David Tosco, dir. The Face of Evil. Film Library, 2007. 52 minutes.
Reviewed by Benjamin Carter Hett (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
"The Criminologist Struck at Night"
This stylish, thought-provoking short documentary by David Tosco opens effectively with shots of faces in an airport crowd (and where is a crowd more seemingly menacing today than at an airport?) as the voice-over observes "when we look at others we look first and foremost to anticipate danger. We do this instinctively." Such instincts led, in the nineteenth century, to the development of "sciences" of criminal identification, which their architects hoped could eventually be prophylactic. The film moves quickly to identify the tremendous current stakes of this quest: "the search for the criminal face" is more intense than ever today, as one of the film's talking heads, sociologist Robert J. Lilly, points out. But is there even the slightest foundation for the notion that "crime is inscribed on the body?" The film's answer is a resounding no, a conclusion which then throws into frightening relief the myriad efforts that anthropologists, police officers, even artists, have made over the centuries--and, of course, continue to make.
The film casts a broad chronological as well as disciplinary net, going back to Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the Jew at the Crucifixion to illustrate the deep roots in European culture of the idea that evil intentions are somehow always physically manifest. The development of photography added a vital new weapon to the arsenal of would-be "scientific" crime fighters. Photography could be made to serve important propagandistic purposes in this connection, underscoring the dichotomy between the law-abiding citizen and the criminal "other." As one of the scholars who speaks in film points out, this notion reflects a common prejudice that a photograph represents the thing photographed, rather than the intentions of the photographer, and a correspondingly naive assumption that the photograph brings a reliable scientific precision to the representation of the subject.
The film takes a quick jog through some of the highlights of development of the sciences of criminal identification--such as the system developed by Alphonse Bertillon of the Paris police, and of course the work of Cesare Lombroso, whose studies of southern Italian highwaymen advanced the proposition that there was such a thing as a "born criminal," amounting to an evolutionary throwback. Lombroso's ideas were, as the film correctly points out, a kind of high-water mark of nineteenth-century positivism as applied to the study of human criminality, and the weakness of this approach is best demonstrated by the fact that today we would not find 90 percent of Lombroso's subjects to be criminals. The film advances the Foucauldian thesis that the success of Lombroso was the success of the bourgeoisie, which through such "science" could defend or advance its own power.
All of this information really serves as contextual material for the film's main exhibit, the case of alleged German serial killer Bruno Luedke. Luedke was born in 1908 in the Berlin suburb of Köpenick. Mentally handicapped, he was known in the neighborhood as "der doofe Bruno." He worked at the family laundry and was not known to have traveled beyond Köpenick; indeed, he did not understand how to buy a train ticket. He had a police record based on some petty thefts and, in 1940, the Erbgesundheitsgericht had ordered him sterilized. Then, in March 1943, Luedke was arrested in connection with a murder. Under interrogation by one Kriminal-Kommissar Franz, he apparently confessed to as many as fifty-three more homicides committed in all regions of Germany. Seeing him as a "wahre Fundgrabe" for the investigation of the biological roots of crime, legal authorities shipped Luedke off to the Nazis' institute for criminal-biological research in Vienna to undergo a bewildering variety of tests. He died in the course of this investigation, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, in April 1944. He was never brought to trial.[1]
Luedke's real fame came with a series of articles about his case that appeared in Spiegel in the 1950s, followed by the movie Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957), which took his guilt as unproblematic--and was nominated for an Oscar. As Tosco's film points out, the Luedke family tried to re-open Bruno's case after the Second World War, with no success. West German authorities were able to argue that since Luedke had never been convicted, there was no legal way to "clear his name." The film makes clear that the striking contrast between Luedke's probable innocence and the criminal-biological torments he was forced to undergo only underscore the ridiculousness of Lombroso's whole quest for the "born criminal." The film does not neglect elements of the specifically German context here either, pointing out that a fixation on the Luedke case probably served as something of a diversion from "coming to terms with the past" in the conservative atmosphere of the Bundesrepublik of the 1950s.
This is, therefore, a mildly polemical film that nonetheless makes its points stylishly enough to be interesting to a lay viewer. Of course, a fifty-minute film has to leave much out, and much more could have been said about any of these subjects. It is interesting to know, for instance, that Luedke was probably murdered on the orders of the infamous Artur Nebe; the police covered up the true cause of death, telling the family that Luedke had died of typhoid. The death certificate, on the other hand, recorded heart failure; and one of the police officers involved, Bernd Wehner, wrote in Der Spiegel after the war that Luedke had died of "freezing," raising the prospect that he actually died in a concentration camp.[2] The film tells its story through artful chronological leaps that I suspect would be a little confusing for a viewer not already very familiar with what Lombroso and Bertillon were all about; for instance, we are not told when Bertillon did his work. Interviews with various scholars are conducted in French, Italian, and German, as well as English. I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the translations in the first two cases, but a few of the subtitles from German are inaccurate or confusing: "Kommissar" and "Kriminalrat," for instance, are both rendered as "chief of police."
Overall, though, this intelligent, stimulating film makes good use of current scholarship on these questions without sounding pedantic. Non-specialists should find it will arouse their curiosity, while even specialists can benefit from some of the perspectives the film opens up.
Notes
[1]. Detailed information about the Luedke case is available in Patrick Wagner, Hitlers Kriminalisten: Die deutsche Kriminalpolizei und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002).
[2]. Ibid, 7-9.
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Citation:
Benjamin Carter Hett. Review of Tosco, David, dir., The Face of Evil.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23716
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