Style and contrast

Style and contrast 

I have soft spot for The Quiller memorandum. Admittedly, I like the whole genre of cold war spy thrillers but that's not the reason I watching this not so great film: it's the photography and above all the use of architecture. Germany in the reconstruction period following the Second World War is presented as a Janus-like built environment - or rather a combination of an overworld (sunny, clean, modernist and hence forward-looking and possibly cleansed of the sins of the past) and an underworld (dark, decaying, full of historicist elements and Nazis). Much of the film is predictable but the contrast between the overworld and the underworld is a point of personal interest. Every time I happen to come across the film on television, I don't change the channel, waiting for some glimpse of those hopeful images of a modern society that were part of my childhood and youth. I miss the belief in the future we used to have back then.