REVIEW:

Film premieres don’t get much better than the official German launch of Volker Schloendorff’s singular Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day) on the Ninth of November 2004 at the Cinemaxx on Potsdamer Platz, followed by a reception in the nearby Filmmuseum Berlin. This, for a number of reasons. First of all, the Berlin event was hosted by Provobis producer Jürgen Haase, in his twin function as Managing Director of Progress Film-Verleih, together with Jean A. Welter, the Luxembourg Ambassador to Germany. Added to the solemnity of the affair was the presence of Georg Cardinal Sterzinsky, to say nothing of an august assembly of Berlin intellectuals and film professionals. Why the overflow house? Like a snowball rolling down a hill, The Ninth Day had been gathering a bundle of accolades since its initial screening last June at the Filmfest München, followed by invitations to festivals in Locarno (Human Rights Award), Toronto, and Pusan ­ to say nothing of the prestigious Bernhard Wicki Prize, also known as the Peace Prize of German Cinema. Indeed, of all the feature films in the current »Nazi wave« ­ Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang, Dennis Gansel’s Napola, to name just a few ­ only Volker Schloendorff’s Der neunte Tag, a low budget production in comparison with the others, accurately takes the pulse of history and can stand on its own as a statement of moral integrity.

Based loosely on a prison diary by Abbé Jean Bernard, The Ninth Day is the story of a Luxembourg priest who survived the notorious Priester-Block at Dachau and chronicled his experiences from May 1941 to August 1942 in Priest Block 25487, published in 1945. A cleric intellectual of some renown, Jean Bernard was the General Secretary at the Office Catholique International du Cinema (OCIC), founded in 1934 and generally responsible for awarding Catholic Film Prizes at international festivals. On one occasion, in the late 1960s, I had the pleasure of meeting Jean Bernard personally at the OCIC office on rue d'Orme in Brussels. A gentle person of quiet manners and sharp intellectual acumen, his broad interest in the spiritual aspects of the cinema (Robert Bresson was a favorite) was echoed in the French school of film aesthetics pioneered by André Bazin, Henri Agel, and Amédée Ayfre (the eminent Catholic theoretician and author of the seminal Cinéma et mystère in 1969).

How Jean Bernard’s Priest Block 25487 (citing his own prison number) found its way into the hands of Volker Schloendorff is best told by Provobis producer Professor Jürgen Haase. »While reading the diary, it came to my attention that his imprisonment was interrupted by a camp leave that allowed Jean Bernard to return for a time to his Luxembourg homeland. Of course, tied to the condition was an agreement that should he vanish ­ that is, not return to Dachau ­ then his Luxembourg community brethren would be executed. A horrifying hypothesis.« At this point, since few other details are given in the diary, the film enters the realm of fiction, of a dialogue with one’s own conscience, of a spiritual discourse on good and evil ­ indeed, the aspects that make The Ninth Day exceptional as a riveting modern-day treatise on the biblical question known as the »Temptation of Christ.«

When Abbé Henri Kremer (Ulrich Matthes) arrives in Luxembourg, he is picked up immediately by Untersturmführer Gebhardt (August Diehl) for a specific reason. The Gestapo wants to put additional pressure on Bishop Philippe (Hilmar Thate), the Luxembourg prelate who has refused to leave his residence during the Occupation, in hopes that the bishop will eventually compromise his position and support unequivocally the Vatican Concordat with Hitler. Kremer, in other words, is a pawn on the Luxembourg chessboard, provided he too can be won over with arguments to support the Nazi cause in their confrontation with godless Communists. If this sounds familiar, then parallels are found in the biblical Temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4, 1-11) and the allegory of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The dialogue between Kremer and Gebhardt, Abbé and SS Man, Christ and Satan, Jesus and Judas, all the more relevant when young Gebhardt confesses to Kremer that he himself was once a deacon about to be ordained. Now, however, as a convinced Gestapo leader, he affirms his new religion by arguing that the death of Christ and the birth of Christianity were predicated on the betrayal of Judas. Without Judas, no Christ on the Cross. Without a crucified Christ, no Christianity. This give-and-take between the fallen Judas (Gebhardt ) and the suffering Christ (Kremer), the key »temptation scene« in The Ninth Day, makes for high cinematic drama!

Indeed, Der neunte Tag well deserves top national awards when the 2004 Lolas roll around. Scripted with sparse cutting dialogue by Eberhard Görner and Andreas Pflüger, lensed in appropriate winter-greys by Tomas Erhart, cloaked in a sensitive score borrowed from the late Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso Nr. 1 for violin-cello (who in his Soviet days also contributed outstanding musical scores for Larisa Sheptitko’s The Ascent in 1976 and Elem Klimov’s Farewell in 1980), and supported by strong acting performances by Ulrich Matthes and August Diehl in the Good vs Evil duel, Volker Schloendorff’s The Ninth Day stands tall as one of the best German films of the current season.

Ron Holloway