“My hands are trembling!” says our doctor, vigorously flapping his hands as he tries to shake off imaginary cobwebs. Veins, that, at a much more tender time in his life operated and learned the language of medicine with comfort. Now, there’s a stiffness in those veins, almost twisted to varicosity. The thumbs and fingers that they command belie a loss of self-comprehension. The doctor’s hands can’t place themselves upon the patient, and in some ways, it reveals to us the larger struggle of the same man being unable to place himself in this new society. This inability to see oneself in the new social order, pulling words from strings of fear by day, playing on their plaintive chords by night – Brynych’s masterstroke is really about maintaining an uncompromising consistency in Braun’s conflict with himself. He manages to do all this while retaining the context of the era he bases his narrative on and more, making the film a sublime achievement that has not got its due on the international stage.
Speaking of the subject, the Holocaust has always called for sensitive viewings. We are made witnesses to acts of external resistance against the Reich. In both Schindler’s List and Polanski’s The Pianist, the protagonist’s defense against the predicament that they find themselves in is to delay death. Survival becomes primordial – as Szpilman forages through brick ruins in the latter, prising rocks and larders open to trace trails of edible food – and the core of their identity in those repressed years is formed only by the singular desire to defeat death. Elsewhere, as in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful and perhaps even in Herman’s Striped Pyjamas, death is seen as a meaningful passage. In years past, Guido’s death as a final act valorises sacrifice and places it firmly in the memory of Giosuè. With peaceful passage into the night, he borrows meaning from his death to leave the life of his son unscathed. But, the same act, though orchestrated unwillingly, is much more forceful in Striped Pyjamas. To members of the Reich, it makes that seemingly impersonal act forcefully personal and thus renders an awakening. In resisting and embracing death, these films surrounding this period make choices constantly and consistently in a landscape where their characters live in visible proximity to death.
Brynych’s film, however, internalizes the conflict. The Fifth Horseman is Fear is a unique outlier in that it presents us with an individual’s dissonance – not that of the community, as viewed in other films from the same period – with the notion of death, and even with the notion of himself. The act of death is a trifle compared to the state of catatonic life. Braun’s struggle is that of a man who moves with the liberty envied by members interred in camps, but he cannot think with the same liberty that his legs experience. Packed into his attic, he begs and pleads that he is able-bodied to be a warehouseman or even a street sweeper, but he cannot think like them. A profession truly becomes one only when a man is accustomed to abiding by its code of conduct – not gleaning and performing from a script. Braun may have ceased to be a doctor, but he cannot arrest his thoughts. This facet of death, that of losing all sense of self while being alive, makes Brynych’s film a rare Holocaust film – one that views the circumstances of oppression as replaceable by that of any other regime. Unsurprisingly, the film was banned in then communist Czechoslovakia.
What perhaps pulls out the heart of this film is the embedded contrast between Braun’s disorientation and that of his milieu. Brynych succeeds in constructing an absurdist landscape – one that mirrors what is so often found in Camus’s work. There’s a monotony in the radio transmissions and their optimism that runs counter to the population’s pattern of fear, much like the charged sermons of hope in The Plague that mirror the equally fervent pursuit of mindless pleasure. Here too, Braun wades through masses of debauchery in his search for morphine and rubs shoulders with those who have chosen to embrace the absence of purpose in their modified lives. For a brief moment, the world even stops for Braun to whisper about the terrible stupidity of it all. All of his uneasiness, and his confrontations with a sense of duty stem from his inability to conceive purpose in this society any more. Fittingly, there’s no contrived irony in the fact that he works for the department that confiscates Jewish property. In such a society, does duty become a luxurious thought to have? Does it become an extraneous thought to deriving the most pleasure one can from one’s senses? In this scene that disrobes Jean Beraud’s Une Soirée and casts it in a pail of black liquid, time stops so that Braun can reflect on it – for if it doesn’t, the irreconcilable sense of duty is the only thing that keeps him going.
For all of this to have translated effectively on screen, Brynych’s ascetic use of film grammar is of much import. He doesn’t allow a fixed ideal to dictate the metronome of the film or its individual parts, rather allowing it to wrap itself around the oscillations of Braun’s mind. The earlier parts of the film build a rhythm that seems unsettled, but soon after, we have unbroken shots – as when Braun prates on the thoughtlessness of society – that place us as closely as possible to the central question of duty and purpose. When Braun himself loses that thread of thought, we move back to snapped sequences at the hospital, the ball, and the whorehouse. The longest static shot in the film only appears as he delivers a final monologue to the Gestapo. At this final juncture, we begin to see his message not addressing them, the members of the Gestapo, as much as the idea of the Gestapo itself. When he does choose death, the decision hardly seems sacrificial despite the circumstances – after all, the entire apartment is cooped in beneath him. It resembles an extremely personal victory for him, almost as if he only needed to kill the germ of fear in his mind. Without obstructions to the exploration of form, we are left to view existential thoughts fold and unfold before being finally laid bare. This alone, more than any other facet, gives a pure sense of the lives and times of men like Braun.
The Fifth Horseman is Fear doesn’t deal with duty as a superior emotion, one that is restricted to the valiant and durable. It develops through the grappling of one man with the notion of what he must do when all else makes little to no sense. Braun, like Rieux from The Fall, finds what seems within reach of accomplishment is an act to be performed. To perform it is a decent thing to do, not an exceptional act. Earlier in the film, a young boy, sunk in his chair, asks his father, “Daddy, who’s a real hero?” His father, absent-minded in his response, rejoinders back with, “a man who dies unnecessarily, as opposed to those who live unnecessarily” With cyanide clutched in his hand, one could argue that Braun died unnecessarily, but knowing his fate, he chose to accept the nearest task at hand and, at the least, not live unnecessarily.
