Burning Bush

Burning Bush is primarily an extremely instructive miniseries, which may not be detrimental in the case of a family melodrama but, in my opinion, it’s not right to consistently lead the viewer in a political drama. I don’t know the reason why a non-melodramatic story would be told with such intensified expressiveness. As if the events after Palach’s self-immolation didn’t have sufficient dramatic potential in and of themselves, drama is created artificially and, on top of that, it is magnified by almost exploitative means. Overacting, tense musical accompaniment, amplified sounds (ideally the screaming of children). The series’ creators underestimate the forcefulness of something as simple as silence. In the second episode, the series slips into horror a few times and, in the third the intense attempt to make the content more attractive culminates in a passionate erotic scene. The bloated drama makes it difficult to distinguish banal events from truly important situations. Everything is taken to the extreme. Always. There is no way to build further tension. ___ The screenplay also suffers from misplaced emphasis, as it focuses on details where they serve no purpose and follows more plot lines than can be satisfactorily developed and taken anywhere in the space of four and a half hours. Carefully studied by Hulík,  the historical context here explicitly fights for attention with the personal lives of the protagonists, which ultimately win out (and, for example, the pressure exerted on the Czechoslovak government by Moscow, which feared a shitshow comparable to the events of August 1968 and considered the post-Palach demonstrations to be a manifestation of unstable party leadership, is left out entirely). On the one hand, the series resorts to the use of cheap shortcuts in the depiction of some of the supporting characters (basically everyone except for Burešová) and, at the same time, suffers from an excess of words that either don’t find a more solid place in the overall narrative or are completely unnecessary. An actor’s appropriately chosen look would often have sufficed to express the same thing. Furthermore, the characters speak as if they were in court (i.e. properly and diplomatically), even though they’re not in court. If Holland didn’t want to radically intervene in the screenplay out of a sense of tactfulness, the dramaturg should have taken care of any additional pruning of the script. ___ If the first episode with its all-encompassing greyness and ruination of the oncoming period of normalisation cannot be believed because of its generally overwrought nature, the calmer second episode, with its much more tightly focused narrative, conveys the funereal post-August mood significantly more convincingly, although it works with the highly improbable supposition that there was a sudden turning point after the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. Almost no one is interested in public events, almost everyone is angry, the level of services is dismal and the food in restaurants is inedible. The streets are teeming with StB agents and cops who never squander an opportunity to harass innocent citizens. Is the depiction of Czechoslovakia as a place that was absolutely unsuitable for normal life really the best way to come to terms with normalisation? The clearly categorised characters are demonstrative of the attempt to promote existing myths rather than call them into question, let alone demolish them. The dehumanisation of the communists, who also have families to feed, comes across as forced. In his film Barbara, Christian Petzold was incomparably more convincing in creating a normalisation-era moral labyrinth in which almost anyone lose themselves. With its natural, clearly conveyed course of events, Barbara is in a number of respects the exact opposite of Burning Bush. ___ The ruin is amplified by the highly professional craftsmanship. The shots are thrown into dark colours, the setting is often a smoky room, the camera captures (or follows) the characters from a distance, often through other objects, with numerous reflective surfaces in the foreground (windows, doors, display cases). Unlike the soundtrack, the documentary-style “inquisitive” (in fact, very carefully thought out) filming does not aggressively push us to adopt a single point of view, but the music and words win out over the images just like the personal dramas triumph over dry factography. Whether intentionally or incidentally, Holland formalistically follows on from the best of the Polish school of moral disquiet, though unfortunately only formalistically and unfortunately only sometimes (mainly in the second episode, which, unlike the other two, deals more with facts than emotions). ___ The non-artistic value of Burning Bush clearly outweighs its actual qualities and its creators undoubtedly have a great advantage in the fact that nothing (more significant) has been made on the given subject yet. It will be up to other filmmakers to try again, differently, and hopefully better. 65% (18.01.2013) (weniger) (mehr)