Make or Break

Alexander Muller’s early life, as it is sketched in Falk Schuster and Mike Plitt’s minimalist animated documentary Make or Break was forged by several years in the children’s home system of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Originally raised by his apolitical mother in the Vogtland region, he was taken away by welfare officers at the age of 11 when it was deemed that his outspoken mother was incapable of raising a sufficiently “socialist personality.” Alex’s childhood was spent in institutions, and his reluctance to stay in them saw him do two punishing stretches in the notorious Closed Juvenile Detention Centre, Torgau.

Alex’s experience is conveyed literally through voiceover and several intertitles that move his timeline along. It is in the visual accompaniment to the details of his story that Schuster and Plitt’s film becomes so evocative. Each location in Alex’s youth – his home with his mother, the first institution he spent time in, Torgau – is represented on screen by a beautifully constructed environment that combines coloured fields, pastel shading, collaged photo elements, and line-drawn details. Hard lines and coloured blocks give these spaces architectural shape, and a fragment of a photo will line the wall with a bookcase or, in the more ominous locales, place barred windows in the background.

Using this bricolage animation technique, along with resonant sound design, imbues each of the locations with an immediate sense of character. Not only that, but the relative anonymity of the imagery – even when we are conscious of the specific facility being depicted – gives the foreboding atmosphere a universal familiarity. As stark grey architecture looms overhead and murky shadows engulf the screen, one doesn’t have to have been to Torgau to feel its monstrous presence. Into these places, Schuster and Pitt insert tiny moments of rotoscope animation that illustrate snatches of action implied or literally described in the voiceover – the making of a paper aeroplane or rigorous exercises in the detention centre yard. It’s an enormously potent effect that makes the oppression felt by Alex, and the almost half a million children who were subjected to this system between 1945 and 1990, distressingly tangible.

Directors: Falk Schuster, Mike Plitt
Screenplay: Mike Plitt
Producers: Max Monch, Alexander Lahl
Cinematography: Falk Schuster
Editing: Julian Quitsch
Animation: Falk Schuster, Julian Quitsch, Alexander Schmidt
Music, sound: Hannes Schulze
Venue: DOK Leipzig (German Competition Short Film)
In German
8 minutes