Sometimes I don’t watch a movie because I think that it is going to be good, but because I think regardless of the quality of the movie or my tastes, the story is too important to not see the movie. The Invisibles is such a movie in which the story takes priority over the filmmaking. It tells the story of four Jewish people who lived in Berlin during World War II: Cioma Schonhaus, Ruth Gumpel, Eugen Friede and Hanni Levy. They are simply a small sample of the broader, varied stories of the 7,000 out of 160,000 German Jews who attempted to escape the concentration camps, but only 1500 survived and could be potentially told.
The Invisibles is a docudrama, which means that the four survivors’ interviews are intercut with the drama unfolding with actors playing the roles in their stories. It is definitely a step above recreations, but I favor recreations instead of such a hybrid. I prefer my drama to be dramas, and my documentaries to be documentaries. Even though it is not a hybrid and features no recreations, Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly is superior to his Rescue Dawn, which stars Christian Bale! A survivor brings a weight that a drama can’t bring because no matter how much a viewer suspends disbelief, a viewer knows that it isn’t real, but fiction on some level so the drama has to be quite good to get lost in the viewing experience. A survivor’s account is real in a way that even the most accurate drama cannot be. An interview creates empathy and gives the viewer’s imagination an opportunity to be the filmmaker. A recreation may be like a drama in the way that actors play real life counterparts, but it is a facet of the overall medium, not the focal point so it is more pleasurable because it does not have to live up to the pressure of a drama and be absorbing and convincing. It is simply a highlighter.
Unfortunately a docudrama like The Invisibles has to balance the problems of dramas and documentaries. Just when you’re getting lost in one genre, the other genre takes over and reminds the viewer of the inadequacies of the other. It is not a critique of the filmmakers’ choices in the drama, which are a higher quality and should not be denigrated by being called recreations, but the minute that the real life counterpart is on the screen, it punctures any narrative tension being created, and I never wanted to stop hearing the person being interviewed, especially since his or her tone during the reflection of incident is something that can’t be conveyed by the actors. The actors may be perfectly embodying their character as he or she appears on the page, but none of them had the same personality or reminded me of a younger version of the person being interviewed. So while every element standing on its own is excellent and riveting as a comprehensive whole, there is a nagging dissonance that is difficult to forget.
While I am relieved that The Invisibles told the story in chronological order, it also chose to intercut the four survivors stories instead of completely telling one survivor’s story then moving on to another. It was a useful technique because you could compare and contrast the survivors’ experiences and show how different their experiences were, but it did feel as if some stories were curtailed in favor of more adventurous and daring stories, which is understandable and an unfortunate concession to convention. I prefer documentaries to explore a subject matter fully especially when it is not as riveting as a drama. The genres are not aiming at the same audience, and even if they were, they are never going to get them. It also unfortunately created the unfulfilled expectation that there would be an overlap in all four stories, which I did not have before watching the film, but there was not.
The Invisibles also uses black and white archival footage of Berlin, which absolutely does not work. The interviews and the drama are in color so these flashes of colorlessness completely took me out of the film. Peter Jackson wisely said during the post documentary making of feature to They Shall Not Grow Old that if filmmakers could choose between color and black and white film, they would choose color and never has that been more apparent than in this film. Instead of adding a flavor of authenticity to get a sense of what real Berlin looked like at the time, it felt like the pause during a television drama or sitcom before it shows the next scene.
In spite of The Invisibles’ construction flaws, I still think that this docudrama is required viewing, especially for Americans who feel unaffected by the othering of undocumented immigrants. The parallels are impossible to ignore except by the most obstinate: children separated from their parents, deportation, constant harassment and casual dehumanization by public officials, the criminalization of decency, exploitation and use of child labor by government (some of the survivors were teenagers). There are subtitles, but that should not dissuade you from watching this movie. I left wanting more, particularly a documentary about Werner Schaff.
I believe that Friede said, “There is a huge difference between not liking Jews and gassing them,” and he was shocked by what happened to him. The Invisibles’ lesson is that there is not a huge difference, and in addition to Jews, feel free to include any group dehumanized with institutional blessing. Because the people being interviewed are from a different era, they were fairly delicate and often resorted to implying wrongdoing than explicitly describing, particularly in the area of sexual violence. I think that many viewers will miss a lot of subtext, and the drama portion could have taken up the slack left by the survivors in this area.
The Invisibles is quite daring in contrast to other documentaries because the survivors take an explicit stance against rationalizing why German Jews were complicit in their destruction. One survivor described the phenomenon as a chicken being the loudest before it goes in the pot—trying to distinguish itself above all the chickens as if it would not eventually suffer the same fate. The issue of turncoats is particularly germane on both the national and international stage.
The Invisibles is a riveting movie in spite of its many flaws. I highly recommend it, and it is suitable for all viewers, but bring your reading glasses. I’m actually sad that it isn’t a series of movies or a television series featuring each and every survivor, which is probably not possible since they are elderly and many of these interviewees died before this movie was released in theaters. If it is possible, please do so.