Berlin 2005 : the Talent Press

Thursday, February 17th 2005

The Wrong Language (WORDS IN BLUE - Competition)
Rhythm of Confusion (THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE - Berlinale Panorama)
Editing as Good Sex (Workshop by Susan Korda: We'll Fix It in the Edit)
Seeking Sanctuary (MOOLAADÉ - European Film Market)
Prising Secrets From the Black Box
Wired for Sound

The Wrong Language
WORDS IN BLUE - Competition

WORDS IN BLUE, a new film by Alain Corneau, tells a story of a dysfunctional family. Clara, a neurotic woman, has refused to learn to read and write. Her daughter, six-year-old Anna, does not speak. When Anna starts going to a special school for the deaf (though there's nothing physically wrong with her), their life starts changing because of a male teacher.

Seems like an interesting story, doesn't it? But I'm afraid the amount of snoring I heard around me at the cinema theatre proves there was something wrong with it.

Clara (Sylvie Testud) is portrayed as an eccentric and neurotic single mother. She has suffered a childhood trauma that should explain to us her fears. Her grandmother who she loved very much, Sweet Baba, lost her ability to speak while reading a fairytale to her. Also she broke up with her boyfriend just when she got pregnant.

But these two dramatic flashbacks don't really explain to us the wierd things she does. She seems a bit mentally disturbed - getting drunk and throwing up at a childrens' Christmas party or walking into the ocean in a nightgown and almost drowning are just a few examples.

The teacher, played by Sergi Lopez, says that childrens' fears are tiny and grown-ups' fears are big. First of all, I don't agree - children's fears are always bigger, no doubt about that. But anyway, the fears of Claire were totally unbelievable. They seemed fake and unreasonable, and when she touched the picture of her beloved grandmom and said "Sweet Baba, where are you?", a fat guy next to me snored loudly. And I can't blame him.

The discourse of portraying a woman is often intuitive, emotional and bodily. So Claire stereotypically runs, cries and rolls her eyes, but that's not enough to explain her character's fears and dreams. Bizarre behaviour is not what all women are about - the characterization should be more complex than that to make her a real person, even more, a real woman.

In a wider meaning WORDS IN BLUE should tell a story about language and communication. We define ourselves by language. Not being able to read or speak affects our identity. Clara and Anna are not fitting because of their language problems, that's clear. But in WORDS IN BLUE there is a lack of chemistry between the characters and the concept - the idea is so much more interesting than the actual story we see.

By saying "This film speaks to me" we mean we can relate to the story. This film was quite silent, I must admit.

Maria Ulfsak

Rhythm of Confusion
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE - Berlinale Panorama

There is rhythm alright, but the kind of melody that runs through the film by Rebecca Miller, in which her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis stars, is eerie. Set in 1986 on an island in the east coast of the United States, at a period that marked the death of the hippie communes, THE BALLAD tells the story of Jack (Day-Lewis) and Rose (Camilla Belle), father and daughter who are both eccentric in their approach to life. Jack has just moved into his eco-house with Rose, a teenager who is out of school, but his ferocious attitude to keep surburban developers out of his vicinity soon lands him in trouble. The signs of the times are not in tune with his concern that people should "live without destroying the planet."

But Jack acknowledges the need for a woman in his life, one who will be a mother figure to Rose, more so as he suffers from a heart problem. But when his girlfriend moves in with her two teenage sons, Jack's problems not only increase, and his daughter's vulnerability becomes more obvious.
Sex is in the equation, rightly maybe, between Jack and Kathleen (Catherine Keener), his girlfirend, but wrongly, and ferociously so, between Rose and the younger son of his father's girlfriend, Thadius. While Rose weirdly celebrates her new status by hanging the stained white cloth on which she lost her purity, Jack fights and breaks a few bones in Thadius' body. The short-lived union inevitably crashes.

Jack loses on all fronts, particularly when it dawns on him that his efforts to defy the signs of the times that favour urbanisation, will achieve nothing. It is a beaten and broken Jack, marvellously played by Day-Lewis, that ends up in bed to breathe his last in the arms of his pretty daughter who gives him reassurance of her love. But she fails, and not surprisingly, to end her life with his father as she had promised all along. It was only Jack, and perhaps, the snake that Rose brought into the house to scare her potential step-mother, that get cremated with the entire house.

If THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE were set to music, the score would be sombre indeed. But a keen listener would not fail to see the deftness with which a few phases of wondrous craftmanship are injected.
Seeing the film to the end became tortuous at a certain point, but Day-Lewis' acting and Belle's innocent attractiveness kept me from a mid-way exit. Yet, the connection between the script and the story that came up on screen is another subject of confusion. You may disagree with the characters in the film, but not the skill that brings them to life, especially if you are given to the kind of quaint humour that intermittently emanated from Rodney, Kathleen's other son, who is battling with obesity and keen on becoming a hair dresser for women.

Steve Ayorinde

Editing as Good Sex
Workshop by Susan Korda: We'll Fix It in the Edit

Editing has to be guided by emotions and not by logic - this was the main message of Susan Korda in her workshop held on Wednesday morning for the participants of the Berlinale Talent Campus. As film is definitely an emotional medium, editing has to be the same. If it isn't, the viewers will not experience the feelings the director wants them to. The authors of a film should never wish to show something obviously. They have to make the viewers experience things emotionally - and this is mostly the editor's job.

The lecture was useful not only for editors because Korda was explaining the main guiding principles of editing and not small technical details. The goal of this approach was to help young directors and editors develop a good relationship, where everyone can use their creativity to benefit the film. Editors must understand the feelings of directors, for whom editing is often like a self-mutilation, and directors have to let editors transform the material in such a way that it really expresses the thoughts and feelings of the director and screenwriter.

This is why an editor should never condemn the raw material of a film. He or she has to read what's in it and after that the editor can play with it. One of the highly emphasised elements of the lecture was the huge importance of the first impression, which an editor has only once with the material. This is why a notepad has to be prepared and every thought, memory, piece of music, etc. that comes in the editor's mind has to be written down, because this will help the editing process enormously.
The editor, according to Korda, has to work by editing the content of the material rather than the form. The form has to be considered only through the content. The editor should always think of the audience, and has to look for the information the viewer gets through a certain form. In this context Susan Korda stated that "very good editing is like very good sex". Good cinema and good editing, just like good sex, always arouses expectations in the viewer or partner, which then have to be fulfilled.

Film excerpts were used to illustrate what good editing can do. With the opening scene of BONNIE AND CLYDE we were shown how the performances of the actors can be made authentic and truthful by the rhythm of editing. Spielberg's JAWS was used to present how the tension of a scene can be heightened by the intercut of an exterior element and by music. At the end we could see a short film's original and re-edited version, which showed how important it is to pay attention to the information given in every sequence to the audience.

Some concrete advice were also given to the Talents: the six points of Walter Murch, emphasizing the importance of emotion in editing, and three principles about how an audience perceives. Finally Korda gave us a list of incomplete sentences, which should be filled in by every director end editor before editing a film. They were: "In my life I believe ----. I will show this by making a film on ----. The main conflict will be between ---- and -----. I want the audience to feel ----- and to understand -----."

Zsolt Gyenge

Seeking Sanctuary
MOOLAADÉ - European Film Market

In the latest issue of Cinema Scope magazine, film critic Ray Pride remarks that 82-year old Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembène "has created some of the most indelible portraits of womanhood in the cinema anywhere over the last 40 years". Having made such powerful and moving works as BLACK GIRL (1966), MANDABI (1968), EMITAI (1971), and XALA (1975), one finds it hard to disagree.

Awarded the Grand Prize for the Un Certain Regard category of the 2004 Cannes film festival, Sembène's latest work, MOOLAADÉ is a scathing critique on the practice of female genital mutilation.

Six young women from a small village attempt to escape from the "purification", or ritual of female circumcision: two by running to the city, and four through seeking asylum with Collé, a mother who has herself undergone the ritual, but prevented her daughter from enduring it some years back.

Collé takes in the four children, pronouncing a moolaadé (marked by the placing of stretched yarn across the base of their doorway), a spell of sacred protection that can only be dissolved by her word. The town is critical of Collé and her defiance, and the situation reaches a boiling point when her husband returns from out-of-town and is criticized by his brother and other elders for not being able to control her. In the films climax, Collé is brutally whipped over and over in front of the village by her husband, in an attempt to force her to call off the moolaadé. Her strength and bravery gain her the respect of many of townswomen, who eventually join her in a final stand-off against the male elders.

Sembène's humanist treatment of the story does not sensationalize the subject, but rather positions us as a members of the community, allowing us to both view and participate in the story that takes place. As we get deeper into the story and witness the horrible acts that takes place in the name of tradition alone, the film slowly begins to trigger our emotions to chorus with Collé and those on her side. Her bravery is inspiring, not just for her fellow women in the story, but for those in the audience as well.

Movies for Sembène, because of their wide-reaching audience as entertainment, make for a powerful tool to instigate discourse on important social issues. It is this instigation, not an all out inditement, that Sembène is after. Captivating the viewer with a gripping tale of the oncome of modernity to a rural village in Burkina Faso, MOOLAADÉ allows its camera to follow and probe its dwellers, successfully bridging art and entertainment, espousing advocacy without delving to propaganda, and triggering the discourse its maker aimed for.

Alexis Tioseco

Prising Secrets From the Black Box

Is it possible to sympathize with terrorism? Should one? These issues are explored in the film BLACK BOX BRD, directed by Andres Veiel. The film was shown as part of Wild Screenings - otherwise reserved for aspiring filmmakers at the Berlinale Talent Campus. Veiel also conducted a workshop on legal basics in documentary filmmaking at the Campus on February 14, along with two advocates.

Veiel, who has been making documentaries for the big screen for 15 years, focuses on the impact of political, historical and social issues on individual lives. His last, ADDICTED TO ACTING, won the Panorama Audience Award at last year's Berlinale.

BLACK BOX BRD is his fourth film. It chronicles the life stories of Wolfgang Grams, a terrorist, and Alfred Herrhausen, a Deutsche Bank spokesman, which are tragically linked to the power struggle between the German state and the Red Army Faction in the 70s and 80s.

"Although it is a film about a German terrorist and a victim, you can extend the crucial issues to many events all over the world," says Veiel. "To understand for example why somebody decided to go underground. What is the motivation for Wolfgang Grams to say goodbye to his friends and family? He was aware that he could either get arrested or killed. He plays high stakes in making his choices. I was interested in why a person like him did it. Besides, with somebody like Alfred Herrhausen, at first you think he's just a typical capitalist CEO, but he's not. I play with the cliches but still show something new."

The idea of BLACK BOX BRD came in 1996 and Veiel screened his film in 2001 - with a rollercoaster ride in between. "It was very difficult because I wrote three treatments but could realize very little of it on screen. The main character said, "I don't want to be involved" and the second said, "Under these circumstances I am not willing to be in the film anymore". So it was a long, yet satisfying journey. It was a huge success in Germany with over 120.000 spectators, and was shown in six festivals worldwide."

How did Veiel manage to make people feel comfortable and talk in front of the camera about such sensitive matters? "It is a question of building up trust with the protagonists. I would say I would like to visit someone like Traudl, Herrhausen's widow, 20 times before I begin to shoot. You can't just come, set up a light and shoot. You have to work a lot before to earn their confidence," he says.

Veiel's next work will be a theatre project at Gorki in Berlin, followed by a feature film. ADDICTED TO ACTING was about the careers of four acting students from the time they apply for drama school. "It was a coming-of-age film. For me it was a relief not to make a film on terrorism and suicide. But my next film is again on the murder of right wing people, of Skinheads."

In the end, Andres Veiel's work tends to encourage the viewer to be less judgemental.

Müge Turan

Wired for Sound

Mike Figgis really stole the show from Walter Salles in the Berlinale Talent Campus session on film and composers. With a background as a musician, and an interest that is rooted in sound design as a whole, Figgis brings enormous experience and insight to the topic. His clips from LEAVING LAS VEGAS, INTERNAL AFFAIRS and THE LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE, were well-chosen examples of the shifting dynamic between picture and sound.

Unlike most Hollywood films, Figgis' work pioneers interesting techniques in sound design: in LEAVING LAS VEGAS he showed how music can be used over dialogue to heighten awareness of what the characters are saying; he talked about the choice to cut away all music in the scene where Nicholas Cage drinks an entire bottle of vodka, reversing the conventional practise of softening tough pictures with the relief of music. He was able to draw the audience's attention to the way natural sound, such as traffic noise from the streets of Las Vegas, can be a subtle but effective contribution to sound design.

Figgis reached a balance between talking as an artist, and as a technician in the Hollywood machine, explaining the reality of producers' prerogatives over soundtrack at the expense of directors' creative control. He opined systematic problems in the industry where composers will be strangers to the film, and will be working on your score at the same time as other scores - and what they produce as a result will completely change the psychological make-up of your film. Both Figgis and Salles emphasised the importance of having a good relationship with your composer.

One of the strongest points that came out of the session is the importance for filmmakers to resist the temptation to cut to music other than the score, and to hold out against the practice of basing films around music. When should you introduce music into the film? Figgis recommends waiting as long as possible. "The film without music is a like a virgin. Once you add your first 15 seconds of music, then it becomes a slut that can't get enough music". The danger is that you end up with a film that is inconsistent between scenes because the music has affected the film rather than the film informing the music choices. At the same time, both directors discuss using pre-composed soundtracks on set to set the mood for actors and cinematographers.

For anyone interested in soundtracks and sound design in film I highly recommend a tour through Figgis' work; you don't need to hear him articulate his ideas because his work really speaks for itself.

Dee Jefferson

© FIPRESCI / Berlinale Talent Campus 2005

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