JANUARY 17, 2022 – As a photography hobbyist, I target scenes. As a cancer patient, I’m targeted by new perspectives. On Saturday evening, the film, A Hidden Life, 2019 masterpiece by American filmmaker Terrance Malick (Amazon Prime)—struck the bull’s eye. It probes as deeply as a Mahler symphony and explores the soul as far as Barber’s Serenade for Strings.
The work is a “war”—or more precisely, “anti-war”—movie but an extraordinary one in that no weapons are fired and not a single death is portrayed. Apart from a brief fist-a-cuffs between the hero and a fellow Austrian farmer engaged in communal harvest, violence is compressed into a smattering of Nazi rants. Even prison torture is depicted tangentially.
The film is also “religious,” yet with insights that surely resonate as much with atheists as with strong believers.
Based on true events, the movie features Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer living a bucolic, hard-working life beside his wife and their three young daughters and his elderly mother (Franz’s father was killed in the trenches in WW I) just outside a picturesque Alpine village near the Bavarian border. Most of the townspeople have drunk the Kool-Aid: the “enemy” is anyone “who’s not like us.” Worse is a traitor: “one of us who’s not like us.”
Franz responds reluctantly to the call for military training but is granted a farmer’s exemption from active duty until several years into WW II. When ordered to appear, he reports (influenced by his priest who says Franz’s duty is to the Fatherland), but he refuses to take the oath to Der Führer. Franz’s defiance lands him in prison in Linz, but he’s offered a reprieve: hospital service if he signs the oath. Again, he refuses. He’s transferred to prison in Berlin, tried for sedition, and yet again—given a way out: the oath. With Christ-like humility he stands firm. He’s guillotined, but the travesty occurs off camera.
My wife slept through most of the movie. She later called it “slow” and “depressing.” She’s in good company. My sister of deep faith (Christian/Episcopalian), who recommended the film, said her beloved priest hated the film.
If my sister’s spiritual compass gives divine direction, my moral limit is defined by the practical. An empty oath to the devil carries no moral imperative—especially when all that’s divine is at stake: love, joy, family, the wonder of creation. (Exception: the first-time denial, which precluded Franz’s induction into active duty and thus, his participation in a host of horrors.) My sister grasped that Franz’s command of the divine reached above human moral constructs, but she allowed that his gift in that respect isn’t a moral requirement for the rest of us. By analogy, I don’t have to be Beethoven to appreciate the genius of the Titan’s soul.
Breathless by the end, I inhaled: it’s 2022. Our race has survived itself—to seize more chances at self-extinction. The Alps, meanwhile, stand stalwart, their aspect changing continuously in concert with the rest of creation.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
