FOCUS:

Thanks to the energetic Klaus Staeck, the newly elected president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin-Tiergarten, that august institution has opened its doors to programming befitting an Academy of Fine Arts. For the first time, and hopefully not the last, the First Doku.Arts International Festival for Films on the Arts (14-17 September 2006) was launched for the benefit of both academy members and the general public as an »international festival for films about art.« And the gamble paid off in spades. The Academy could boast of full houses for most of its screenings, while backup projections for elite audiences at the nearby Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art did just as well in smaller quarters. According to festival director Andreas Lewin, »this festival is overdue. I have been surprised by the amount of enthusiasm and support I have received from people working in the field of the arts and film.«

Altogether, 35 documentaries were programmed at the festival. Fortunately, no attention was paid to the year of production. The aim was to find the best documentaries available on the arts: music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, writers, video art, theatre, museums, artist profiles, filmmaking styles and vision, and havens for creative artists. Tributes and panels were the highlights of each day. A Panel titled »Focus Canada — Films on Art in the Context of the Great Canadian Documentary Tradition« tipped its hat to the National Film Board of Canada. The Dutch Documentary School — oft acclaimed as the best in Europe — was also highlighted at the festival. No juries were called upon to vote on awards and citations. Indeed, that might well have defeated the overall purpose of Doku.Arts as a platform of creative vision and excellence. Although all entries were either shot in English or carried English subtitles, it doesn't likely that international documentary film festivals will be booking many of the films in the Doku.Arts program. Thus, it appears appropriate to offer readers a complete overview of the festival entries.

Museums

Doku.Arts opened with the Aliona van der Horst’s The Hermitage Dwellers (Netherlands, 2003). A warming portrait of »Hermitashniks,« attendants and curators dedicated to the care and keeping of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, a first-class museum that houses one of the world’s greatest collection of works of art. Similarly, in Jan Schmidt-Garre’s Art Now: Olafur Eliasson (Germany, 2005), a visit to the Tate Modern Art Museum in London featured the »Weather Project« installation by Olafur Eliasson with an emphasis on perception through examples of the interplay between light and water. Again, in Coraly Suard’s Jours tranquilles au Musée Précaire Albinet (Quiet Days at the Makeshift Albinet Museum) (France, 2004), the focus is on Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s concept of loaning modern art pieces (Warhol, Mondrian, Beuys, Malevich, Duchamp) from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (and elsewhere) for exhibition in the Albinet housing project, an underprivileged Parisian suburb. An impressive documentary on an unusual event of art appreciation, to say the least.

Painters

The salute to painters and artists was both revealing and baffling. The best of the lot was Adam Low’s Bacon’s Arena (England, 2005) in which he chronicles with compassionate understanding for the man and his art the elusive Irish-Anglo painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) over several years until his death in Madrid. For art lovers Sherman De Jesus’s Jan Schoonhover — Beamte Nr. 18977 (Jan Schoonhover — Official No. 18977) (Netherlands, 2005) aims to show why the artist’s unique vision has propelled Schoonhover to the top of the sales chart at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but why his mysterious white-reliefs are often compared with the tradition of Vermeer and Mondrian (as hinted in the documentary) is still a mystery to me. By contrast, I was taken by a quaint documentary steeped in a distinct African artistic tradition: Katy Léna Ndiaye’s Traces empreintes des femmes (Traces, Women’s Imprints) (Senegal/Bukina Faso/Belgium, 2003), in which grandmothers of the Kassena tribe pass on to family heirs the rural tradition of mural painting.

Art Havens

Art havens were featured prominently in Doku.Arts. South Africa, for instance, is known for the village of Beufort-West situated between Cape Town and Johannesburg. In Walter Stokman’s Beautiful in Beaufort-West (Netherlands, 2006) the quaint village is depicted as a mystical site inspiring unique artistic images by poets and painters who feel at home here. Similarly, in Iwan Schumacher’s Der Wolken-Sammler Jean Odermatt — San Gottardo (The Cloud-Collector Jean Odermatt — San Gottardo) (Switzerland, 2005) we meet an »arts scholar« who has been climbing Gotthard Mountain for the past twenty years to study rock formations there and absorb the »speech« on the mountain top between earth and clouds. For those in the Academy audience with a taste for Gesamtkunst, Josef Nadj’s self-portrait Josef Nadj — dernier passage (Josef Nadj — Last Landscape) (France, 2006) seeks to define himself as some kind of »landscape« artist with roots in Vojvodina of ex-Yugoslavia, a heritage that in turn formed his vision as filmmaker, dancer, choreographer, pantomime artist, painter, sculptor, and (probably the best description) »fantasy performer« primed to the brim with self-esteem.

Video Art

Of course, a video-art installation was included in the cultural fanfare at Doku.Arts. A separate screen in the foyer of the Academy featured Sepp Dreissinger’s Artgenossen. 35 Minuten-Portaits (Artgenossen: 35 One-Minute Portraits) (Austria, 2005), a collection of portraits of Austrian artists made over the years with a video camera. Webke von Carolsfeld’s Walk With Us — The Collaborative Works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (Canada, 2005) is loosely described by Carolsfeld as an »audio-video-walk« through a sound project by the Canadian artists who have found a second home in Berlin at the Hebbel Theater, where Cardiff and Miller invite audiences to join them in their sound sessions. Along somewhat the same lines was Deborah Warner’s The Waste Land (England, 1995), a Beta Cam experiment from the London theatre scene that has withstood the test of time simply because we watch in close-up actress Fiona Shaw as she subtly brings to life T.S. Eliot’s famous poem on a tour that takes her to Brussels and Toronto.

Architecture

Audiences were plentiful for the panel discussion on »Films on Architecture« at the Academy. Of particular interest was Mirjam von Arx’s Building the Gherkin — Norman Foster baut in London (Switzerland, 2005) in which over a period of four-and-a-half years she follows the design, panning, and building of Norman Foster’s new skyscraper in London that has been nicknamed the »Gherkin« because it resembles a gigantic pickel. Since the construction on the skyscraper began shortly after 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Norman Foster had to contend with an assortment of difficulties before the project was finished. Another highlight of the festival was Maria Anna Tappeiner’s Richard Serra — Thinking on Your Feet (Germany, 2005), a portrait of the architect who created the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao along conceptual lines of circular steel sculptures. Also present for the panel discussion was Fredrik Gertten, whose documentary The Socialist, The Architect and the Twisted Tower (Sweden, 2005) chronicles the troubles encountered by architect Santiago Calatrava to create a »turning torso« building in Malmö, Sweden, at the invitation of Johnny Örbäck, a social democratic politician who failed to calculate the exorbitant costs of such a design.

Sculpture

Sculpture was given its day when two films from »The Eye« series by Illuminations Media were programmed at the Academy: The Eye — Tony Cragg (England, 2001), preceded by and exhibition of Tony Cragg’s work, and The Eye — Rachel Whiteread (England, 2003), the creator of so-called »voids« from plaster and resin and other materials to present poetic everyday situations, like »voids« beneath tables and beds and houses. Coupled with the screening of The Eye — Rachel Whiteread was Emily Young’s The Tower of Babel (Poland, 1999), a short documentary about Henryk Kowalczyk, a blind and deaf sculptor whose hands are his main contact with the outside world at a workshop in Poland for blind and deaf sculptors.

Dance

Dance documentaries were strongly represented at the festival. Should Yan Ting Yuen’s Yang Ban XI — The 8 Model Works (Netherlands, 2005) ever come your way, don’t miss it! During China’s Cultural Revolution (1969-76) Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, sponsored eight »operas« to be filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope productions, all pure propaganda pieces with smiling performers in song-and-dance spectacles modeled after Hollywood musicals to praise the glories of the revolution and communist ideals. As presented in Yan Ting Yuen’s documentary, these films are still popular today with middle-aged Chinese audiences. Moreover, the performers interviewed for the documentary confess to strongly believing at the time in what they were doing to help promote a world of equal opportunity. In Anaïs and Oliver Spiro’s Time Flies (France, 2005) the setting is the 2004 Festival d’Avignon, where dancers and musicians from the Moroccan »Groupe Weshm« are rehearsing Tempus fugit under the direction of Nadjib Cherradi to interpret the concept of time in relation to rhythm and the speed of movement, conceived along themes embracing love, religion, happiness, grief, separation, and death. And Lloyd Newson’s avant-garde DV8: The Cost of Living (England, 2004) employs dance as a »complex emotional narrative« that can be funny or comic-tragic. The filmed version the author DV8 Physical Theatre, The Cost of Living features two down-and-out, yet sympathetic street performers, one without legs, at an old British seaside resort, where they confront society’s prejudices against disabilities.

Music

Documentaries on music were popular fare at Doku.Arts. A top festival attraction was Larry Weinstein’s The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin (Canada/Germany, 1997). The outstanding film portrait makes broad use of interviews with friends and historians, live orchestral performances, and some unknown archival footage to literally take the pulse of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) during the war years, when he composed five of his symphonies (from the Fourth to the Eighth) as outright statements against the tyranny of Stalin and the Personality Cult. Denounced by Party officials on two different occasions, in 1936 and 1948, he somehow managed to escape the death camps by compromising his talent on occasion to compose film music for the Personality Cult. In Paul Smaczny’s »...Wir können nur den Hass verringen« — Daniel Barenboim und das West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (» ...We Can Only Limit the Hate« — Daniel Barenboim und das West-Eastern Divan Orchestra) (Germany, 2005) the focus is an orchestra of adolescents is composed of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. This »festival special« was followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Paul Smaczny.

Another impressive music documentary was Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir’s From Shtetl to Swing (France/USA, 2006), chronicling the passage of Jewish »Shtetl« (village) music from Eastern Europe all the way to Broadway, where it meshed with swing, blues, and ragtime to inspire such immortals as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Benny Goodman, among others. Archive footage also aptly demonstrates how Jews and Blacks in the jazz community combined talents to inspire each other. Frank Scheffer’s Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time (Netherlands, 2004) pays tribute to the American composer, who in turn grants that he himself was inspired by the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Cocteau as well as by contemporary urban life. Bettina Ehrhardt’s »...Wo ich noch nie war: Der Komponist Helmut Lachemann (»...Where I Never Was: Composer Helmut Lachemann) (Germany, 2006) portrays how one of today’s prominent contemporary composers shapes his »acoustical material« while working with the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In Bruno Monsaingeon’s Glenn Gould — au-delà du temps (Glenn Gould — Hereafter) the viewer is treated to the faces of an audience seemingly spellbound by the pianist musical interpretations of music by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. And in Dirk Lienig’s Beatbox Colombia (Germany, 2005) the filmmaker explores the passion for rap music by youngsters in the ghettos of Bogotá and Cali, rappers who cling to hope by expressing themselves through music. Since some of the documentary footage was shot by the rappers, this adds to the authenticity of the film.

Film

Documentaries on films and filmmakers were among my personal favorites at Doku.Arts. In Rolf Orthel’s Babel — Je Moet Alles Weten (Babel — You Must know Everything) (Netherlands, 2005) the last film script of legendary Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is scrutinize as just one of an estimated hundred scripts that had never been realized under the Stalinist dictatorship. Vicente Ferraz’s Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano (I Am Cuba, The Siberian Mammoth) (Brazil, 2004) pays tribute to Mikhail Kalatozov’s ill-fated first Soviet-Cuban coproduction of 1962-63, filmed in Cuba shortly after the Castro revolution. Intended as a propaganda production on behalf of the revolution, it was shelved shortly after its release in Moscow and Cuba, due in great part because of its technical advances (sweeping camera movements, wide-angle shooting). Today, I Am Cuba is widely recognized as a cinematic masterpiece, thanks to the efforts of American directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to bring the film to the screen after 30 years on the shelf. Another film with both documentary and animation import, Laurence Green’s Alter Egos (Canada, 2004) draws parallels between two talented Canadian animation filmmakers: Ryan Larkin (Oscar nominated Walking, 1969), who now lives as a vagrant on the streets of Montreal, and Chris Landreth (Ryan, 2004), whose award-winning animation film saluted Larkin in a poignant testimony to both friend and colleague.

On the avant-garde side, Reinhard Wulf’s James Benning — Circling the Image (Germany, 2003) delves deeply into Benning’s bent for shooting films without a crew and with only transportable equipment. His meditative focus is often on remote landscapes in California — as, for instance, in his 13 Lakes (USA, 2004), where his choice of static shots study the reflection of light on the water of 13 different lakes. Naom Gonick’s documentary on a Canadian poetic filmmaker, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (Canada 1997), explores Maddin’s penchant for themes drawn from film history, particularly the silent movie and German Expressionism. The documentary portrait was accompanied by two samples from the Guy Maddin oeuvre: The Heart of the World (Canada, 2000) and Dracula — Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (Canada, 2002), the latter awarded an international Emmy because of his wedding of choreography by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet to stylized silent film images.

Austrian filmmakers Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor were programmed at Doku.Arts in a panel discussion on »How Cinematic Are Films on Cinema?« Their portrait of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, 24 Wirklichkeiten in der Sekunde (24 Realities per Second) (Austria, 2004), was made while Haneke was shooting Wolfszeit (Time of the Wolf) (Austria/France/ Germany, 2003). It has the filmmaking guru synthesizing his vision of cinema in a single quack sentence: »I always say that film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth or at the service of the attempt to find the truth...« Whatever that means.

At the close of the festival, Andreas Lewin announced that there will, indeed, be a second Doku.Arts in 2007. And why not. The first Berlin Doku.Arts International Festival for Films on Art was already one for the books before it even finished!

Ron Holloway