A Hidden Life’s Phenomenological Exploration of Attunement and Detachment
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A Hidden Life is striking for what it is not; it is by and large not loud, not hurried, not overwrought. It resembles director Terrence Malick’s own previous foray into the WWII film, The Thin Red Line, more than other entries in the genre, which can skew maudlin, or explicitly violent, or just narratively conventional, the impossibly high stakes of good and evil allowing the war to become a staging ground for countless films crafted in the tradition of classical cinema. But here even working with a true story with some narrative momentum, Malick lets his film unfurl rather than propel forward, expanding languorously and quietly over three hours, letting every turn of events settle and reverberate. It is a continuation of Malick’s work, informed in part by his study of Martin Heidegger, in phenomenological film, the experiential, non-symbolic mode of allowing the viewer to wander through a film rather than be led by it to some intended conclusion. It also acts as a potent demonstration of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, using the bureaucratic processes that incriminate its main character and his treatment as a result of them to create a devastating experience for the viewer, watching a good man die bit by bit for refusing to compromise his principles. It is a unique Malick film in that way, creating a deeply felt, subtle rendering of the tragedy of the Second World War through this collision of German thought, of Heidegger and Arendt, that the director engineers, setting the emotional, the sublime, the attuned, against the soulless, the minute, the base.
The film tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer from the village of St. Radegund, beginning with his military training as the war starts in 1939. He lives there with his wife Fani and three daughters until he is conscripted to serve. But Franz has been skeptical of the rationale behind the war, wary of the fevered, hateful rhetoric it brings out in his neighbors, and when it comes time to swear loyalty to Hitler at the garrison, Franz can’t do it. The legal battle that ensues, at its heart a crisis between conscience and self-preservation, has been explored before with regard to the Second World War, but here it’s presented without propulsive, plot-driving force; instead Malick gives the story plenty of time to breathe, especially scenes of life on the farm, naturalistic, well-trodden territory for the Days of Heaven director. In fields of lush green, framed by mountains and clouded skies, the Jägerstätters tend to their crops and livestock, play with their daughters, share quiet moments with each other. There’s such an immediacy to these moments, in the earthiness of the setting and the open, loving way they interact with one another, augmented by the lack of artifice with which it is all presented, the camera smoothly, gracefully following them, rarely stopping. Close-ups figure largely in the film’s style as well, diminishing the distance between viewer and character through that most traditional means.
When the film moves away from the earthy and into the petty and human business of both the fascist sentiment growing in the village and Franz’s trial, the tone remains the same—slow, graceful, letting each moment hang there to be contemplated. Franz and Fani’s conversations with political and religious leaders are meditations on philosophy, on moral and social responsibility, on human decency and the notion of innocence, delivered with a bareness that leaves the viewer consumed in thought over the heavy issues at play, and feeling deeply each slight against the Jägerstätters. In its length, slowness, and expansiveness, not in location or time but in scope of ideas considered and fullness of place realized, A Hidden Life is an immersive experience, engaging philosophically and sensually as it unfolds around the viewer.
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That immersivity is key to the film’s phenomenological nature, the type of filmmaking that could be said takes a Heideggerian approach. As one of the key philosophers of phenomenology, and one whose theory Malick engaged with in his academic work as well, Heidegger’s ideas on being, or dasein, greatly inform the relation between A Hidden Life and its viewer. Even Heidegger’s personal perspective on place and belonging, the “rootedness” of his thinking, as Martin Woessner describes it (pg. 135), is felt in the film. Heidegger wrote about the role of peasant life and the magic of place in his work, a spirit that suffuses the scenes of the Jägerstätters’ farm, the purity of place and vocation rendered in the elemental, placid forms of the landscape and the traditional farming performed within it. As Franz’s trial proceeds, the fact that this farmer is being drawn further away from his land and further into bureaucracy is not lost on the viewer, nor is Franz’s characterization as someone apart from politics and strategy who somehow deep down knows what is happening is not right, and holds fast to his convictions.
In how the film specifically deals with Heideggerian theory on being, it is primarily from a formalistic standpoint that the concept of attunement (pg. 283) as it functions as a mode of being-in that is explored, both from the perspective of the viewer’s attunement to the film world, and the film’s reckoning with the idea of communal attunement, with the way humans understand their being in relation to others. The phenomenological film is one in which attunement is paramount; the viewer’s attention to all that is happening onscreen, and how that coalesces into an experience for them, is most important. This is why, in Heidegger’s writings on art, symbolism is seen as an impediment to meaning, in the way it draws explicit conclusions, taking away the viewer’s agency through an interference with their direct experience of the object in front of them. Whereas films that express something inherent about being, which project the world and what it means to exist within it in an unmediated way, are the films that, in Heidegger’s opinion, are worth watching.
That comes through in A Hidden Life through those previously-discussed “immediate” images, the unfettered way of living the Jägerstätters have, the pure emotions, the honest work, etc. In its non-symbolic plainness, the film breaks down the barrier of the screen for the viewer to participate in this world, to let it sink in and ruminate on what being means as they watch the story. As Shawn Loht, the author of a book applying Heideggerian philosophy to film, describes it, the viewer is “existentially present in the film world and as such, attuned to situations on screen,” a sort of reconceptualization of being as being part of art, transcending the gap that is supposed to exist between the art and the participant (pg. 61). In A Hidden Life’s non-hierarchical presentation of space and time as a natural, ever-flowing, ever-expanding environment, the viewer finds not a movie but a world they can find themselves in.
Besides this personal attunement as cultivated primarily through formal qualities is the sense of communal attunement, attunement to the events of the Jägerstätters’ lives, which also agrees in a thematic sense with the ideas of communal responsibility inherent in this particular story. Since if the viewer is a participant in the world of the film, they must also be a being amongst the other beings of that world, “beings whose fates are also existentially significant for us” (Loht, pg. 53). The film frankly wouldn’t work without that level of empathy, of identifying as a co-participant in Franz’s life, to feel the cruelty inflicted upon him as he’s beaten in prison and has any hope drained from him. In the film’s steady pace you see the totality of this treatment and feel the years drag on, feel the physical and emotional hurt of not only Franz but his family too, as they’re outcast from their community. Sensing yourself standing next to them in this immersive filmic disposition you open yourself to greater empathy. It’s that empathy that’s missing in the microcosm of the film’s plot and WWII as a historical event; hatred and fear of the Other is what leads to death and destruction, seen here most clearly in the mayor’s fiery tirades on the dangers of immigrants and the need to protect the fatherland from them. In one scene Malick shoots him from below at a bonfire inciting other townspeople into a frenzy, projecting fascist rhetoric with fevered intensity.
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Those sentiments are what fuel the Third Reich’s policies, the primitive heat behind the cooled bureaucracy. It’s in those discussions of protocol and technicalities and duty to nation that the idea of the banality of evil comes to the fore. While there are violent outbursts of brutality, like those from the mayor or the guards at the prison, it is these quiet, measured meetings with representatives of the institutions of the state that show how heinous philosophy can be subsumed into the workings of a government, sublimated into an appearance of normalcy through the trappings of respectable, sober places like churches and official buildings. Even quite literally do the settings change, from open farmland to spaces like well-appointed offices and the bleak prison Franz is kept in. In voiceover he talks about how much it means for a prisoner to see grass, something he’d take for granted when not enclosed in sickly yellow and pale grey concrete walls, surrounded by the cool metal of shackles and bed frames.
Franz turns first to the Bishop of Salzburg, coming to him as a Catholic looking for spiritual guidance, for an interpretation of God’s word to instruct him in how to act when faced with evil leaders. “You have a duty to the fatherland,” the bishop says. “The Church tells you so.” Notably he references not God, but the Church as the arbiter of this responsibility. He continues, “Do you know the words of the apostle, that every man is subject to the powers placed over him?” After the meeting Franz speculates that the bishop toed the line because he suspected Franz a spy, but regardless, here is a man ostensibly in the service of a higher power advocating instead for service in the name of the nation, perpetuating the ambitions of men out of some blind devotion to the idea of a fatherland, not any Christian sense of right and wrong.
In the conversations that follow are variations on the same theme, of a redirection of the issue at stake in Franz’s case, which is a conflict of the fundamental order between good and evil, into something more quotidian, about practicality and self-preservation. In his first conversation with his lawyer, Franz is asked what good he thinks his defiance is doing, if he thinks it’s going to change the course of things. Franz replies, “Does it make no difference if this war is just or unjust?” We don’t see the lawyer’s answer, but hear it as Franz performs prison labor: “You shine their shoes, you fill their sandbags…Are you innocent?” He emphasizes, in his attempts to get Franz to give up the ghost, his complicity in the mechanisms of the war whether he likes it or not, and the futility of his protest. In this, the lawyer has a point, but there’s still a sense of missing the forest for the trees, of thinking in terms of rational behavior and logic, not in the moral imperative his defendant sees in his actions. The lawyer does the same later on, trying to find workarounds to get the charges dropped, like having Franz work as a medical orderly, but it’s again a pragmatic solution that’s inadequate in addressing Franz’s more lofty dilemma.
Meanwhile, the various meetings Fani takes on behalf of her husband go nowhere for different reasons, as she’s shut out of the legal system by officials who won’t even take her calls, unable to break through the maze of the structures keeping her husband from her. Her neighbors in St. Radegund ostracize her further and further, at times shouting and lunging at her, even turning their kids against the Jägerstätter girls. They might be motivated in part by ideology, but likely just as strong is their desire to not be outcast as well, to join the rising tide against the family to maintain their status in the community.
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Finally, in Franz’s last meeting, he talks to the judge of his military tribunal, who echoes what his lawyer told him early on, that his actions won’t change anything. Even though their conversation dips into the probing and philosophical when the judge asks if Franz judges him, asks what right Franz has to defy the law like this, that sense is snuffed out quickly once they’re back in the courtroom. Franz is still sentenced to death in the end, the only outcome possible in his refusal to pledge loyalty to Hitler, the most draconian measure for defiance of the most perfunctory of actions.
The duality that A Hidden Life forges, with the sublime, the radically sensitive and in tune with the world on one end, and the banal, the mundane and base on the other end, leaves the viewer caught in the middle, between the fullness of experience, the keenly empathetic identification with the characters and their world and the lifeless pursuit of protocol for the sake of protocol. It finds you in the middle of this tragic, immersive experience that slowly seeps into you, feeling the push and pull between the farm and the state grinding you down as it does Franz. Through a phenomenological approach is the banality of evil really felt, really allowed to be experienced or understood in its totality, the way you might experience it if it were happening to you.
In the opening of The Thin Red Line, where the action of WWII takes place on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, a voice asks, “What is this war in the heart of nature?” And while initially A Hidden Life might seem like another incantation of that question, it’s less about war inserting itself into nature, dominating and spoiling, but about nature and war clashing with one another in an equal sense, bringing with them all that they represent about purity and corruption, about attunement to and detachment from the human experience. A Hidden Life’s war is not a war in the heart of nature but a war amongst the structures created by man, a complicated world of churches and villages and homes and government offices and prisons, that makes its positioning of attunement and detachment all the more complex, but all the more recognizable as well, and therefore more deeply understood, more heartbreakingly resonant.