The venue of the Berlin Film Festival is located in the vicinity of the former Wall, near an old watchtower from the GDR times that is still standing on one of the streets a few steps away from the Potsdam Square. It is a symbolic neighborhood.
Like any other major film forum, the Berlinale more or less successfully reflects two tendencies: the state of affairs in cinematography as it is, and the internal festival policy, which is not necessarily dependent on the first factor.
One should not forget that the festival was launched back in 1951 in a country that clearly remembered the horrors of Nazism and the World War II, and the Cold War was in full blow. Cinema was a place for one to learn about distant cultures, to develop mutual understanding and solidarity. It was a window for cinematographers from developing countries and for dissident film directors from authoritarian states: such was the basic concept of the festival’s creation, and it still remains true. Whether this benefits cinema as a form of art is another question.
The author of these lines visited the Berlinale in 2003 for the last time; in all those years many memories remained clear. However, before the current festival, I tried to remember: what film had won then, who was awarded the Golden Bear and how did they fare afterward? I had to search on the Internet. Michael Winterbottom remained a mediocre British director as before; he didn’t shoot any outstanding or even noticeable films since then, and his gold for In this World was soon forgotten.
This is no unique case: one can say the same of almost all the recipients of the “bears” during the past decade. The only exception is The Milk of Sorrow by Peruvian Claudia Llosa; although her triumph in 2009 was largely conditioned by the fact that the heroine’s past was associated with the Peruvian dictatorship. While comparisons are unreliable, Berlin is always mentioned together with Venice and Cannes; these are the “big three” world festivals, according to popular belief, and they set the cinema season. The Cannes winners are always names with potential; those who receive “palms” remain household names, and winning films are discussed for years. Rather than simply distributing awards, the festival on the Azure Coast set the trends in the entire industry. Alas, one cannot say the same about Berlin.
What are the common features among the Berlin-61 winners Nader and Simin, a Separation (directed by Asghar Farhadi, Iran, Golden Bear for the best film, Silver Bears) Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Koehler, Germany-France-Netherlands, best director), The Forgiveness of Blood (Joshua Marston, US-Albania-Denmark-Italy, best script by Marston and Andamion Murataj), The Prize (Paula Markovitch, Mexico-France-Poland-Germany, outstanding artistic achievement) and If Not Us, Who (Andres Veiel, Germany, Alfred Bauer prize for innovation in the cinema)? The films are averagely realistic, straightforward and often publicistic. They are shot in a traditional and lasily understood manner, seemingly to fit the tastes of the general TV audience thus the Bauer prize for If Not Us, Who looks like a bad joke. There are no metaphors, notional background or work with visual language, the characters are not complicated and are driven by obvious motivations. A Separation and The Prize have really good casts, but generally the films are typical conversational dramas, and apart from the endless dialogs, the performers have no other opportunities to act.
To some extent the heroes resort to deal with socio-political circumstances: with state repressions, with the system, with a backward social order, bureaucracy and domestic problems. The directors set themselves a meaningful task, locking the author’s message and, finally, their creativity in the bounds of actuality. The artistic search is replaced by popularism, and the eternal questions by social neuroses. Fictional cinema takes over the functions of being an enlightener and an accuser, and it is not ingenious. It often seemed that if some competition works were documentaries, they could only gain from it. For example, the non-fiction film Khodorkovsky (in the parallel Panorama competition) has caused more of a stir than any of the films in the main competition.
Certainly, Farhadi’s motion picture is good cinema. But abstracting from the director’s situation, Nader and Simin is but one of the many family “conversation pieces,” of which the film industry has no shortage. Looking at the festival in a broader, non-conjunctural context, the Berlinale succeeded as a feast (in the exact meaning of the word “festival”) of cinema art. Almost every section had works somehow broaden the boundaries of cinema language — demonstrating new ways of expression and uncovering new names.
The most profound and significant film of the competition was a new motion picture by the famous Hungarian director Bela Tarr, The Turin Horse (Hungary-France-Germany-Switzerland-US), who deservedly won the Jury Grand Prix and the prize FIPRESI. The beginning of the story remains behind the scenes: in Turin, on January 3, 1889, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw a coachman beating his stubborn horse. Nietzsche, a former cavalryman, came out to the street and put an end to the beating, entwining the horse’s neck with his arms and sobbing. The only words he uttered then were: “I am in despair.” After that the philosopher suffered a mental collapse and spent the next 10 years in silence, under the care of his family. Actually, Tarr completes the other story line — he shows the destiny of the horse and coachman.
The film is black and white, which looks outdated. A skewbald horse, harnessed to an old cart, is moving through a hurricane to slow, monotonous music. Then life appears in this forgotten country: the silent old coachman with his paralyzed arm, his miserable hovel, his daughter, boiled potatoes, home-brewed brandy to sell, water from the well. Many stills might be hung on the wall like paintings, some seem to be made with Rembrandt’s feeling of light and composition. Sharpened minimalism is combined with visual perfection. Obviously, this is the way one should film the end of the world.
Although deprived of awards, On Saturday by Aleksandr Mindadze (Ukraine-Russia-Germany), due to the originality of the directing style and screenwriting skills, also distinguished itself from the majority of competition’s motion pictures.
It begins in the first hour after the Chornobyl disaster. The main character, a young party worker Valerii (Anton Shagin) is one of the first to find out what happened. It shows a frantic hero who is torn between his duty and obligation to secrecy, and his desire to rescue the beauty Vira (Svitlana Smirnova-Marzinkevich), whom he loves with unrequited love. Then the film focuses on life on the edge of the abyss.
Another work that deserves attention is A Mysterious World (France-Germany-Uruguay). The director Rodrigo Moreno managed to create a film where nothing is happening, and yet it is impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The hero, whose girlfriend suggested living separately so as to salvage their relationship, starts killing time. He sets out on aimless journeys, courts other girls without special insistence, wanders the streets, drinks somewhere, buys a half-broken Romanian car and reads cheap criminal novels. Moreno looked into the mysterious world of a man who was left alone to himself — and shot a subtle, cultured movie.
This was not the only interesting Spanish motion picture. The premiere of Amador (Fernando Leon de Aranoa, Spain), was also part of the “Panorama” competition. The film is both elegant and simple, and stars the charming Magaly Solier (she became famous for the main role in the abovementioned Milk of Sorrow). Solier plays the pregnant wife of a migrant from Latin America, a flower merchant. She then finds a job nursing a sick old man named Amador. The old man unexpectedly dies, and the girl, in order to preserve her earnings, keeps silent about his death and continues to tend to the house where the dead body lies, pretending that she’s working as before. There are many funny, witty moments, but there is also a little melancholy. Its strong points are the excellent screenplay and the stunning Solier.
Overall, the parallel programs were often better than the main competition. Notably, “Panorama” featured a film with the undistinguished name The Mothers. The director is a Macedonian, Milcho Manchevski (his drama Before the Rain had won a “Golden Lion” in Venice in 1994). The Mothers consists of three completely different stories, not united by anything other than the theme of motherhood: a comic sketch about two scatterbrain schoolgirls, a deeper story about documentary makers, who record the lives of abandoned villages, and a frightening documentary about a maniac-killer, made in the style of a tough report-investigation. It would seem that the material is very diverse, yet Manchevski combines it into a perfect composition, pierced with common motifs.
Actually, The Mothers is a thought-out and flowery artistic research on the interaction of objective reality and cinematic reality, on manipulation, on the question for the truth — in life and on screen, on law and justice, on parents and children. Contrary to one’s first impression, it’s a very complex film.
Aditya Assarat, a Thai director, is another breakthrough of the festival. His motion picture with the untranslatable name Hi-So was shown in the “Forum” section. It reminds one of such refined sources of inspiration as the prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the early films of Alain Rene. Aditya borrowed the structure of the plot, built on repetitions (but each time with new, slightly bizarre details), from the first. From the second he took the ability to display huge empty spaces and heroes that get lost in them, a meditative rhythm and hidden tension that slowly accumulates in the looks, gestures and pauses. Still, generally, this director does not imitate anyone. Together with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s loud victory at last year’s Cannes festival, it appears that cinema in the Far East kingdom is on the right track.
The arrival of the 3D format to independent cinema also marked an important turn for the festival’s history. Two documentaries by outstanding German directors — Pina by Wim Wenders and Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog (non-competitive), plus the animation Night Tales by a Frenchman Michel Ocelot (competition program) attracted attention not least due to this technical trick.
The results, of course, are incomparable. Wenders managed to create a real dance spectacular, a worthy cinematic dedication to the great choreographer and director Pina Bausch. Herzog shot another popular science film in the style of Discovery Channel. Ocelot remains a children’s animator-director — it was not clear what this collection of short cartoons was doing in the competition. But in all cases the radical difference from commercial cinema was obvious: if 3D was removed, nothing would have changed. The films would have lost neither in stylistic originality, nor in visual quality. Conversely, many Hollywood 3D creations wouldn’t be interesting without the “volume.”
Thus Berlin, unlike Cannes or Venice, does not set trends, but quite clearly reflects them. In many parts of the world just making an honest film is already a deed. Despite all the lamentations about the crisis, the exhaustion of ideas and the generation gap, independent ci-nema is living and thriving, and it appears that it became more Europe-centered; at least, the times of exotic national sensations are gone (apart from the Thais with their “old-school” culture of pictures). The films are becoming more like documentaries, the nervous camera is reappearing, and cinema seems to be slowly sinking into itself as its pace slows down.
And watching this pace slow down is terribly interesting.
