“Rich with political, artistic, and narrative contexts that reward multiple viewings, Barbara depicts a familiar world in which a woman must always be looking over her shoulder for who’s watching her. Petzold won the Silver Bear for Barbara at the Berlin Film Festival. His austere and controlled direction is superb for the layers he brings to this character study, in that he allows the viewer to experience how the GDR scrutinizes Barbara, as well as how she functions within her headspace as the observed.” - Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review
“The reality of Barbara’s world, and the world of all East Germans, is one of constant surveillance, omnipresent informers, and a huge gap between private and public behavior. Petzold is a master at creating the kind of tension that can be felt on a subterranean level, a sort of acute uneasiness that can’t be easily diagnosed, fixed, or even acknowledged by the characters. This is well-trod ground for Petzold, but never has it been so fully realized, so palpable, as in Barbara.” – Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com
“The final scenes of Barbara are a testament to Petzold’s careful direction. All of Barbara’s internal struggle leads to a series of choices, major ones, existential ones, the sort of decisions she’ll have to live with for a lifetime. There’s a look on her face that tells you how she feels about it, there are sounds that are somehow louder than bombs, and it all happens in a place that underlines her final, internal statement about freedom, morality, and dignity. No words are spoken, but none need to be.” - Hubert Vigilla, Flixist
***
While attending the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official who was instrumental in organizing the Holocaust, philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the now famous phrase “banality of evil”. Jack Maden summarizes Arendt’s thinking as follows: “The ‘banality of evil’ is the idea that evil does not have the Satan-like, villainous appearance we might typically associate it with. Rather, evil is perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by people who do not think about things from the standpoint of others. Evil becomes commonplace; it becomes the everyday. Ordinary people — going about their everyday lives — become complicit actors in systemsthat perpetuate evil.”
Which brings us to the world of BARBARA, a world which is terrifying not because it is set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic hellscape, but because it is a normal, recognizable world remarkably like our own, and where the enemy is not some jackbooted officer with a scar on his left cheek but rather the kindly looking elderly woman who waves at you while attending to her gardening as you drive by on your bicycle, knowing that one well-placed phone call from her can land you in jail. Welcome to life in Communist East Germany in the 1980’s. Director Christian Petzold does a masterful job of immersing the viewer in the titular character’s world, so much so that a sound as innocuous as car tires rolling on gravel can fill us instantly with dread. And yet, this film is more than just a snapshot of life in a police state; the characters we most sympathize with must make hard, existential decisions with no clear path forward, and invite us to share in their angst as they contemplate what it really means to be free.
You can watch BARBARA on Kanopy or Hoopla.
Happy viewing!
