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Berlin 2006 - Daily reports
Monday, February 13th
Of love and other myths. Maria Antonia Velez-Serna reviews Terrence Malick's The New World, screened in competition. 
Nothing New on the Eastern Front. Vera Brozzoni reviews Chen Kaige's The Promise (Wuji) (competition).
Empty Eruptions. Tamás Bella reviews Jasmila Zbanic's film Grbavica (competition).
A Shock to the System. Soumaya Beltifa reviews Detlev Buck's Tough Enough, screened in the Panorama.
Cinema As Theatre. Oleksiy Radynski reviews Andres Veiel's Der Kick (Panorama).
A Touch of Genius. Laurence Reymond talks of Absolute Wilson, the documentary by Katharina Otto-Bernstein on Robert Wilson (Panorama).
The Flower Sellar. Leo Mirani on Peter Sellars's talk on Art as Moral Action.
Reading the Film. Katie Kohn met the great British director Jim Clark, who worked with John Schlesinger, Stanley Donen and Mike Leigh, among others.
The Precise Look. Anne von der Goenne met Dirk Grau, "one of Germany's most talented and creative editor".
Overeating but still starving. Maria Antonia Velez-Serna on independent film and slow food.
Film and Food as Pure Mediums. Olya Aylarova reports on the Talents' encounter with Peter Kubelka. Professor of "Film and Cooking" at the Frankfurt School of Fine Arts.
Of love and other myths
When I saw the trailer, I decided not to watch this film. It was a fast round of arrow trajectories, cannonballs, and semi-naked dancing, all set to the accelerating thumping of drums -boring and exhausting at a time. Exactly what the film is not. Whereas the trailer promised live action Disney's Pocahontas, the film is actually a sober evocation of an imagined past.
Approaching this film as a retelling of the American foundational myth would account for the fact that its grandeur is not epical but, precisely, mythical. As such, this movie is self-conscious and, in rare moments, even pretentious, but Malick has rightfully understood the need for a different kind of narration, therefore adapting film form to mythological storytelling.
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In this order of ideas, nature holds a prominent place. The notion of a courageous, if desperate, civilization conquering a virgin and enchanted land is clearly the content of the Pocahontas story, and 65mm film stock lets nature envelop every shot. However, the finest achievement of The New World is the interaction between sound and image. Voice-over monologues on top of images of nature link the characters to the setting, and the ways in which they react to their surroundings mark the breach between their cultures. The actors' bodies also incarnate this difference: the long shots of John wading through a marsh in his armour, in utter fear of nature, contrast with those of Pocahontas staring in wonder at London buildings and people.
Music is what finally makes all these elements fit together into the mythical tone and context. There is a repetitive piece that plays on two scenes. A bass note is sustained, there is no percussion, and the melody swirls around and returns. First, it is played during the falling-in-love sequence, which required enough skill if such romantic idea of love was to be verosimile (this is the 17th century). The director achieves this by turning the sociologically constructed notion of love into something rooted in nature, and music threads together the blooming New World forests and the two lovers' monologues. The swelling melody is so convincing, that it even seems evident that love works in the same way in any culture. This illusion of a timeless, universal feeling is a common ingredient in mythology, and it is necessary for the power of a legend as a cultural reference.
The music returns for the final scene, which uses gardens to build up an atmosphere of emptiness and mystery. Thus, the film ends with the texture of dreams, with a certain sublime tone that consolidates it as a myth and makes its historical accuracy irrelevant.
Nothing New on the Eastern Front
It seems really strange to think that the director of the beautiful Farewell my Concubine and of this senseless wuxiapian are the same person. What is really surprising for the viewer is not the idleness of the plot - the usual melodrama with a young and beautiful woman, a Master, a handsome slave, a deus ex machina who appears everytime the script is going nowhere and of course the fantastic power of love. Nothing new on the Eastern front since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brought the wuxiapian to a new life.
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Given that the dramaturgical side is not effective nor involving, because no one actually cares about the fate of the characters, we as viewers should hope for at least stunning visuals and CGI effects. And this is actually the most amazing side of the film, but not in a positive way: what shocks the audience is not seeing hundreds of bisons running down a canyon or slave Kunlun carrying away princess Qingcheng clad in a snow-white feathered cape and flying her like a kite or the immense Purple Armour battling on the mountains; what shocks the audience is that the effects are of bad quality. Whatever software the post-production crew used, they did not use it to its potential, or they did not use their own skills enough; despite it is embarassingly presumptuous to write (and to read), the hand of Photoshop & friends can always be perceived right in front of the audience's sore eyes. The "suspension of disbelief" is not an issue in this case: everybody knows that little girls cannot walk on water and that men don't vanish into air with a greenish glow; but nevertheless, it is not believable even from a fantastic point of view.
Hopefully the complete failure of this film, saluted by hardly no applause, will ultimately draw a line between what is a good wuxiapian and what is not. If there can be an utility in Chen Kaige's last labour of love? money? whatever, is that directors will stop exploiting a genre only because it is trendy and cool and will turn their minds to another and more genuine kind of fantasy. Wu Ji may not be the swan's song of wuxiapian or of Kaige's career, but the world of cinema must take its lesson in order to provide the audience with good and honest movies in the future.
Empty Eruptions
Jasmila Zbanic's film Grbavica has certain moments which might be able to function as the touching dramatic peaks of a well-unfolded story. In this particular case, however, they simply go to waste, the reason of which is apparently Zbanic's failure to establish characters the viewer could emotionally relate to.
Radiating with jingoism, the awkwardly chosen title is very likely to discourage or even frighten off a vast part of potential audiences just because its odd consonant collision is the name of a Bosnian town where people around Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) are struggling to cope with post-war Balkan reality. Small-scale and somewhat fragmentary parallel stories begin to unfold: Esma finds a new job at a sleazy dance bar as a waitress but is repelled by the atmosphere of cheap eroticism; her daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic) has trouble conjuring up a heroic figure filling her missing father's empty niche and falls in love with one of her classmates; the bar owner's bodyguard develops an affection for Esma and tries to court her etc. This abundance of themes is unfortunate--there is no discernible central character or plot, so the episodes fall apart. Besides, some of the epic lines seem to be overburdened with tedious everyday occurences, which may increase the grittiness a bit but impede the unfolding of the drama excessively.
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The paramount problem of this feature is, however, that it is entirely unable to make the audience actually care for its leading characters. How could we feel sincere pity for Esma if we do not really know her? There are no intimate moments either between her and Sara or her sister or even the bodyguard that could awaken any kind of tender sentiment here; the dramatis personae remain distant and hazy.
Despite all this, Zbanic tries to lead each of her main subplots to a climax: Esma is literally forced to tell Sara the truth about her father who was not a war hero at all but an unknown enemy rapist; her liaison with the bodyguard remains platonic and finally he, fleeing from his boss who is pursuing him because he beat him up defending Esma, commits a murder to get money for his escape to Austria. All these dramatic heights are well acted and told--my favourite directing solution of the whole movie is that the killing is only referenced by one image: the bodyguard says farewell to his companion who drives away in an Audi he received for the murder - but they still fail to move viewers because these emotional eruptions are not sufficiently enough prepared. A pity.
A Shock to the System
Tough Enough (screened in the Panorama) is a fresh, exciting, and fast-paced movie about a German teenager. Director Detlev Buck not only charts authentic situations in an underprivileged German city milieu, but also intentionally shocks the audience with violent scenes.
It is interesting to see the evolution of the main character, fifteen-year-old Michael Polischka (David Kross), who is thrown into a gritty urban world when his mother breaks up with her rich doctor lover. They move into a shabby apartment in a rough ethnic neighborhood. Michael's first day in public high school proves miserable. He is clearly stunned and confused by the chaos and the disinterest of the students in his class. He gets into trouble with the school gang leader, Erol (Oktay Ozdemir), who promptly beats him up. Michael soon plans with Crille and his younger half-brother Matze, a couple of neglected and beaten teenagers, to break into the house of his mother's ex-lover in order to get money demanded by Erol and his gang.
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A meeting with urban crime lord Hamal and his henchman Barut turns Michael's life around. The thugs take him under their wing, protecting him from the high school gang. Michael's honest face makes him the perfect guy for drug deliveries to local dealers. He proves that he can handle the job, but on the day when a big cocaine deal is going down, he loses the money because of Erol. Hamal promptly kidnaps Erol, and instructs Michael to kill his foe.
David Kross gives a sincere and convincing portrayal of Michael. After all he has experienced - stealing, drug-dealing and even murder, we assume that he will slide even further down the crime trail. But the end of the film brings us back to the opening scene in the police station, with the camera this time revealing Polischka's trainers drenched in blood.
Detlev Buck blends all the ingredients for a successful film here: violence, offbeat (and often humorous) love scenes between the mother and the cop, and some excellent music to accompany the action.
Cinema As Theatre
Two actors in a darkened room were enough for German director Andres Veiel to tell a story of a famous "Skinhead murder" which stressed Germany in 2002.
Der Kick is based on a play of the same title which was staged by Andres Veiel in Berlin's Maksim Gorky theatre. In his movie Veiel breaks the borders which divide theatre from cinema. He tries to reach the point where these two arts can no longer be separated, and finds this point in the sphere of documentary. The roots of Der Kick lie in so-called documentary theatre, which is based on a reproduction of stories, conflicts or even monologues which took place in real life. The plot of Der Kick, as well as the monologues performed by the actors were taken from the trial over a group of skinheads from a German town of Potzlow who had murdered their mate Marinus Schoberl in an extremely cruel way. While performing the murderers', witnesses', prosecutors', and lawyers' monologues, the actors Susanne-Marie Wrage and Markus Lerch behave as if they were on the stage, and this turns Der Kick into highly innovative experiment. Actors don't try to reproduce the original behaviour of their characters. Consciously or not, they follow the instructions given by Jean Genet to the performers of his The Servant, another great theatrical piece on murder: act as if your characters were playing the role themselves.
As a result, Der Kick is a movie that totally concentrates on the figure of an actor. In that way, Der Kick may be called counter-cinema. It's a movie you have to read, not watch. Permanent close-ups as well as endless monologues could turn this movie into a rather boring experience, but Veiel's success lies in his ability to prove that total refusal from the normal cinematic language is the most adequate way to speak about the inhuman violence of skinhead teenagers - the direct result of the social crisis in modern Germany. The experience of putting cinema into theater in Der Kick becomes extremely productive for both.
A Touch of Genius
Robert Wilson has been a charismatic and controversal figure in the world of theatre and opera for the past forty years. Although his name is now a worldwide synonym for cutting-edge avant-garde and for great theatrical performances, this recognition was the result of many years of scorn and even loathing from the same cultural world he was about to transform. Changes never come easy, and Wilson embodies through his life the historical impact that new forms of art can have on society, and how an artist can still be revolutionary today. A discreet man, Bob Wilson has never been a public personality, expressing himself only through his art. With Absolute Wilson, German director Katharina Otto-Bernstein offers us a rare opportunity to discuss the major steps in the life of this genius.
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As a genre, the biopic tends to result in predictable films, trying to put some romance into real-life material. With its chronological approach, filled with dubious archive footage and overwhelmed by the traditional off-screen narration, Absolute Wilson could have been a typical TV career portrait, with one big exception, however - Robert Wilson himself. Being a major artist of his generation, Wilson has worked with (and influenced) so many talents, that hearing through his own words about his life and his ideas gives the film its true value. With much humour and detachment, he talks about his childhood and his first years as an artist, with so many of the pitfalls and challenges that genius must overcome. Being a homosexual in a very strict family in Waco, Texas, uneasy within his own body, Wilson discovered acting through the work of dancers such as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine, created performances with mentally retarded children, and directed stage plays as if they were music. In fact his life and work were never predictable, and yet it is thanks to him that theatre entered a new age, and achieved another dimension through lighting, dance, singing and deconstructive movements and language.
While Europe welcomed Wilson's modernity from the 1970's onwards, it took a long time for America to recognise his revolutionary talent and the universality of his work. With its triumphs and its disappointments, Wilson's life is a wonderful symbol of persistence and self-confidence. Katharina Otto-Bernstein delivers a complex image of this dictatorial, hard-working and yet profoundly responsive individual, and her film shows us an inspiring and quite necessary model for the future.
The Flower Sellar
"Art doesn't tell you what to think," declares Peter Sellars grandly. "It only asks that you do."
As he walks onto the stage in a floral print shirt, beads down to his waist and a spiky buzzcut, Peter Sellars resembles an ageing flowerchild - a description that makes more and more sense with every word he says. He starts with what could easily be mistaken for new-age psychobabble. "How do you feed hungry people?" he asks, and a large part of the audience groans and makes for the exit. In fact, Sellars's talk on Art as Moral Action on Sunday afternoon saw a steady stream of people leaving the auditorium at regular intervals. But for those who sat around and listened, Sellars definitely has something to say.
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Discussing art and its morality will always be shrouded in the abstract and Sellars' talk was no different. In an hour-long speech, he touched on a wide range of topics, from 21st century slavery - an attention grabbing way of putting economic exploitation in the third world - to the gaze of love.
Using the human body as the best example for the former, Sellars drew attention to the things that are the closest to it - clothes and food. "The clementine I ate this morning had a little label on it that said it came from Ethiopia, a country in the middle of a famine," he says. "My underwear today is Bangladesh, my shirt is Hong Kong and my shoes were made by Chinese prisoners." His point? That we need to taste food, really taste it, not just eat it. To do that, according to Sellars, we need to think about how much of the world we're wearing and eating on a daily basis. Like art, Sellars doesn't tell his audience what to think. All he asks is that we do.
Perhaps the best part of the talk came right at the end, when he narrated a South Indian folk tale - called, aptly enough, "A Flowering Tree"- about a girl who shares her gifts indiscriminately. The analogy we were supposed to draw, for Sellars left it open ended, was that artists need to take responsibility for their actions.
Quoting the Bhagvad Gita, the Upanishads and Jesus Christ, his point was simple: the need to acknowledge that art, and specifically cinema as art, does much more than just entertain. While his argument that cinema acts as a catalyst for social change is not new and perhaps the abstractions he uses to illustrate this point are a bit vague, one thing is for sure. You can say what you may about Sellars and his message and the way he goes about articulating it, but there's no doubt that if nothing else, he entertains. And he makes for excellent copy.
Reading the Film
What do the films Charade, Copycat, The Mission, The World is not Enough and Vera Drake have in common? Other than immense popularity and a sequence of closing credits, not much. Oh, but they all have Jim Clark. If you are not already familiar with the eclectic career of this amicable editor from Lincolnshire, UK, then allow me to introduce you.
Jim Clark has been editing feature films since 1956. John Schlesinger, with whom he has worked several times, has consulted him for directorial work, as did Gene Wilder when Clark edited Wilder's directorial debut, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (one of Clark's personal favorites and highest reccomendations, if you can find it). Clark has worked uncredited as an editor on dozens of films beyond his official repertoir, including one of his most precious jewels in his crown, Midnight Cowboy.
For most film fanatics, post production is mysterious process - a dark room behind a locked door reading "Employees only." While preserving the "magic" of filmmaking, the enigmatic editing process often leaves editors themselves out of the public eye as well as public acclaim. Clark, however, doesn't seem to care in the slightest. "We don't sign the name on the material, it's not a film by Jim Clark, it's a film by somebody else." But who a film is "by" and who actually makes the motion picture audiences are enraptured with, is a tremendous difference. "It is a truism to say we remake films. Very often our job is to remake a film that is not working." For Clark, at least, that job is rewarded as well as rewarding. In 1984, Clark earned an Oscar for the project which he considers to be the most challenging one in his career to date, Roland Joffe's, The Killing Fields. "The editing of that was quite arduous. It was a) way too long and b) people didn't understand it." By the time Clark was done with it, The Killing Fields was one of the most acclaimed films of its year.
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Being the one who can either make or break a film can be a hazardous position if one doesn't also have a trusting relationship with the film's director. As Clark asserts, it is better to get personal before one gets professional. "I like to be in close proximity to the director as much as possible because then you get to know them as people before you sit down with them in the editing room and show them the film in is worst possible state, when you have to say, 'It's not going to be worse than this,' as they sit down to watch their three hour epic that should be ninety five minutes." Much to his dismay, however, the film industry is often not a personal space. "These days we often work away from directors. On the last film I did ("Opal Dreams") I never saw him. I'd phone him up, but I never met him till the very end."
It might come as a surprise to those on the outside of filmmaking, but the director's absence during the editing process is as commonplace as it is unproblematic. Clark claims, "If the director is happy with it then everything is fine. If its not what he had in mind, then I simply ask what he had in mind." But ultimately, the final decision usually comes down to Clark. "We're always trying to accentuate the material. The material dictates what you do." And if the director is not a film's "dictator", then is it in fact the editor's style audiences and critics are seeing when they remark on a film's distinctness? Clark thinks not - at least not concerning his own career. "Style is something you're unconcscience of. Maybe I have a style. If I did I wouldn't be able to describe it. Its eclectic I guess." Clark notes that more often than not, an editor's "style" is actually something like pigeonholing after an editor has done good work on a topic or genre. "Take the woman who did 'My Architect' for instance. Now all the projects she gets are interested in her working on things about architecture and things like that. There are people known as 'comedy editors' and 'action editors.' I haven't gotten that."
Lucky enough for audiences who have enjoyed Clark's little known treasures such as Day of the Locusts (another of his personal favorites) in addition to his international blockbusters (for those of you Bond fans, Clark is enthusiastic about doing another for the franchise), Clark has eluded that pigeonhole for fifty years and counting. There is something all his films have in common though, and thats consistently incredible quality and attention to detail. Would Charade be a classic today if it had not struck that balance between suspense and tongue-in-cheek? (Recall the famous shot of the sinister pistol that seamlessly transforms into a water gun in one deft cut.) Clark may not "sign" his films, but he is written all over them. After all, the editor is not the author of a film but rather, its interpreter. "Depending on the (director) and the material itself and how you interpret the material, you cut to literally, re-make the film back into what it was in the director's mind or the script.... First, I read the script, then I read the film."
The Precise Look
With sharp bounded blue eyes Germany's well known editor Dirk Grau gazes at me. The tall man seems very relaxed while I am interviewing him. To stand in the center of attention doesn't seem to bother him at all. Odd because normally he sits in dark rooms for weeks, going through film footage with directors, assembling scenes. Supposably a lonesome and quiet life. But Grau never really wished to be an editor, it kind of happened accidentally. While editing his own short movies he simply learned by doing, he never went to any film school. That's maybe the reason why his way of editing is unconventional, even though he denies to have a personal style of cutting: "That always depends on the project.", he straightens out.
"A good cut itself stays invisible", Grau combines. The editor who goes to the movies at least twice a week likes especially those in which he remarks nothing but the story. "The moment I ask myself why they edited it that way, used a tracking shot or if the light is to bright, I realise I am not captured."
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Editing cheesy TV series as well as independent movies he has a big variety in his projects. "Sometimes you choose movies only to earn some money." Not because of financial but quality orientated reasons he decided to cut his latest flic Knallhart (Tough Enough) by director Detlev Buck. Grau almost stayed unsatisfied: "In the very beginning there was something wrong and I struggled long with telling what exactly it was." 20 short seconds made the difference in the end. "That's what easily happens, that you get too close to your movie. You simply forget whether certain information have already been given, if people have already been introduced". Then he adds: "It's essential not to be too much in love with your own labour. You should be able to erase a hourlong work for a good result. In the ends it's only the movie that counts." Which other qualities should a good editor have, except for being unselfish, I ask Grau. "He or she should be a good dancer", the ambitious editor replies. Because following Dirk Grau it's always about the right rhythm. No wonder that his most successful project so far is called Rhythm is it!. For his work in the German documentary by Thomas Grube and Enrique Sanchez he even received a German Film Award in 2005.
The constant will to keep learning from other directors and editors, his focused look and light hearted style make Dirk Grau one of Germany's most talented and creative editor.
Overeating but still starving
If you intended to make a revolution, your main long-term strategy ought to be to transform the production system. On a smaller scale, you can make your own personal revolution changing the way you eat. Innovating, poingnant films can only be made after attaining control of the production process, as it occurs on the overall artistic sphere. Coming from very different backgrounds, the panelists found an at first unlikely intersection point between food and filmmaking in the tension between industrialised production and independent efforts.
Carlo Petrini, the edgy Italian who founded the Slow Food Movement, denounces the "altair of profit" on which all creativity is sacrified. When gastronomy is commodified through a folkloric, artificial approach, it loses its significance as a conveyor of the dignity, identity and culture of peoples. According to Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse - a natural food restaurant in California - and a supporter of small-scale farming, "we're eating the idea of fast, cheap and easy". The entertainment industry feeds this idea to its customers (all of us), seducing us into the comfort of not having to think.
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Physicist, activist and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva argues this to be one of the impoverishing consequences of biotechnology - it supposedly helps farmers by eliminating the need to know their land and take their own decisions. Thus, it destroys local knowledge built over centuries, subduing all decision-making to the efective rulers within the system, namely transnational corporations and the WTO (World Trade Organization). Having no access to the media, farmers lack of a voice against these monster institutions. It is up to young directors to address these issues; but to do that, they must deal with their own dependence first.
In a wonderful 1980 short, Werner Herzog not only eats his own shoe at Chez Panisse, but also calls for a holy war against television and recommends burglary as a fundraising strategy for film. Marginality, illegality, piracy... are not these the sole possible strategies for many third-world filmmakers? Dr. Shiva points out that most Indian people "live the indie way", that is, they survive with informal jobs, relegated to the outskirts of the system which they unknowingly support. Agriculture, the quintessential human labour, so dignified in other cultures, has now been assimilated within the profit-worshipping scheme, pushing farmers out of their land and their traditions, into a life of mind-numbing television in the slums of a big city.
In this situation, independent film, slow food, and small-scale farming, are means to raise awareness of pressing political issues. As a member of the audience commented, we are not only overeating on food - the industrial system depends on wasted production, and consequently thrives on consumerism. In art as in food, this means: grow your local ingredients, work out your own nourishing recipe, act ethically, and stop putting out so much rubbish.
Film and Food as Pure Mediums
"I don't tell you about my film, I want you to taste it!", says acclaimed avantgarde Austrian filmmaker and art philosopher Peter Kubelka. Professor of "Film and Cooking" at the Frankfurt School of Fine Arts, Kubelka is also the founder of Austrian Film Museum and New York City´s Anthology Film Archives. At the Berlinale Talent Campus he presented his famous lecture "Edible Metaphor" on cooking as a communicative meduim.
His perfomance was accompanied by examples to see, hear, feel, smell and involved the sences as well as the minds of the listeners. Raspberries, real and artisificial stakes, knife and even a poem by Robert L. Stevenson were among the items that helped Peter Kubelka express his thoughts.
He talked to the Talents about his idea of food being the most ancient communicative medium and also the ancestor of physics, chemistry and philosophy. According to Kubelka, cooking speaks on the power of people to edit what seems unedible. The art-philosopher assumes that your every meal is a metaphor created by cooking, and that is where the name of his lecture - The Edible Metaphore - came from.
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Kubelka is also famous as a commited proponent of film as a pure medium. The message of film resides in the material but comes from the mind of an artist. Thus, a spoon is similar to a frame - they are both just vehicles to carry the idea of a filmmaker or a chef.
One of the most celebrated of experimental filmmakers, Kubelka is against of digital cinema. "I do not allow to transfer my films or show them in digital form. I must have body contact with the film. I count the frames by taking the material in my hands", he says.
Kubelka´s power of persuasion, talent of improvisation and sense of humour make it difficult to remain indifferent to his ideas. Whether you share them or not, important is that the artist reminds you to live the routine life sensing lightest smells, hearing ordinary sounds, seeing and understanding shapes and colours around because each of them carries a certain message. In an interview Kubelka was asked why he had made only 6 films in his filmmaker career. The answer was that if you counted the number of the frames he made for these films, that would be two frames a day. "That is enough for me", he said.
© FIPRESCI / Berlinale Talent Campus 2006
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