Berlinale: Experimental Films

Today, the closing day of the festival, I attended a screening of John Cook's Langsamer Sommer, shot in the '70s in Vienna. Cook, a Canadian, put himself and his acquaintances at the heart of his film, then indulged in self-referencing and navel-gazing, as he agonised (on-camera) about finishing the film and about his relationship with his ex, "the beautiful Ilse". Christ, it was dull.

Cook is an unsympathetic character, seemingly unaware (or is he?) of his relentless self-pity and casual misogyny, while his "friends" Helmut and Michael have their own problems. By the end, when Cook declares the film finished, I could only breathe a sigh of relief. Was it fiction? Documentary? Fictionalised reality? Frankly, I didn't care.

Experimentalfilme, a programme of shorts encompassing work from the USSR, Hungary, DDR, BRD and Poland, screened as part of the Winter Ade series. This proved to be a mixed bag. Gerd Conradt's Ein-Blick, 12 hours of surveillance across the Wall from West Berlin into East Berlin, was revealing and witty, while Thomas Werner's Sanctus, Sanctus, shot during the 1988 May Day parade in East Berlin, offered a poignant glimpse of long-gone rituals.

The two shorts from the USSR, Lessorub and Schestokaja bolesn muschtshchin, were baffling. The first a series of group hijinks in the snow, the second a kind of socialist-realist-brutalist lesson.

Z mojekgo okna, by Jozef Robakowski, offered a glimpse through his Lodz apartment window, as the view changed from 1978-2000. What started as a collective square traversed by workers and the odd dog walker became a parking lot cluttered with the latest western imports. Progress, eh?

Berlinale: No Country for Young Folk

As, Grafinjata (Petar Popzlatew)
Hayat Var (Reha Erdem)
Dorfpunks (Lars Jessen)
Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (Marco Wilms)
Die Koreanische Hochzeitsruhe (Ulrike Ottinger)
Chan di Chummi (Khalid Gill)

Today's theme is youth and its discontents. How society treat its young tells a lot about its values. In the Bulgarian film As, Grafinjata, the state and family conspire to crush all life from the spirited and rebellious Sybilla. Her individuality and opinionated nature are not valued in a state that demands uniformity.

Hayat Var is a film that revels in its tediousness, as the titular character, a 14-year-old girl on the outskirts of Istanbul, retreats into her own head to escape the mundanity and casual violence that lurk around every corner of her extremely proscribed existence.

The teenaged boys of Dorfpunks seek a way out of the tedium of 1980s German suburbia by forming a band but find their inadequacies are only magnified by the process.

Their East Berlin counterparts in Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie sought to express themselves through fashion and performance and in so doing, found themselves enemies of the state. Eventually, the state fell, but 20 years later, as middle-aged people in reunified Germany, they miss the excitement and danger of their youth.

Which brings me to two docs which shed a bit of light on the differing expectations of boys and girls. Die Koreanische Hochzeitsruhe is Ulrike Ottinger's examination of Korean wedding rituals. Leaving aside the clumsy attempt at placing it within some kind of mythology, one is left with numerous shots of shops and teeming streets. The film really comes to life in the ceremony, excruciatingly regulated and staged, with a strange Fix-It woman constantly adjusting the bride's dress and issuing instructions to guests as the ceremony progresses. Nobody, including the bride, looks happy.

The Khusra community of Lahore is a grouping of people who might be called intersex and MTF in western society. Historically, they were held in high regard, admired for their dancing and connection with spirituality. But, as shown in Chan di Chummi, modern society regards them as freaks, misunderstood and cast out by their families for not being proper men. Living in the margins, they eke out a living through dancing and prostitution. Celebrating the birth of boy children in neighbourhood homes, they seem unaware of how they are actually reinforcing the gender roles that so oppress them.

Berlinale: Panelstory

Full title: Panelstory aneb jak se rodi sidliste (Prefab Story). This astounding film was made by Vera Chytilova in 1979 and showed as part of the Berlinale strand Filme Vorboten der Wende, which includes Soviet, Bulgarian, Polish and East and West German films, as well as this Czechoslovak entry.

Chytilova was part of the Czech New Wave and endured her share of troubles with the authorities. A rare woman in a male scene, she had a distinctive vision that still seems fresh and modern.

The opening title sequence alone is mind-blowing, as a taxi driver tries to find an address on a giant housing estate in which all the buildings look the same, and he is told to find the number by the colourful laundry on the balcony. The estate is under construction and the cranes and rollers impede his progress. As various residents pick their way through the muddy paths, it becomes clear that the building of a socialist paradise has come unstuck, and that the project is crumbling as quickly as it is being built.

Chytilova's handling of the multitude of characters--an array of workers, housewives, errant children and corrupt officials--is as sure-footed as her eye for a shot. A series of absurd situations is intercut with shots of the cranes lifting the various panels of the building into place. Nothing works and everyone is on the make--a brilliant metaphor for society.

Earlier in the week, Chytilova sat on a panel (see pic; she's on the left) discussing the theme of films that appear to pre-sage the end of state socialism. She spoke of her run-ins with the government and the various strictures in place. Unfortunately, this panel, as with her remarks at the film screening, was not translated to English and I understood little. This is curious, as the subtitles for the film were in English. I asked the moderator about this oddity and he explained it was to do with "Grenzen" and "Logisten". Perhaps appropriate, considering the subject matter.

Happily, Chytilova, a small woman wearing Yoko-type glasses and clearly made of stern stuff, is still working. She has two films underway, one of them about men and women. So, still critiquing the state of things.

This year, Berlin is celebrating 20 years since the end of the Wall. On Potsdamer Platz, where the wall used to stand, is a strange-looking structure, a combination of viewing platform (to see what?) and exhibit about the peaceful revolution. Polls suggest that a large percentage of Germans remains unsatisfied with reunification and that easterners, in particular, feel let down. One wonders if in 10 years' time there will be a slew of films on 30 years of unfulfilled promises.

Berlinale: Pez + Ghosted + Chat

Three auteurs. Three visions of relationships.

The best thing I've seen so far at the Berlinale is Sophie Fillieres' Un chat un chat, a sophisticated comedy starring Chiara Mastroianni (see pic for cast and director). Amazingly, Mastroianni had never before done comedy and was in a panic a week before shoooting, but her performance as Celimene (or Nathalie or Natasha), a writer suffering writer's block that masks a deeper crisis, is note-perfect. The expression on her face when her well-meaning friends offer her books as birthday presents is priceless--no words are needed.

There's so much that's right about this film--intriguing leads, a good set-up (the writer is stalked by a lonely teenager), snappy dialogue and space to let the film breathe. Not much happens but a lot develops, including Nathalie and her pursuer.

Monika Treut's Ghosted sets up a triangle, as artist Sophie travels to Taipei hoping to lay the ghost of her dead lover Ai-Ling to rest. Instead, she meets the mysterious journalist Wei-Ming, who takes a more than professional interest in her. Why is Wei-Ming so intrigued? How did Ai-Ling die? And can Sophie let go? A co-production between Germany and Taiwan, the film travels back and forth between Hamburg and Taipei as Sophie and Wei-Ming try to settle unfinished business.

The post-film Q and A session was amusing. Most directors come over all coy, allowing the Berlinale staff to shower them with praise and field questions. Not for the formidable Treut, who took control of the stage, setting up her own personal chat show, introducing the actors and discussing the problems of finding the money.

At least five funders' names and logos were listed at the start of El Nino Pez, Lucia Puenzo's follow-up to XXY. Adapted by her from her own novel, the film is something of a throw-back--a kitchen sink melodrama of forbidden love, as spoiled rich girl Lala (Ines Efron, who also starred in XXY) and housemaid Aylin plot their escape with the family loot. But the course of true love never runs smooth. Nor is it clear whether this is true love, as Aylin also has entanglements with Lala's father, as well as with others. Is she simply using Lala to better herself? When the father is found dead, the strength of their relationship is tested.

As with XXY, I was a bit disappointed with this film. I wanted to really like it but found it lacking dramatically. Pondering a crucial plot point, I found myself asking: "why are they taking the dog? That makes no sense." A pity as it's beautifully shot and acted. I just didn't quite buy the maid character. If she is untrustworthy, the audience's sympathy is compromised.

Berlinale: Human Zoo

dir Rie Rasmussen

This one had it all: drama, controversy, dramatic entrances--and that was off-screen. The film was pretty good, too.

It all started when the woman introducing the screening announced that director Rie Rasmussen was not attending and that there would be no post-screening discussion.

OK, so on to the film, which was a disturbing, violent affair asking (but not answering) a lot of questions about morality. Adria, a Kosovo Albanian, escapes certain death at the hands of the Serb Army in 1998, then falls in with a deserting Serb soldier and embarks on a life of crime. Intercut with this are scenes from her present-day life as an illegal immigrant in Marseilles (how she arrives is never explained), as she fears deportation and cuts herself off from emotional entanglements. After meeting nice guy Shawn, she dreams of a new life but then finds herself dropped back into violence.

Part war drama, part jet-black comedy, part romance and part social commentary, the film is wildly uneven in tone. In Serbo-Croat, French and English, the dialogue varies from astute to embarrassingly obvious. The film takes a wild left turn when the heretofore timid, restrained Adria suddenly turns into The Terminator and starts chopping off hands and shooting up strip joints. Most bizarre.

The director, who also played Adria, has very strong views on gender roles and I think somewhere in this picture is a comment on violence and strength but I found the ending a huge copout.

With the film over, I waited to leave. But then Nick Corey, the actor who played Shawn, jumped on-stage (with the lights still down), and the drama became a farce. He told us the director was outside the screening room and wanted to speak to us. The woman who had done the introductions appeared with a mic (and a spotlight) and explained there was no time for a post-screening discussion.

Cue Rie Rasmussen (see pic), who strode on stage. No messing with her. She and Corey traded insults directed at Luc Besson, who is credited as producer but apparently hated the picture. She also said the story had personal resonance, in terms of the immigration and trafficking theme (a sub-plot of the film), as her adopted sister's mother had been trafficked to Russia.

Extraordinary stuff, but it was cut short to make room for the next screening. Corey repaired outside and continued slagging off Besson and bigging up Rasmussen, who mortgaged her house to make the film. Then she held court. I was quite interested to hear her views on the reversal of gender roles in the film, with Adria taking an all-action stance while Shawn is a support. Once she started talking about women's natural function being reproduction, I rather lost interest--biological determinism is so 20th century.

But, the Human Zoo continues in various locations throughout Berlin for the next week or so. Ba-dum-bum.

Berlinale: Panorama

I have a habit of picking Teddy Award winners to see. Last year it was Zero Chou's Spider Lilies while this year it was Olaf de Fleur Johannesson's The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela.

In truth, I was a bit underwhelmed by the latter: great story, panoramic sweep (Philippines, Iceland, USA, France, and a bit of Thailand are in there). But, for me, the faux documentary style was distracting.

The director explained after a screening that he originally wanted to make a documentary about ladyboys and contacted various candidates via email. When Raquela Rios replied from the Philippines, he decided she was the one. But then he thought her story deserved a more cinematic treatment. The Amazing Truth contains a mix of fiction and non-fiction techniques. Many characters have the same names as the actors and speak directly to camera in some scenes. Some scenes appear to be improvised but at other times are more cinematic.

It is a gripping film, with Raquela longing to meet her Prince Charming and stroll through the streets of Paris. In some ways she gets her wish but life is no fairy tale and she goes back to the Philippines and an uncertain future.

Probably the standout performance is by Stefan Schaeffer as the sleazy American chatroom boss who embodies the ugly side of globalisation. This character is based on a real person but is not played by him, the director was at pains to point out, lest the audience lynch Schaeffer. He really is a b-----d in the film, with a hilarious rant about France that brought laughter from the audience.

Also viewed was the documentary Shahida: Brides of Allah (Natalie Assouline). This one is quite contentious, as the director, a Jewish Israeli, spent two years visiting failed Palestinean female suicide bombers in prison. She explained after the screening that she wanted to meet them face-to-face to see why they did it. She had expected them to be hard and ugly (why?) but found them beautiful and engaging. One does wonder how much her expectations led to the shaping of the film, which was, at times, a bit emotionally manipulative.

In fact, the theme of manipulation is interesting to investigate: the prisoners have a spokesperson and a lot of sensitive negotiation went on behind the scenes to get the project made. Very little of that makes it to the screen, although there is one scene in which a prisoner concludes an interview with the camera crew, goes into the prison yard and is met by another prisoner who asks: "What did you tell her?" "Nothing. Just the usual interview stuff." Hmmm.

The interviewee who made the biggest impression on me was Ranya, who said she is shunned by the others because she refuses to join Hamas or any other organisation. During the filming she left the prison, but then returned, and explained that prison life was better than at home. Truly heartbreaking.

The film suggests many of the prisoners had difficult home lives and that this contributed to them agreeing to help or become suicide bombers. But no context is offered for the larger conflict between Israel and the Palestineans.

Berlinale: Forum + Expanded

Isabella Does Cheap from Val Phoenix on Vimeo.

In my second year at the Berlinale I have become more acquainted with the different strands of the festival. Forum is the home of art cinema and its spinoff Forum Expanded shows installations utilising film. Both are housed in the Filmhaus complex in Potsdamer Platz and I have become a frequent visitor there. The dramatic glass-fronted lifts go up to the 9th floor and there is a definite hierarchy in place, with the European Film Market at the top level off-limits to the non-accredited, while the Cheap Gossip Studio in the basement is open to all. Hmmm.

The most fun place to be is definitely the latter, back for a second year. I missed Patti Smith's spoken word performance there but did see Isabella Rossellini (see film), a swarm of press in tow, wowing the crowds as she visited. Her film Green Porno is showing in the festival and a related installation is part of Forum Expanded. For this, she dresses up as various forms of insect life to explain their sexual behaviour. "This is a strange role for her, no?" enquired a TV journalist. "Yes, I think she wanted to stretch herself as an actress," was my reply.

Cheap is presenting a series of Underground Über Alles awards, the first of which were handed out on Sunday night. One went to filmmaker and friend of Cheap Marie Losier, who was swept into the arms of Cheap's Vaginal Davis, twice her size, as she collected it. Clearly emotional, Losier said she felt she was among family. Moments earlier, I overheard part of her conversation with Guy Maddin, in which he described someone peeing. I guess that's familial.

As for the films, well, they were certainly arty. One Hand on Open (William Wheeler and Stefan Pente) is an experimental feature featuring drag queens pondering violence and appropriate responses. It looks fantastic, shot with a blue screen and a lot of animation. But I found it a bit of, um, a drag. Too long and a bit pretentious.

The same could be said of some of the shorts. I saw two programmes, Grandmother Threading Her Needle and Locations and Speculations. The latter featured two quite long shorts, and I can't recall ever experiencing so many people leaving a screening in my life. It really is a case of voting with one's feet. If I were one of the filmmakers I would be mortified. But one could understand: 33 minutes of a silent film consisting of shots of a building site (In die erde gebaut--Ute Aurand) is a bit too künstlerisch for me.

Shorts highlights for me were Schein Sein (Bady Minck), a lovely evocation of a 2D orchestra coming to life from the page to the stage, and Bruce Lee in the Land of Balzac (Maria Teresa Alves), a witty juxtaposition of kung fu sound and French pastoral images. Arty and captivating, a wonderful combination.

LFF: Brand Upon the Brain / Black, White and Gray

Though I've never met Guy Maddin, I think it's safe to say he has issues. This view is formed not only from Brand Upon the Brain, his latest work, but also my attendance at his birthday party at this year's Berlinale. This was a very public event hosted by Cheap, at which Marie Losier premiered Manuelle Labour, a faux silent featuring her giving birth to Guy Maddin's hands, the result, she explained, of her wanting to do a portrait of him.

If this wasn't startling enough, Maddin was as surprised as any of the onlookers when he was presented with a cake and forced to exorcise the painful childhood memory of being terrorised by a monkey at a birthday party. This was accomplished via a series of silent film titles, filmmakers dressed as monkeys and, back in the Cheap Gossip studio, a quick number on a piano--Marlene Dietrich's piano, no less, specially wheeled in for the occasion from the adjacent Film Museum. The cake was then smashed on the floor.

At the Berlinale, Brand Upon the Brain was given a gala staging with musicians and live voiceover by Isabella Rossellini. At the LFF it is playing as a standard film, but is still enormously inventive, witty, beautifully executed and clearly the product of a delightfully twisted mind.

A man, called Guy Maddin, returns to his childhood home on an island, after an absence of 30 years, summoned by his mother to give the lighthouse two coats of paint. Most people's memories of childhood are charged enough, but poor Guy has quite a lot of baggage to unearth, as his memories emerge over 12 chapters. His mother ran an orphanage while his father carried out mysterious experiments in the lab. When teen sleuth Wendy Hale arrives on the island, all kinds of passions are unleashed, all under his mother's omnipotent gaze, equipped with the lighthouse searchlight and the aerophone, which she uses to keep tabs on eager-to-please Guy and his sister.

Mother and son have an unsettlingly close relationship and all kinds of dynamics within the family are hinted at. Guy and his sister Sis end up vying for the attentions of Wendy, who disguises herself as her brother Chance and confuses everyone. So, in the midst of a lot of sci-fi hokum and family melodrama, a very sweet lesbian romance unfolds, leaving Guy on the sidelines.

All of this is accomplished in Maddin's signature faux-silent style, with voiceover, intertitles, asynchronous sound, no dialogue and vignetted black and white photography.

Much black and white photography is on display in Black White and Gray (dir James Crump), a documentary on the life of New York art curator/collector Sam Wagstaff, a powerful figure in the 1970s who is almost forgotten now, unlike his protégé and lover Robert Mapplethorpe. It was Wagstaff, 25 years older, who promoted Mapplethorpe and drove up prices for his work. Wagstaff also left much of his enormous wealth to Mapplethorpe, who profited greatly from the relationship.

In fact, there are those in the film who suggest Wagstaff was nothing more than a convenient sugar daddy for Mapplethorpe. By contrast, Patti Smith, who lived with Mapplethorpe when he met Wagstaff, insists that the photographer loved Wagstaff and she paints a picture of a threesome who all got along, despite the differences in their backgrounds and outlooks. Wagstaff came from a privileged Ivy League background, whereas Mapplethorpe was more rough around the edges.

As a curator, Wagstaff favoured modern art and hated photography until he had a change of heart and pursued his interest in voracious style. It is suggested that he was a collector of people as well as art. And so the two formed an alliance that lasted until their deaths from AIDS in the late 80s, during which time Wagstaff changed from a Brooks Brothers suit-wearing establishment figure to a leather-jacket wearing habitué of the meat-packing district.

The doc features work by artists favoured by Wagstaff, such as Tony Smith and Mapplethorpe, as well as interviews with various art world figures from New York and London and a few archive clips of Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff. Wagstaff's photography collection is now owned by the Getty Museum.

Festival Roundup

Films recently viewed at festivals:

Le Lit Froise
dir Myriam Donasis

French short in which two friends spend an evening drinking and giggling, their bonhomie unexpectedly turning to lust. The bulk of the film concerns the awkward morning after, with frosty silences, awkward chatter and a complete denial of what has happened to change their relationship replacing the earlier drunken exuberance. The unstated emotion is palpable.

Me
dir Chris Spinelli

Very odd experimental short recounting life of lesbian decorator Elsie de Wolfe whose life's work was to "make everything around me beautiful." But rather than a conventional documentary, writer/director Chris Spinelli makes use of strange staged scenarios, voiceovers and addresses to camera to convey de Wolfe's world view. Rather arte and odd.

Berlinale:

Ci Qing (Spider Lilies)
dir Zero Chou

Beautifully shot feature film about tattoos, family relationships and trauma set in Taiwan and featuring a lesbian relationship at its heart. The heroine, who is a flirty teenager with a webcam set up in her bedroom, has lost her parents and wants people to remember her. I was a bit bemused by the lack of depth of this character as she seems to be very superficial. By comparison, the woman she pursues, a tattooist called Takeko, is very grave and more nuanced. She even offers a bit of tattoo philosophy: "Male wants power. Female wants love." This was the Teddy award winner.

Generation K Plus Kurzfilm

Blod Sostre
dir Louise ND Friedberg

Here's an oddity from Denmark: a love triangle of seven-year-old girls, as chubby Sidsel finds a rival for the affections of her neighbour and tries to rid herself of her rival. Poor Sidsel--she just wants to be loved but goes about it the wrong way and finds herself humiliated in a very disturbing sado-masochistic scene featuring birthday cake. All in all, a pretty adult film. Hence it was very startling to see it programmed in the kids section.

Tommy the Kid
dir Stuart Clegg

Aussie boy seeks revenge for the theft of his bike in this very funny faux western.

Hawaiikii
dir Mike Jonathan

Dad makes his daughter a boat for show and tell. Mostly English but no translation of Maori, unfortunately.

More, Strycku, Proc Je Slane?
dir Jan Balej

Delightful Czech animation explaining why the sea is salty and offering a warning against greed and betrayal.

Berlinale Retrospective I: Cheap

Anyone venturing into the atrium of the Filmhaus during the Berlinale would have found him or herself part of a giant art installation. As part of the experimental Forum Expanded strand of the festival, the art collective known as Cheap had turned the space into their Cheap Gossip Studio, adding some light relief to the heavy duty A-R-T going on elsewhere.

Cheap's latest production, with US drag artist Vaginal Davis, is the German fairy tale Max und Moritz, which will premiere in Berlin on 19 April.

The Cheap Gossip Studio, hosted by Davis [see photo above], became the place to be seen for the Berlinale, featuring a circular bar offering Kaffee and Kuchen, various art installations, films and live "Beauty Moments" every evening. Newly arrived in Berlin from Los Angeles and revelling in the atmosphere, Davis offered me a "grand tourina" of the space as well as a helping of his tongue-in-cheek philosophy. The beauty moments, he explained, were key "because we can always look more beautiful. That's very important--beauty. Who cares what you're like on the inside? It's about the outside. That's what counts 'cause that's all anyone sees anyway." A self-proclaimed Sex Repulsive, he made numerous claims for public sex occurring pretty much everywhere in the Studio but I saw no evidence of this.

Though the promised Isabella Rossellini beauty moment failed to appear, others included Miss Pascal offering makeovers and "The Whoracle at Delphi" providing misinformation.

Short films in the space's Rooftop Gallery included Shannon Plumb's lengthy one featuring drag queens attending a fashion show, Marie Losier's of aliens emerging from pots of pasta and Davis's of his friends dancing on a roof. In the Red Gallery Davis had another film featuring him and Cheapie Marc Siegel shrieking over photos taken by the latter's grandfather Sam of various celebs in the '60s and '70s, with Davis suggesting various libelous explanations for their expressions.

Cheap began in 2001 with a co-production performance piece. Its members include Tim Blue; driving force Susanne Sachsse, formerly an actress with the Berliner Ensemble; and Daniel Hendrickson, both of whom are personally involved with Siegel. All very post-modern. They invited Davis and others to collaborate on what the latter describes as a "funky, performancey piece that had these cheap aesthetics, an incorporation of availabism."

Availabism, coined by Kimber Fowler, refers to using what is available to create art and is something Davis has always embraced. "All you need is creativity. I take trash and make sculptures and costumes." The group also shares an admiration for queer experimental filmmaker Jack Smith.

Interestingly, according to Davis, the queer community was a bit suspicious of the group, especially those who knew of Siegel as a gay man. Davis observed, "German sexuality to me is so bizarre. Germans either like to get fisted or cuddling. It's either fisting or cuddling but nothing between that. It's extremes."

He is quite pleased that Sachsse has emerged as a leader within the group. "She puts the projects together. It's so great to have an art collective where it's female-driven... A feminine presence is the main spark to igniting the work and that's really, really rare. Because usually, whether it's straight men or gay men, everything is all about the men. It all becomes about them. The females become kind of tagalong." Sadly, I never got to interview the formidable Frau Sachsse because she was always busy, but I can say she has a crushing handshake.

A lifelong resident of Los Angeles before his recent move to Berlin, Davis sees the German capital emerging as a destination for artists. He has already seen an influx from New York. His own move was prompted by spiralling rents in his hometown. As he explains, "If you don't have cheap rent if you're an artist, you can't do your work 'cause all your time is being spent trying to have a roof over your head. Berlin has got a tradition of [being] bohemian and funkiness." He expects to stay in Berlin for the foreseeable future and travel around Europe to do installations and spread his message of "trying to motivate others to be as comfortable as possible within themselves".

Cheap's version of Max und Moritz transforms it into a girl gang with one boy. Davis, who plays Witwe Bolte, cackles and exclaims that "the boy is their bitch!" Cheap's production of Max und Moritz premieres in Berlin on April 19th at Theater an der Parkaue. It will also play in Hamburg and Graz.