Shultze rocked (but very quietly)

A few weeks ago I babbled incoherently about the film Shultze gets the blues and, as promised, we invited my FYS students over to the house to eatch the film with us. So last Sunday five students came to the house to watch the film. The short version? WeatherGirl and I quite liked the film, but Sub-Evil Boy and some of the students found it a little slow for their tastes.

The basic story is that Schultze, a retired miner and “classic” German polka accordion player, discovers a snippet of zydeco on the radio and becomes enamored with cajun/zydeco music and culture. He starts to play this little zydeco riff he’s worked out, but the locals really don’t understand what he’s doing and respond quite negatively. Somewhat independently, his local music club decides to send him as their representative to a German heritage festival in their sister city of New Braunfels, Texas. After hanging around the festival for a bit, however, he bails on it and embarks on this strange boat journey down to the Gulf of Mexico and through the bayous of east Texas and Louisiana.

From what I’d read, I had expected it to be a slow, gentle film, and it certainly was. It was, however, much quieter and less focussed on a traditional narrative than I’d expected. It was really more a portrait of Schultze and his German community, told in quiet shots where very little actually happened (because very little was actually happening in their lives).

For a film “about music”, it is in fact largely silent, filled with almost soundless shots of Schultze in his living room, or riding his bike across the flat plains around his village (which was so like Morris!), or coasting along the bayous in his blue boat. On the one hand this was mildly annoying (I wanted to hear more of the cool music!), but on the other hand it was remarkably moving and effective, and made the music we did hear all the more powerful.

The visuals were also quite “silent” in the sense that the camera almost never moved. They would set up a shot and hold it for quite a while (often minutes), and people would wander in and out of the shot without the camera making any effort to track them or even acknowledge their motion. The shots themselves, though, were typically beautiful and often achingly so. And as Sub-Evil Boy correctly pointed out, the lack of motion made the shots where they did use things like pans stand out that much more.

Given that Schultze only says a handful of words in the entire film, it’s quite amazing how powerfully his character is conveyed, and how strongly I felt about and for him at the end. In many ways, the film was much more like a poem than a novel, using a few carefully chosen words and images to build an deeply resonant world.

One thing that several of us commented on was that the boat trip makes no sense from a logistical standpoint. We have no idea where or how he acquires his boat, and a look at the map of Texas makes it clear that boating from New Braunfels to southern Louisiana would be a pretty tricky business (especially with his very limited command of English and no evidence of maps). So you just have to set those details aside, treating it as something more impressionist than representational.

In the end, I found it a very powerful film and am really glad that we stumbled across it. It was beautiful on many levels, and spoke in wonderful ways to issues of diversity and complexity both within a single person and their life, and within and among communities.

There is a soundtrack for sale on Normal Records, which looks like a neat collection of German and creole music. I suspect, though, that it doesn’t have the silence that is so dominate in the film itself. For that, I think I’ll go listen to something like Peter Cusack’s Baikal ice, Lauren Weinger’s Silos, or Chris Cutler’s Twice around the earth. The little accordion piece they play when you visit the film web site, though, is quite beautiful and worth hearing several times over.