Silence, Listening

I’ve seen a couple of performances lately that have left me wondering about the proper way to remember the Cold War. The first was Animal Farm by the Synetic Theater, a Washington, D.C. group that deserves a great deal of attention. They interpret classic books and plays using mime and dance, often dispensing with any dialogue. They are best known for a silent production of Hamlet (called Hamlet: The Rest is Silence) which will be reprised next month. Watching them, the absence of speech forces you to turn off the front part of your brain and read the emotion in their carefully modulated facial expressions. Animal Farm is not silent, I guess because they wanted to include the animal noises, though it is strongest when they return to the dancing. In the end, the production was fun to watch but less successful than their recent silent Macbeth. The latter was a very brilliant meditation on the themes of power and superstition, using the three witches as stand-ins for each of the monotheistic religions. Orwell is far less open to interpretation than Shakespeare; they are at opposite poles, in fact, since Shakespeare can service almost any message, but an allegory is intended to have only one meaning. So there may be little that one can do with Animal Farm other than simply retell a story we already know. And because the Soviet Union is only history now, a book that once served as instruction and a warning has been demoted to the role of explaining what already happened. It could be the failure to say anything new about the Cold War simply means we have not thought about it enough to understand how it is relevant to the world we now live in.

Later, I went to see The Lives of Others, a very good movie that is also a period piece. The year (you guessed it!) is 1984, and the main character is a Stasi officer assigned to monitor a wiretapped apartment in East Berlin. While the entire cast does well, the film rides on the performance of Ulrich Mühe, who plays the officer. He wears an impenetrable facial expression at all times so that his feelings, if they exist, are hidden. When he makes several decisions that are crucial to the plot, we are left wondering about his motives long after the movie is over. The atmosphere is immaculately rendered, with not a single bright color visible anywhere on the streets of the city. It is not a criticism of the movie to say that it teaches a great deal about a particular time and place, but does not answer many questions about present-day authoritarian governments or modern surveillance programs.