Day 05 – Wednesday, February 13

Suchandrika Chakrabarti on Madonna and her film Filth and Wisdom
Ben Cho about Dusan Makavejev who visited the Talent Campus
Dilek Aydin on Marian Quinn's 32A
Martyna Olszowska talks with Thai director Aditya Assarat
Mayank Shekhar on Luis Buñuel and the Berlinale retrospective
Dilek Aydin attended the panel "From Street Cred to Street Credibility — Hip Hop and the Movies"
Mayank Shekhar listened to a debate on film criticism

Heavy on Schmutz, Light on Weisheit
By Suchandrika Chakrabarti

Following in the footsteps of the Rolling Stones, Patti Smith and Gorillaz, Madonna has become the latest pop star to bring a film to the Berlinale. The press screening of Filth And Wisdom as part of this year's Panorama section, attracted a huge crowd of journalists, all eager to watch the singer's attempt at moviemaking. The turnout showed that Madonna's star power can bring in even the most skeptical audience. Unfortunately, though, being a film director might just be a transformation too far for the Material Girl.

Her husband's influence is clear in one strand of the tale, concerning young Londoner Holly's incipient career as a pole-dancer. It's set amongst the Essex boys and girls of Guy Ritchie's work, such as Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. Holly's flat mates include the philosophically-inclined Ukrainian singer André and the pill-stealing pharmacist Juliet. A variety of weird and whacky things happen to them over an indeterminate time period, as the characters deal with their rather predictable inner demons.

The film has the feel of a sitcom, and is an uneasy mix of cheesy and pretentious. Someone got the proportion of wisdom to filth wrong, it seems. For instance, almost all the characters have a scene in which they are curled up on their respective beds in a fetal position, clutching the pillow and looking anguished, while the camera hovers above like a concerned mother. The shot is nice once, but its repetition bulldozes the point home, that these people have problems! Filth creates problems! Dealing with problems leads to wisdom!

Eugene Hütz, in the main role of André, basically plays himself, and attempts to get his real-life band, Gogol Bordello, signed to a label. This suggests a desperate attempt on the movie's part to get down with the kids by showing that Madonna's heard of this new, young band. Filth And Wisdom is a star vehicle for Hütz, with the final scene showing all the characters united and delirious with joy, grooving to his "Transglobal Gypsy Punk Rock." There are happy endings all around, with not a loose strand to be found. Or a point. (Suchandrika Chakrabarti)

From Penises to Politicians
By Ben Cho

The image of a seventysomething, conservatively-dressed Dusan Makavejev seated under a slideshow of bare breasts, penises, soldiers, politicians and animals seemed oddly fitting for the infamous Serbian filmmaker's appearance at the Berlinale Talent Campus. This is, after all, the sixties-era iconoclast who committed some of cinema's most strikingly discordant visuals to the screen: Sweet Movie's copulating lovers on the good ship Marx, a typical example. Makavejev's brand of cinema is virtually non-existent in today's movie-climate but his experience working on low budgets, battling censors and finding radical new forms of expression remains vital talking points for a generation of up-and-comers.

With the benefit of numerous clips from his filmography, Makavejev discussed politics, sex and the image — the three tenets of his work — and went into the gritty details on his most controversial work, WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. When asked by moderator Peter Cowie to impart advice for new filmmakers he commented that today's directors should work without financial dependence, "make cinema out of nothing", and not be afraid to ask stupid questions because "sometimes you can get marvelous answers". In reference to the former, he referred to his experiences on Coca Cola Kid and how the memorable image of a mouse in a shoe was stumbled upon purely by chance and had nothing to do with budgetary concerns. Speaking on his native Yugoslavia, Makavejev once quipped that the nation was 100% Marxist — 50% Groucho and 50% Karl – which gives a hint of the politically-barbed humor audiences were treated to.

His appearance however rammed home the point just how far history has shifted in both politics and cinema. The Cold War is over, sex-in-cinema has somewhat liberalized and when the audience was asked, by show of hands, how many had seen WR only about a third raised their arms. There was something quite sobering about watching the same man who brought coprophilia and emetophilia to the big screen entering old age and discussing the future of cinema for a new generation. The focus on the industrial side of art-cinema, the "business", has intensified and you need only walk around the Gropius Bau or Potsdamer Platz swarming with EFM buyers and sellers to see evidence of this. When the slideshow comprised of images from Makavejev's work stopped on a Coca-Cola advertisement being touted by Lenin it provoked laughter amongst the audience. The Talents obviously saw the future of non-mainstream cinema staring right back at them. (Ben Cho)

Not Depressed This Time
By Dilek Aydin

Screened in the Generation section, 32A could be called a simple teenager film with well-chosen music, beautiful cinematography, and art direction that is appropriate to the subject. But the story is not told in a familiar way. It is not only the story of a group of 13-year-old girls discovering their womanhood and comparing their bra sizes but also contradicts the clichés about adolescence by using the clichés themselves. These teenagers have problems with parents and school, they fall in love, they are disappointed and they discover their sexuality like any teenagers. But here in 32A, Marian Quinn introduces Meave and her three girlfriends who are coping with all their problems, maybe with a little bit of crying but still standing tall. They are facing the anxious part of their lives and going through it. Their relationship to the process of becoming women is totally different from what we usually see in films. We are face-to-face with adolescents who are perfectly aware of their situations and taking adolescence as it comes.  

At an age when wearing a white bra for the first time means stepping into womanhood, Meave compares her sexuality to others by staring at women's breasts trying to guess sizes. Her love affair with Brian, who is older and more experienced, ends as she fails to survive in his late-teenager world. Quinn successfully portrays Meave's situation, showing both her frustration and her recovery. She mourns her lost love while mourning a childhood that will not return, but she does it to move on. She doesn't just stick to her problems and end up being the traumatic, depressed teenager we might expect. Even her father's punishment becomes a kind of meditation for her. She cleans the messy garage, organizing everything, getting rid of all the dirt, as if it were a bad memory.  At the end, we see her cleanly-washed bra not as pure as it was before but something she is still proud of. (Dilek Aydin)

Fast Life, Slow Stories
By Martyna Olszowska

Can films be a source of inspiration in studying the future? Indeed, what's the future of film? Thai director Aditya Assarat (whose Wonderful Town was screened in the Berlinale Forum) and Wolfgang Müller-Pietralla, Head of Future Affairs at Volkswagen, discussed the speed of life and the need for slow (or at least, slower) cinema, video games, and the Internet during a panel entitled "Cinema Inside the Crystal Ball — Future Thoughts on Filmmaking" at the Berlinale Talent Campus.

You like "fast life" but slow stories?

Aditya Assarat: Like most people, I enjoy everything "speedy." When you're using the Internet you want it to be fast. But as far as cinema is concerned, I like slow stories. When I make a film, it comes from my feelings and emotions. And I believe that emotions will never change, because people will always like sitting on the beach and looking at the sunset.  

You said you see filmmaking in terms of cooking and tasting…

Aditya Assarat: Yes, I think that film is like cooking. You don't really use your brain, only your heart. It's an art. When you cook something, you don't ask why you add an onion to the dish. It's the same in films. I just create some of my feelings. It's emotional.

Contemporary cinema is more and more spectacular. Do you think there is still something new to invent in cinema or we should return to simpler stories?

Aditya Assarat: It's neither one way nor the other. There are as many different tastes as there are people. I can enjoy watching Harry Potter, but I enjoy Tarkovsky's movies as well. People are complex and they like different things. And the nice aspect of the art is that it gives you all these styles and genres.

So maybe there is room for changes more in the marketing of films than in the cinema itself?

Aditya Assarat: I think the Internet could be the future of cinema as a means of distribution. At the end of the filmmaking process, it's the product that needs to be watched. The Internet is the way to show it to many, many people. Certainly, it's the greatest invention of recent years. Nowadays the problem is with the business model, because nobody can figure out how to make money out of the web.  But the idea is a good one. (Martyna Olszowska)

Forgotten For A Reason
By Mayank Shekhar

On an oeuvre of 34 films in almost five decades, Luis Buñuel's range may frustrate any conventional description of him either as a director of a national cinema, or a limiting genre. This, despite recurring elements in several of his works of shocking surrealist imagery, strong attacks on middle-class morality and organized religion. Roughly, you could position Buñuel's career into phases at different countries he lived in: whether as an early surrealist in Spain and France; a failed filmmaker in the United States; or his final years in France that produced his best-known works.

The Daughter Of Deceit (La hija del engaño) belongs to the early 1950s when Buñuel, a Mexican citizen at this point, had made about twenty (mostly low-brow) movies for mainstream local appeal alone. Some of them could arguably stand a test of time (EL, in particular); many are entirely forgettable for good reasons.

Film-buffs and historians both before and after have taken Buñuel since. You don't need the silly shenanigans here — never mind a possible pressure to interpret more than what meets the droopy eye. Clearly this show is merely about a Don — a casino and cabaret owner — who's in search of his daughter. He had abandoned her as an infant at a poor man's home. He'd thrown out his wife then, finding her in bed with his best friend. The film moves around in circles as the Don and his two side-kicks meet a girl. The Don doesn't know she's his daughter. He gets into a scuffle instead with her husband, and bays for his blood.

The tone is intentionally comical in a Chaplinesque-slapstick sort of way, but the humor too weak and contrived to be even discounted as culturally specific. Eventually you know the don hugged his daughter. The producers laughed their way to the bank. For the director's memory, 56 years later, we should have just left them alone. Just for the record, sometimes even Buñuel couldn't beat commercial constraints. (Mayank Shekhar)

Breaking the Waves With Hip-Hop
By Dilek Aydin

The Panel "From Street Cred to Street Credibility — Hip Hop and the Movies" hosted many people from the worlds of music and cinema. Afro-German actor and musician Tyron Ricketts was one of the panelists who discussed hip-hop culture and its influence on cinema. He brought up his own experiences with hip-hop and their contribution to his career by emphasizing the disadvantages of "being a black man in Germany". He said that starting his career as an MC certainly contributed to him breaking the taboos of being a black actor. Using hip-hop helped him to get the leading role in a very popular TV series. "A black guy being a German detective is really something", he said. About the question of whether hip-hop is a business or not, Ricketts expressed himself very politically saying "Yes and no. It's a business but hip-hop is hip-hop." After this answer the inevitable question was, if he is against the system, why is he in this business? If he describes himself as a hip-hop person, and if this music is a rebellion, isn't it a little bit strange to be in such a conventional TV series? He answered quickly "Yes, but if you want to change things you have to reach more people, and to reach more people you have to be on screen." His idea about the effects of hip-hop music on young people was very positive. "This music brings together young people from different backgrounds. It's a meeting point for those who have something to say against the system. Whether they are rich or poor, they see that they have a common medium and this makes them break their prejudices about each other. Hip-hop is quite new to young people in Germany, as it became popular only at the end of the 1990s and it is good to see the improvement in younger kids in Germany since then." He summarized the discussion this way: "Hip-hop is used when there is an urgent need to express your emotions, so it will keep being a medium of expression in music and cinema." (Dilek Aydin)

Critic, The Film's Enemy?
By Mayank Shekhar

The topic for discussion at the Berlinale Talent Campus on Wednesday said, "Matters of Life and Death: Reviews That Make or Break." That question appeared pretty much settled in the first few minutes.

István Szabó, the only director, and the most forceful speaker on the panel, almost had his way with a rather one-sided view that critics in fact did not matter at all (let alone make or break films). He said he preferred to learn from his audiences; the filmmaker himself being his film's audience number one. It's the bouts of silences in the theatre, or the creaking of chairs, that told him if a scene had worked (or not), rather than a professional critic who was likely to be corrupt, politicized, and have no idea about films.

Also, for world cinema, he emphasized, the context changed depending on an audience's cultural or historical awareness. Szabó (Mephisto, Sunshine) is arguably the most critically-acclaimed filmmaker from Hungary.

There is no likely defense for low-quality film criticism (just as no excuse for bad filmmaking). But German actress Martina Gedeck was the only one to stand up for good criticism as an act of creation itself — a genre of writing that could even take forms of poetry. Gedeck has reasons to side with film critics.

As David D'Arcy, formerly with the American NPR, put it, it was a dinner-evening in Los Angeles with 80 movie critics that ultimately warmed up audiences to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives Of Others. Gedeck was the star of the 2006 Oscar-winner.

It isn't a surprise in this case that all critics that evening had thought favorably of the same film, incidentally rejected by Cannes that year. There was still a fear of a "common group-think", D'Arcy warned, when several critics met up for the same show. Every critic, he said, must champion a film he knew he may be despised for by his colleagues.

And then there was Shaibu Husseini with Nigeria's "The Guardian" in the group, who has to face death-threats in a country where honest (or harsh) criticism isn't taken lightly. Given the nature of the discussion, young Husseini may have felt making a thankless job a matter of life and death!

The debate still continues. An uneasy relationship between art and its critics is, of course, almost as old as art itself. (Mayank Shekhar)

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