Parky at the Pictures (DVD 15/1/2015)

An introductory crawl reveals that, following the Spanish invasion of their territories, the Incas devised the legend of a fabulous city that contained more treasure than any other on earth. Determined to claim the booty for Philip II of Spain and the Roman Catholic Church, Gonzalo Pizarro went in search of El Dorado, with Don Lope de Aguirre as his second in command. The account of the ill-fated expedition written by Brother Gaspar de Carvajal serves as the source of the ensuing action, which begins on Christmas Day, 1560.

Peering down on the heads of the conquistadors and their Indian captives picking their way along a winding jungle incline, Thomas Mauch's camera makes it clear from the outset that this is a reckless and treacherous mission. Brandishing their pikestaffs and wearing heavy armour, the Spaniards trudge through the mud as their equipment, supplies and heavy weaponry are born by horses, llamas and slaves. As they reach a rampaging river, Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) declares that all will be well from here, although Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is far from convinced and fears that they will all be dragged under.

In voiceover, Brother Gaspar (Del Negro) declares the Indians to be useless, as they succumb to disease the moment the temperature changes. However, there was no time to give them proper Christian burials, as the terrain was so forbidding that progress was slow. Eventually, with the new year approaching, Pizarro makes camp and announces that a party of 40 souls will be given a week to find El Dorado before the expedition is abandoned. He places Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) in charge and gives him permission to take his mistress, Inez de Atienza (Helena Rojo). Aguirre's adolescent daughter, Flores (Cecilia Rivera), is also allowed to go along, while Gaspar and Don Fernando de Guzman (Peter Berling) will respectively represent Church and State. Pizarro uses a stencil to sign the document and warns that he will only wait a week for Ursua to report his findings.

On 4 January, the force sets sail on three wooden rafts that are swept along the fast-flowing river. Ursua and Aguirre are forced to watch, however, as one craft is caught by the rapids and trapped against a rocky bank. Ursua sends Armando (Armando Polanah) to see if the crew can be rescued and, while they wait, Inez and Flores bathe and some of the soldiers build a makeshift shelter. As night falls, however, the sky suddenly lights up and gunfire rings out across the valley. The following morning, Armando finds six corpses on the raft and wonders whether the Indian oarsmen have found sanctuary with the local tribe. He urges his men to be vigilant as they return to camp, but one is caught in a foot trap and swept high into a tree, with his dripping blood being the only clue to his whereabouts.

Ursua wants to bury the victims with due ceremony, but Aguirre knows they stand to lose more men just retrieving the cadavers and orders Perucho (Daniel Ades) to ensure that the cannon doesn't rust up by firing a test shot directly into the raft and blowing it to smithereens. Inez wants Aguirre punished for such a sacrilegious act, but Ursua agrees that they need to show the Indians their power and lets the matter rest. On 8 January, however, they wake to find that the river has swollen dramatically overnight and swept away the remaining rafts. Aguirre orders Perucho to start building new ones, but Ursua insists they should abandon the trek and return to Pizarro.

As he speaks, Ursua is shot in the shoulder and another trooper rallying to his cause is gunned down. Aguirre has Armondo locked in a cage to prevent him from aiding Ursua and reminds the men that Hernán Cortés disobeyed orders and became rich and famous after conquering the Aztecs. He convinces the men to depose Ursua as the leader of the expedition and, when Inez begs Gaspar to intervene, he tells her that the Church has always taken the side of Might over Right. Consequently, he helps draft a document that frees them from fealty to Philip II and they vote for Guzman to become the new Emperor of El Dorado, with Aguirre as his deputy.

Two days later, Armando is murdered, along with the soldier guarding his cell. Aguirre accuses Ursua and demands his execution. However, Guzman orders a trial so that Ursua can defend himself and so that that any punishment can carry a semblance of legitimacy. Perucho opines that Ursua is a traitor and both Pizarro's black slave Okello (Edward Roland) and Spanish-speaking Indian Balthasar (Alejandro Chavez) confess that Ursua had given them payments that could be construed as bribes. Inez tries to speak up for her lover, but Gaspar dismisses her as too confused to be a reliable witness and he finds Ursua guilty and sentences him to hang. Aguirre is quietly satisfied with the verdict, but it is immediately commuted by Guzman to celebrate the day the Moors were driven out of Castile and he concludes his judgement by confiscating half of the prisoner's wealth and dividing the rest among the soldiers.

The new rafts are completed by 12 January and the conquistadors soon see fires burning on the bank. Okello is sent to investigate, as the Indians are supposedly scared of black men and horses, and he finds bunches of bananas inside the empty huts. However, as they scout around the settlement, they realise that the occupants are cannibals and beat a hasty retreat. By 20 January, Aguirre has had the rafts lashed together and built a canopy in the centre so that they can find shelter from the blazing sun. He has also had a toilet hut built for Guzman and finds a cuddly critter for Flores to pet. But Inez has nothing to do with him and stands watch over Ursua to prevent him from being assassinated.

The river has suddenly become sluggish and this makes them sitting targets for the tribes spying on them from the jungle. When a horse kicks over a fire, Aguirre picks up a burning keg of gunpowder and hurls it into the water, while Guzman dives off the raft to protect himself. In the furore, however, one of the band is killed by a poison dart and Aguirre orders the men to fire their muskets into the air to scare the Indians away. He also tries to raise morale by having one of the slaves play his pan pipes. But fresh hope comes on 24 January, when a Yagua fisherman and his wife approach in their canoe and Aguirre notices that he is wearing a golden charm around his neck. When Balthasar questions him, he points in the direction of El Dorado, only to be set upon when Gaspar offers him a copy of the Bible and he replies that he cannot hear the Word of God emanating from within.

Guzman draws a map and claims all the territory they have seen for his empire. Despite his initial misgivings, he is now warming to the task and tucks into the delicacies that Okello feeds him. The others are becoming discontented, however, as grain supplies are running low and, when the last horse breaks free from its tether and has to be pushed into the water to stop it stampeding, the men grab the food from the distracted Guzman's table. But the horse is swept away and Gaspar complains that they could have eaten meat for a week if Aguirre hadn't been so hot-headed.

A few days later, Guzman dies on leaving his toilet and Gaspar records in his journal that Ursua was taken away the following day and hanged from a tree by Perucho and his cohorts. As they aimlessly drift downstream, they hear Indians on the bank and Balthasar translates that they are chanting `meat is floating by'. This provokes Aguirre, who fires the cannon into their camp and torches the huts. Some of the men are killed, while others gorge on salt they find spilt on the ground. But Inez has had enough and wanders into the jungle alone to accept her fate.

One of the soldiers mumbles to his friend that Aguirre has lost control. But he overhears the mutinous remark and orders Perucho to behead him in front of everyone as a warning. He proclaims that he is the `wrath of God' and that those who cross him will perish, while those who remain by his side will be richly rewarded. Over the ensuing days, Flores's pet gives birth to babies. But the arrow attacks from the bank continue and, on 1 February, Gaspar announces that the men have had enough and believe El Dorado to be nothing more than a myth. However, Aguirre retorts that Mexico was real and he refuses to blaze a trail for others to follow without getting his due reward.

By 21 February, though, many of the survivors are struggling to stand, while others are hallucinating from fever. Rising water levels prevent them from getting ashore for food and Gaspar is forced to abandon his journal when a comrade drinks the last of his ink in the belief it is medicine. Even Flores regards her father with despair, while Okello points out a sailing ship that he insists is stuck in a treetop. However, he is hit with an arrow and Gaspar and Flores are also wounded, leaving Aguirre to strut across the deck in a frantic effort to drive away the monkeys that have overrun the raft. He dreams about sailing to Trinidad and establishing a kingdom in Mexico, where he could marry his daughter and breed racially pure offspring. As the camera swoops along the river and circles the craft to symbolise the final futility of the mission, Aguirre is seen as the last man standing, but one who has been beaten by his unfamiliarity with the terrain, by the cunning of his largely unseen adversary and by his own hubris.

A fiction posing as history, this is a magisterial account of a deluded megalomaniac pursuing a dream that is actually the figment of a supposedly uncivilised imagination. Herzog took his inspiration from the chronicle of Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who served as chaplain to Pizarro and accompanied Francisco de Orellana along the Napo River in the search for La Canela, a place reputed for its cinnamon rather than its gold. The real Gaspar survived his odyssey, became a missionary and completed the Relación that was finally published in 1865. But Herzog wasn't interested in such mundane truths. He was only concerned with the legend that highlighted the greed, hypocrisy and inhumanity of the conquistadors who sought to subjugate, exploit and plunder in the name of religion.

However, as is usually the case with Herzog, the narrative is merely a pretext for taking an individual out of their comfort zone and pitching them into a hostile environment that not only reflects their plight, but also exacerbates the flaws and weaknesses that will compound the situation and either bring about the protagonist's doom or an exceedingly hard won redemption. In the case of Aguirre, he learns nothing from his experiences and still seeks his elusive goal even after it would have become clear to any other rational being that he has failed as a leader, as a father and as a man.

Fittingly, several creation myths have grown up around the shoot in the Amazonian jungle, with Herzog reportedly pulling a gun on Kinski when he threatened to quit because of the director's increasingly unreasonable demands. But whatever the state of Herzog's relationship with Kinski, he managed to coax a remarkable performance out of him. His eyes frequently blaze with simmering malevolence and haunted dementia in close-ups that isolate him from his companions while still fixing him firmly in the wilderness that has inflamed his ambition and robbed him of his reason. The decision to keep the Indians largely invisible reinforces the sense of entrapment and paranoia that also fuels Guzman's delusions of grandeur and Gaspar's decision to put his faith in Aguirre rather than God.

Accompanied by an eerie score composed for the choir-organ by Florian Fricke of the rock band Popol Vuh (whose name is derived from Mayan mythology), Thomas Mauch's views of the daunting topography are mesmerising. But the uncredited production and costume design are also worthy of note, as are Herbert Prasch's sound and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus's editing. However, this is undeniably Herzog's picture and goes a long way to justifying his reputation as a cinematic visionary. He would put Kinski through similar hell during the production of Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987), but they would never improve upon this intense exposé of the insignificance, arrogance and folly of humankind.

Josef Mengele died six years after Aguirre, Wrath of God was released. It's remarkable that a war criminal as notorious as the `Angel of Death', who conducted genetic experiments at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, could have managed to remain at liberty for so long. But a clue as to why he was never captured is provided in Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda, an adaptation of her own 2011 novel that speculates on the extent to which German ex-patriate communities in Latin America helped protect prominent Nazis from facing justice for the atrocities they had committed on behalf of the Third Reich. Yet, while this is an intriguing premises, Puenzo seems uncertain how best to tell her tale or how much to trust the audience with its awful secret. Consequently, while this is every bit as thoughtful and meticulous as her respective studies of intersexuality and lesbianism in XXY (2007) and lesbianism in The Fish Child (2009), it lacks a sense of palpable menace and feels more like a grim fairytale than a Gothic à clef.

At a rest stop on the Desert Road in Patagonia, dapper stranger Àlex Brendemühl watches a group of children playing. He is taken by the diminutive and pale-skinned Florencia Bado and is surprised to discover that she is 12 years old when he returns her dropped doll, Wakolda. She cheerfully informs him that her father makes porcelain dolls and fits each one with a mechanical heart. Suitably intrigued, Brendemühl asks Diego Peretti if he can follow his car to the German-speaking community of Bariloche, where he is due to start work as a vet. Peretti nods begrudgingly, as he ushers sons Alan Daicz and Nicolas Marsella into the backseat. But pregnant wife Natalia Oreiro is rather more friendly, as she speaks to Brendemühl in his native tongue and reassures him that the 300km route belies its forbidding reputation.

Seeking shelter from a storm, the travellers are given beds for the night by a gnarled farmer and Oreiro informs Brendemühl that she is returning to her birthplace to re-open the lakeside hotel she has inherited from her recently deceased mother. As the others sleep, Bado notices Brendemühl patching up her doll and he is charmed by her frankness, as she reveals that she is not allowed to talk to strange men, but will make an exception in his case. Peretti calls her back to bed and fixes the newcomer with a stare and bids him a firm farewell at the gate to the hotel compound the following day.

Bado joins Daicz in rushing off to explore and housekeeper's daughter Abril Braunstein notes the furtiveness of the neighbours as they watch a hydroplane land on Lake Nahuel Huapi and taxi to a private jetty. Back at the hotel, Bado helps Peretti paint eyebrows on his latest doll and looks through some photographs of Oreiro as a girl. She thinks nothing of the fact that the pupils are giving the Nazi salute, but she is intimidated by the booming rendition of `Deutschland, Deutschland über alles' at her first assembly next day. Oreiro is pleased to discover old classmate Guillermo Pfening is now a teacher, but only Juani Martínez shows Bado any kindness, as she is teased mercilessly for being so small for her age.

A few days later, Brendemühl comes to the hotel and asks if he can pay in advance for a six-month stay. Pleased to have some income and glad to have a doctor around during the latter stages of her pregnancy, Oreiro readily agrees. She invites him to dine with the family and he describes his work experimenting with growth hormones for cattle. Perhaps hoping that he can do something about her own height, Bado follows Brendemühl to his office in town and allows him to take a blood sample and make an x-ray of her legs. She is also intrigued by his allusion to `Sonnenmenchen' and asks school librarian Elena Roger if there are any books she could consult to learn more about the concept of supermen.

Despite Pfening's romantic interest, Roger is something of an outsider and it becomes clear after she meets Brendemühl at a party to welcome him to Bariloche that she has her suspicions about his true identity. She captures him in the background as she takes pictures at the school and sends them to her Mossad handlers in a coded letter, in which she reports that she may have stumbled upon the infamous Angel of Death.

Oreiro has no such misgivings, however, and is grateful for the vitamin supplements that Brendemühl gives her when she feels rundown. Moreover, she is tempted by his offer to give Bado some injections that might encourage a growth spurt before she reaches puberty. She tries to coax Peretti into agreeing to the treatment, but he warns her away from Brendemühl and insists that Bado is perfect as she is. Yet she is tired of being bullied and tries to sweet talk her father into granting his permission. However, he refuses, even after Brendemühl offers the financial backing to enable him to mass produce his dolls.

Convinced her husband is simply being stubborn, Oreiro goes behind his back and Bado grows a couple of centimetres almost as soon as Brendemühl starts the course. Such is her gratitude that she steals the blueprints for Peretti's doll design and gives them to Brendemühl during a trip with Pfening to a ruined hideaway into the woods and she eavesdrops without comprehension as her teacher mourns the loss of the Führer. Meanwhile, Roger has taken some more pictures of Brendemühl and urges her superiors to capture him before he can make plans to escape.

During a party for Bado's 13th birthday, Brendemühl shows Peretti the prototype casing of his doll and he has to admit to being impressed. Brendemühl also spies on Bado through her bedroom door, as she has her first kiss with Martínez. But he reassures her when she begins to suffer pains in her limbs and develops a rash on her abdomen. Indeed, he recommends to Oreiro that they should double the dosage and, even though she no more understands the copious notes that Brendemühl keeps taking about her family than the inquisitive Bado does, she readily concurs.

A day or so later, Bado menstruates for the first time. But, as she emerges from the school cubicle, she is set upon by some Aryan bullies who accuse her of nosing into their affairs and Martínez is expelled for defending her. She cheers up slightly during a visit to the premises in Trelew that Brendemühl has equipped for the manufacture of Peretti's dolls and she looks on proudly as her father joins the female workforce in completing the first model off the production line.

On their return, however, Peretti discovers the rash on Bado's body and he orders Brendemühl to leave his house. Snow falls heavily that night and Oreiro goes into labour. One of the twins has breathing difficulties and Brendemühl sends Peretti and Bado to the neighbour's house to fetch nurse Ana Pauls and the apparatus he needs to help the infant survive the night. Peretti would rather take his chances and drive to the nearest hospital, but Oreiro pleads with him to trust Brendemühl's expertise, no matter what he might have done in the past.

Pauls informs Brendemühl that Adolf Eichmann has been arrested in Buenos Aires and urges him to take the hydroplane to Paraguay. However, his desire to help Oreiro (and his twisted fascination with twins) prompt him to tend to her before he flees. He also warns Roger, who has been snooping in his room after being summoned to the hotel to photograph the babies, that those who die unawares are invariably found with their eyes open. As Brendemühl heads to his plane, Peretti opens the gates to allow the Israeli agents on to his land. But they are unable to prevent their quarry from taking off and a closing caption not only reveals that Josef Mengele continued to practice medicine until he drowned at Bertioga in Brazil, but also that Roger was murdered the following day and was found in the woods with her eyes open.

This final detail makes no sense, as Roger would surely have left Bariloche with her Mossad colleagues once her cover had been blown. But there are a several slipshod flaws in Puenzo's slickly structured, but far from convincing screenplay. Why, for example, did Oreiro initially leave home and what prompted her to uproot a seemingly settled family in order to start a new life in a backwaters whose Fascist affiliation could hardly have come as a surprise given her childhood mementoes? Similarly, why did Mengele leave behind his incriminating notebooks when he had plenty of time to pack them before he fled?

A number of other issues are left frustratingly unresolved, such as identity of the hydroplane passengers holed up at the neighbour's house and the significance of the contents of the buried box whose unearthing results in Bado and Martínez being attacked. But it's the clumsiness of the doll symbolism that proves most enervating, as it helps undermine the otherwise perceptive insights into the extent to which the well-meaning duplicity of the family and the unquestioning loyalty of Brendemühl's compatriots anticipate the confusion, silence and complicity that allowed the Galtieri junta to disappear so many Argentine citizens between 1976-82.

The tone also proves problematic, as Puenzo vacillates between fable, thriller, melodrama and horror. Marcelo Chaves's production design seems to reinforce the fantasy aspect, as the hotel is a modern variation on a picture book castle, while Puenzo almost parodies the generic undercurrent by including a scene in which Bado clings to Brendemühl while watching a creepy monochrome chiller. The restraint of the performances (with Bado particularly excelling) certainly makes the action disconcerting. But, even though the urbane Brendemühl resists the histrionics exhibited by Gregory Peck in Franklin J. Schaffner's The Boys From Brazil (1978), his Mengele still comes across as something of a pantomime villain rather than the monster of historical record.

Numerous European directors have denounced Catholicism in recent times and Dietrich Brüggemann and his co-scenarist sister Anna become the latest to join the scathing cadre with Stations of the Cross, a droll satire on blind faith that rather confounds its own scepticism with a miraculous denouement. Divided into 14 parts linked to Christ's progress to Calvary, this is often as stylistically austere as its subject matter, as all but three of the scenes have been photographed from a static camera. But, for all the aptness of the mise-en-scène, this is never as sharp as the central segment of Ulrich Seidl's `Paradise' trilogy.

Somewhere in Germany, Fr Florian Stetter addresses a class for the final time before their confirmation by the bishop. He urges them to become warriors in the army of the Lord by following the teachings of the Catholic Church to the letter and by seeking the devils within their own psyches and driving them away, along with the temptations that entice them into sin. The students listen with a mixture of reverence and indifference. But 14 year-old Lea van Acken is intrigued by both her faith and its interpretation by the Society of St Paul, to which Stetter belongs.

As her classmates file out, Van Acken lingers to ask the priest why a loving God would allow small children to fall sick and she seems only partially satisfied by his answer that an ailment can be a sign that the Almighty has chosen the child for special grace. However, she is impressed by his suggestion that self-sacrifice can bolster prayer and she vows to stop eating and go without warm clothing in the hope that her offering will be pleasing unto the Lord.

The reason for Van Acken's inquiry becomes apparent when she gets home, as her four year-old brother, Linus Fluhr, has yet to speak his first word and his silence only exacerbates the tensions between their parents, Klaus Michael Kamp and Franziska Weisz. The latter is very much the head of the household and blames the emasculated Kamp for their son's condition. But her disdain also keeps Van Acken at a distance and she seeks solace in the unfussy affection of French au pair, Lucie Aron.

She also knows better than to let Weisz know that she has become friendly with Moritz Knapp, a boy from another class who approached her in the library on the pretext of requesting help with his maths homework. He invites her to attend the choir practice at his liberal-minded church, Don Bosco, where they play gospel and soul as well as Bach and hymns. Knowing such satanic sounds would never to tolerated at St Athanasius, Van Acken tells her mother that a girlfriend is keen for her to join the choir. But Weisz refuses to consent to her daughter participating in musical orgies and she so convinces Van Acken that dabbling in such ditties can only inflame the passions that the teenager confesses her failing to Fr Stetter, who is dismayed to learn that she had entertained sexual yearnings for Knapp.

Dismayed at having sinned so wantonly, Van Acken refuses to dance to the pop music played in Birge Schade's gym class and orders Knapp to leave her alone when he tries to take her side. She also brushes aside Aron's concern about her appetite and, for once, is glad that her parents pay so little attention to her, as they fail to detect that she is looking pale and drawn. Indeed, she is so weak that she faints during the confirmation ceremony.

Weisz is more embarrassed than concerned. But, when Van Acken begins having breathing difficulties, she asks Stetter to give her daughter communion and is as stunned as everyone else when she chokes on the wafer and dies and Fluhr utters his first word - his sister's name. Convinced that Van Acken should be beatified for performing a miracle, Weisz splashes out on an ornate coffin. But only Knapp shows any real emotion at the funeral, as he tosses a single rose into the open grave.

Although splendidly played by Van Acken and a fine ensemble, this always feels as it is taking the easiest pot shots rather than discussing thornier topics like faith, fanaticism, devotion and gullibility in a little more depth. Thus, such is the monotonous stridency of Stetter and Weisz's austerity that they feel more like cartoon characters than antagonists in a on Christian morality by such masters of the form as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman. Van Acken's naiveté also seems a little far fetched for a 21st-century adolescent, even for one so firmly under the maternal thumb. But she holds the picture together with an endearing earnestness and a pathetic vulnerability that makes her demise more worthy of a tear than a snort of derision.

Clearly, zeal should be open for lampoon when taken to such monolithically ludicrous extremes. But, even with a primary target like the Society of Pius X (which was founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 and rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council), the screenplay hammers home the admonitions with such vehemence that the Brüggemanns themselves run the risk of appearing preachily sanctimonious. The references to the youthful saints of yore, for example, could be handled with more comic finesse, as they are already sufficiently disturbing. However, the ascetic restraint that Brüggemann demonstrates in restricting the movement of Alexander Sass's camera around Klaus-Peter Platten's atmospheric sets (which evoke stern Christian art with amusing subtlety) is altogether more laudable, as is the stark insertion of the captions defining each stage on this mournful Via Crucis.

The lawman at the centre of Philip Gröning's The Police Officer's Wife may take his duties seriously, but he is certainly no paragon of virtue. Indeed, as the action unfolds over 59 chapters, it becomes clear that David Zimmerschied is every bit as bestial as Leo Fafard. But in employing the observational detachment that served him so well in recording the everyday lives of the Carthusian monks in the 2005 documentary Into the Great Silence, Gröning deprives the audience of the psychological insight that is vital to understanding both the wife beater and the victim who endures his tyranny with a passivity that extends well beyond her desire to protect their young daughter.

Gröning sets the tone in the first chapter, which is bookended by captions announcing its start and end. The scene is filmed by a static camera, which fixes on two birth trees in the middle diatance. As birdsomg fills the soundtrack, an unidentified figure runs through the woods. Across the small, provincial German town, policeman David Zimmerschied walks home through the quiet streets after his night shift. He creeps around the house and performs a few chores before washing and joining wife Alexandra Finder All seems cosy, yet Gröning follows this scene of domestic bliss with a close-up of an old man, Horst Rehberg, who turns from looking out across a snowy landscape to stare forlornly into the lens.

Zimmerschied and Kleemann have a four year-old daughter (who is played imperceptibly by twins Pia and Chiara Kleemann) and they take her on a candy hunt in the forest. She hopes to see some rabbits, but it content to snuggle up to her parents on a rug and look up into the trees. But things are less idyllic next time Zimmerschied is out in the countryside, as he and partner Katharina Susewind are sent to a traffic incident and he has to shoot a deer that has been badly injured by a frightened motorist. Fortunately, he seems to have the knack of not taking his work home with him and he is shown arm wrestling with Finder before they go to bed together.

Finder dotes on Kleemann and takes her for little outings to a nearby river, where she tells her about ducks, baby birds and fish. They spot a worm crawling through the grass and Finder suggests making a little home for it. Over a spaghetti supper, Kleemann tells Zimmerschied about her day and feeding a creature named Hob with some apple. A top shot peers down on to the table, but the deceptive peace is shattered in Chapter 9. Husband and wife had been watching television together, curled up on the sofa. But, after Zimmerschied returns from a night patrol (or perhaps wakes up from a dream), he jumps up from the settee and starts searching every room in the house. Eventually, he gets his gun from the wetroom and pulls the covers off the bed and demands to know why she didn't come to wish him goodnight. She says nothing as hunches up on the bed and listens as he demands that she keeps him informed of her whereabouts every hour of the day and night.

Hiding whatever fears she might have faced, Finder wakes Kleemann next morning and fusses over her as she dresses for breakfast. The child is next seen singing a ballad about St Martin giving half his cloak to a beggar and Gröning follows a shot of a squirrel in the woods with footage of Rehberg getting dressed methodically in his cramped kitchen. Some time later, Finder and Kleemann go into the alley at the side of the house and lift four paving stones to create a little garden in the soil beneath the slabs. They use toy tools and a plastic watering can to plant some seeds and Finder smiles when Kleemann asks if they will have grown in a few hours. They play football in the alley and Finder later enjoys a moment of tenderness with her spouse.

When the weekend comes, Zimmerschied takes Kleemann to a monster truck rally and she giggles as he blows on her fingers to keep them warm. More proof of her infectious sense of mischief is provided when she sings while hiding under a sheet with her mother and shines a torch in her eyes. They fall asleep together and Finder convinces Kleemann that they have had the same dream. The next day, she allows her to leave some fruit out for Hob and reassures her when thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance. But, while mother and child are inseparable, they rarely interact with others and Finder looks wistfully out of an upper window at the neighbours milling around a bric-a-brac sale in the street below.

Kleemann gets excited on her father's birthday and Finder is reluctant to wake him after he spent the night drinking with a pal. However, she insists on entering the bedroom to sing to Zimmerschied and present him with a toy boat and a candle to blow out. But he is far from interested and Finder tells her disappointed daughter that he wasn't fully awake. Still hungover,Zimmerschied pulls Finder down on to the bed and tries to make love to her. But she wriggles free because Kleemann might come back in and he sulks that he should be allowed to do what he wants on his birthday.

In order to cheer herself up, Kleemann plays with a toy piano and Zimmerschied is seen in a much better humour, as he sings a swimming fish song through the window of his patrol car. Perhaps this is the memory that Rehberg as he chops vegetables alone in his kitchen (although it is never made clear whether he is the aged Zimmerschied). He might also be reflecting on the water fight he had with Finder as she tried to do the laundry. She gives as good as she gets and he is forced to hide in the shower before calling for a truce as he cowers in the bath. But Finder soaks him with sink spray hose and leaves him to clear up the mess when she insists she can hear Kleemann crying upstairs.

At bedtime, Kleemann complains that she doesn't like the bear on her pyjama bottoms because he is hitting the other animals. So, Finder has a fox in the pattern explain that the bear isn't mean, even if he sometimes gets cross because he and doesn't always feel comfortable in his thick fur. As they lie on the sofa, Finder strokes Zimmerschied's hair and gazes lovingly at him. He wakes from a doze and looks up to see her looking down on him and they link fingers in a touchingly trusting gesture.

That night, a fox scurries across the pavement under the streetlights. Unable to sleep, Zimmerschied tries to coax Finder into having sex. However, she turns on her side and he suddenly loses his temper and kicks her on to the floor. Fearing the worse, she tries to flee. But he chases her around the house, bawling that he is nothing without her as she is the basis of his existence. Finder locks herself in Kleemann's room and the child looks nervous as she hears her father trying to yank the handle off the door. They sit and wait in reddish light until Zimmerschied breaks down the door and sweeps his daughter out of the room. He sits down and fights to regain his composure, while Kleemann runs back to her mother. The girl clings to her on the bed, as Zimmerschied lies on the kitchen floor and begins to sob. But, as they camera returns to the dimly lit bedroom, we see for the first time the bruises on Finder's slender body.

All seems placid again as Finder takes Kleemann to watch the water cascading down a small weir in the river. But she has a nightmare that ants have invaded her bed and Finder has to give her a bath and wrap her in a fluffy towel to convince her than the insects have gone. As she dries her, Finder explains how veins carry blood around the body and that this makes her skin tingle rather than any ants in her bedding. She shows Kleemann how to find her pulse and she kisses her, as the child looks up in wonder that her body is capable of doing such strange things.

While out on patrol with Lars Rudolph, Zimmerschied gets a call that Finder has locked herself out and he asks his partner to drive home to check she is okay. Whether this action was inspired by concern or possessiveness, it appears to be playing on Rehberg's mind as he eats in quiet contemplation in his kitchen. As the focus falls back on Finder and Zimmerschied, they are blowing bubbles and trying to catch them on a dartboard. Fingers gently stroke skin as they play and a similar tenderness is evident as Finder helps Kleemann weed her flower patch.

But Kleemann clearly finds her father's mood swings difficult and Finder has to interrupt him as he plays a driving game to tell him that she wants to make friends with him again (after an unseen incident). Zimmerschied petulantly declares that he doesn't want to be friends with Kleemann today and sends her back to bed before resuming his game. Finder consoles her weeping child and reassures her that Zimmerschied is not as unkind as he sometimes seems. Feeling brave, Finder confronts her husband and blocks his views of the screen. He gets angry and accuses Finder of making promises on his behalf and he grabs her by the hair when she demands that he shows their daughter some affection and warns her never to speak to him like that again.

Breaking free of his grip, Finder storms outside and, as she paces furiously, Zimmerschied.slips penitently into Kleemann's room. He promises that they will always be friends and pushes the door closed to stop Finder from peeking in as he reads a story. As if to seal the deal, he takes her for a ride in his police car and turns on the siren at her request. They speed along an empty country road and Kleemann covers her ears while trying to eat an ice cream cone. Zimmerschied smiles at her indulgently when she asks him to put the siren on again and even keeps his cool when she lets the ice cream slat on to the rear passenger window and he makes her promise to tell no one about their secret day out.

Finding herself alone, Finder looks into the camera and sings about a lovely day. Her joyless rendition ends with the spoken words, `because I like you'. Meanwhile, Zimmerschied takes evidence photographs at a crash scene as the injured are stretchered to an ambulance and the dead lie twisted in the undergrowth. On another occasion, Finder takes Kleemann to see a parade march past and they walk home holding hands. Some time later, she gets up early and finds Zimmerschied's flak jacket and riot helmet. She puts them on and waddles in to see her sleeping mother. Somehow needing an audience, she wanders downstairs in her pyjamas and pads barefoot through a side door and into the street, where a highly amused Zimmerschied finds her as he returns from his shift.

A top shot peers down on Zimmerschied and Finder coiled naked together on the bed. One of them is crying quietly. Next door, Kleemann sleeps soundly with her toys and doesn't hear the fox foraging outside or the squeak of metal that suggests it has found the food she left out for Hob. A few mornings later, Zimmerschied brings home some flowers, which he arranges in a vase before picking up a few toys and pulling some weeds from Kleemann's flower bed. Seemingly on an even keel, he lets the sun warm his skin before wandering out of the side gate. The light also pours in through Rehberg's kitchen window, as he snoozes at the table. A bird sings outside, but he is alone.

Finder amuses herself by making squeaking noises with her finger on a window pane. There is dirt under her nail and, from her profile, it would appear as though she has been battered again. Her eye is blacked when she comes to sit with Zimmerschied, who is playfully trying to steal Kleemann's food. He laughs when the child informs her mother that she smells and Finder fights the tears of pain and humiliation. She falls forward on to the floor and both Kleemann and Zimmerschied ignore her. After a while, she picks herself up and sits on a chair. But she soon leaves the room and Zimmerschied tuts that she has probably gone back to bed, while Kleemann repeats her accusation that she needs a wash.

Yet, as Finder stands naked in the bathroom, the camera surveys the bruises on her body. She lights a cigarette and Zimmerschied bangs on the door forbidding her to smoke. When she ignores him, he smashes down the door and Kleemann catches a glimpse of her mother's injuries. Shocked, she tries to run away. But Zimmerschied catches up with her and sits her on his knee to tell her that Finder has an illness that causes her to go funny colours. He tells Kleemann to pinch him to help her understand and he continues that the nasty odour is caused by the same condition. Finder eavesdrops through the door before taking a shower.

It's never revealed whether Kleemann believes Zimmerschied's story, but she is next seen lying with her head on her mother's lap as they sit beside the river. She also appears with both parents to sing a hesitant version of a ballad about Sleeping Beauty, whose lyrics reflect ironically on Finder's situation of being caught in a bad dream from which there is seemingly no escape. The pair smile awkwardly at one another as Kleemann keeps bailing them out when they forget the words, but it doesn't look as though either is entirely convinced by the story's happy ever after. And the fairytale mood is reinforced when a slow-motion shot of Finder and Kleemann sharing a bath appears to present them as doll-size figures adrift in a giant's tub.

Out on patrol, Zimmerschied drinks from a hip flash. Some of the liquor splashes back on the wind from his open window and douses Rudolph, who lets it pass. When they stop,Zimmerschied wanders into a cornfield and lets the ears brush against his outstretched palm. .Back home, he plays darts with Finder, but there is no pleasure in the game. He leans the board against the back of the sofa, but Finder loses interest when she sees the fox pass by on the street below. She rushes to fetch Kleemann and asks her if she can see it. An old man wanderrs past walking his dachshund and they convince the sleepy girl that she has finally seen their nocturnal visitor.

Left to her own devices one day, Kleemann rushes between rooms wearing Zimmerschied's helmet and Finder's wedding dress. She totters down the stairs and goes to inspect her flowers, which she sprinkles with a large watering can. Her activity contrasts with the empty stillness of Rehberg's kitchen, which could almost be what Kleemann is dreaming of when Finder wakes her and dresses her while she is still half asleep.

However, things are about to get terrifyingly real again. Zimmerschied is watching television with a beer when Finder comes in to offer him some fruit salad. He declines, but makes room for her on the sofa so she can watch and eat. After a few mouthfuls, Zimmerschied announces he is going to bed. But he cannot resist commenting on the noise Finder makes when she chews and he grows even more irate when she tries to eat more quietly. A distorted medium shot resets the scene, as Finder sits back on the settee and tells Zimmerschied to go to bed if he is sleepy. He asks if he is no longer allowed to sit on his own furniture and he slaps her hard across the face when she tries to explain that she merely didn't him waiting up on her account.

Standing over her, Zimmerschied pulls hard on Finder's hair as he tells her that he is always there for her and that she doesn't appreciate what he does for her. He slumps into the armchair and apologises profusely. But when Finder keeps crying, he tells her that he will get up and go. Suddenly, Finder screams at him to get out. Yet, when he makes a move towards the door, she throws herself on the floor and grabs his leg while pleading with him not to leave her. Zimmerschied clasps her to him and she squirms free to fetch a duvet to keep them warm. He tells her they don't need it and throws her across the room when she tries to wrap it around them. Finder sobs that she loves him, but Zimmerschied throws a punch that leaves her motionless on the floor.

Almost in embarrassment, Gröning cuts away to pictures on the walls. Zimmerschied whips himself up into a frenzy by repeating the word `me', as the room grows darker. A crosscut to a cornfield in bright sunshine whites out to return him to the reality confronting him, as Kleemann wanders into shot to tell Kinder that she can't sleep. Seeing her mother on the floor, the child fetches her own duvet and covers them both as she lies beside her. Feeling guilty, excluded and admonished, Zimmerschied starts to weep.

Cutaways to a white dove and some trees at dusk give way to a top shot of Finder and Kleemann holding their noses as they duck down in the bath. Despite her bruises, Finder sings about being as strong as a tiger and as tall as a giraffe on a beautiful day. As she sings, the camera closes in on the surface of the water and the blurred pinkness of female flesh. Kleemann appears underwater with her eyes closed, as though she is being drowned to spare her further pain at the hands of her father. A cut reveals a child's drawings on a wall, while a second shot shows some curtains through an open doorway. Rehberg appears again against a snowy backdrop. He looks down and turns away, as the camera pulls to the right to focus on the view as it fades to black. The 59th and final chapter centres on Kleemann, as she stares into the lens with a mix of accusation and questioning that suggests she has been scarred by experiences that will continue to haunt her.

Few will thank Philip Gröning for his fussy use of 118 chapter captions during this often arch exercise in slow cinema. But there is no question that this disconcerting drama needs all 175 minutes of its running time to capture the timbre of the household under scrutiny. Unfortunately, however, while it could be taken as read that monks adhere to their vocation because of their devotion to God, it is less obvious why Finder would remain with a man who not only endangers her own well-being, but also that of her daughter. As he had given no reason why Zimmerschied should be prone to violent conniptions, Gröning perhaps felt the interest of balance was best served by withholding any clues as to whether Finder derives any sexual gratification from her torment. But, by imposing such rigidly detached objectivity, Gröning and co-scenarist Carola Diekmann eschew any social or psychological rationale for the stand-offs and, consequently, their this runs the risk of becoming more provocatively voyeuristic than valuably analytical.

Acting as his own cinematographer, Gröning composes each frame with meticulous care and he wisely keeps the majority of the brutality off screen. But some may quibble at the decision to study the family in isolation, as this prevents outsiders from commenting on the state of the marriage or offering to intervene on Finder's behalf. But the elimination of the quotidian social contact that might occur through shopping or taking Kleemann to kindergarten renders proceeding unnecessarily artificial. Indeed, they often feel as though they are taking place within a controlled experimental environment and that Gröning has consulted his notes before deciding which scenes to include in his final dissertation. Given the prescribed sterility of the milieu, it's a wonder the performances are not more metronomic, although the Kleemann twins are always much more expressive than their screen parents, who understand the need to maintain an air of authentic unreality.

Numerous incidents feel contrived and replete with loaded metaphors, but the least satisfactory are those involving Rehberg. Gröning and Diekmann invite the viewer to speculate about whether this morose figure represents Zimmerschied after a lifetime of recrimination and regret. But, as it is never revealed what happened to his wife and child (if, indeed, he ever had any), it is impossible to read anything tangible into his weary movements and withered expressions. Production designers Petra Barchi, Adan Hernandez and Petra Klimek deserve credit for creating such a poignant contrast between the two domiciles. But this subplot only reinforces the suspicion that Gröning is more intent on playing rather pretentious narratorial and structural games than offering cogent sociological insights into why seemingly respectable men feel the need to abuse their partners and why so many of these victims elect not to resist or flee.

The scene next switches to Switzerland, where Karl Meier exploited the 1942 amendments to the penal code that legalised homosexuality to found the multi-lingual magazine, Der Kreis. Given the levels of intolerance then extant in neighbouring Germany, this was a remarkably liberal step and director Stefan Haupt might have explored its implications in greater detail in The Circle. However, in combining re-enactments with talking-head interviews, he concentrates instead on the romance between Ernst Ostertag and Robi Rapp, who met at one of the balls thrown by Meier's journal and made history half a century later by becoming the first Swiss couple to register as same-sex partners. Their story is undeniably touching, but its impact is frustratingly diluted by a hybrid approach that precludes dramatic momentum.

In 1956, Ernst Ostertag (Matthias Hungerbühler) is hired by principal Max Sieber (Peter Jecklin) to teach French literature at an all-girls school in Zurich. He is warned off introducing his students to experimental existentialist works, but Ernst is such a naturally cautious fellow that his family has no idea he is homosexual. Indeed, he rather surprises himself by becoming involved with Der Kreis, a self-help organisation that organises social events to enable gay men to meet and discuss the burning issues of the day. As membership cards only contained numbers, Ernst feels secure in the welcoming environment and begins helping with the eponymous magazine, which is mailed twice a month in plain envelopes and contains articles in French, German and English (which was used for the racier items, as the censors were seemingly not trilingual), as well as full-frontal nude drawings.

Although initially content to engage in the intellectual side of the club's activities, Ernst falls head over heels for 18 year-old hairdresser Röbi Rapp (Sven Schelker) when he sees him performing a drag number at a costume ball. He is taken by Röbi's acceptance of himself and delights in the company of his mother, Erika (Marianne Sägebrecht), a German widow who works as a cleaner and uses her experience as a theatrical wardrobe mistress to help her son create his fabulous costumes. As Ernst needs to be discreet until he has obtained his teaching certificate, so Röbi (who is two years under the age of consent) has to maintain a lowish profile to secure his naturalisation papers. But, as their relationship develops, a string of murders within the gay community sees the police put pressure on the Kreis hierarchy to release the names of its members, while the climate of fear in Zurich inspires the local papers to carry increasingly homophobic editorials.

Taking the story into the 1960s, this subplot sees Ernst become a more outspoken advocate for gay rights and it might have made an intriguing subject in its own right. But Haupt fails to develop it sufficiently and similarly underplays the sad fate awaiting Max, who turns out to be a Kreis member who convinces his wife that he is out bowling whenever he is attending functions. Indeed, this forever feels like a film of missed opportunities, with the chatty snippets with the elderly Ostertag and Rapp rarely adding much of consequence to the reconstructions they consistently interrupt. This is doubly a shame, as the pair have clearly been through a good deal together - and still bicker about the fact that Ostertag only came out to his family on his 70th birthday - and their union may well have been better served by a standard documentary treatment.

But Haupt also sells Hungerbühler and Schelker short, as the inclusion of so much footage of the lovers in the present day robs their sequences of palpable tension, as we know that things worked out well in the end. Nevertheless, the performances are nicely judged, with Schelker throwing himself into the musical routines that Rapp gamely recreates in bookending segments. Federico Bettini's score is a little twee in its efforts to combine emotional cues with period kitsch, but, thanks to Tobias Dengler's burnished imagery, production designer Karin Giezendanner and costumier Catherine Schneider are more successful in evoking time and place without straining too hard for effect.

Around the same time in France, Violette Leduc was trying to find her voice as a writer. However, as Martin Provost recalls in Violette, the French literary establishment was not ready for the frank discussion of female reality in which Leduc specialised. Moreover, her artistic frustration found echo in her unrequited passion for Simone de Beauvoir, whose acceptance within the intellectual Left Bank clique exacerbated the sense of abandonment that characterised all Leduc's relationships with her mother, her male and female lovers and her fellow writers.

Posing as husband and wife, aspiring author Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) and gay, Jewish poet Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py) hide out in the French provinces in 1942. She trades on the black market while he writes. But he resents her constant attempts to bully him into a physical relationship and escapes to Paris, in spite of the risk of being rounded up by the Gestapo. Leduc follows and begins dealing contraband from a poky bedsit after she learns that Sachs has been sent to Germany, as part of the volunteer work programme. She follows his advice of recording her memories and emotions in prose and presents the manuscript to Simone de Beauvour (Sandrine Kiberlain) after following her to her well-appointed apartment.

Much to Leduc's surprise, De Beauvoir is sufficiently impressed to suggest amendments and she pass the revised text to Albert Camus for his Espoir imprint for new writers at the Gallimard publishing house. Leduc hopes her acceptance will please her mother, Berthe (Catherine Hiegel), who has made little effort over the years to conceal the resentment she still feels for having fallen pregnant out of wedlock. However, she is more concerned that her husband, Ernest (Jean-Paul Dubois), has bought a farm and chides her daughter that she should more to a nicer neighbourhood.

Soon after Leduc finds light and airy lodgings, she learns from Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) that Sachs was executed in Germany at the end of the war and she pours her misery into her prose. The following year, however, L'Asphyxie/In the Prison of Her Skin is published and Leduc hopes to use her change of fortune to persuade old flame Hermine (Nathalie Richard) to give her a second chance. But, as always, she is rebuffed and her pain is exacerbated by the discovery that her novel was accorded such a small print run that she can't find it in a single bookshop.

Despite keeping an emotional distance, as Leduc becomes increasingly besotted with her and complains that she is repelled by her ugliness, De Beauvoir encourages her to write about her struggle as a woman and promises that there will be an audience for insights into her unhappy marriage and the ordeal of her abortion. She also arranges for Gallimard to pay Leduc a monthly stipend so that she can concentrate on her work But she is frequently interrupted by Genet and his friend, Jacques Guérin (Olivier Gourmet), a wealthy perfumier with a passion for autograph manuscripts. He assures Leduc she will be a success and invites her to his country estate at Luzarches, where she loses her temper at having to play a single mother in an amateur film and embarrasses him when she tries to kiss him as he apologises.

Nevertheless, Guérin offers to pay for a special edition of her second book, L'Affamée/Starved (1948), only for it to be largely ignored by critics busy eulogising over De Beauvoir's The Second Sex. She further wounds Leduc by spending three months in the United States and she becomes so convinced that she has been jilted again that she argues with De Beauvoir and Genet at a rehearsal for the latter's play, Les Bonnes/The Maids, and refuses to respond to their messages for several weeks. However, De Beauvoir's faith in Leduc remains unshaken and she urges her to travel to broaden her mind and suggests that she focuses in her next book on the lesbian romance from her schooldays.

Yet, while she takes up De Beauvoir's suggestion to take a vacation, Leduc struggles to come to terms with her erotic memories, as she camps beside a lake in Provence. She fantasises about her innocent affair as she hitches a ride on the back of a priest's moped and manages to doze off on the bus to Rousillon. However, by happy chance, Leduc finds herself in the idyllic village of Faucon, where she is shown an empty house with a view of Mont Ventoux that immediately feels like home. Feeling inspired, she returns to work on Ravages (1955) and is disturbed in the night by a banging upstairs that turns out to be her younger self in a wedding dress beating her distended belly to bring about a miscarriage.

De Beauvoir is delighted with the manuscript, but is powerless to prevent the publishers from demanding cuts to avoid a clash with the censor. Leduc is so traumatised by her past being subjected to the whims of unknowing men that she suffers a breakdown and undergoes electroshock therapy in order to recover. Guérin offers to pay for her treatment, but De Beauvoir insists on meeting Leduc's expenses and begs her not to give up now, as, the reviews of her book have been positive and she reassures Leduc that she is halfway to fulfilling her potential.

Having been pipped to the Prix de Goncourt by De Beauvoir, Leduc informs Berthe that she will never write again and launches a bitter diatribe about the inferiority complex she has carried since she discovered she was an unwanted baby. But, even though she deeply resents that her mother never held her hand, Leduc allows her to bathe and dress her in her apartment, so that she is ready to go out and face the world again.

Naturally, her first port of call is De Beauvoir. She finds her in the process of moving to Montparnasse and offers to help her pack. But, when De Beauvoir asks Leduc if she would like any hand-me-downs for her apartment, she feels insulted and orders her to stop paying the Gallimard retainer, as she no longer wants her charity. She storms out and refuses to listen as De Beauvoir tells her to channel the anger and envy she feels towards her. Hurt at doing everything to earn De Beauvoir's love, but getting nothing in return, Leduc defiantly boards a bus and rides off into the night.

While walking one afternoon, Leduc catches the eye of René (Stanley Weber), a young builder wheeling his bicycle, who refuses to take no for an answer. She cooks him roast beef in her apartment and he notes all the photographs of De Beauvoir dotted around the room. He sucks the blood from her finger when she cuts herself carving the joint and they sleep together.

Several years have passed, but Leduc finally completes La Bâtarde (1964) and she takes it to De Beauvoir for her approval. Downcast after burying her mother, De Beauvoir invites Leduc inside and they share their fears of ageing and death. Leduc reveals that her builder is a married man and has suggested that she sleeps with his brother instead. De Beauvoir offers to write an introduction to the new tome and hopes that the reforms going through the National Assembly will bring about a more receptive climate for Leduc's writing. She reads through the night, as Leduc sleeps on the sofa and she proclaims next morning that she has nothing but admiration for her friend's tenacity and style.

Leduc is back in Faucon when the book is published to great acclaim. De Beauvoir goes on the radio to opine that it stands as a testament to Leduc's courage and calls it a monumental act of redemption. Back in Paris, Leduc is feted at book signings. But she finds her true contentment in the peaceful, parched landscape of the Vaucluse, where she settles to write between some gnarled trees in the yellow sunshine of a late afternoon.

A closing caption reveals that De Beauvoir finally stopped paying the monthly 25,000 francs when La Bâtarde made the bestseller lists. But Leduc would only live for another eight years, dying at the age of 65 on 28 May 1972. However, she got her wish in never having to be without her mother, as Berthe outlived her by eight months.

Notwithstanding the odd moment of dramatic licence in the late 1940s, this seven-chapter portrait deserves to stand alongside Séraphine (2008), Provost's exceptional biopic of the naive artist, Séraphine Louis. Emmanuelle Devos delivers a performance every bit as open, volatile and raw as Yolande Moreau's and she is splendidly supported by Sandrine Kiberlain, as the prim, but quietly loyal Simone De Beauvoir. Their scenes together are compelling, with Devos yearning for affection that Kiberlain knows if would be fatal to bestow and, yet, she always puts the author before the woman in coaxing Devos into sharing her life and pushing the boundaries of contemporary French fiction.

Clearly relishing a literate, but always cinematic script by Provost, Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty, the supporting players are also admirable. But its the succinctness of the screenplay that makes it so effective. The names of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau are casually dropped, but Provost avoids turning this into a who's who of Left Bank worthies. Moreover, he conveys the pain and the pleasures of the creative process, while also dwelling on the frequent treachery of words and their occasional habit of coming together to express a feeling with poetic precision.

Yves Cape's photography (which subtly suggests that the countryside outshines the City of Light), Thierry Françoiss's production design and Madeline Fontaine's costumes are also impeccable. Yet, at no time does it feel as though Provost is striving to recreate the Occupation or the Swinging Sixties. Instead, the milieux have a lived-in feel, with small details like the choice of music that Leduc listens to as she works and the transition from smuggled tins to choice cuts lending an easy authenticity to proceedings that will enchant Leduc's acolytes and fascinate the average arthouse audience. And, as a consequence, this does for the art of writing what Jacques Rivette did for the painterly process in La Belle Noiseuse (1991).

Finally, the savagery of warfare is laid bare by documentarist Göran Hugo Olsson in Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence, a harrowing follow-up to The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011), which similarly mines the Swedish news archives to offer fresh perspectives on a key moment in history. The focus this time is post-colonial Africa and Olsson structures his footage around extracts from the first chapter of Martinican psychiatrist-cum-philosopher Frantz Fanon's seminal text, The Wretched of the Earth, which he dictated to his French wife, Josie, as he battled the leukemia that would eventually kill him at the age of 36. Fittingly, Olsson presents the text in its spoken and written form, as he fills the screen with key phrases as they are read on the soundtrack by singer and activist Lauryn Hill. Some may consider this a Godardian gimmick, but the text focuses the mind without necessarily distracting from imagery that has lost none of its power to shock and shame.

As the subtitle suggests, this dissertation has been divided into nine segments, with the emphasis falling on those countries previously ruled by the British and the Portuguese. However, Olsson is not against criticising Swedish attitudes to the concept of the White Man's Burden, as he shows Olle Wijkström and Sören Lagergren of the Liberian-American-Swedish Minerals Company enlisting the help of the Liberian army to evict striking miners from their homes and a missionary couple in Tanzania struggling to answer a TV news reporter's questions about why they feel the need to impose Christianity on the locals and why they have prioritised the building of a church over the establishment of a hospital. The white settlers in Rhodesia fare little better, as one supremacist farmer is depicted ranting about the material aspirations of his labourers and his dismissive treatment of one who crosses his path makes it all the more remarkable that the country's passage to becoming Zimbabwe was not much bloodier.

Elsewhere, however, transition came at a greater cost. A vicious war was conducted by the Portuguese and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and Olsson includes footage from 1977 of the MPLA rebels as they prepare for a dawn raid on the base at Cabinda. He also recalls the deeds of Antonio de Spinola in both Angola and Guinea, while showing clips of the soon-to-be assassinated Amílcar Cabral, whose battle for independence in Guinea-Bissau is summed up by scenes of a wounded soldier being operated on in a rough-and-ready field hospital. His courage chimes in with the Marxist songs being chanted by the women of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). But the single most striking image in the entire film centres on a Guinean mother and baby who each lost a limb while she was breastfeeding during an air raid by the infamous Fiat G.91 planes used by the Portuguese air force.

Each image seems to support Fanon's contention that `colonialism is violence in its natural state and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence'. But, while Cabral sent volunteers to the Soviet Union to become trained war correspondents, the bulk of the footage shown here was filmed by Swedish camera crews. Thus, even though Olsson is clearly championing the anti-imperial cause, the slant cast by the historical perspective can never be entirely eradicated. Thus, there are moments when the images edited by Olsson, Michael Aaglund, Dino Jonsäter and Sophie Vukovic feel a touch too knowingly juxtaposed, while the addition of a lilting jazz score strives a little too hard to suggest a colonial insouciance to the suffering being perpetrated in the name of prejudice, power and profit.

Some critics have noted that Fanon had been dead for several years before the incidents shown here took place and they have questioned whether, in seeking to pay homage, Olsson has actually done him a disservice by presenting him as a weary soothsayer rather than an acute commentator on the oppression and uprisings of his own times. The decision to use Hill as Fanon's also seems a bit calculating. But, while this is necessarily less focused than The Black Power Mixtape, it still provides plenty of food for thought and should send viewers back to bulletins about Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - as well as the continuing, but often less widely reported conflicts across Africa - with wider open eyes.