6/26/2023 0 Comments A hidden lifeIt’s a machine too large for an Austrian peasant farmer to interrupt, and it renders Franz’s protest inconsequential. But the scale of the war drowns out his voice. His faith tells him unequivocally to oppose Hitler, and so he does. “ was not content to watch his nation in a state of collapse,” an older villager explains. Meanwhile, his countrymen scapegoat Hitler’s murder, claiming that a strong political will unfortunately is needed to overcome their national rut. ![]() The town priest, installed by the Third Reich to replace the previous priest, refuses to condemn Hitler. He finds the war despicable and does not support Hitler, an opinion he dangerously voices in public, to the dismay of those around him. The forces that trap him in to participating in evil are beyond his control. Once the war is in full motion, Franz is called to serve under the Nazis. And their lives, while strenuous, are secure and peaceful - that is, until the world’s accidents make their kind of wealth a source of precarity. All four of them experience the uninterrupted Austrian countryside as a bounty of natural resources, a place of wonder and beauty. They dance and they work they play and they love. Malick captures the innocence and richness of their home. Radegund, the west Austrian village they live in, is remote and pleasant, far from the hustle of the modern millwork and disconnected from Hitler’s earlier invasion of the Rhine. He lives with his beloved wife, Franziska (Valerie Pachner), and their two young children. ![]() Franz (played by August Diehl) is an Austrian peasant farmer. Told mostly through a series of loving voice-overs between husband and wife, A Hidden Life follows and is based on the life of Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector to the Third Reich who was beatified by the Vatican in 2007. Malick wants to shed light on the courage that stands behind un-historic acts of sacrifice, ones which fail to stop an injustice and which couldn’t be expected to put a dent in it anyway. The title and epithet come from George Eliot, who writes: “ the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The spirit of the film is in testing the resolve that rests in those unvisited tombs. At once a portrait of resistance and an exegesis on love, A Hidden Life interrogates who should sacrifice, what demands a sacrifice of us, and how we cope with sacrifice when it arrives, questions which take on special significance in the context of the film’s setting in World War II. ![]() This question of courage and of sacrifice - of what drives us to sacrifice our goals and projects - has gripped me since watching Terrence Malick’s latest film, A Hidden Life (2019). Which only deepens the question: what kind of beliefs and feelings could lead one to put their life on the line, the most serious of moral commitments, and do so reluctantly? He’s thrown forward, making a choice few would ever make, falling on a grenade with the end of his life before his eyes - but without the speed and charge expected of such a sacrifice. No doubt it can be immobilizing to stare sacrifice in the face. It’s an interesting way to describe an example of courage, and it’s interesting because the private’s motives appear so courage-less. The suddenness of a grenade falling in front of the private dials in his attention on the object, and unthinking habit carries his tired body toward the explosive. The thought doesn’t enter his mind it doesn’t have time to. ![]() But does he fall on the grenade out of a desire to be brave or to do good? Of course not. IN TREE OF SMOKE (2007), Denis Johnson writes of a private who throws his helmet on top of a grenade, and lowers himself, “not rapidly, but with some reluctance.” Falling on a grenade is, of course, a brave thing to do, the bravest sacrifice that the private could make.
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