Let me be clear. The agonising process of the UK’s departure, or not, from the EU will be an infinite field of academic study over the decades to come.
Birmingham’s reggae veterans UB40 are a band who have often worn their politics on their sleeves, and the title of their new album is taken from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party mantra. The parallels between the two have already been noted, of course. After a turbulent time, a split saw a new man thrust into the spotlight while divisions raged and claims were made over who had the rights to the soul of a British institution. Sound familiar?
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning.
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen handled proceedings like a fight before a Millwall game.
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat.
Compared to Scotland, Welsh independence has yet to hit the mainstream. The idea has been mostly supported by the Welsh-speaking population, with opinion polls hovering around 19 per cent. It’s fallen to Super Furry Animals keyboardist Cian Ciaran to change this with the Yes is More campaign.
Is there a connection between revolution and theatre? The answer has to be yes – a visceral one. The supremacy of symbols, the collective strength of a crowd, a sense that some kind of pressure valve is being released to challenge the dominant social narrative. The Ancient Greeks understood this – it was from such impulses that theatre had its birth. So how does that work amid the populist turbulence of the twenty-first century?
Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15 1919, her body then thrown into a canal), as her significance and influence as a political figure attracts new attention, the film deserves the handsome restoration it receives here in StudioCanal’s “Vintage World Cinema” strand; particularly – remarkable though it may seem, even given von Trotta’s rather neglected status as a director on these shores – as it’s really the first ever English-language home entertainment release in the UK.
Sukowa compellingly catches Luxemburg’s prowess as an orator, that force-of-nature ability to capture the attention of an audience – it's a performance that Sukowa seems to carry on the strength of her jaw alone. Rosa Luxemburg certainly opens as an extroverted film whose set pieces owe more to an older, more traditional style of European filmmaking (the score by Nicolas Economou is particularly stately) than to the New German Cinema from which the director herself emerged.
Von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine
The changing panorama of revolutionary politics in Germany over the two first two decades of the 20th century can sometimes daunt, not least because von Trotta’s script is chronologically elliptical. It dots backwards and forwards, from an opening escape from imprisonment in Warsaw (which actually came later) through grand Berlin New Year celebrations in 1899 at which the fancy-dressed comrades (complete with Luxemburg ias a geisha) saw in the hopeful new century.
But it’s as Luxemburg becomes increasingly isolated – in her angry rejection of the Social Democrats’ collusion with the declaration of war, followed by long confinement in a German gaol – that the film’s greatest strength, its sense of an interior life, emerges. In the 20-minute interview that is the main extra on this release, von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine: never afraid to criticise her Party colleagues, she was unsparing about the ruthless paths taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. But the sense of personal separation is even more potent, something never assuaged by her passionate involvement (more on her part than his) with the revolutionary, Leo Jogiches (played by Daniel Olbrychski, pictured below with Sukowa), or a later affair with the much-younger son of fellow revolutionary Clara Zetkin, or even close friendships with women with whom, like Zetkin, she was part of a shared political circle.
One of the stories that von Trotta heard from a surviving acquaintance during her research speaks volumes – of how when Luxemburg was at home on her own, she would eat across the table from her cat, Mimi (the feline ate from a plate, too: it took close on three months for the cat’s performance to finally come right). The source for this private portrayal was Luxemburg’s letters, though their gradual East Berlin publication was still highlighting public achievement over personal drama: von Trotta was allowed (on the strength of an earlier involvement with the Peace Movement) unusual access to the archives, something denied to some major West German historians before her.
The sense of the director’s engagement with her character becomes absolute, von Trotta creating a fully rounded portrait that goes far beyond the stereotypes of “Red Rosa” as a figure unflinchingly devoted to revolution at any cost; her directorial handling is as confident, as vigorous even as her subject. Rosa Luxemburg is a film as much about that almost abstract concept, moral development, as it is about particular historical events, a process that led her to convictions that put human life above ideology or dogma, as she articulated a powerful insistence on social justice that would especially chime with later generations. .
The other extra is a short interview with Sukowa, in which she remembers her surprise at the casting suggestion from von Trotta (“I thought she’d gone mad!”), given that the director had initially been looking for an actress who more obviously resembled Rosa as the short, dark, vibrant woman she had been in life. There may be something slightly more detached, chillier even, in Sukowa’s performance, but the sense she gives of the “profound intelligence and morality” of her character is unmatched.
Overleaf: watch the German trailer for Rosa Luxemburg