THE CAPTAIN

Director's Statement

Almost 70 years after the fact, the harsh brutalities of World War II still elicit incomprehension and dismay. By present-day standards, the violent acts committed seem abnormal, psychopathic, horrific.

But horror is a moral, not an analytical concept.

In order to explain Willi Herold’s actions we have to understand the world he lived in and not just our own world. We need to go beyond mere moral responses and experience the world from his point of view. Non-morally, so to speak, see what he saw, feel what he felt.

Aesthetically this does not mean the fetishizing of authenticity so common in historical films. “This is how it was!” is the mantra intoned, ignoring the fundamental fact that authenticity in cinema is always an illusion created by a team of filmmakers. Getting an era’s license plates right just isn’t enough.
Our audience needs to experience Herold’s historical, psychological and social reality directly, viscerally, emotionally. This story won’t be told from the outside in, but from the inside out. We will fully immerse the audience in Herold’s state of mind.

Our goal is not to justify or forgive Herold’s actions by contextualizing them, or worse: by introducing a moral relativism - but to understand the frame of reference which made these actions possible and so arrive at the general through the specific:

Herold’s highly particularised perspective of a specific historical event allows us to glimpse a universal truth about the human condition in wartimes -- past and present.
The continuity of violence connects all ages and cultures: Germany, Yugoslavia, Africa - most recently Syria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The layer of civilization covering the call of blood remains paper thin.

As the excesses of WW II pass from memory into history, are we any closer to understand why, or even how, they happened? The same can be asked about any one of the conflicts mentioned above. Neither has violence disappeared from societies considering themselves fundamentally nonviolent. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility and as such plays a major role in human imaginations.

In our film this continuity is expressed by featuring purposefully anachronistic sights: images of a contemporary Germany, both specific historical sites and ordinary, everyday environments.

This second temporal plane is also a response to the aforementioned fetishizing of authenticity. The fact that this movie is an object made in the year 2017, by filmmakers looking at the past with a certain historical perspective, will be an integral part of its visual strategy: we admit to the illusion of cinema.

There is another continuity that connects our world to that of the past: the act of renaming and the use of euphemism and their power to efface actual cruelties. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" was Stalin's apology for revolution and forced modernization in the 1930s.

If one extreme of euphemism comes from naturalizing the cruelties of power, the opposite extreme arises from a nerve-deadening understatement:
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

The phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. There is a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture -- the mode of their nonmeaning is the point. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.