Lore

Dir. Cate Shortland

So here's the deal: you fight a just war, overcome tyranny then rub your hands and congratulate yourself on a job well done. You can assert your moral superiority and claim to have created a new world order. There's a familiar ring to all of this, isn't there?

If only history worked in such straight lines; if only hearts and minds were so pliable. This film amply demonstrates that if war is hell, then so is the aftermath. The Second World War is generally depicted as the good guys versus the evil Nazis with a convenient overlooking of the Allied partnership with Stalinist Russia, a blind eye turned to the Dresden atrocity etc. It's an ambivalence which surrounds the eponymous Lore as she takes on a matriarchal role with regard to her four younger siblings attempting to deliver them safely to their grandmother in Hamburg; a nightmare five hundred mile journey through post-war Germany.

As with most picaresque tales the greater journey takes place in the head. Lore begins the film showing the influence of her Nazi parents, "The final victory will soon be here," she says to her mother whose return look is more eloquent than any line of dialogue could be. The Nazi brainwashing can not be easily dismissed. A woman in a deserted house weeps before a picture of Hitler and says, "He loved us." Passengers on a train discuss photos of the holocaust and dismiss them as "American lies." Even when the children reach their grandmother's house she urges them to be proud of who they are and stresses that their parents "did nothing wrong." 

But Lore's conviction is shaken by having witnessed the residual waste of war: the rape victims and the suicides. She has seen for herself how the children are rejected by country folk who now do not want to associate with them or what they stood for. Guilt by association or generational endowment. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge" complains Jeremiah in the Old Testament. But this more than a legacy innocently picked up by the younger generation. Lore has seen the holocaust pictures and has made a link with her father's role in the war. Add to that the fact that the children are being helped by a Jewish boy refugee from the camps and the moral picture is muddied. Muddied even further when they kill an eel fisherman for his boat after luring him with sex. Then it turns out that Thomas, the boy, is not Jewish after all; he is travelling using stolen papers. What horrors and crimes is he hiding about his past? Who are the good guys, if not the young kids?

This is a compelling but disturbing film. Cate Shortland's direction takes us right up to the whole sorry mess where we can almost smell the stench and feel the filth of squalor. How tantalising then, the bathing in the river scenes, the sharing of baths. The exterior shots too demonstrate the ironic beauty of rural Germany. Cleanliness and moral rectitude are surely within reach.

Pour your favourite drink, sit back in your most comfortable chair and settle back to enjoy this book. Crossing by Pete Lancaster, his second book, following his Blue Bridge in 2009, is a collection to savour.

On the face of it the same themes are evident, most prominently memories and philosophical musings prompted by wanderings in the watery edgelands of Wakefield, like in the title poem for instance:

"I crossed to the ice-laced washlands edge,
searching paths made strange by snow."

Wanderings which often lead to a final image or an event of subtle significance,

"...There was the frozen lake,
and there, as the sun held fast at noon,
the fox aflame quickening across the pane
of trackless white, never to look back."

But beyond these themes and pre-occupations there's a greater determination to explore the fullest extent of metaphor and symbol, and like the blackbird in In Ambleside Churchyard, Pete Lancaster is opening his throat and giving it all he's got, which he does to great effect.

How to Draw an Apple begins prosaically, "First sharpen your pencil," and develops with a typically tender simile, "Caressing gently as an approaching kiss/ the cheek of it." and then finally blooms with three lines which suggest that this poem is about much more than an art class:

"And then you'll capture it,
expose the sin deep under the skin,
discover the deep sad heart at its core."

This confidence in the way he handles his material is evident in New Year which lists observations around the trip to to an airport and eventual flight. But its conclusion:

"...the beds of cloud below us

On This Day…Forgive Me, Forgive Me, Stevie Smith

 

Forgive me, forgive me

Forgive me forgive me for my heart is my own
And not to be given for any man's frown
Yet would I not keep it for ever alone.

Forgive me forgive me I thought that I loved
My fancy betrayed me my heart was unmoved
My fancy too often has carelessly roved.

Forgive me forgive me for here where I stand
There is no friend beside me no lover at hand
No footstep but mine in my desert of sand.

Stevie Smith

Best known for her lines: “I was much too far out all of my life/and not waving but drowning,” Stevie Smith died on March 7th in 1971.

She had been awarded the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969 but perhaps the sense of isolation in her poetry foreshadows the obscurity which would follow for her and few lists of influential English poets of the mid to late twentieth century include her name. Fellow poet, Jeni Couzyn remembers her, “standing in all of her loneliness as one standing on a great height.” Robert Graves also recognised her sense of isolation but said that she wrote “the purest poetry of our time.”