East of War
All Feature Films A-Z
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1h 52m
Dir. Ruth Beckermann - 1996 - Austria
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting, on the walls the black and white photographs of the exhibition “War of Extermination”, which documents the atrocities committed by the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Against this background, Ruth Beckermann films former soldiers talking about their experiences that exist beyond the realm of "normal" war. Never straying beyond the confines of the exhibition, Beckermann spent a month in the exhibition rooms of the Alpenmilchzentrale, observing and asking questions. An uncompromising film about remembrance and forgetting and which helped advance the destruction of the myth regarding the Wehrmacht's decency.
"It is a film that is ostensibly about speaking, literally a visual lesson in storytelling. But the even more valuable point of the film is: how it leads to a reassessment of silence" - Robert Menasse, 1998.
"Two oppressive hours about Hitler's war veterans: two hours about cowardice, weakness, ignorance, about fellow travellers and incorrigible perpetrators; two hours about a disappearing minority who are not furiously searching for excuses; two hours about a generation who escaped from themselves into a collective amnesia" - Hubertus Czernin, 1996
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