Light On Dark Water

The Ninth Day

I want to recommend this excellent German movie about a priest imprisoned in Dachau who is given a nine-day furlough so that the Nazis can pressure him into helping them get his bishop to cooperate with the Reich. It's extremely well done (in German, with subtitles): more information here. I should warn you that it contains a few scenes, brief but powerful, of pretty rough violence. Most of it, though, takes place away from the prison.

An interview with the director, Volker Schlöndorff, sheds some interesting light on the question of Christian art. I think most Catholics (and Protestants) who are interested in such things have had disappointing experiences with self-consciously Christian art—books, movies, whatever—that just isn't very well done, however well-intentioned it may be. This is an instance of the inverse: a very fine work of art by a non-Christian which presents Christian and specifically Catholic themes very skillfully and powerfully. 

Maclin Horton
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11 responses to “The Ninth Day”

  1. francesca

    I have shown this movie to my students several times.
    I also like the interview with the director. There is a moment when he says, ‘what a striking thing it is that such a thing as the soul exists’

    Reply
  2. Mac

    I actually haven’t finished the interview. I don’t think I’ve gotten to that remark. My wife & I watched the movie together last weekend, but not the interview. I took a day off work yesterday and thought I would watch the interview while I ate lunch (Armour chili, not bad, for those keeping track 🙂 ) and then put the movie in the mail to Netflix. Ten minutes or so in I decided that my wife would find it interesting, too, and stopped.
    It does bear mentioning that he seems to have been raised Catholic, or at least he went to a Catholic school, so that probably gives him some insight that he may not really even be aware that he has, or that other people might not have.

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  3. francesca

    I’m wrong about the interview with the director. I was thinking of another German film which I’ve watched with students, The Lives of Others. (I think – I am going to have to watch the interviews again now!)
    I have shown The Ninth Day several times to students on my ’19th & 20th Century Catholic Politics’ course.

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  4. Rob G

    I’ll have to watch this. ‘The Lives of Others’ is outstanding. Another very good one I watched recently is ‘Katyn,’ about the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets at the beginning of WWII. The Catholicism in evidence in the film is subtle but profound.

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  5. Mac

    Yes, Lives of Others is really, really good. Another movie related to E. Germany that I really liked is…oh heck, can’t think of the name…about the fall of communism, and a guy’s effort to keep the news from his dying mother who was a dedicated communist. Goodbye Lenin? Yes, that’s it. No particular Christian slant, but a touching picture of love.

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  6. francesca

    I had a sense of humour failure during Goodbye Lenin.

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  7. Mac

    Well, it wasn’t all humor, or maybe even mostly. Did you just not like it at all?

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  8. francesca

    I think it was the left-wing art house audience. It’s a bit like, Dr Strangelove is actually funny, but if you see it surrounded by an adolescent leftist audience doing knee-jerk guffaws at the Nazi salutes, it spoils it. In the same way, when I saw Goodbye Lenin, there were spontaneous knee jerk jeers at the son trying to hide the giant Coca-Cola balloon, and so on. I’m sure GL is a funny and good movie in itself, but when you see it with an audience which is willing it to be saying that the evils of Western capitalism are equivalent to those of East German style communism, it loses its charm.

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  9. Anne-Marie

    It’s been a few years since I watched GL, but I thought it had a bit of an identity problem. Most people seemed to think it was a comedy, a political commentary, or both. Although some parts were indeed very funny, for me especially because I saw it shortly after living in former East Germany, the comedy was ancillary, not the driving force. As political commentary it didn’t get beyond Osstalgie, and maybe even not that far.
    But as Francesca said, it’s a touching picture of love and it raises very interesting questions about love, truth, and loyalty.
    I have wanted to see both The Ninth Day and The Lives of Others for a long time.

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  10. Anne-Marie

    Whoops, sorry, it was you who said that, Maclin, not Francesca.

    Reply
  11. Mac

    Yes, that was exactly my view of it, Ann-Marie. I thought the comedy was ancillary (and muted), and I didn’t see it as a political statement at all. The political situation just provided the framework, albeit a rather remarkable one, for the important stuff, which was personal.
    I can imagine, Francesca, that that would have spoiled it.

    Reply

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