Customer Reviews

Germany, Pale Mother [VHS]

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I saw this film 18 years ago, and it still haunts my memories. The film is itself about the way post-war Germany has been haunted by the memories of its Nazi and World War Two past. It follows the story of a mother and her daughter as they struggle through the last years of the war and the immediate post-war years. The mother is raped by a Russian soldiers among bombed-out buildings and ends up carrying her small daughter on her back through miles of ravaged countryside. They struggle on to achieve a fairly comfortable new existence after having been refugees. Then the father returns and turns out to be a patriarchal tyrant. The most haunting scene is the final one in which the little girl stands outside the locked bathroom and knocks, calling out 'Mama, Mama' while her mother is inside, attempting to commit suicide. I won't tell you what happens after that: see this film.

This film is so difficult to watch, but its brilliance is still exceptional. Helma Sander-Brahms should be world famous simply for this movie. I wish more of her films were available in the United States. In this film, the use of old documentary footage of post-war Germany combined with Sander-Brahms' own exquisite images is breathtaking. The film is a painful study of the devastation and heartbreak that the children of post-war Germany had to face in the wake of World War II; an entire generation coming to terms with the massive genocide that their parent's generation had participated in. Sander-Brahms pulls the viewer into her own personal and extremely sad story. She is brave and unforgiving and that is what makes her film so haunting.