Film review: ‘THE CONFERENCE’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’
While there is no onscreen violence or bloodshed, German docudrama, The Conference is possibly the most disturbing film so far this year. This film depicts the abhorrent attempt to sanitise the most appallingly brutal aspects of human nature through bureaucratic process.
The film dramatises the events of the meeting held in a chateau next to Wannsee Lake in Berlin on January 20th, 1942. Here, SS second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich (Phillip Hochmair) outlined to various high ranking Nazi officers and bureaucrats, his plan for the enslavement and slaughter of Europe’s Jews, a plan monstrously dubbed ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’.
The film mostly takes place in the Chateau’s conference room where the attendees discuss in rigorous detail the various aspects of the plan. It largely follows the familiar format of a corporate meeting although participants occasionally argue about their various responsibilities and engage in mini power games to assert whatever authority they have. It’s presented in close to real time, the actual meeting apparently took 90 minutes and is partly based on a stenographer’s notes.
Seeing these erudite, polite men treating the mass murder of millions of human beings as a logistical problem and something akin to a corporate KPI is utterly chilling. In addition to the holocaust and the Nazi regime, the filmmakers appear to be commenting on the dangerous nature of power structures generally, be they corporate or government. The film depicts the way the most atrocious acts can, through subservience to bureaucracy, a twisted sense of duty, the use of sinister Orwellian euphemisms (‘special treatment’ used here for killing), legalistic language and a veneer of intellectual sophistication, be turned into matters of process.
Almost no one at the meeting questions the moral implications of what is being proposed, their main concerns are additional workload and expenses. When one member of the conference (Thomas Loibl), a First World War veteran who had witnessed the horrors of gas, expresses a sliver of concern about the brutality of what is being suggested, he is quickly cowed into silence by accusatory looks and angry pronouncements of loyalty to the fatherland and supposed Aryan purity.
Given the limited setting, the film’s effectiveness is highly dependent on the quality of the acting and writing, both of which are superb. A little like 12 Angry Men, the film allows specific personalities to emerge from a physically constrained and highly organised scenario. The participants convincingly shift from robotic compliance with policy to protestations about encroachments on their territory, to outrageous antisemitic tirades, to casual exchanges over the buffet.
Not only because of the subject matter, some will find this film heavy going. The dialogue is very dense with many Nazi bureaucratic terms and it’s in German so there’s alot of reading for the audience. Still, this should not be a deterrent to filmgoers as The Conference is one of the most potent examinations of the banality of evil ever presented in a feature film.
Nick’s rating: ****1/2
Genre: Docudrama/Historical.
Classification: M.
Director(s): Matti Geschonneck.
Release date: 11th Aug 2022.
Running time: 108 mins.
Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.