User Reviews

some people get stuck in time... that certainly is the case with the portrait in Porträt einer Bewährung. as always, Kluge play with concepts like time, warfare and the results of defeat. in fact, every Kluge short movie can be seen as a case of psychological denial of the main figure in an environment with facts happening on a different scale of the main character in question. Porträt einer Bewährung offers us the chance to see history happen again through the eyes of an innocent bystander, who gets involved in more than he'd like to be, thus creating our present (or his future in the past storyline) reformed by his own thoughts. it may sound silly when you put it like that, but the real question is whether or not this will happen to ourselves. will we become old and naive in a world we can't follow because of the values we learned to appreciate in our youth? possibly. and perhaps that possibility makes this movie so great to watch.

"Porträt einer Bewährung" is a 12-minute black-and-white documentary made by Alexander Kluge over 50 years ago, still during the early years of his career. We basically hear a man telling us about his professional life as a police officer, mostly about the mistakes he made and the consequences that he had to face afterward. Apart from the ending, it feels like a report he is reading from a document, a statement in fact. This was a very bleak little movie and I never really caught interest in the protagonist. Apart from that, the images did not really fit what we heard. It is also a bit of a historic summary for Germany. I like Nazi-themed films, but this one hadn't a lot to offer. Not recommended.