Watch Amen Movie Online
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 |
Watch Amen Movie Online.
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The relationship between the Vatican and the Third Reich has been a very hot topic recently, as modern documents and scholarly works have served to ignite a massive debate. Could the church have done more, did they relieve the Nazi’s covertly, was Pope Pius XII a coward in the face of Hitler? These are all relevant questions that deserved to be answered. Into the debate steps Amen, an effective drama directed by Costa Gavras, which, while looking at the actions of the church hierarchy during the war, concentrates more on the extreme level relationship, which I mediate remarkable more spirited. The movie is an titillating notice at morality and responsibility in the most troubling of times.
The movie’s protagonist, interestingly enough, is SS officer Kurt Gerstein, played by the subdued Ulrich Tukur. Gerstein is a chemist by trade, and is promoted because of his ability to originate extremely effective “anti-vermin” pesticides, such as forms of Zycklon-B. Gerstein is unnerved to seek, as he stares into a gas chamber, that his formula’s are being former for far more than animal extermination. The realization changes his life, and Gerstein, a devout Catholic, gives the information and more to a well-connected Italian priest, Father Riccardo. Riccardo’s family is halt to the Pope, and the two unlikely allies feel they can effectively fade the church against the Nazi regime. They have a precedent, considering that a Catholic uproar ended the SS sponsored extermination of the mentally handicapped. However, the two soon glean that the church is hesitant to challenge Germany, for numerous reasons, including their hatred for Stalin’s Russia, their anti-Semitic attitudes, and their awe of decreased power in Nazi dominated Europe. It’s a wait and glimpse attitude that is getting millions killed. Both men are locked in their fair duty, even as those they trusted fail them, time and time again.
Amen is a stylish film that uses the rich history of Europe to lend a foreboding atmosphere to the entire residence. The Vatican shots are wonderful, as are the Berlin and, horrifyingly, the camp scenes. The acting is favorable all around especially Tukur’s portrayal of the tortured SS officer, unsure of where to turn. While it may construct some leaps of faith that are factually baseless, it does shed an provocative light on those times. It’s ending is a haunting one, as was history’s verdict. A obliging film.
Based on a correct epic, *Amen* is an essential, and heretofore unexamined, angle in cinema’s ongoing grappling with the Holocaust: the complicity of the Catholic Church with the Third Reich’s “Final Solution”. Famous BECAUSE the subject hasn’t been examined in film. Valid, too; the movie is concerned with the execute of the Jews in particular. Early in *Amen*, we gaze the German Catholic Church place a close to the euthanizing of what the Nazi Party calls “unproductive citizens”, e.g., people with Down’s Syndrome and, indeed, any who suffer from mental illness. The local archbishop threatens the Nazi bureaucrats with exposure to world belief, and thunders angry, logical arguments from the pulpit (”‘Unproductive!’ And what of injured soldiers returning from the front? Are they ‘unproductive’, too? ” etc.) . But the thing is, these mentally ill were baptized as Christians. The JEWS, on the other hand. . . . Director Costa-Gavras gives them an unlikely champion: an SS officer and chemist Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) whose creation of a cleansing agent, designed to filter sinful drinking water for the troops at the front, becomes a critical tool in the mass-murder campaign by the German government. The chemist, a devout Protestant, is tremulous when he discovers to what uses his invention is being do. He is eventually brought to a concentration camp, and is more or less forced to plan a gassing through a peep-hole on a gas-chamber door. Thankfully, WE’RE spared the gawk. Indeed, we “witness” almost no atrocities: Costa-Gavras assumes we’re quick-witted and factual enough to already know that genocide is injurious. (Obviously a substandard assumption, considering that this movie received almost zero attention from audiences and critics. We clearly need piles of bodies displayed with Barber’s *Adagio for Strings* swelling in the background, and a Schindler-like hero played by a robust and good-looking Irishman.) Instead, he shows us the horrible paperwork, the incessant criss-crossing of the cattle-cars (empty one method, beefy the other contrivance) . . . the whole damnable mechanical PROCESS of the Holocaust. Gerstein decides to be the “eyes and ears” of this process, and even tries to listless it down in his fumbling draw by hysterically claiming that THIS batch of chemicals is leaking from their canisters and must be destroyed, THAT batch won’t be ready for months, and so on. Meanwhile, having learned that the Church managed to close the murdering of the mentally ill, Gerstein appeals to the local diocese. Upon informing the local big-wig prelate that the Nazis are systematically wiping out the Jews, the prelate muses suspiciously, “Are you even Catholic? ” But he DOES derive the attention of a fictional young Jesuit, Father Riccardo (played with agonizing understatement by Mathieu Kassovitz) . Riccardo becomes clear that Pope Pius XII should learn of the atrocities . . . and is fiercely checked by the Church bureaucracy and finally by the Pope Himself. *Amen* savagely attacks the Church in general and the Pope in particular: it’s rather telling that Costa-Gavras could fetch no single figure to ghastly Riccardo upon, but had to earn an amalgam from various (and doubtless dilapidated) voices in the Church hierarchy at that time. Some may complain that Riccardo is merely a symbol of Righteous, and that another character in the film, known only with chilling anonymity as “The Doctor”, is unbiased Execrable personified. But I contemplate enough ambiguity is provided by Gerstein himself: we like him, we identify with him, we sympathize with his disgust, we aid his attempts to alert the world, but we also feel uneasy that he remains in his situation as SS Lieutenant. What IS the truth about Gerstein? We’ll never truly know what was in his heart; we only know what he documented about the process of the gassings, after he was incarcerated after the war. Was he trying to condemn his murderous colleagues, or merely hoping to absolve his occupy continued participation? Or both? Perhaps Riccardo and the Doctor, both fictional, narrate his contain divided soul.
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