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Festivals: Berlin
QUALITY CONTROL
By Olaf Möller
a Film Comment online exclusive
above: Before Sunset
It's been three years since Dieter Kosslick took charge of the Berlinale, and the changes are finally becoming clear: less edge and a general drop in quality in all three main sections, due to a philosophy that has less to do with programming the best and brightest than with filling slots by the numbers. Some say festival insiders have admitted to passing over good films (e.g., the new Straub-Huillet) in favor of weaker ones - or, put another way, selecting the readily digestible at the expense of more difficult work-in the interest of keeping the overall image of each section neat and tidy. At this point the Berlinale is more concerned with its own brand.
In the late Eighties and early Nineties the Berlinale was pure pandemonium. It was shaped and led by three strong personalities, each with their own agenda: Moritz de Hadeln, who was officially in charge; festival co-director Ulrich Gregor, head of the International Forum, an autonomous, semi-renegade sanctuary offset from the official structure; and the late and sorely missed Manfred Salzgeber, who programmed the Panorama section. Two had something like a vision, two hated each other's guts, and all three were bullheaded and determined not to yield any quarter to one another. You could always feel the behind-the-scenes heat just by looking at the program. The three programmers may have had their own priorities, but every year each section would include films that seemed to belong in another program. And so things were productively ambiguous and the borderlines weren't clear-cut - the better to prepare audiences for surprises and the redefinition of each section's game.
In today's Berlinale, you can forget that. Kosslick is El Supremo, and while Christoph Terhechte and Wieland Speck, the successors to Gregor and Salzgeber, may assemble their sections' lineups, they're lieutenants at best. Neither is exactly known for standing up to Kosslick and they usually agree with him about which films go where. Berlinale propaganda would have us believe that the festival's programs were created by one big happy family, and that feuding is a thing of the past. In other words, no more rough-edged, unpredictable selections: each section delivers according to the dictates of its image - which is just as well since Speck and Terhechte have yet to prove they're anything more than administrators.
Kosslick also introduced the idea of assigning a motto or theme for each year's festival and judiciously distributes films that reflect them in all three sections. This is partly an expression of the Berlinale's new all-for-one mentality, and partly a cunning PR move which helps shape and overdetermine how the festival is perceived by both its audience and the press; creating sidebars and adding special screenings left and right also helps. In this kind of setup the quality of individual films becomes less and less important: as long as they serve their purpose in a given context, people have something to talk or write about, and everything is just hunky-dory. In other words, if you find enough ways to interconnect films and program sections, quality stops being a decisive factor - or even an irritant in a system in which the artist's work is reduced to a reference point for others to express their opinions.
Kosslick has also circumvented the question of quality by making the promotion of new filmmakers the central focus - and as it happens, with the exception of Kim Ki-Duk's disappointing Samaritan Girl, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director, none of this year's prizes went to established filmmakers. This is another sly move. Not only does it reverse Cannes's Battle of the Art-house Titans approach, in which the auteur's name is often more important than the actual quality of his film (the overrated 2002 edition is a perfect example), but it's also a good excuse for the absence of serious quality, decisiveness, or vision - the new Berlinale is about promise and investment in cinema's future, and we have to be patient and just concentrate on those parts of a film that work. After all, the Big Guys go to Cannes, and when they want to come to Berlin, Cannes makes them an offer they can't refuse, as was the case this year with Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries. But Cannes's dishonorable behavior in recent years is one thing; the Berlinale's shameless playing up of the underdog role is something else entirely.
If the above is perfectly reasonable for the average festival, it's certainly not fitting for one of the Big Three. All of this may seem like insider grumbling, but it's important to consider. After all, festivals don't just happen spontaneously; they're shaped the way they are for definite reasons.
The changes in Berlin's structure, organization, and outlook became blatantly obvious at this year's 54th edition. They're all the more noteworthy because the Berlinale has finally become a true reflection of the German cinema establishment itself, where decisions by committee and middlebrow ambitions result in dreck like Rosenstrasse or Das Wunder von Bern and annoying nothings like Nowhere in Africa and Goodbye Lenin, our international successes of 2003.
That said, Berlin '04 offered as many great films as, say, Venice '03, but nevertheless felt like a shambles. Whereas Venice's best films seemed to grow from the soil of the large number of generally good films around them, each major work in Berlin felt like an oasis, merely emphasizing the surrounding desert.
Which brings us to Fatih Akin's Head On (Gegen die Wand), the first German film to win the Golden Bear in nearly 20 years. Relative to most of the films in competition, it's actually a fine piece of work. Carefully constructed, forcefully directed (though its piss-and-vinegar tone is perhaps a little too showy) it offers that rare thing: an honest picture of contemporary Germany, one that actually looks and sounds like the country I live in. On the other hand, Head On pales in comparison to the competition's two bona fide masterpieces, Romuald Karmakar's Nightsongs (Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder) and Richard Linklater's Before Sunset.
The competition lineup resembled a battlefield with all the promising young(er) directors on one side, a motley crew of old masters on the other, and a handful of filmmakers in between who were easily overlooked, although Patrice Leconte did garner support for Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intimes), admittedly one of his better films. Tellingly, Karmakar and Linklater didn't fit in any category: too young to be old masters but definitely masters all the same, too established and successful to be up-and-comers, too consistent and unclassifiable and too at the top of their game to be considered in-betweeners.
The old masters included John Boorman (Country of My Skull), Eric Rohmer (Triple Agent), Theo Angelopoulos (Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow), and Ken Loach (Ae Fond Kiss). Boorman and Rohmer offered the two most interesting, if somewhat flawed, entries. Ae Fond Kiss was moving and nice but nothing more, while with Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow Angelopoulos seems to have finally abandoned his pompous European auteur routine and come up with his strongest work in a decade, a film in which his style doesn't self-indulgently run on empty around some E.U. cinema PC subject. For once the director has some understanding and feeling for his story, not just an opinion about it. Still, the film's nothing compared to his Seventies and early Eighties films.
The old masters should also have fielded Chantal Akerman, whose Tomorrow We Move (Demain on demenage) was wasted in the Panorama, and Ermanno Olmi, whose Singing Behind the Screens (Cantando dietro i paraventi) was buried in the Berlinale Special section. Both are maverick masterpieces, defiantly different and quite unconcerned with realism, the competition's semi-covert doctrine-realism being, a handy excuse for all kinds of artistic inadequacy, as well as a superficially simple and agreed-upon standard by which a film's merits can be judged. Tomorrow We Move is one of Akerman's "entertainments," ergo odd by definition: a crypto-hysterical comedy in classical French style, circa 1956, but with lots of weird twists, it features an uptight hack writer (Sylvie Testud) penning a pornographic novel without, it seems, ever having gotten laid properly. She's searching for a new apartment while trying to deal with her pestering mother (Aurore Clément), and everything ends in an all-singing proto-lesbian utopia. Besides offering sharp insights into relationships and family, it also wittily comments on art cinema's current fondness for dabbling in pornography: when the writer unwittingly produces closet Dada-esque erotica, her mother breezily suggests more dirty words.
Olmi's Singing Behind the Screens was a different type of anomaly, a fable about grace set among Chinese pirates in the early 19th century. It features Seventies Italian trash-movie icon Bud Spencer as the old captain who narrates the story, while the visuals offer a mind-boggling mix of stylized theatricality and big-budget realism at once sensual and dialectical. In other words, Olmi's out on a limb, and judging from his evolution since the mid-Eighties, that's exactly where he wants to be: free from the constrictions of realism and inhabiting a realm where the essence of things is what matters and all formal strategies coexist in harmony.
Country of My Skull was one of the competition's officially-designated-theme entries. In the context of 10 years of post-Apartheid South Africa, Boorman was widely reviled for telling the wrong kind of story, for talking about love instead of politics by centering on the romantic relationship between an African-American journalist (Samuel L. Jackson) and an Afrikaner poet (Juliette Binoche), both covering the proceedings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It didn't seem to register with audiences that in Boorman's film the personal reflects the political in a soundly dialectical manner and that, in a far more general and meaningful way, it deals with guilt, redemption, forgiveness, and deliverance. Or perhaps it was simply too spiritual or morally ambiguous for a Berlinale audience that (in the words of a friend) "always knows what's right"; it didn't help that Boorman is too decent to tell you what to think in the end. Dealing with the essence of images, in this case the images people create for each other, Country of My Skull is pure Boorman. The director dives headlong into the mess that is South Africa, dwelling on the ambiguities that define its society, mostly refraining from moralizing, constructing his argument in such a way that a character's intentions or a situation's actual meaning remain uncertain. The film's central question is: What's wrong with this picture? As its characters repeatedly reinterpret the events we've just seen, arriving at diverging meanings, Country of My Skull recalls Rashomon, less as a film about ambiguity as one dealing with taking action. When all is said and done, only the deed itself matters. The poet, having learned and confronted certain ugly truths about both the world she lives in and her own soul, has been changed forever-while the journalist, in a bitterly ironic ending, has learned nothing. Boorman couldn't avoid all the traps inherent in the subject, so clearly he's an easy target. Binoche's black assistant may function as little more than a sidekick, but given his social inferiority to both protagonists, that's the only role available to him - and Boorman wisely doesn't pretend to be able to see things from a black South African's point of view. But the incorrect substitution of English for Afrikaans, which might seem like a minor quibble, overlooks a distinction that carries a great deal of political significance for white South Africans and can only be viewed as a notable flaw in a consciously political film.
Interestingly, Eric Rohmer's latest is also about images, as well as being a comparable essay on ambiguities and politics in which nothing is as it seems. Triple Agent, like his other historical films, takes its cues from period painting - but what does realist painting mean in the age of cinema? And how can we separate fiction and documentary when their material reality is identical? (Is cinema itself a kind of triple agent?) In a number of respects Triple Agent is a companion piece to The Lady and the Duke. It's set in a time of turmoil (mid-Thirties France and with Civil War-torn Spain in the background), steeped in an aura of ordinary terror, and focuses on a couple's struggle to survive. The big difference here is that the protagonists are most likely perpetrators rather than victims. It's a film ruled by uncertainty and ambivalence, reinforced by Rohmer's self-consciously bland, deceptively wide-open images and anti-dramatic arc and pacing. As usual, politics is all tactics and words, and the director's main character, the spy of the title, talks up a reality so chock-full of contradictions that in the end nobody knows for sure who he's working for, if anyone. Does he himself know? Does it matter?
The problem is, it's a little too easy to argue that organized politics, especially as viewed through the looking glass of the intelligence services, is merely smoke and mirrors, and that personal morality is the only valid position-which, most people seem to forget, works only in a stable conservative society. But then, Rohmer was never much of a progressive.
More interested in the terror of ordinary images and the ordinary terror of life scrutinized to death, Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion's I Love You All (Aus Liebe zum Volk) drew some scary and highly relevant lessons from the past through the melancholic reminiscences of a cog in the machine of political control, Major S., an East German Stasi agent. Like The Specialist, Sivan's 1999 journey into the mind of a clerk of oppression, I Love You All is a found footage film that defies categorization (and was therefore consigned to the Berlinale Special section). Though it's a documentary essay, it's so character-driven that it plays like a narrative feature, albeit one in which its protagonist is never seen, only heard. The film consists of snippets from surveillance recordings, training films, GDR TV material, amateur movies and tapes of phone calls to the Stasi, so that there's more to listen to than the ravings and justifications of Major S., taken from the 1990 autobiographical account that forms the film's narrative backbone and starting point. Sivan also includes two reconstructed scenes that are smoothly integrated with the general style and flow of the visuals, and serve to heighten the overall sense of ambiguity and perplexity already established by the difficulty in differentiating actual surveillance or interrogation footage from their training film simulations. A pitch-perfect portrait of a certain East German mentality and the ends to which it could be put, I Love You All is above all a timely comment on the nature of surveillance and the security state that becomes ever more real with each passing day-or rather, since it's already a kind of reality, ever more blatant.
(It's regrettable, but hardly surprising, that the Berlinale opted not to present Sivan's other new film, Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, made in collaboration with Michel Khleifi - so much for the principle of interconnection. This epic meditation on the arrogance of power premiered a few weeks later at the Cinema du Reel festival in Paris, where it received only a single screening in a tiny venue after a ferocious critical attack accused it of anti-Zionism. It's not as if this kind of programming - charting the dynamics between two markedly different films from the same director - is alien to the Berlinale.)
The premiere of two new films by German filmmaker Romuald Karmakar, Nightsongs and Land of Annihilation (Land der Vernichtung), represented a double high point of this year's festival. The two could be said to be the alpha and omega of Karmakar's universe - and maybe cinema itself. Land of Annihilation is a research documentary shot in preparation for what will hopefully be Karmakar's next project, a film dealing with the war crimes committed in occupied Poland by a Hamburg reserve police battalion as part of Operation Reinhardt in 1942-44, during which 1.7 million Jews were murdered. This now-notorious event demolished once and for all the myth that German civilian forces participated in the Holocaust unwillingly. Karmakar visited the Majdanek concentration camp and the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and immersed himself in their reality to get a feel for their texture as well as that of the surrounding landscapes; he also interviewed locals who remembered days filled with gunshots and screaming. The material used in
Land of Annihilation was never intended for any eyes other than those of Karmakar's production team, and so the camerawork and sound are as artless as it gets. But this surface coarseness is deceptively simple - it you look closely, Karmakar's video becomes a poetic epic on history and remembrance, images and imagination, the strange turns life can take - and maybe even God. Humble and supremely assured, it's an object lesson in filmmaking at its most fundamental.
Meanwhile Karmakar's Nightsongs was presented in the Competition. A Kammerspielfilm based on a play by Jon Fosse about a young couple's relationship reaching the end of the line, it's directed with patience, passion, and an artisanal rigor that puts its spiritual-materialist filmmaking on par with Dreyer's Ordet or Ford's Seven Women. An experience in endurance and humility, its perfectly calibrated aesthetics guard a raw soul full of pure, inconsolable pain.
Nightsongs and Before Sunset made a fascinating pair: like the sun and moon of a planet ruled by unconditional devotion to cinema and respect for the real that goes far beyond the simplicity of realism. Where Nightsongs speaks of the end of love and illusion, Before Sunset presents the wonder of illusion transformed into truth, life, and love; where Karmakar's aesthetic is austere, Linklater's is airy and fleeting, bordering on invisible, embracing the whole world; and where the language of Nightsongs has an almost material presence, its own unique heightened reality, Before Sunset's dialogue rings true in a way that, for all the film's tenderness, can be devastating. But they have one thing in common: they exalt life and, by extension, the viewer.
Final kudos to: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's awe-inspiring Infernal Affairs trilogy, Derek Yee's touching melodrama about loss and salvation, Lost in Time, and Johnny To and Wai Ka Fai's madcap Buddhist redemption extravaganza, Running on Karma - five instances of Hong Kong cinema's classical approach to filmmaking and modern/postmodern sense of genre; and Bruce LaBruce's camp, prudishly pornographic, post-Punk The Raspberry Reich, a quasi-Situationist farce about wannabe homo-terrorists who seem to have taken Fassbinder's The Third Generation and Adachi Masao's 1968 film Sex Games too seriously - the kind of irreverent strangeness we need to see more of these days.
Olaf Möller is FILM COMMENT's European editor.
© 2004 by Olaf Möller
