Review of Stars (1959)
Seen in 2026.
In the siege of Leningrad, a nameless German corporal developed an appreciation for carefree chimpanzees, an animal he’s probably never seen. He appreciates the quiet summer of rural Bulgaria, where he is stationed to recover from his personal losses. Like Hitler, he was a bad painter before the war. Here, he is friends both with his local workers in the motor pool and with a lieutenant who takes advantage of the shashlik as well as the women. One day, a train rolls to a stop here. It’s full of Jews from Greece. It is still only 1943. They won’t be staying very long.
Though the film has a little extradiegetic music, dreamlike double-exposure edits, mildly Russian-formalist cuts, and even a central romance of sorts, it is still beautiful in its simplicity and its realism. By working primarily on a small scale with fewer adornments than Hollywood, the film embodies “Walther”’s moral dilemma, where a small-scale solution to a large-scale problem seems futile to him at first.
Over the course of the film, “Walther” slowly raises the stakes of his involvement, from merely doodling on the clock to supplying weapons to Bulgarian partisans aligned with Petko, a local man who never openly identifies as a communist but says there are more like him, with names like Vasily and Ivan. When he says this, Petko is lit low key, looking as close to glamorous as you get in this East German co-production. It is a rare case of sincerity in an accessible fiction film, both when it comes to its depiction of the Holocaust and its own production as pre-stagnation Soviet propaganda.
References here: Schindler’s List (1993).