The City and the City (Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas, 2022) (Patreon)

A film that is far more interesting than successful, The City and the City more than lives down to its odd, elliptical title. It seems that its makers are laboring under a false assumption. Given that its subject is a complex, sprawling one -- the lives and fates of Jews living in Thessaloniki, particularly following the Nazis' occupation of Greece -- it only makes sense that the film's makers, Passalis and Tzoumerkas, would conclude that they required an expansive, somewhat experimental approach in order to do it justice. The results, however, are flat and muddled, since any time the directors start establishing a tone or a coherent point of view, The City and the City shifts gears. 

At times it plays like a Harun Farocki-style docudrama, combining patently artificial reenactments of political violence with actual photographs of the Nazis deportation of Thessaloniki's Jewish population. At other points, the filmmakers opt for slow, atmospheric tracking shots across wide fields and bodies of water, clearly recalling Theo Angelopolous's landscapes of historical memory. And just as suddenly, Passalis and Tzoumerkas will insert contemporary footage of Thessaloniki, its rigid city streets suggesting traces of the horrors the city has seen, very much like Ernie Gehr's Signal: Germany on the Air. There is seldom a clear reason when one kind of material gives way to another, leaving the viewer disconnected and adrift. The bottom line: I learned about a facet of the Holocaust about which I'd previously been ignorant, but The City and the City's creative treatment of these horrors actually detracted from my understanding.