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Berlin 2006 - Daily reports
Wednesday, February 15th
The Sound of Cinema from London to Berlin. Vera Brozzoni met the passionate editor and sound designer Larry Sider. 
A New Wave of Political Film? Maria Antonia Velez-Serna followed a panel on political commitment.
On the Lam with Angie. Leo Mirani continues exploring the Hunger, Food and Taste theme of the Talent Campus.
Growing Together by Reflecting the Past. Anne von der Gönne on the Polish-German year.
EFM: Yet an Excursion. Olya Aylarova gives her impression on the European Film Market.
Seeing What You Hear in Your Mind Today. Katie Kohn visited the German School for Film and Television in Potsdam together with film composer Stephen Warbeck.
"Pitching" - Putting theory into practice. Soumaya Beltifa followed "The Pitch", a workshop based on Judy Counikan's fifteen-year experience as a British producer.
Film as Artefact. Tamás Bella reviews Matthew Barney's Drawing restraint 9 , screened at the Talent Campus.
Child of Digital Filmmaking. Oleksiy Radynski met the acknowledged editor of Wenders' Land of Plenty, Moritz Laube.
Criticising Critics. Laurence Reymond followed a panel on the evolution of film criticism.
The Sound of Cinema from London to Berlin
I first met Larry Sider in spring 2005 at the School Of Sound, a four days seminar he runs in London every second year about sound designing and soundtracking. In that occasion, Sider proved to be not only a passionate editor and sound designer (he is Head of Post-Production at the National Film and Television School in London), but also someone who loves to communicate his passion to the youngsters. Sider is now in Berlin to moderate two events going on in the Talent Campus, "Meet the Cutting Crew" (held on February 12th) and "Tinkering With the Truth" (on February 14th).
As he explains, he is not a new face to the Berlinale: "I have been attending Berlin Film Festival for the last two years. Last year I came to introduce directors Steve Deutsch and Annabelle Pangborn and their work with image and sound; the year before I came here by myself. This time, as always, I don't want to merely moderate other people's speeches, but I also want to get new ideas."
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This festival is for sure the right place to be inspired, Sider says, especially this year: "The Berlinale Talent Campus always does a very good job in organising an eclectic programme. What I find particularly interesting is the Hunger, Food And Taste section: the link between cinema and food is a theme that the majority of filmmakers take on a superficial way, whereas they should approach it in a more philosophical way - as the panelists who are speaking these days demonstrate."Indeed every Talent is appreciating the unusual moral and political engagement that people like Vandana Shiva or Alice Waters are putting in their theories about food. "Yet", as Larry keenly observes, "someone might call it a contradiction: they are talking about going no global, but they are saying it in a big global film festival!"
Nevertheless, it is good to see so many young people being interested in cinema and social issues related. "I think the young generations are now seduced by technology and they don't really understand what they are coming into; this is mainly because cinema is split into two sides, half an industry and half a form of art: a hybrid. The good thing is that there are still people who want to learn how the others before them have succeeded. Nowadays people with two-three years of experience are immediately thrown in the middle of the action and actually forced to learn the ropes; when I started being an editor and a sound designer, I had to practice for ten years! But that's understandable: nowadays many more films are shot and screened, the industry keeps requesting new product and therefore more people are called to work in it."
This also leads to a broader variety of styles in cinema, says Sider: "There are so many ways to make a film. You can choose a narrative genre, and in that case storytelling must always lie on the bottom; or you can choose avant-garde, that doesn´t tell a story but explores the possibility of the media. All the styles are equally legit, given that you work on them with honesty. And I must say - you don't really understand how tough the fight for honesty is, until you don't find yourself in the middle!"
A New Wave of Political Film?
Yesterday, the Berlinale Talent Campus hosted a panel which intended to address issues of political commitment and contend the view that politically-charged films cannot also be commercially successful. The gathering, which got its name from Lindsay Anderson's 1956 article arguing "in the best art, style and commitment are inseparable", summoned filmmakers Amos Gitai from Israel, Eliane de Latour from Ivory Coast, Jean-Marie Téno from Cameroon and Dito Tsindtzadze from Georgia, all presenting their new features in the Berlinale.
The underlying assumption for this kind of event is that the term "political film" makes sense, which - I agree with Téno - is a disputable idea for a start. It does not describe a genre, nor a subject, nor a production scheme; it seems prone to include Spielberg's "Munich" as well as documentaries on Christian colonialism in Cameroon. However, the moderator argued that this vague concept has somehow resurrected in the past few years, roughly during the Bush Jr administration, quoting George Clooney's assertion at the premiere of "Syriana", that "for the first time since Watergate, people talk about politics on the kitchen table".
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Eliane de Latour agreed that we currently experience a revival of the 1960's and 1970's mood. Téno, on the other hand, argued that film has never stopped being political, especially in the case of Hollywood cinema, which has succeded in spreading a culture and making the others invisible. Apart from Amos Gitai, all the panelists came from Third World countries. Does "political" necessarily mean "anti-stablishment"? And why quoting Clooney, who was clearly talking about the United States?
The sway of the inmmigration topic in this year's Berlinale reveals deep concerns of the European countries - it only becomes so politically charged because it is a pressing issue in this place and time. Why is there no German filmmaker in this panel? Téno sighted when being asked who had he made "The colonial misunderstanding" for. George Clooney never gets a question as such. "When someone invisible makes a film, that is a political gesture", Téno said; yet, most of the questions he was asked revealed that "there is a lot of deconstruction to be done", in Europe and in Africa as well, to eliminate embedded notions of exotism.
Amos Gitai addressed a touchy point when he claimed Europeans should stop giving advice to the rest of the world: "we didn't commit the atrocities that Europe did", the Israeli director said. The paternalistic view of Third World issues, commonly held by NGOs, is also attacked on Téno's film. When granting preference to "political" films, is the Berlinale making the same mistake? How much of it is political correctness, how much an unconsciously patronizing policy, and how much true recognition?
On the Lam with Angie
Angie Lam likes metaphors. Her favourite one at the moment is that staple of Chinese restaurants across the world - sweet and sour pork. In keeping with the Hunger, Food and Taste theme of the Talent Campus, Lam uses cooking as her metaphor du jour to describe the editor's role.
"Think of the script as the recipe and the director as the chef. He has determined what he is going to cook, he has his own recipe, his own ingredients and his own seasonings and then he buys the ingredients and mixes them together. If he wants to make sweet and sour pork, the editor can't change it to sweet and sour lobster because I'm not trying to make another dish. Even if he bought the worst meat from the market, I'll try to enhance that meat, but I can't leave it out altogether just because it's bad. I can't tell the audience that you will only get sweet and sour without the pork."
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According to Lam, editors don't create. They rephrase. They take something that is in its raw form and shape it. "It's the same thing as how you present your dish. Sweet and sour pork," she says, using her favourite her preferred example, "can be presented in many different ways. You have to decorate the dish so that it will be presentable to the the audience or to the one who is going to eat it."
In the same vein, Lam believes she only decorates her dish according to the wishes of the chef. "Different martial arts directors have their own styles. Some are more conceptual while others are more traditional. For example, in "Hero", the director wanted the fight scenes to be romantic, so you find many beautiful fight scenes on a lake, in a forest and so on. It looks like dancing rather than just fighting. Then there are directors like Corey Yuen, who treats martial more traditionally. In his films, you feel like the actors are really fighting each other. So the way I edit depends entirely on the director."
Lam, who has been editing for over a decade and is best known for her work on martial arts movies such as "Hero" and "Kung Fu Hustle", is doubly excited about Berlinale because not only is this her first European film festival, but she's been having a great time at the Talent Campus as well.
"I've been to many different film festivals in South East Asia, but this is really important to me because I can share my feelings with Westerners," she says. The fact that this year's theme is food is an added bonus for the petite editor who lists food as one of her biggest passions.
Growing Together by Reflecting the Past
The rapport between the Polish and the Germans hasn't always been easy. World War II destroyed most of the trust of the citizens of the two European countries. It's thus essential to have a Polish-German year, where many cultural events are held to help the people overcome their prejudices . One of these events is "Reflection", an international film project organized by the Andrzej Wajda School of Directing and the International Film School in Cologne. Twelve short documentary films have been produced by the students of the partner schools. They present a portrait of the life in the small towns of Remscheid-Lennep in Germany and Gorá Kalwaria in Poland. The short movies provide an insight into the day-to-day life of the inhabitants. Much is revealed about the young directors just by the way they tell their stories and which characters they chose. Most of the short films are melancholic, like Anna Shirin Wahle's contribution "Alexander", which tells of the troubles of a four-year-old Russian orphan, going to a German kindergarten. A very touching piece, full of depth, about the ingenuousness of children, who don't really know borders but already struggle with cultural differences.
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In the short movie of the Polish Kalina Alabrudzinska we find ourselves in the middle of the life of an old man, who is walking through his orchard, reflecting tragic events from the past. The old Jewish man is telling about how the Germans killed his sister when she was only five years old. He describes all these cruel memories without any anger. He says that time slowly heals his wounds and now he has a wife and children himself, which makes it easy to go on.
The unique project "Reflection" makes two cultures meet in a very sensitive way. The fearless look, even on the worst aspects of life, makes the short movies very authentic.
EFM: Yet an Excursion
When shooting ends, that´s where the real work begins - at least, this is what many people involved in filmmaking truly believe. However, here at the Campus, most Talents are sure that all they have to do for their future success is just to be creative enough to make a decent film. And that is when the word that scares everybody appears: the film business.
Only a rather small Campus crew attended to the European Film Market excursion: 8 Talents amidst more than 500 wanted to plunge into the busy fuss of the EFM. People looking sharp, talking business, food in the café twice more expensive than at the Campus and jungles of booths were confusing for the first-time visitors of the market. And then, finally, Sydney Levine from the Swissfilms Company showed up to tell the Talents who is who and what are all they here for.
According to Sydney, the Martin Gropius Bau (MGB) congregates this year 250 sales companies. The overspill section with 40 offices that didn´t fit in the MGB is located on the fifth floor of 11 Potsdamer Platz. In its current edition EFM, mostly claimed by the European companies, features several U.S. debutant exhibitors, including Focus Features, the Weinstein Company and Lion Gates.
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Sydney showed the Talents the classic sales booths on the first and second floors of MGB and the video screening-on-demand rooms on the third. A short review of the activities of each company given, she lead her group through the corridors of booths and smiling hostesses. Greeting acquaintances with her every step, she talked on the importance of business gossips, trade publications and the right parties.
This year the market looks all glossy and brand new at its new home, MGB. According to Dieter Kosslick, it enjoys a 100% attendance of the top industry executives. Now, since the American Film Market moved from February to November, Berlin is in a very favourable position - right between AFM and Cannes.
EFM has also expanded its cooperation with the publishing industry. For the first time, the Frankfurt Book Fair is represented on the market by a booth hosting 30 publishing houses. The Berlin film market also brings independed films "Right from Sundance", featuring 33 new titles.
Right opposite to the MGB, at the House of Representatives, the Co-Production Market runs. This showcase of partially completed films and projects that seek financing and co-production is the most exciting part of the Berlinale for Talent Campus folks. Getting your project in here means a chance to move to the MGB next year and become one of those who turn back time in the film industry.
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Seeing What You Hear in Your Mind Today
While hundreds of Talent Campus participants filed into the main auditorium at the House of World Cultures for a panel discussion on filmmaking legend, Krzysztof Kieslowski, a handful of us quietly left the Berlinale Talent Campus headquarters and boarded a bus for Potsdam. The small but excited group included composers of all ages and nationalities who have worked on film scores and aspire to broaden their talent. The excitement was focused on one who has developed this craft as well as an impressive career, film composer Stephen Warbeck ("Shakespeare in Love" and "Billy Elliot" among fifty two others).
Before meeting Stephen, however, the crew of composers were greatly impressed by our destination itself, the German School for Film and Television "Konrad Wolf". Nestled among the famous studios of Babelsberg-Potsdam, the hallowed ground upon which the rich legacy of German film was born (the school's architects used Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" as inspiration which was shot mere meters away from the school's site), the school is now fifty years old and remains the oldest and largest film school in Germany. Every year six hundred students circulate through the elegant building, producing two hundred films in eleven different departments including its newest addition, the department of film music composition which is the first of its kind in Germany. Just a few days ago, one of those films won the Silver Bear here at Berlinale with a short animation titled, "Our Man in Nirvana".
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As impressive as the tour of the school was (in particular, the brand new digital color correction and transfer lab, the only one in the world), however, the composers only wished they could have spent more time picking the brain of Mr. Warbeck, who had a lot to offer the aspiring talents. The composers sat in one of the school's state-of-the-art screening rooms enrapt with Worbeck's charming demeanor as well as astute advice on film scoring. First Warbeck asks himself, "What is the vocabulary of the music? What does the film asks? What do the colors and textures ask of you? This is about just watching the film and imagining the music.seeing what you hear in your mind." Next, he tries to distinguish one work from any other. "There should be some kind of signature to the soundtrack which should not be the same on any other soundtrack. I think it is very important that it might not work in a concert hall (Warbeck's example is a symphony that uses a ukulele as the central instrument), that it might not be appropriate anywhere else but for the film."
The intimate setting allowed the Berlinale Talent Campus guests to interject with questions or even to share personal experience. Warbeck admitted to one inquisitive composer from Paris, "I play lots of instruments extremely badly which I find useful, because you find out what instruments can do and what they can't." In response to another composer from the Phillipines Warbeck noted, "One of the most dangerous things going on today (Warbeck mentioned in particular, North American films) is film composers using other film scores for inspiration for their score. It's like inbreeding in a family. The pool gets smaller and smaller."
The discussion was far too short for the group of musicians who commented often that there were not only few composers at Talent Campus but very few events aimed at their craft. Nevertheless, many thought Warbeck was as brilliant as he was brief, and the Talents were reminded that he will be speaking again tomorrow at the House of World Cultures in addition to a live demonstration of one of his now famous scores. Appropriately he added near the end of the interview, "Sometimes its better to not have music - to have music do the emotional job the film is supposed to do. Sometimes our job is also to argue for silence.in hopes we don't lose our jobs."
"Pitching" - Putting theory into practice
Screenwriters, script readers, directors, editors and producers charged with selling creative material were present at "The Pitch", a useful and often fascinating workshop based on Judy Counikan's fifteen-year experience as a British producer.
How to transform creative ideas into money? How to crystallise the idea and to communicate it to the money people? Counihan was adamant from the beginning: "I'm not going to change you, I'll just give you useful tools". She told the Talents about the typical investor's criteria and all the do's and don't's for a successful pitch. She also emphasised how to deal with the buyer's psychology.
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Four important factors need to be taken into consideration during a Pitch meeting: passion for the story, clarity, tenacity, and the identity of one's audience. One has to convince film financiers to choose one's story, and demonstrate to them what's so special in one's script.
Talents should prepare their meetings with buyers by gathering information and improving their communication skills in order to catch people's attention. In fact, having some knowledge of potential investors such as age, life-style, religion, political leanings and so on can help one achieve one's goal. It's also vital to ask them smart questions and to prepare one's material as thoroughly as possible.
At the end of the session, Judy Counihan distributed copies of the Skillset "Pitch Format Card" (PFC), a useful tool that helps shape a story's "melody" in just a few sentences and in pitching one's ideas in future. The PFC includes the project's title which should be as brief and as terse as possible, time and place, genre, as well as some indications about the main character's aims and challenges.
Film as Artefact
I think that regarding Matthew Barney's Drawing restraint 9 as a movie of any kind would be an immense misstep because it is first and foremost an ambience piece. It does not make any pretension to build up a narrative structure. The only way to make an attempt to cautiously summarize its contents is by listing the key concepts its somewhat disjointed imagery keeps revolving around: Japan, whaling, the sea as a place of origin and mystery, eating, and last but not least (human) flesh.
Why an ambience piece? Because I honestly think that this work of art does not seek to be absorbed in the way a feature film or a piece of literature demands. In my opinion, we should better expose ourselves to it in the same way we look at a painting or a sculpture. A linearity or continuity of the act of looking at the artefact is not required here. In fact, it might even be a hindrance to a broader exploration of the possibilities it offers.
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From a very early stage on, I felt liberated by this piece: by its mystical, mesmerizing, meditative music (mostly composed by Barney's wife, the magical Northern Witch Björk) and its symbolic imagery. My thoughts soon began to soar with an associative momentum rarely experienced, until I arrived in a state of bliss. Trying to recount what happened to me, I feel that I must transgress the boundaries of regular criticism, otherwise I will completely lose contact with my experience. So please excuse me expressing my feelings in a poem in my mother tongue:
gyönyör fényköre!
jön, jön, csak árad
gondolat, ne vesd le mosoly-ágyad!
újra itt van velem a legszebb énem
Életem értelme
Értelmem élete
kacagások sora
mind kerengö buboréklánc
szalad át rajtad, csiklandva ajkad
csengettyük, gamelán, minden szót dobj el!
ez már nem te vagy
ez: AZ
szemhéjad melegében
minden más messze mosódik
végtelen mosoly vízszintje
Dear Matthew Barney! I dearly thank you for this!
Child of Digital Filmmaking
Moritz Laube is spending noisy days at the Berlinale Talent Campus in the quiet auditorium of the Editing Suite. While completing his studies in a film school, the acknowledged editor of Wenders' Land of Plenty is running a workshop on digital editing. Laube offers his students the chance to re-edit the footage of this film. The result is three totally different versions of the film, composed of the same material.
How did digital technologies transform the profession of an editor?
"For me it's hard to say. Actually, I'm a child of digital editing. I've learnt on the computer. That's how I started. I edited on film as well, because I really wanted to get this experience, but I have never edited a feature movie on film. Still I think the profession of an editor has changed greatly because of digital technologies. Many people would say it's bad. But I wouldn't. The good thing about editing on film is - when you do it, you have to think hard before making the cut, because it's really hard to replace it afterwards. But digital filmmaking brought us great freedom. Now you don´t need a lot of money to make a film. All you need is the desire to tell a story. Take DV camera, shoot the footage, then edit it on your laptop, and you have a film. That´s the great thing about that. What´s also important, when you´re making a film this way is that you get much more material than if you had shot it on film. For "Land of Plenty" we had 170 hours of material. Of course that wouldn´t be possible if they shoot the movie on film. And editing time increases incredibly. But still I think it´s a kind of freedom".
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Do you use some special approach during the workshop on the Campus?
"The thing is I never learnt how to edit. I studied it myself by making errors, correcting them and trying to find out what would work for me. So I basically don´t have a method. I actually don´t think there is one. You just have to be sensitive towards the material you get. Just look through it and see what you could do with the material. That´s why before the editing I spend the first week just watching and watching the material, trying to get a feeling of a movie. You have to get started not with the final film in the head, but with the feeling of the final film in the head. That doesn´t mean you´re right, and the feeling can change while editing, but you must try to see what´s in the material. I think it´s the only thing I can suggest. I don´t talk a lot, I just told the participants of the workshop what´s my approach to editing. It´s much more important that they learn how Wim Wenders worked, how he developed the scenes. I leave them rather alone, but I´m there in case they have any questions".
You also shot several films as a director. How the roles of director and editor coexist in one person?
"I study directing in a film school, I´ve directed several short films and now I´m preparing my diploma. When I make a film as a director, I never edit it myself. I have an editor, because as a director you have to edit the film in your own mind. You know what you want and you know how to do it. But the editor is your third eye. And hopefully the editor has a completely different - or similar but different - view on the material you have. He has other ideas than you have as a director. I love directing very, very much, but I would never leave editing. And I would still love to edit another feature film".
Criticising Critics
Film criticism still is, more than a century after cinema was born, a very delicate issue. It's quite funny and relevant to notice that no other arts or practices can offer us such stormy debates and personal confrontations put into the light of the largest public interest. The audience, as well as directors, if they don't always settle their minds on the films by reading, watching or listening to them, do make their minds on the critics themselves, who often fall into the most violent polemics. So, critics, audience or filmmakers, who is the one to be eaten alive?
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Famous and respected critics such as Margret Köhler from Germany, Michel Ciment, director of French historical review Positif, and Derek Malcolm from the UK, joined by director Amos Gitai and moderated by the also famous and respected critic and film historian Peter Cowie, all of them tried to answer this inextricable, if not vital, matter. One could believe that with the major evolution in the media, specially with the internet, there would be a change in the habits of the public towards film criticism. And indeed, while paper magazines lose everyday more readers, websites tend to become a new way to drive people's attention. Long analysis are slowly replaced by informative and short articles as everyone here confirmed, but none the less, a spirit of criticism still exists, and people remain attached to discussing cinema.
Answering to a young director who explained his dubious look on "those too personal writings and lack of real arguments", a quite typical interrogation, it was well assumed here that subjectivity remains the crucial base for film critics work. But, as Michel Ciment pointed out, critics can become their very own enemy, by falling into one of the two extremes he revokes: being a prostitute/a populist or being a virgin/an elitist. In the two cases, the author breaks the invisible contract with the reader, as well as he loses his credibility. To emphase the fact that film critics don't only try to destroy the work of filmmakers, Margret Köhler recalled the important part they share in discovering new talents, through festivals and national releases. As Amos Gitai reminded us of his debuts, when he was given a strong support by the French critics and productions, what's written about his movies, as long as arguments are involved: "Even if it never educated me about my work, critics are an important link between my films and the public".
© FIPRESCI / Berlinale Talent Campus 2006
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