The German Wave at the Berlinale
During the nine months following his appointment as the fourth director of the Berlin International Film Festival, Dieter Kosslick initiated an open-door policy to German filmmakers that, in the end, literally galvanized the 52nd Berlinale (6 - 17 February 2002). No less than 60 German productions could be seen at the festival, including four German entries competing for the Golden Bear, in addition to two German coproductions in the official program. Extra programming space was set aside for the »Perspektive Deutsches Kino«, a new section given comparable festival status to the Panorama and the International Forum of Young Cinema. Next year, it was announced, the »Berlinale Talent Campus« will be launched to showcase tomorrow’s Autoren.
Indeed, it was hardly a coincidence that this year’s Retrospective, »European 1960s: Revolt, Fantasy, Utopia«, offered today’s young directors the chance to see and discuss the early NGC films of Herbert Vesely (Das Brot der frühen Jahre, 1962), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Nicht versöhnt, 1965) and Alexander Kluge (Abschied von gestern, 1966), among a half-dozen others. With an oft-repeated festival motto »Berlin should become a festival for the German film industry« Dieter Kosslick breathed new life into the Berlinale.
The talk of the festival was the German Cinema Perspective. According to programmer Alfred Holighaus, »The aim of the new series is to include and group together films that formerly could not be screened at all, and to focus on the filmmakers of tomorrow whose work we can already take pleasure in today.« In effect, Holighaus was tearing down a barrier for, as happened all too often in the past, new German productions that had previously premiered at other festivals were ipso facto excluded from participation in nearly all the sections at the Berlinale, the one exception being the German Series (now retitled German Films).
The icing on the festival cake was the Premiere First Movie Award, sponsored by Premiere World, the German private Pay-TV station. In effect a second competition with its own jury, its portfolio extended to films in the major sections by debut directors. Thus, the First Movie Award follows in the traces of the Camera d'Or Award at Cannes, the Opera Prima at Venice, and the Tiger Awards at Rotterdam. Further, Rotterdam is destined to play a key role in the future plans of the Berlinale. Upon taking note of how the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) had developed rapidly over the past three years along the lines of the successful CineMart at the Rotterdam festival, Dieter Kosslick inaugurated the first »Rotterdam Berlinale Express« a joint selection of six out of 43 CineMart 2002 projects to be presented at the European Film Market as the first step towards further collaboration.
For the first time in festival history, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, officially opened the Berlinale, and he fittingly made use of the opportunity to remember actress-singer-author Hildegard Knef, who had died just days before. Even more significant, the presence throughout the entire festival of Germany’s Cultural Minister Julian Nida-Rümelin left little doubt that he too meant every word he had said in München, just a few weeks before the Berlinale, when he presented his »Proposals for Reforming Film Politics«. With an eye on the flourishing French film experience, Nida-Rümelin called for a »higher valuation of German cinema as a cultural heritage« and submitted some strong arguments for more financial support from the federal Länder (states) and television stations. »All must contribute their obolus,« he underscored, »including the tax-payer.«
With the German entries playing to packed houses across the board at the Berlinale, the only problem was keeping track of tight programming schedules and getting to a venue on time to find a seat. In between, there were plenty of other distractions: the daily Premiere World broadcasts from the red carpet before the Berlinale Palast, the bumper crop of seminars and roundtables, the Freedom Film Festival with its prestigious Andrzej Wajda Philip Morris Freedom Prize awarded to young German director Andreas Dresen, the eminent Templeton Prize awarded to Ibolya Fekete’s Chico (Hungary), the Best Screenplay Award announced by Julian Nida-Rümelin, and the Honorary Golden Bears handed out to Claudia Cardinale, Robert Altman, and Horst Wendlandt. The honor bestowed on Horst Wendlandt, shortly before this »living legend« celebrated his 80th birthday, was particularly well deserved for over the past 44 years he had produced and coproduced over 100 films, among them several Golden Screens (awarded for more than three million attendance) and Ingmar Bergman’s Das Schlangenei (The Serpent’s Egg) (1978).
Also, at the Goethe-Institut breakfast, Dieter Kosslick personally handed the Berlinale Camera Award to Dr. Volker Hassemer, the outgoing head of Partner für Berlin and the city’s former Cultural Senator. »We are honoring a universal visionary and initiator of the kind of art that today best characterizes the Berlin metropolis. With untiring engagement he has contributed immensely to Berlin’s international cultural image and the internationality of the Berlinale.«
To help festival neophytes find their way through this maze of offerings, the Berlinale published a flyer that earmarked the eleven Special Events, most of which were held in the neighboring Otto-Braun-Saal at the State Library. Herewith a brief rundown: »The Script Factory: SCENE« featured talkshows with Saul Zaentz (Amadeus Director’s Cut), Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday), Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), and Tom Tykwer (Heaven). One of the key themes at »The 3rd Berlin Forum on Film Economics« was »The Impact of September 11th on the Film and Television Industry«. The International Media Art Festival Transmediale programmed over three days a compact and informative Transmediale Special on the latest developments in digital art on video, internet, CD-Rom, and interactive installations.
As an aftermath to the Retrospective »The European 60s: Revolt, Fantasy and Utopia« - the Filmmuseum Berlin invited filmmakers Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Ula Stöckl, Frank Beyer, Jürgen Böttcher, Werner Enke, Claus Lemke, and others to augment the screenings with lectures, discussions, and readings. Critics and theorists also had their say in »Framing Reality«, a series of give-and-take panel discussions with writers and directors on the general topics of »Word and Image«, »Reality and Fiction«, and »High and Low Culture«. The first day of the Chinese New Year was celebrated with a display of fireworks on »Beijing Night«, a present from Beijing to Berlin. »Vision Day« was set aside to promote the »Berlinale Talent Campus«, due to be officially inaugurated next year at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt venue in Tiergarten. And properly accredited guests had access to the wheeling-and dealing action at the »Rotterdam Berlinale Express«, to a seminar on »Children’s Films Without Children« sponsored by the Children’s Film Festival on its 25th anniversary, to an open-ended exploration of »The New Russian Film Market« with the participation of Russian guests attending the European Film Market, and to the »From Asterix to Amélie« forum on French-German coproductions and the input of the newly founded Franco-German Film Academy.
One glance at the Competition schedule, and it was clear that the four German entries in the race for the Golden Bear had been spaced evenly over the stretch like a kind of directors’ relay team at the Berlinale Olympics. Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (Germany/USA) launched the Berlinale in the opening night slot, followed a few days later by Dominik Graf’s Der Felsen (A Map of the Heart), then in the second half came Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (Grill Point), and finally in the closing days of the festival by Christopher Roth’s Baader. So seen and evaluated, each entry served to trigger interest for the one to follow, while at the same time elbowing each other in a friendly manner for critical honors and audience acceptance. Further, as rightly cited by critics and commentators throughout the festival, the foursome also highlighted some of the strengths and weaknesses of current film production in Germany. (See reviews in this KINO issue.)
Has something gone wrong in the Land of Arriflex? Of the four German films contending for Golden Bear honors, no less than three Dominik Graf’s Der Felsen (A Map of the Heart), Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (Grill Point), and Christopher Roth's Baader were directed by filmmakers who had substituted film for video. Even more significant, these entries manifested some of the glaring weaknesses of the digital revolution: flat images without depth, shots minus shadows, the zooms and pans of a hand-held camera, long takes spliced into sequences on the editing table. By contrast, Wim Wenders’s documentary on a popular rock’n’roll band, Viel passiert Der BAP Film (Ode to Cologne) (Germany), the German answer to the Rolling Stones over the past 20 years, probed the limits of new digital technology.
Ask these directors why they opted for the camrecorder and espoused the digital revolution, and they will usually answer: the cost factor. An Arriflex camera is just too expensive to rent, they say, so too is the price of high-speed Eastman Kodak material. Also, you only need a skeleton crew, and you can shoot on videotape at the required 24-pictures-a-second. Moreover, TV stations have no objections to broadcasting productions shot with a digital camera in fact, they often recommend it. So the only question is how to convert the »24p« process to the movie screen. Currently, the resulting movie image is still sub-standard, and the day when digital projectors are the norm in movie theatres is still a few years away. So critics tend to resolve the issue by overlooking the technical downside to critique instead how aptly the director has applied the new medium to his personal vision.
If there was a central running theme at this year’s Berlinale, then it had to do, directly or indirectly, with the Nazi past and a belated reckoning with collaborators, fellow-travellers, and moral leaders who had simply looked the other way. Bertrand Tavernier’s Lassez passer (Safe Conduct) (France) is a tragicomedy set in the French film studios during the German Occupation; Costa-Gavras’s Amen. (France), a loose film adaptation of the Rolf Hochhuth play The Deputy, has extra scenes and dialogue added see Dorothea Paschen’s report in this KINO issue. Istvan Szabo’s Taking Sides Der Fall Furtwängler (Germany/France/UK), a screen adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s play, deals with the denazification trial of orchestral conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. And Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (USA, 1940) is a restored version of his satirical masterpiece on fascism.
As timely as these films appear to be at first glance, they do not command the relevance of a talking-head documentary programmed in the Panorama: André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer’s Im toten Winkel: Hitlers Sekrätarin (Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary) (Austria), a straight-forward confessional account by an 82-year-old of her job six decades ago as Hitler’s personal secretary that was filmed just weeks before Traudl Junge-Humps died of cancer. Her memory of some details is crystal-clear, as though it all happened just yesterday.
Dedicating Laissez-passer to fellow countrymen who had somehow found ways to live decent lives throughout the German Occupation, Bertrand Tavernier sought to take the pulse of the times by contrasting the fates of two real-life filmmakers in Paris of 1942. One is Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydes), a highly polished and fast-living screenwriter, who refused offers to work on German-backed productions and used his pen to aid and abet the Resistance movement. After the war, Aurenche collaborated with Pierre Bost on Jean Delannoy’s La Symphonie Pastorale (1946), awarded the Grand Prix at the first Cannes festival. An adaptation of André Gide’s novel, their screenplay was exceptional for allegorical references made to postwar conditions in France particularly in the persona of a sensitive blind woman, played by Michèle Morgan, who was also awarded Best Actress at the same 1946 Cannes festival.
Tavernier’s other real-life filmmaker in Safe Conduct is Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gambin), an assistant director at Continental Films, who boldly worked for the Resistance from his relatively safe camouflage inside a film studio owned by German producer Alfred Greven. As for the film’s inspiration: »I had already read several stories on the period by Jean Aurenche,« said Tavernier at the press conference, »so when I finally met Jean Devaivre, I knew I had the material needed to film two different destinies from different angles as a tragicomedy, an adventure film, another view of the Resistance.« Alongside these two figures are a half-dozen other individuals who compromised and collaborated, who opposed and faced hunger, who did whatever was required in order to survive. Jacques Gambin, as the impulsive, rather reckless Jean-Devaivre, received the Silver Bear for Best Actor. And composer Antoine Duhamel was awarded a Silver Bear for Best Film Music.
Istvan Szabo’s Taking Sides, filmed entirely at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, leans heavily on the Ron Harwood play about the denazification trial of Wilhelm Furtwängler for dramatic effect. But after all is said and done, the reasons why the eminent and ageing conductor chose to stay in Germany rather than to emigrate abroad remains a mute question. Even Harvey Keitel, as the investigating U.S. army major, is discomforted by the polite objections of a Jewish army aid and the daughter of a resistance leader executed by Hitler. Moreover, Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård does capture some of the resigned bitterness of Furtwängler during the interrogation, who, after all, did intervene with Nazi authorities on behalf of Jewish members in his orchestra. Taking Sides is best seen as a continuation of his prior trilogy on the precarious duplicity of men in high positions: Mephisto (1981), Oberst Redl (Colonel Redl) (1984), and Hanussen (1988).
Thanks to digital technology, the copy of Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which closed the Berlinale, is as close to the original negative print as possible. Besides being an aesthetic visual experience, the film is as timely today as it was yesterday perhaps moreso, in view of Roberto Benigni’s warming Chaplinesque performance as an Italian Jew deported with his young son to a concentration camp in La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) (Italy), Oscar winner and Special Jury Prize at the 1998 Cannes festival. But as funny as Charlie is in the double role as Adenoid Hynkiel (Dictator of Tomania) and the Jewish barber, it’s Jack Oakie as Napaloni (Dictator of Bacteria) who steals the show when the pair’s alter egos, Hitler and Musolini, meet to divide their territorial spoils. Furthermore, it should be remembered that it was Horst Wendlandt, the visionary producer-distributor, who broke the ice on Nazi satires in Germany by successfully releasing The Great Dictator two decades ago.
For many, Georgian-born, French-based director Otar Yoseliani ranks with Jacques Tati as an accomplished low-key comedian, a master craftsman of visual humor, and a satirist par excellence whose wit embraces the foibles of contemporary life. Nowhere is this comparison more evident than in Lundi matin (Monday Morning) (France/Italy) with its thematic link to the modern contraptions in Tati’s Mon oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Traffic (1971). In Monday Morning Vincent played by Jacques Bidou, veteran producer of over 100 films in his own right, including Rithy Panh’s Rice People and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba wakes up and decides not to go to his menial job as a welder at the chemical factory. All he ever wanted to do was to enjoy a smoke and paint. Now, however, he finds that his family life, whatever there was of it, doesn’t interest him any more, nor do the people in the village, who are all locked into daily, mechanical, absurdly quaint routines. On a lark he jumps on a train for Venice.
»I made a parable about the unhappiness of solitude,« said Yoseliani in an interview, »and a comedy about the unhappiness of being obligated to obey the rules of the world.« Everyone in the film is alone: Vincent, his father, mother, wife, kids, friends, the people he sees on his rounds in the village. In Venice, however, he feels himself fortunate to have met Carlo, also a welder by trade and a dabbler in painting as well. His tired spirit is lifted too by a Sunday soaked in the company of a friend. Then along comes another Monday morning and Carlo is off to the factory. Eight months later, Vincent heads back to the village, his idyllic odyssey ended. Half of the viewing pleasure is to follow cameraman William Lubtchansky’s eye for detail. The other half is the imaginative feast of puns and gags among them a neat cameo appearance by the director himself. Otar Yoseliani received a Silver Bear for Best Director, and Monday Morning was awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize.
Ask the film historian if he remembers George Cukor’s The Women (1939), his screen version of Claire Boothe Luce’s venomous back-biting stage hit, and he’s liable to answer by naming the stars in that MGM classic: Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Crawford. Ask a Berlinale regular what he thinks of François Ozon, whose 8 Femmes competed for France at the Berlinale, and chances are the francophile fan can name all eight women who starred in the film: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danièlle Darieux, Ludvine Sagnier, and Firmine Richard. Conceived as a whodunit, the setting is a snow-bound mansion during the holiday season of the 1950s. When the manor’s patriarch is murdered during the family gathering, all the women are likely suspects: the victim’s wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, housekeeper and chambermaid, either of the two pretty young daughters.
This was a Berlinale stocked with »women films« indeed, they decked the screenings in the official program like flag-markers. In Richard Eyre’s Iris (UK/USA), the story of Iris Murdoch, eccentric British writer and philosophy professor, she is interpreted in her flamboyant youth by a winsome Kate Winslet and in her fading years by a forlorn Judi Dench. In Zoltan Karmondi’s Temptations (Hungary), the story of young man trying to free himself from the tight grip of his single mother, he manages to escape with the help of Juli, a fetching 10-year-old Gypsy girl.
Known abroad as the country’s leading »cult director«, Korea’s Kim Ki Duk burst upon the international scene with back-to-back invitations to both Berlin and Venice. His Birdcage Inn (1998) was invited to the Panorama at the 1999 Berlinale, followed by Bad Guy (2001) in the Competition at this year’s Berlinale. In between, Kim’s The Isle competed at Venice in 1999 and again with Address Unknown in 2001. All four films in fact, all seven of his features to date are remarkable for reworking the same theme in different yet interlocking contexts: outsiders who express their pain through acts of naked brutality.
Japanese cinema enjoyed remarkable success at the Berlinale. The Golden Bear was awarded ex aequo to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, an animation feature that drew freely from a myriad of myths and legends in the collective subconscious of a rich Oriental culture. Just as important on a political level was the Japanese coproduction with South Korea: Junji Sakamoto’s KT the case of the 1972 kidnapping in a Tokyo hotel of Kim Dae Jung, the Korean opposition leader who was later elected President of the Republic of Korea (1998) and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (2000). Altogether, 14 films by Japanese directors were programmed at the festival, half of these in the Forum of Young Cinema.
The other half of the Golden Bear was awarded to Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (UK/Ireland) on a date quite close to the 30th anniversary of the events depicted in this powerful fiction-documentary. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that, during the very week when the film premiered at the Berlinale, an official inquiry was about to be closed on what really happened in Londonderry on that fatal day of 30 January 1972, when 13 people were killed and 13 wounded (one fatally) in a civil rights march in Northern Ireland. Since it was alleged that the shooting had been done by British paratroopers, a tribunal had been sitting for four years on the inquiry. Greengrass tells his story from different points of view, each linking with the others to present a full and rather balanced reconstruction of how and why this blood-bath in broad daylight was triggered in the first place. On one side is a Protestant community leader, who espouses the Catholic cause in the spirit of a non-violent, Martin-Luther-King march. On the other side is a Brigadier General, who wants to halt the march at all or any cost even if it means bringing in the hard-line troopers of the Parachute Regiment. Bloody Sunday, awarded the Ecumenical Prize as well as a Golden Bear, is one of those tightly strung fiction films that appears, particularly in the powerful crowd scenes, to be newsreel coverage pushed to the limits.
For the first time at the Berlinale, an independent jury awarded the Premiere First Movie Award to the debut director of a feature film. The prize went to the Australian entry: Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds, directed by an Aboriginal whose previous shorts and documentaries offer a different perspective on life in the bush. The story of Lena (Dannielle Hall), a light-skinned, blonde teenager born of an Irish father and an Aboriginal mother. Burdened by a rough life in the outback, to say nothing of her painful fate as a mixed-blood daughter, she leaves home to hitch-hike to Sydney, the »dream city«, in hopes of finding her father. Along the way, at a desolate bus station, she meets Vaughn (Damian Pitt), a proud dark-skinned Aboriginal, who has broken out of a corrective institution to visit his dying mother. Ivan Sen depicts the Australian province with an eye for conditions as they are: people living on the border of existence, without hope and brutally denigrated, the landscape ruined by reckless industrialization, and the ever recurring emnity between the Aborigines and the settlers. Thrown together, without a penny in their pockets, Lena and Vaughn learn to adjust to their circumstances. As the title hints, it’s the open sky an endless Australian horizon on a large screen, photographed strikingly by Allan Collins that makes Beneath Clouds particularly memorable. And a film you won’t easily forget.
Ron & Dorothea Holloway