Szabó: Oberst Redl (Colonel Redl) (1985)

The second installment in István Szabó’s Hungarian trilogy once again stars Karl Maria Brandauer, this time as the infamous Colonel whose counter-espionage proved so disastrous for the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of World War I. Szabó strays pretty far from previous understandings of Redl’s conduct, painting him as a devoted soldier whose homosexuality forced him to become a counter-agent to the Russians, as well as condensing his character study to the tics and nuances of Brandauer’s face.  From the opening credit sequence, which almost imperceptibly morphs close-ups and freezes of Brandauer, we’re presented with an extraordinary facial tactility and prehensility that’s only enhanced by the sterile austerity of Szabó’s mise-en-scenes, most of which tend to be lit by pinpricks of snowy light, and contoured by stark, stony bursts of speech or sound. In Szabó’s hands, Redl’s face reaches out and caresses other faces, or begs to be caressed by other faces, meaning that, on the one hand, it’s a poignantly, pregnantly homosexual face, but, on the other hand, it’s an eminently military face, moulding as it observes, scrutinising each soldier with an almost sculptural rigour. That's the nature of Szabó’s camera, too, which manages to be both sensually, meticulously exploratory and remote at the same time – it’s a camera that supervises, oversees and manages as much as it relays information; an agent of sensual surveillance. So it feels right that Redl is promoted to head of surveillance, where he becomes a pioneer of surveillance in his own right – nobody’s more qualified for the job, just because nobody in the military has spent more time or fastidiousness observing other soldiers. And the surveillance unit quickly becomes a way of displacing the attention Redl's flamboyant lifestyle was starting to draw by this point in his career, until his face becomes positively holographic, abstracting itself from its gazes as soon as they’re issued, much like military orders or commands. Szabó has stated that Redl’s homosexuality isn’t the point of his film, and it’s true that there are very few depictions of sex, but that’s also what makes it such a powerful evocation of how pleasure, or thwarted pleasure, produces history – in this account, World War I begins as soon as Archduke Franz Ferdinand remarks upon Redl’s remarkable, surveillant face.