film-notes | yalpertem

Die innere Sicherheit (2000)

What can I say, she’s walking away
From what we’ve seen
What can I do, still loving you
It’s all a dream
How can we hang on to a dream
How can it, will it be, the way it seems
— How Can We Hang on to a Dream, Tim Hardin (OST)

This is the earliest film I’ve seen from Petzold, made in 2000. It’s also the first of his ‘Ghosts’ Trilogy together with Gespenster (2005) and Yella (2007). Letterboxd shows eight more films from the director before this; some are short films. While the direct translation of ‘Die Innere Sicherheit’ is something like ‘Internal Security’, the English title of the film is ‘The State I am In’. At first, I thought the political connotation is lost in translation but then noticed ‘the state’. I remember trying to mention the film during a German class to the teacher the day after I watched it. Just instantly, she ridiculed me for the title I tried to pronounce. I thought the name evoked an example of the cheap crime fiction movies in the teacher’s mind. Maybe it was something different; I don’t know; I couldn’t say anything other than the film’s name in German, and I still can’t. Anyway, the IMDb has 2.6k votes for the film now, so I don’t expect to include the film in a daily conversation anymore.

It’s a ‘crime’ fiction where the crime is long gone. Jeanne and her parents run away from the police and the state due to their probably illegal leftist/terrorist background. In the plot, RAF is explicitly mentioned, but it’s not explicitly stated in the film. Probably, it’s an easy guess for the people who know the background.). The film opens with the family hiding in Portugal, and then they return to Germany hoping to fly somewhere they can feel safe again. They try to find money from ex-comrades or a hidden trove. When those don’t pay off, they try to rob a bank.

Around this story of running away, the film focuses on Jeanne. The adolescent daughter of the family becomes a fugitive at an early age. She’s out of the regular school education, learning a new language, and doing some translations, probably because she might need them soon. Her family buys or steals pretty oldskool and childish clothes -a loose yellow sweater with a bee on it- to her which makes her embarrassed. But she still has a solid love and trust in her parents. She’s in, with them. As a youngster en route, she has encounters with others, ones that compel her. She meets with a broke surfer guy who loves Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and falls in love with him. She stumbles a girl, the daughter of one of his parents, who listens to cool music and wears a blue t-shirt having ‘Diego Maradona’ on it. A couple of scenes later, Jeanne steals a blue t-shirt. Frances Meh captures Petzold’s interest in Jeanne, her family, and other characters in his films in a short comment on the film: “… you know it’s a Petzold joint. He just can’t turn his eye away from people in liminal states.”

Taking the family’s political history and the transformation of their ex-comrades as a backdrop, the film primarily focuses on Jeanne’s hardships while growing up in this constant fear and disguise. She acts way older than her actual age due to the circumstances which do not let her live like her peers. Sharing cigarettes and starting a conversation looks like to only way for her to socialize with strangers. She does the shopping, takes her role if there’s a secret plan, or even finds shelter for the family when necessary. At times, she says that she’s sick of everything. Falling in love also lets her guard down.

The film has some silent but striking scenes like Jeanne sitting at the table next to her mother with the money they stole; or the painful melodramatic breakup with the surfer guy -sorry I forgot his name- that was similar to Turkish melodramas – “I never loved you, you’re a pathetic and disgusting person”. Not to spoil it, I would avoid the intense final scene. But there was an even more interesting scene that stuck in my mind. While the family was running away on the empty highway, they stop for a moment at the traffic lights, and they start to suspect the movements of others. One guy gets out of the car to take a look around, there seem to be some other cars following the family. Jeanne’s father thinks they’re busted, gets out, and surrenders. Suddenly, when the lights turn light, everyone minds their own business. They hadn’t even noticed the runaway family. Maybe connected to Petzold’s interest in ‘ghosts’, this scene underlines the anxiety of running away together with being a ghost or nobody.

“This fraught drama about an ex-Red Army Faction-style couple, still on the run with their teenage daughter, doesn’t use a single flashback to narrate their past. The tension apparent in every frame speaks of the unseen state forces whose ‘domestic security’ was—and remains—their mortal opponent.” (Hertäg, 2022)

I wanted to take this long quote from Max Nelson in Film Comment which documents the opening scene because I also listened to one of Petzold’s interviews where he argues that in the first two minutes, the film’s morality shows itself:

“The first two minutes of The State I Am In go a long way towards explaining Petzold’s methods and intentions in the trilogy. A young girl with blonde, wind-tossed hair—eyes downcast, lips set in a natural frown—gets change at a seaside bar, strolls over to the jukebox, and puts on an American pop song (“How Can We Hang On to a Dream?” by Tim Hardin). The camera hovers on her shoulder, lingering over the curve of her neck, then pulls back slightly to follow her as she saunters with studied casualness towards an empty table. (“What can I say,” the singer asks plaintively: “she’s walking away…”) She glances off-camera, casts her eyes back down, lights a cigarette, and sits silently for another twenty seconds, lost in thought. Her eyes barely move; her mind is busy turning over invisible possibilities, considering options, and reflecting on a past to which we don’t yet have access. When she looks back up, Petzold cuts to a shot from her eyeline of a handful of surfers chatting at the other end of the dock, and her desire finally connects, in our mind, with an object. But it’s in those previous twenty seconds, I would argue, that she comes alive to us. For a moment, her desire seems to exist outside of, or prior to, the narrative that is about to be constructed around it. It would be hard to count the number of times over the course of the trilogy that Petzold films a young woman sitting alone like this, planning what kind of movie she wants to inhabit.”

Hertäg, J. (2022, May/June). Germany’s Counter-Cinemas. New Left Review, 135. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii135/articles/julia-hertag-germany-s-counter-cinemas

L’événement [Happening] (2021)

I haven’t read Annie Ernaux yet (2025 edit: i read ‘the years’ and it was an unbelievable text about personal and 20th-century-france history). I read that Les Années (2008) and Passion simple (1991) gained passionate readers in Turkey quickly after the translations. On a mundane Sunday morning, I was browsing through the films at Yorck, I saw this film adaptation was screening at noon, in a single séance, at Rollberg. The name Ernaux and the Best Film Award at Venice Film Festival excited me. With that, I also learned that Venice FF is the first film festival, started in 1932, as a part of the 18th Venice Biennale.

Audrey Diwan’s film tells the story of Anne Duchesne who studies literature in France, in the early 1960s. She’s a hardworking and promising student where all the students are highly stressed about passing the exams and not being able to explore their desires. The only relaxation moment they have is going to university parties, drinking coke, and dancing a bit. Living in a dormitory, Anne occasionally visits her parents who run a bar. The family conversations are also focused primarily on her success at school and earning her life.

Anne gets pregnant. Her carnal and arduous journey for finding a way to get abortion starts. Together with the fear and espousement of the law, no one helps her: her friends, her boyfriend, or the doctors. Anti-abortionist doctors even trick her with lies. Since it’s also unthinkable to tell her family too, she tries to find a way all by herself. The two films that this struggle quickly reminded me of are 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007) and Araf (2012), from Romania and Turkey. Lately, I have also encountered a lot of interference from the US regarding the oppression of anti-abortion laws, and the interrogations about miscarriages. The film feels like a story about the past for a second, then all of a sudden it becomes too actual.

I listed some quotes from the various reviews below. Things like the ‘buy yourself a novel’ scene, are really helpful reminders.

cinechat

Shot exclusively in a 1.37 ratio

The film and its director refuse to censor: “The other grand subject of the film – one that is very important for me – is carnal pleasure.” said Diwan.

Happening revolves around the dichotomy of women’s pleasure and women’s pain.

Anne’s first attempt at self-inflicted abortion recalls Karin’s self-mutilation in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)

it is the first and only time blood is shown in the film. Indeed, the absence of blood throughout Happening is interesting to note and suits the film’s deterrence from exaggerated melodrama.

We are never allowed to forget this because the film is divided into the weeks leading up to her exams.

We are given through Anne’s story an empathetic understanding of how people solve “life’s problems” – we go about solving them by saying, as Anne says, “I solve them as best I can”.

The Hollywood Reporter

a slice of clear-eyed French social realism that will be meaningful to anyone who cares about personal freedoms.

Annie sees another doctor (François Loriquet), who tricks her by prescribing a drug he says will induce her period but instead strengthens the embryo.

Shooting in the boxy Academy ratio, cinematographer Laurent Tangy sticks close to the protagonist throughout, searching for signs of surrender in her face even as her resolve never falters.

The film serves as both a transfixing drama and an urgent reminder of the need to protect women’s reproductive rights.

The Guardian

Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalisation of abortion in provincial France

Her hardworking mum and dad, Gabrielle and Jacques (played by Sandrine Bonnaire and Eric Verdin) run a bar, and Gabrielle is endlessly proud of her daughter, at one stage giving her some money and saying: “Buy yourself a novel!”

Diwan’s movie is cleverly structured so that we do not at first know who the father is… . The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe.

Happening takes a different line on abortion than a film like, say, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake from 2004 or Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from 2007, films that focused with a more ironised chill on the abortionist; this is about the pregnant woman herself.

Deadline

Trying to vomit in secret, to shower in communal bathrooms without anyone noticing the mounding belly, stealing food from other girls’ lunchboxes and looking – constantly looking – for someone to tell, someone who would tell someone else who might know something, without being branded a slut.

Halt and Catch Fire | Notes

I watched Halt and Catch Fire again, for the third time. I occasionally cried during the last season, probably due to the accumulated emotional investment of the binge-watch experience together with the idea of the loss of a central character. It’s one of AMC’s series broadcasted from 2014 to 2017. Some obsessive entrepreneurs contribute and witness the tech history from the early 1980s until the new millenium. We start with writing a BIOS and end up with the early search engines! Meanwhile, there are many significant developments such as personal computers with a ‘handle’ becoming prevalent, the first anti-virus programs, the amazing evolution of (online) gaming, and several phases of the internet and the world wide web parade.

The five (others might say four) main characters are:

Cameron Howe: coder, gamer, the young prodigy
Gordon Clark: hardware person, builder
Donna Clark: hardware person, investor
Joe McMillan: salesman and product manager
Jon Bosworth*: oldskool manager adapting new era

The challenges and interactions among these people are somewhat inspiring for me, even though I had never been in an innovation landscape that close. I’m just an ordinary programmer, not fascinated or inspired by any of the ‘real’ events in the domain. I’m indifferent to the majority of the breakthroughs in the tech realm. I try to follow and read them, but I’m not overwhelmed with them, i.e., just playing with GPT-3 to build stupid paraphrases of historical speeches. The reason why this series affects me is due to its dramatic aspect, together with its subject focus that is close to my day-to-day job. I enjoy witnessing the passion that I don’t have but also, it kicks me. I feel more aspirational in the last two weeks that I was re-watching the series. At the very least, it gives some -potentially distorted- context and historicity to the infrastructure I’m working on. It also reminds me some of the fundamentals of the domain.

Other than that, the characters’ challenges are interesting. There’s such a nice balance and distribution of the obsessions and longings of each person. Cam tries to do what she thinks is right and meaningful – connecting people with games. Joe always tries to be the explorer of the future. Gordon tries hard to make everything work in small increments and build a decent persona. Donna tries to defend reason and maintainability while being the key creative person in many achievements. Bosworth just sways, adapts, and tries to survive.

I like these kinds of historical software/tech dramatizations in general but Halt and Catch Fire was the epitome for me. I’m not counting, first, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014), or TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013), the second, because they belong to a higher purpose. Recently I enjoyed The Billion Dollar Code (2021) with all the tech/art debates and the Berlin Döner, but it was only an appetizer. The Social Network (2010) was a good take and a witty Sorkin/Fincher/Eisenberg collaboration. StartUp’s (2016-2018) best finding was to replace the criminal enterprise with investors. “Jobs” biopics, I recall that I watched, but I don’t remember a single detail. Devs (2020) was following one of the ultimate ideas in the futuristic realm with terrible storytelling. I didn’t follow Silicon Valley (2014-2019) for more than a season, but maybe in the future.

How To Act On Reality TV | Notes

My dear friend H. whom I owe many of my personal interests in film and music, has been spamming me about John Wilson for a week or two. Wilson has a docuseries called How To with John Wilson that I’ll watch soon if I find a legal way, but How To Act On Reality TV was the introduction to the filmmaker for me: it documents a workshop by a media professional who helps people planning to join to Reality TV. He gives tips to the participants about how to introduce themselves better and improve their self-expression, educates them about how the producers and the audience desire to see them on screen, and warns about the pitfalls to avoid acting while being hyper-authentic. Of course, the video itself is a great example of Reality TV. The whole workshop is recorded similarly. In addition, there are some familiar missions for the participants such as trying to get phone numbers from strangers in a park or a sudden singing performance on a supermarket aisle. On the other hand, the camera —and the editor— does not avoid including the scenes about the participants yawning. All in all, we need boredom too.

He manages to achieve exactly the sweet spot where authenticity intersects with essayistic intent. As the trainer says, “it’s the improv factor, that I like most… it’s also an opportunity to serialize in a way where documentaries can’t… I guess I’m not patient enough.” I felt that it was the very reason why I, and I think several other people, like YouTube or any other sort of personal content.

How To Act On Reality TV | Vimeo

Don’t Look Up (2021) | Notes

A professor and a Ph.D. student discover a comet that will hit the earth in a couple of months. They try to transmit this information to the officials who can initiate action at this scale. However, their attempts in talking to the media or the president of the U.S. don’t end up with concrete action. Their message is lost inside the social media frenzy, political and business interests, the avoidance and the rejection of truth, etc. When the president decides that it’s the right time to tackle the issue, they team up in a project to do some propaganda about “saving the world” and to deflect the comet. But at the very moment, the Apple/SpaceX CEO intervenes and changes the plans since his team finds some very valuable minerals inside the comet. The passion for profit takes precedence over saving the world.

In terms of its overt messages, it is a critical movie. In terms of its screenplay, storytelling, and puns, pretty mediocre. Its success can be found in transforming the mainstream media and communication critique to superficial characters and dialogues. That is also its defeat. If it’s only a dinner of family and close friends that you can put against the whole extravagance you observed, it means you’re unable to build any counter-discourse against it. Cate Blanchett does her best for underlining what these patterns do to one’s own self, but it doesn’t suffice in the end. I felt sorry for Meryl Streep while watching her struggling with the terrible dialogues written for her part.