A Film Canon

The Bridge draws a common denominator between late war and adolescent sensibilities, elaborating a depleted German village in which paternity has been relegated to a purely symbolic significance ("What do you believe in?" "Everything Father told me"); or, alternatively, has been entirely subsumed into the Fatherland, and it's perverse surrogates, dwindling to the murky origin of letters, enlistment papers, and the abrasive bursts of sound that periodically disorient the mise-en-scene. As a result, the affective kernel of the film turns on maternal estrangement, locating the adolescent between mother and lover, and effeminising the indiscriminate romantic observation-networks that unite a group of schoolboys, and distract them from their language lessons. The result is a poignant characterisation of their subsequent military service as the attempt to reclaim and solidify signification, as the eponymous bridge around which the action revolves moves from a free-floating, umbilical signifier, to a ghostly reiteration of their imaginary childhood world and, eventually, an instance of the traumatic, abject reality of war, all of which clarifies the unknowability of the Fatherland's demand, and the only conceivable response as psychosis.