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As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me

Josef M. Bauer

The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Escape from a Siberian Labour Camp and His 3-Year Trek to Freedom




 　Originally published in 1955, As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me has seen international success ever since. It has been translated into fifteen languages, sold more than 12 million copies, and is the basis for an award-winning German entry at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. Recounting an incredible real-life adventure, it tracks the destiny of German soldier Clemens Forrell who, in the aftermath of WWII, was sentenced to twenty-five years of forced labor in a lead mine in the barren eastern reaches of Siberia. Subjected to the brutality of the camp and the climate, Forrell dreamed continuously of escape—and then daringly effected it. From East Cape across the vast trackless wastes of Siberia, for thousands of miles and three years, with fear as his most intimate companion, Forrell fled treachery and endured some of the most inhospitable conditions on earth. In a long series of taped interviews with esteemed German author Josef M. Bauer, Forrell unfolded his remarkable story of survival. Bauer not only reconstructs Forrell’s arduous journey to the Iranian frontier and freedom; he also poignantly evokes the emotional content of Forrell’s brave quest—emerging as an affecting portrait of a man who strove and triumphed against all odds.

Anna M.

Director:
Michel Spinosa

Extreme jealousy becomes a dangerous obsession for Anna (Carre) when she takes a psychotic liking to her doctor. Deluded he is in love with her, she harasses the poor, happily-married Dr. Andre Zanevsky (Melki) with unwanted gifts, late night phone calls and demands to meet. Anna's condition is known as erotomania, and is the subject of this thriller which tries hard to be compelling and shocking, but falls into wild melodrama.

Writer/director Spinosa had all the ingredients to cook up a tasty mix of tension and dangers of the mind. Anna is a woman close to the edge when she attempts suicide, so places her full attention on the doctor who treats her. Left with a huge scar up her leg, its no surprise she wants to take her mind off the accident. Sadly for Dr. Zanevsky, when she asks him for a coffee she isn't being friendly. She is imagining a trip down the aisle with him and their future together. As he tries to back off, her behaviour becomes more extreme in trying to keep him in her sights leading to a disappointingly formulaic final act.

Spinosa researched heavily for Anna M, consulting books, PhDs, theses and articles about erotomania, which adds a sense of realism to the movie. Given he knows so much about the condition, he splits it into the psychiatric terms for sufferers of the condition: acts named illumination, hope, disappointment and hatred suggest how Anna's mood turns from a gentle love into an obsession Zanevsky has to battle against. Throughout the initial three he provides an edgy and disturbing portrayal of how twisted Anna's world is. Everything Zanevsky does to repel her is read as a act of affection by Anna, and as he becomes more irate, she goes to great lengths to win him from his loving wife. An innocently-taken picture of Anna and Zanevsky is used as evidence he is guilty of cheating on her and she takes provocative photos of herself to send to him. It’s no surprise when the police get called in, but here is where Spinosa turns to sensationalism over gritty reality.

Rather than attempt to understand Anna's condition, the police simply blame the doctor and question him harshly without there being totally convincing reasons why her story outweighs his. Save for a dodgy interrogating officer, Anna would be locked up long before she makes a final attempt to get close to Zanesvsky by getting hired to look after the children living in the flat above him. When she does finally snap in a surreal moment of ghostly apparitions, Spinosa has undermined most of his well-controlled unfolding of events with blunt thrills. The conclusive moments go some way to redeeming Anna M. as a study of the mind, but he should have lingered more on the finer details of the erotomania conditions if he wanted us to truly understand the tragedy of it. Instead it plays out as an excuse to rack up the tension and lose sight of how it might be treated. Anna M. is fine for entertainment, just lacking in its director's ambitions of providing an accessible way for audiences to understand erotomania fully.

In the mouth of madness : when psychological study meets horror movie.


Anna M (Isabelle Carré) is a poor and sick girl : she's lonely, depressive, she has no friends or sentimental life, she's got a boring job at the Fench National Library and she lives alone with her mother, who seems unable to fill the void of her life. So, she naturally tries to kill herself an evening, while taking the dog out. And when she wakes up at the hospital, she had to find a new meaning to her life, and it will take the shape of the doctor who cured her (Gilbert Melki), for whom she'll develop a crazy love fixation : even if it seems obvious that he only fells indifference for his patient for whom he only have professional concerns, she'll convince herself that he shares with her an absolute love. The movie develops wit realism and intelligence this fixation, that slowly become a dangerous mental sickness, and fallows its progression steps by steps, with the seriousness of a psychological study.

To the crudity of this study, that sometimes really penetrates the intimacy of this troubled conscience, Michel Spinosa adds some horror/thriller's touch that wears a double face. Spinosa uses a fantastic tone and even some horror movies figures of style in order to describe the subjectivity of his character (nighmare sequences, deformed frame to underline the sickness of Anna, etc.), but he's also stage some horrific triller scenes, that lead to the most impressive and tense sequence of the movie, where the monstrous character is now in charge of children. The use of horror figures in a traditional dramatic movie is always interesting in the world of french "Cinema d'Auteur", even if it's more and more common (see the recent "Le dernier des fous", in which Laurent Achard imposed a fantastic tone to a classical family study, or "ILS", a french horror movie, supposedly based on real events). And it's nice to see that the mix is quite efficient and that, thanks to the the reflection of the psychological and the horror sides, you're able to clearly understand the madness of the main character.

This description of madness, full of tension, is certainly the great achievement of the movie, but if you're deep in it when you're watching it, it's strange to see how its effects quickly disappear after the screening. Even if I was completely emerged in the movie while watching it, I didn't kept a strong memory of the movie, and it didn't get much impact on me. I think it's partly due to the clinical and cold impression that crosses the all movie, and to the fact that you never really fell anything for the characters. Anna is more like a figure of study, an experimental subject for whom you don't really get any emotion nor compassion, but only understanding, than a really human being. And the Dr. Zanevsky doesn't really exist, except in Anna's mind. Melki's character is just plain and mediocre, and you're never really able to see it through the crazy eyes of his mad lover. That's also why, at the end, despite the original efforts of the movie, I still got the feeling to have watched another classical french little drama.

i don’t understand to much.