surprised by this B-movie horror yarn built with A-list production values.

After a brilliantly designed and shot, low key “big city America” skyline opening credits sequence, taken at a much slower and meticulous pace than we are used to seeing this kind of thing and significantly rendering it one of the greatest architectural opening montages in recent cinematic memory... we have a short prologue to the movie and shortly after we meet the newly promoted, totally unsympathetic protagonist Lockhart. He is blackmailed/tasked by the board of his new company to bring back a former employee who has gone to a clinic in Switzerland for their ‘hydro treatment’ and not returned. Lockhart is played by an up and coming actor who I have a lot of time for called Dane DeHaan. I’ve only seen him in two other movies, the brilliant Chronicle (reviewed by me here) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here), where he played a sort of good person turned evil in both films. I’m actually worried he’s going to get type cast playing unsympathetic characters if he carries on like this but, you know, he does it so well. And he does it again here in a less black and white way, as his character is definitely the ‘hero’ of the piece but, simultaneously, not someone you would really want to give the time of day to, in all honesty.

The rest of the movie, after the first ten minutes or so, takes place at the castle sanatarium in the mountains of Switzerland and the neighbouring village... both, curiously, shot in different locations in Germany. The film details a story arc pitching him up against the head of the sanatarium, Doctor Volmer (played by Jason Isaacs) while befriending a mysterious girl there, Hannah (who is played by an amazing actress called Mia Goth). He also encounters a puzzle loving lady who is joyfully played by Celia Imrie in exactly the kind of role I wouldn’t expect to see her in. She is absolutely excellent in this too... as are pretty much all of the cast.

The film details a complicated, in its untangling, mystery about the fall out of something which happened at the previous version of the castle three hundred years ago. My overall impression of this, even after it was explained to me, was that it was a little impenetrable in terms of its convolutedness. At the same time, though, it gives the piece a nicely ambiguous feel and my title to this review really fits here, I think, as it’s ultimately a very Lovecraftian affair and has more of the atmosphere of one of his tales than many ‘straight’, actual adaptations of the writer’s work over the years.

Now there are a few problems with the movie, as I see it, and I’ll detail those now.

One is the continuity in some places. Since the film focuses, for good reasons, on people drinking various fluids, there are a lot of shots of half filled glasses and, I have to say, a lot of the cuts between long shots and close ups did have some discrepancies in the level of the top of the fluid in proportion to empty glass, it seemed to me. There are also some discrepancies, I felt, in the timing of sequential scenes and moods of characters in some sequences where the film almost looked like it was heading for a completely different kind of denouement. In some scenes, to me at least, felt like they were completely contradicting each other in tone and character progression and there was, I felt, at least one crucial 'escape' sequence missing. I am wondering if there were two versions of the script as the shoot went on and stuff was shot for both, with the director maybe not wanting to lose certain scenes. So things may have been kept in which screw up the linear flow of the movie, maybe? I’m guessing here but it would make sense to me if that were the case. It would also maybe explain why I was left a little unsure about certain elements of the mystery as it played out. The ending did feel kind of ‘tacked on’ too, to be sure.

One other thing I might say is that, at almost two and a half hours, the film seemed very much overlong in its execution. An hour could have been chopped out of this and it might have played as a much more satisfying and succinct piece. That being said, though, it does have it’s own, European pacing and I’m also quite a fan of this kind of slow burn kind of affair, which didn’t drag at all throughout the course of its length. So, not too worried about this and perhaps one of the reasons it all held together so well was because it has a very nicely put together score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which is quite striking and appropriate for the film. Indeed, one of the first things I did when I got home was to pre-order the CD soundtrack and congratulations to the label for actually putting it out in a proper format... so many movies these days are coming out as download only which is a truly horrifying treatment of music.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about A Cure For Wellness. It’s a great little horror movie with an ambiguous, lurking horror filled with some nicely grotesque set pieces involving eels and dentistry which might test the resilience of some audience members but it all makes for an unusual experience at the movies and I would definitely recommend it to certain types of horror film fans who are okay with a slowly developing story arc. The cinematography is beautiful and the shot design meticulous. It’s a little muddled, perhaps, in its editing but more in what was kept in the movie, I think, than in anything jarring on any other level asides from content. I don’t think it will play at cinemas for very long so maybe it’s one to catch sooner rater than later, if you’ve a hankering to see this one. A flawed but intriguing movie which I will probably take another look at some day. If I don’t, there may be eel to pay.

The Monuments Men

The Art Of War

The Monuments Men
2014 USA/Germany
Directed by George Clooney
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers which, in no way, 
give away the course of the story.

There’s a scene about three quarters of the way or more through The Monuments Men which best demonstrates one of the things I found a little disappointing with this film overall. One of the lead protagonists has stepped on a landmine and cannot move for fear of blowing up himself and his colleagues. We’ve all seen this scene before in countless war movies, of course, and it’s a cheap but effective trick used by directors for decades to build up suspense, tension and force the audience to empathise with their characters even more... but this time it doesn’t quite work in it’s intent. At least that’s how it felt for me.

Instead of being played fully for tension, the director, as is his right, seems to want to play it for yet another in a series of “war romp” scenes. It’s not a funny situation but it’s played quite lightly and, for me, this really highlights the movie’s one, main flaw. There’s no edge to it and almost no consequence. It’s also dealt with in an unrealistic manner too... I thought the central characters were smarter than this.

Now my reaction to this might just be one of conditioning, to be honest. I’m really not one for watching too many war movies but we have been under fire in recent years from films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and The Pianist, which show the horrors of war and pull, relatively few, punches in showing the raw misery that conflict will always bring into being. The Monuments Men, on the other hand, seems to be of direct lineage from films such as Kelly’s Heros and The Dirty Dozen in it’s genetic make-up (two films, I hasten to add, that I’ve not yet seen... so if I’m wrong in this judgement, please feel free to take me to task over it in the comments section below) and, naturally, films like The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino’s own war movie in this vein, Inglourious Basterds (not actually a remake or homage to the former, in fact)... the latter being perhaps the best of this lineage to combine the War Is Hell but also, the bizarre War Is Fun element of a conflict which has been the subject of so many hundreds of movies since the 1940s.

It’s a decision and Clooney goes with his gut and delivers a war romp which is, in all honesty, quite entertaining... but finds itself at odds with itself, I believe, because some of the scenes he’s written in to deliver “the dark edge” are perhaps played a little too lightly for their own good. And I’m not putting that down to the acting because everybody in this movie... Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban and even Clooney himself, are all absolutely brilliant in their performances and it doesn’t seem to be their tone which is the problem.

For instance, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, when it comes to a movie set during the Second World War, that some of the main protagonists are going to wind up dead at various points in the movie. However, I found that, even though I liked all these characters, I didn’t really feel much when they died. Don’t get me wrong, the other characters on screen did... but I, as the audience, didn’t feel much. Similarly, when a couple of characters realise the gold they’ve been running their hands through is comprised of the gold fillings of dead victims of the German concentration camps, although we are given time to dwell on this horror, along with the characters, we don’t really feel it as such. At least I didn’t and, believe me, I’m not taking the actual events any less seriously for it.

I think the “lightening” effect I’m talking about here is something which came in the struggle to find the perfect edit and sound mix from the film. And also perhaps from the baggage that some of the actors have brought with them from other roles. Many of these are noted for giving some great comic performances and maybe that’s thrown into the mix too. Perhaps some shots needed to be a little longer or maybe have a less beautiful score than the “classic war anthem” style of composition, with direct lineage from the scores of Ron Goodwin, that master composer Alexandre Desplat has delivered... much to my puzzlement as this score doesn’t seem to me to fit his usual modus operandi, although it’s still a score and a half, to be sure.

So yeah. The film does seem a little, “war light” in places. Especially after such a brilliant opening montage of static shots of works of art juxtaposed with the sounds of hammer blows. This short sequence was almost stomach turning, when seen on a big screen, in the way the sound and image worked together in rhythm and sets you on edge for an intense and dynamic darkness which never quite delivers, at least on that front.

Okay, so that’s a pretty negative view of the film so far so let me just temper that a little and tell you about the good way of looking at this...

It’s actually quite fun and it’s well acted, holds your attention and doesn’t, not even once, get boring.

It was possibly scripted so that certain scenes would go to the various “stars” in the movie to play to their strengths but, honestly, it doesn’t look or feel like it’s been tailored for specific performers in that way and it flows beautifully, not feeling like a series of separate incidents highlighting characters... even though it kinda is in many ways, as the lead protagonists work in smaller, separate units for the majority of the film and only come together for key scenes every once in a while. It’s a solid little story and although it certainly doesn’t drum home the horrors of war I was talking about earlier, they’ve not been forgotten or pushed to the background either (maybe tonally but not in terms of sweeping them under a rug or something like that).

What we have in The Monuments Men, I think, is one of those films which is going to play on television during seasonal holidays like Christmas and Easter for decades to come and will, in future years, be rightly identified as a classic. I know, for instance, that when future generations sit down and watch this, they’ll see a snappy and solid little war movie with a great cast of actors who all died many years ago and wonder why this didn’t make a bigger splash when it landed at the box office on its release. The haze of nostalgic rediscovery is as valid a process of receiving the art form as any other, it’s my belief, so I think this film will be remembered well when it starts to be included in text books of the history of war films in years to come. But don’t take my word for it... go and see this possible classic in cinemas now while you still can. It’s nothing like a perfect movie for us now... but it may well be a perfect movie in the future.