One film above all was on my agenda for the Berlinale from its first announcement, and that film was a restoration of Eisenstein’s October.  This was my must-have ticket, and I got it.  October was playing as part of the retrospective “The Red Dream Factory” which was a review of rarely-seen co-productions between Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s.  I only wish I would have been able to see much more of this retrospective as I’m sure there were plenty of unearthed gems to behold.

October screened as a special gala at the Friedrichstadt-Palast which is an impressive setting, to say the least.  Probably the grandest in which I’ve ever watched a film.  Adding to the regal feel of the palatial setting was musical accompaniment by the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra.  They played very well, though the director Frank Strobel didn’t often look at the images as he was conducting, which threw the timing of certain sound effects and musical cues on more than one occasion.  The musical performance was moving all the same, just not as crisp as it could have been.

This year marks my first trip to one of the ‘big 3′ festivals (also representing my first trip to Berlin).  First reaction: it’s even bigger than I expected.  As a renegade, independent film critic, my frame of reference is as an outsider to the Berlinale ‘in-crowd’.  I have no press pass, no online reservations, and no connections.  Let the journey begin.

It became immediately apparent to me that I prefer smaller festivals.  What is one to think of a festival where most everything you would want to see is sold out in advance?  Where those films that are not sold out, one still has to wait in line an hour or more for a chance to buy tickets?  It’s a bit depressing.  That’s less of a festival to me than an immense industry, and I don’t like my film-going experiences to feel industrialized.  Furthermore, I appreciate a feeling of intimacy in film festivals.  Personal intimacy, where one can meet and interact with other film lovers as well as film-makers; spatial intimacy, where one can access all screening venues and events without traveling times of 30 minutes or more.  But there you have it.  This is the Berlinale, for better or worse.  I’m absolutely afraid to see Cannes.

Goran Paskaljevic and Milco Mancevski

A special section called “Europe Outside Europe” represents the competition program at FEST.  This section is composed of films from European countries that have not yet been included in the European Union, which in essence makes it a de facto Balkan panorama.  Well-known directors in this year’s section included Milco Mancevski and Danis Tanovic.  The jury presiding over the competition section included the Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic, Cineaste editor Deborah Young, German film critic and curator Barbara Lorey de Lacharriere, and Serbian film critic Dubravka Lakic.

In the end Mancevski walked away with the grand prize (a replica of the sculpture “Erythrocyte” by Serbian artist Nikola Pesic) for his film film Mothers.   Mothers was the best of the competition films that I saw (granted I did not get a chance to watch Tanovic’s Circus Columbia).  It was more experimental in form than Dmitri Mamulia’s Another Sky and more emotional than Mladen Maticevic’s Together.  It is comforting to see that Mancevski is still pushing the boundaries of his art form rather than succumbing to mainstream demands, as can often happen when your feature film debut is awarded the Golden Lion in Venice.  During a post-screening interview Mancevski revealed that despite offers, he is not attuned to working in Hollywood on big budget pictures because he is not willing to sacrifice his freedom of creative expression.  Hopefully his fifth film will continue to blaze new paths in Macedonian cinema and serve as a model for future generations of creatively-inclined Macedonian auteurs.

R

The film R by first-time writing/directing team Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer is a work of gritty realism that gives an example of how to transcend genre by adhering to it faithfully.  R follows the generic tradition of the prison film, which demands certain tropes: the new guy learning the ropes, the hierarchical struggle, the rise through the ranks, dispatching of a snitch, the downfall.  This Danish film owes a debt to American Me and Blood In, Blood Out, among others.  However, though it works with and through shared conventions it does not succumb to a romantic Hollywood-ization of incarceration.

Ostensibly the protagonist of the film is Rune (Pilou Asbaek), the new guy in question and (also ostensibly) namesake of the movie.  He arrives in prison on a two-year stint for stabbing a man which of course immediately runs him afoul of inmates who were friends to his victim.  They take advantage of Rune in numerous ways until he makes himself useful in the drug trade and slowly moves up the ladder of respectability.  Eventually things go wrong and Rune must pay for a botched deal with his life.  This occurs about three-quarters of the way through the film.

Michel Ciment

On a Saturday morning the veteran French film critic Michel Ciment hosted a master class in which he discussed his personal history as a critic as well as the larger history of film criticism and cinema in general.  As a young man Ciment loved to read film criticism of all types and often kept a notebook listing the films he had seen with short observations regarding how he felt about them.  He began publishing his first film reviews for a small student magazine and then decided to send a long review of Orson Welles’ The Trial to the venerable film journal Positif.

Ciment recalled that many critics at that time attacked Welles’ film, believing it to be a betrayal of Kafka’s writing among other offenses.  He instead wrote an extended defense of the film which was accepted and published by Positif launching his career as a professional critic in the process.  During the late 50s and early 60s Positif and Cahiers du Cinema were often at odds with each other, championing different filmmakers as well as different causes.  Positif was known as a left-oriented magazine (how Ciment also identified himself) while Cahiers du Cinema leaned to the right.  Of course these two French journals were not only on the front lines of the battle for cinema in the 50s and 60s but they also became the flagship enterprises and symbols of advanced film criticism throughout the world.

Hitler in Hollywood

A fictional documentary by Frederic Sojcher in the tradition of the great mockumentaries.  Starring Maria de Medeiros (of Pulp Fiction fame) as herself, hot on the trail of a missing filmmaker of the classical era who was wrapped up in a CIA-sponsored plot to use Hollywood to destroy the financial prospects of European cinema in the postwar period.  So the film betrays maybe just a bit of an irrational fear of Hollywood hegemony which nevertheless is based on a meritorious complaint about a general lack of diversity in movie theaters all over the world.

The film is shot in a first-person manner from the point-of-view of either de Medeiros or her cameraman (and would-be lover).  Visually the film looks excellent and is given a majestic air because of the use of large-gauge film stock rather than the expected digital video for an aesthetic of this kind.

Mothers

Milco Mancevski’s fourth film continues with his favored structural device: interlocking disparate stories in large episodic blocks.  The first section details two young girls as they journey through Skopje on their way to a police station to report a flasher.  The second narrates the tale of a television crew shooting a reportage on an old village and the old people that live in it.  The third is a classical documentary account of a Macedonian crime journalist who reported on the very murders he committed (proving the theorem that reality is stranger than fiction).

This third narrative thread becomes experimental because of its placement within the film.  The shift to classical documentary discourse from traditional storytelling is so sudden that the viewer is forced to assimilate it and given no chance to reject.  The break is somehow radical and seamless at the same time, yet it is not certain if Mancevski is pushing the boundaries of narrative or simply cobbling things together dispassionately.

18 Meals

This new Spanish film directed by Jorge Coira is grouped into three segments sectioned off by intertitles corresponding to the three meals of the day.  It is an ensemble film full of melodrama structured as a “day-in-the-life” narrative in the Galicia region of Spain.  Described in this way the film seems very unoriginal and even a bit hokey, which unfortunately is the case.

For the most part the acting is adequate as the film features a wide variety of talented players.  Coira used a lot of improvisatory techniques in creating the scenes for his actors to incarnate.  What could have been disastrous and meandering turns out to be the strength of the film, though it only seems strong in relation to other weaknesses that prevent the film from being of even moderate interest.

Black Swan

Here is a film that is enjoyable but probably won’t have much of a shelf life.  That’s because the content is a bit cliched: an artist who must sacrifice everything for their art; a young woman coming of age; a possessive and demanding mother; the dark half of a personality.  These are stock themes with the requisite stock characters to go with it.  All of the internal elements of the film are paper thin but structurally, formally, the film is commendable.

The use of grainy 16mm makes for an interesting contrast with the polished world of professional ballet.  Aronofsky seems to have a solid control of the telling of the tale if not the tale itself.  Still, one gets caught up in it.  The film is a visceral ride but like most roller coasters they diminish in interest the more you revisit them.

Though cliched one still feels for the story of a hard worker who must sacrifice everything in search of success.  If you know what it feels like to have a dream and to be consumed by it you can’t help but be marked by a tinge of recognition for Portman’s Nina.  She walks through the film in a one-note performance as a blank slate that others project their own recognitions on.  By the conclusion you root for her to complete her final brush stroke, not just to see a job well done but because it is also the only way she can free herself.  It is perhaps heavy-handed irony that her search for perfection means that she must ultimately destroy herself.  This is fine for “popcorn” art cinema but one must expect more from Aronofsky the next time out.

From the Waist On

This curiously-titled film by Gianfrancesco Lazotti derives from what is probably an untranslatable phrase in Italian which serves as the original title: “Dalla vita in poi.”  The story is about a disabled girl who begins writing love letters to her best friend’s boyfriend in jail and the two eventually strike up a short-lived affair.  Broadly described the plot doesn’t sound much better than your typical telenovela (or whatever the Italian equivalent is).

Lazotti worked as an assistant director for both Ettore Scola and Dino Risi but has not been able to siphon any of the cinematic aptitude from those old Italian masters.  Up to this point he has spent a majority of his career making television series and it is plainly apparent in both the look and feel of his film.  Not that television series are of an inherently lesser quality than cinema — just that they are often of lesser creativity.  Everything seems flat on television, which can be understood when one considers that broadcasting is reaching for as broad an audience as possible.  Lazotti has made a medium-neutral work that would more deserve to be on Rai TV rather than the Rai Cinema that produced it.