This essay was originally published at Filmmaker: Dispatch 1, Dispatch 2, Dispatch 3.
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Dispatch 1
Two days into my first trip to Berlin, I haven’t quite got my bearings yet—for the physical landscape of the fest or for the sprawling program, which includes more than 340 films from 71 countries. Along with being a milestone year for the Berlinale (the 70th), this is also the 50th anniversary of Forum, the festival’s program of boundary-pushing work, and the first edition under the co-leadership of Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian. Rissenbeek joined the fest after nearly four decades in the German film industry; Chatrian moved to Berlin from Locarno, where he’d served in a similar role since 2014. In a recent New York Times profile, both describe the increasingly popular dual-leadership model, or doppelspitze, as a more productive division of labor. For Chatrian the daily work of curation, which this year involved watching more than 800 films for consideration, “would not have been possible if I had 10 meetings a day like Mariette.”
I began the fest in a sleep-deprived fugue, which only enhanced the experience of watching Raul Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, a surrealist fantasy about a man (Rubén Sotoconil) reckoning with his wife’s suicide. Haunted by her spirit—and, most disturbingly, by images of her wigs skittering across the floor—he is driven to ultimate despair himself, at which point the film breaks in half. For the remaining 30 minutes, nearly all of the earlier footage and spoken dialogue is revisited in reverse, like an extended visit to the Red Room in Twin Peaks, eventually winding its way back to the opening image of a partially obstructed view of his wife’s body on the floor. “Let’s say we killed you because you were killing us, Darling,” the man laments in voiceover.
Intended as Ruiz’s debut, the material for The Tango of the Widower was shot in 1967, but because of a lack of funding he was unable to complete the soundtrack and, so, moved on to a new project, the award-winning Three Sad Tigers (1968), which launched his career. Following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, Ruiz was forced into exile and left the footage behind, where it remained untouched until 2016, when it was rediscovered in the basement of a theater in Santiago de Chile. Sarmiento, a filmmaker herself and Ruiz’s widow and longtime editor, commissioned lip-readers to reconstruct the dialogue, which she then recorded and added to the mix in a style that recalls the bewilderingly intimate, subjective voice of Andrei Tarkovsky’s non-synch soundtracks. The fundamentally split nature of the film—one reasonable reading is that the widower is the suicide, that the wigs are his own—is reflected even in the closing titles, which list all major credits in two columns, one for the 1967 production, one for the 2019 reconstruction. Clumsy but energetic, The Tango of the Widower is impressive for its ambitions. At 27 Ruiz was already uninhibited with his camera and eager to film our most private dreams.
The Tango of the Widower screened in Forum, which is likewise looking back to its origins while remaking itself in real time. Now under the directorship of film critic and writer Cristina Nord, Forum has since its founding in 1971 been curated independently by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. For its 50th anniversary edition, Forum is revisiting 25 films from its first lineup (more to come in a future post), in addition to 35 new films in the main lineup and nearly 40 films and installations in Forum Expanded.
Judging by the first two days of Forum screenings, one guiding curatorial principle for Nord and her team is diversity of formal practice. The Calming, like Song Fang’s feature debut, Memories Look at Me (2012), is tasteful and contemplative to a fault—aesthetic whiplash following Ruiz’s histrionics. Xi Qi stars as Lin, a 30-something filmmaker struggling to recover from a recent breakup. When we first meet her, she’s in Japan, overseeing the installation of a new gallery show. Over dinner with a mutual friend she becomes reacquainted with a Japanese woman played by Makiko Watanabe, and the tone of the film lifts suddenly, suggesting a shift toward more natural performances and the possibility of a new relationship. It’s a wonderful scene. Speaking in English, Watanabe and Xi seem to be improvising, or at least working with some amount of freedom, as their chat veers close to flirtation.
However, when Lin leaves Japan, the tone reverts back to staged, suffocating quiet. Song, who played the film student in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), is working here in the mode of Hou’s Café Lumiere (2003), using Lin as a surrogate wanderer and observer of the world. We watch as Lin watches—through car windows, from passing trains, balconies, and the sterile vantage of her bed. Often that perspective is stunningly beautiful, but an hour into The Calming, I’d given up all hopes of an Apitchatpong-like splintering of the narrative or anything approaching transgression. As I said, the film is tasteless to a fault—like the art-directed fantasies of a Pottery Barn catalog.
James Benning returned to Forum with Maggie’s Farm, which consists of 24 static shots collected in and around the California Institute of the Arts, where Benning has taught since 1987. The first eight images are of trees and tall grass, and of the parking lots and hillside surrounding the campus; the second eight are of hallways, stairwells, and classroom spaces; the final eight are of the surfaces of buildings, outdoor industrial storage containers, and a loading dock; all are unpeopled, except on a few occasions when someone is heard passing through off-screen space or when Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt drop in via the soundtrack.
As has always been the case with Benning’s films, that kind of dry, point-by-point description of his formal strategy drifts toward spoiler territory. Part of the pleasure of each new film is discovering the rules of the game. Maggie’s Farm, like so much of his work, is autobiographical—as we’re granted access to his particular perspective, painted by his particular taste—but this one has the tone of a valedictory. While I haven’t heard any official word of Benning retiring from CalArts, the film’s title suggests leaving some kind of work behind. The space where he has taught for more than three decades is populated with trash cans, dented water fountains, sloping trees, and cinder block walls that Benning’s flat DV images elevate into Mondrianesque balance and tension. (The middle section of the film reminded me of my college years, when I worked as a janitor and would quietly explore the same empty hallways and classrooms five evenings a week.) The final shot is of the top of the cab of a blue pickup truck parked in front of a slatted, deep-red wall. It’s a stunning image, timestamped by the falling ash from recent wildfires—an ending that returns to the beginning.
Dispatch 2
At the risk of being canceled, I’ll admit that in the days since I watched The Salt of Tears, I’ve found myself wondering, “Who will make films like this when Philippe Garrel is gone?” (The best answer I’ve heard so far: Louis Garrel.) By “this” I mean a stereotypically oh-so-French comedy with an existential bent. Or a season in the life of a dour-faced, impoverished young artist who beds every beautiful woman he meets and is too young and too myopic to realize he’s a gaping asshole. Or the story of a boy who loved, disappointed and mourns for his father. Or the perspective of an aging man who, to quote another now-aging man, wishes he knew what he knows now when he was younger. At the very least, I will miss the precision of Garrel’s and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière’s attacks. After the hero of The Salt of Tears cancels a rendezvous with one woman because a last-minute change of plans forces him to remain at home with another, they mock his stupid anger in ironic voiceover: “He felt his cowardice had benefited Genevieve without him deciding it.” Who will write that line two decades from now?
I suspect The Salt of Tears is the film we will most often point to when we discuss “late Garrel.” It’s a catalog of the director’s recent preoccupations and formal moves—among them widescreen black and white cinematography and joyous, kinetic dance sequences—all working to the best effect since Regular Lovers (2005). Logann Antuofermo is Luc, a provincial carpenter who, after years of apprenticing under his beloved, aging father (André Wilms), travels to Paris to interview for a position in the prestigious École Boulle and, while there, picks up Djemila (Oulaya Amamra). They meet cute, while waiting for a bus, which is an opportunity for Garrel to do what he does better than anyone: getting young actors to show the nervous excitement of first attractions. While Antuofermo and Amamra stand side by side on the bus, not quite touching, Garrel cuts away briefly from the two-shot to a stranger sitting a few feet away, our surrogate witness to what can only be described as a spark between two impossibly charismatic performers.
I’m too new to Berlin to step into the debate over whether The Salt of Tears should be in the competition; I’ll add only that it is among my favorites of the eight competition films I’ve seen. That Garrel’s signature views on the sentimental educations of young men can now seem out of date doesn’t erase the exactness and wisdom in his filmmaking. The Salt of Tears ends suddenly, like a shot, after Luc delivers a line that I can imagine Garrel carrying with him since Maurice Garrel died a decade ago. It’s a wrecking ball of a line that destroys, in surrealist fashion, the possibility of this particular movie continuing to exist for even one more frame. The ending works only because of the filmmaking choices leading up to it, including a rare (for Garrel) and deeply merciful close-up of one of the actors and the unusual decision to leave the camera on a person who is delivering bad news rather than the person who is receiving it. It’s quite a feat—I don’t know of another director who could imagine the sequence, let alone pull it off.
Garrel’s problematic fixations seem quaint compared with those on display in another of my favorite competition selections, Abel Ferrara’s Siberia. In his official press notes, Ferrara reports that after making Pasolini (2014) he began collecting “crazy images” of an isolated wilderness, putting the ideas to paper as they visited him not in hopes of creating a typical screenplay but as the necessary next step toward discovering something more elemental in his filmmaking. “I have a great appetite for what cinema can be,” he writes. The result is Ferrara’s Mirror (Tarkovsky) or his Tree of Life (Malick) or possibly his L’Intrus (Denis)—an unshackled, shameless purging of the id. Siberia is rescued from laughable absurdity by Ferrara’s filmmaking, which is as moment-to-moment thrilling as any I’ve experienced so far at the fest. (To be clear, I’m in the minority opinion here; much of the press audience indeed found the film laughably absurd.)
Willem Dafoe returns as Ferrara’s alter ego, this time playing a loner named Clint, whose days are spent serving drinks in a remote, snow-covered cabin. Almost immediately, the narrative is interrupted by visions of violence and impossible shifts in perspective that suggest dream logic—a critical cliché that, in this particular instance, is essential. A Russian woman sits at the bar before transforming into an erotic embodiment of motherhood. Her babushka sips vodka and whispers untranslated secrets before mutating into a nightmarish creature on the floor. Or, at least, I think it’s the same old woman in both images. As in dreams, the transformations are often associative: that old woman later becomes another old woman, and both are somehow also Clint’s mother. Dafoe is game for it all, as usual, slipping into capital-s Symbolic disguises and declaiming self-aware lines like, “The only thing I’m guilty of is loving you too much.” Siberia will likely end up sitting alongside Showgirls and other films of the Campy But Deadly Serious sub-genre. Its devotees will be a small but enthusiastic crowd.
The most mysterious competition film I’ve seen is Undine, Christian Petzold’s retelling of a myth in which a hopeless man stands at the edge of a lake that is hidden deep in a forest and calls forth a mystical sprite who will love him forever with only one condition: if he betrays her, she must drown him with her tears and return to the water. We meet Undine (Paula Beer) at one such moment of betrayal. In the opening shot, as she learns that her lover is leaving for another woman, Petzold frames Beer in close up, which signals the director’s first crucial intervention. Rather than telling one more story of a desperate man destroyed by love, he shifts the tale to Undine’s perspective and imagines a scenario in which she chooses to resist her nature, as it’s been written by generations of male mythmakers, and break the curse. More simply, Petzold gives Undine agency.
For 25 years, Petzold has been perfecting his unique brand of genre-adjacent filmmaking that blends the pleasures of classical Hollywood cinema with whip-smart socio-political analysis. In his previous film, Transit (2018), he transposed World War II refugee crises and police crackdowns onto 21st-century Europe. In Undine, he reunites the stars of that film, Beer and Franz Rogowski, and tries with less success to repeat the trick, throwing them into a fairy tale world tethered awkwardly to everyday reality. I’m not convinced it works. For example, Undine is a contract tour guide at the Senate Administration for Urban Development, where she lectures on the history of Berlin as she leads visitors through a room of maps and large-scale models at the Berlin City Museum. That Berlin was built on swamps and has a long tradition of demolishing its past resonates with the myth but in fairly schematic ways. The lecture scenes, like too many of Undine’s narrative turns, will be of great interest to academic discussions of Petzold’s work, but they lack the tense coherence of his best films.
Dispatch 3
On the shuttle from the airport into Berlin I snapped some pictures as we passed Brandenburg Gate, Victory Column and the Television Tower. My hotel was just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, so several times a day, as I made my way to and from Potsdamer Platz, I would walk over the brick-drawn lines in the sidewalk that mark the former location of the Berlin Wall. East into west, west into east—that and a meal with friends at Stadtklause, the pub where Bruno S. would perform with his accordion, satisfied whatever interest I had in playing tourist. Except for taking a few short subway rides to find better restaurants, I was content to stay in the main festival area, where the press offices are a two-minute walk from three screening venues and The Barn, a first-rate coffee shop and meeting spot.
The Berlinale, I realized fairly quickly, is something like my ideal film festival, mostly because the program balances its lineup of important premieres with expertly curated sidebars. In North America we tend to draw a line between those two worlds, relegating repertory programming to a few key institutions in our major cities and adopting everywhere else a generic approach to festival curation that amounts, with varying degrees of success and ambition, to showing the best new films we can get. There are practical reasons for the situation, including the scarcity of curatorial expertise and the lack of access to public funding and film projection. Regional organizations are also burdened by keeping up with the Joneses, choosing to simply adopt the good-enough model that appears to be working in peer cities. Still, it’s a major loss for North American film culture. Without the counter-balance of older films and older forms—without the tangible presence of cinema history and the conversations and experiences it engenders—our festivals too often celebrate trends and ephemera.
As I mentioned in my first dispatch, the Forum celebrated its 50th anniversary this year by re-presenting its inaugural program. Forum was born out of a controversy at the 1970 Berlinale, when jury president George Stevens demanded that Michael Verhoeven’s anti-war film o.k. be removed from competition. No compromise could be reached, so the competition was canceled, no prizes were awarded and in the aftermath, the festival board invited Friends of the German Film Archive (now Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art) to present a separate, independent festival alongside the Berlinale. Erika and Ulrich Gregor, who co-founded Friends of the German Film Archive in 1963, agreed to a budget and set about curating a program of “difficult, dangerous films.” (Critic Bert Rebhandl recently moderated a conversation between Erika and Ulrich Gregor, Christoph Terhechte, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Birgit Kohler, and Cristina Nord, who tell the full story.) The 28 titles screened in Forum 50 indeed include radical work of the day by Theo Angelopoulos, Nagisa Ōshima, Alexander Kluge, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, Dušan Makavejev, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, alongside Happiness (Alexandr Medvedkin, 1935) and Obsession (Luchino Visconti, 1943).
Designing a screening schedule is an overlooked skill in programming, so I want to tip my hat to whomever scheduled The Murder of Fred Hampton (Howard Alk, 1970), Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (William Klein, 1970), and Angela – Portrait of a Revolutionary (Yolande du Luart, 1971) on consecutive mornings, in that sequence, at the Arsenal theater. They were, for me, the highlight of the festival. Together, the three films are fascinating studies in political and rhetorical style—Hampton the fiery and charismatic young rapper, who might have preached the gospel if he’d found religion instead of revolution; Cleaver the kind-eyed politician/convict, who speaks slowly and in measured, perfectly articulated sentences; and Davis the philosopher/teacher, who is as quick to laugh with students as she is to call out frisbee-tossing hippies for their shameful lack of commitment to the struggle. “What are we celebrating?” she asks them with exhausted disdain.
I’ve seen clips of Hampton, Cleaver, and Davis over the years, but the films include long sequences of public speeches and private interviews that allow time for us to watch their minds at work and to experience in our bodies their control of rhythm and tempo. Du Luart and her crew followed Carter for several months, so we witness her sometimes awkward transformation from a high-achieving student of Adorno and Marcuse into the role of revolutionary icon. Of the three, Hampton was the finest improviser, a true genius at the game, who was fueled by genuine rage over injustice and by an ego that compelled him into the spotlight. At one rally, Hampton seems hesitant to turn over the microphone to his second in command, Bobby Rush. Hampton has the audience right where he wants them, on the edge of their pews with fists raised, answering in unison to his call-and-response. When Rush does finally take the stage, it’s immediately apparent why the FBI murdered 21-year-old Hampton. Rush’s nervous stringing together of Black Panther talking points would never stoke an uprising, but the threat posed by Hampton was real.
“We’re gonna make our deaths expensive,” Cleaver says near the end of Klein’s film. Although he in fact lived a relatively long life—long enough to become a born-again Reagan Republican!—Cleaver was sounding a common refrain of all three films: that fighting racist American imperialism at home was the most important battle in a war that extended from Oakland and Chicago to colonialist Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Cleaver, who was living in exile in Algeria at the time, is clear-eyed about their chances of overthrowing a well-armed technocracy. His politics are one step removed from the purity of Hampton’s “high on the people”/“kill the pigs” rallying cries. In the long-term struggle, “’The black community’ and ‘the white community’ become meaningless categories” for Cleaver, who questions every tool of power, even language itself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says to cheers and laughter, demonstrating in real time that when we exclude non-Oxford English Dictionary words from the discourse, we exclude people from the discourse. Within the context of a cultural event as grand as the Berlinale, that still felt difficult and dangerous.
As did Northwest Passage (1940), which screened in the Berlinale’s 33-film King Vidor retrospective and which is one of the grimmest depictions of racist imperialism I’ve ever seen. Starring Spencer Tracy as Robert Rogers, the film follows a company of soldiers during the Seven Years’ War as they paddle and trudge their way north to launch a surprise attack on a camp of Indians. Vidor replaced W.S. Van Dyke on the big-budget, Technicolor spectacle, which was conceived as the first of two films (Rogers’ Rangers don’t head off for the Northwest Passage until the final scene) before poor ticket sales caused MGM to cancel the sequel. Like John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, which was released a few months earlier by 20th Century Fox, Northwest Passage puts the full force of the Hollywood studio system behind a disturbing and expressionistic study of the trauma of war. For the first half of the film, Rogers’ pragmatic-to-a-fault leadership style seems almost kindhearted: he’s just looking out for his men and giving them the best chance of survival. But the long and gruesome battle scene, which generates none of the traditional pleasures of a war movie, and the even longer and more gruesome march back home, during which Rogers loses more than half of his men, harken more to Joseph Conrad than to other historical adventures of the day. Rogers’ patriotism, duty, and honor are all false flags. His single-minded commitment to his mission is gradually exposed as sadistic race-hatred drawn to the level of madness. Northwest Passage has the disillusioned, Herzogian worldview of the post-Vietnam era. It would have fit nicely into the 1971 Forum program.
The best of the five Vidor films I saw was Street Scene (1931), a Pre-Code adaptation of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about two days in the life of six families who share a building in New York. All of the film’s action takes place on the stoop, where they gather to escape the heat and where Mrs. Jones (Beulah Bondi in her first film role) gossips with anyone willing to suffer her bitter condescension. The main focus of her attacks is Mrs. Maurrant (Estelle Taylor), a middle-aged mother of two, who is sleeping with the milk man while her belligerent salesman husband is on the road or at the bar. Barely out of her teens, their daughter Rose (Sylvia Sidney) is already worn down by the sexual advances of her boss and by the catty accusations of her neighbors, but she finds some degree of solace from her conversations with Sam (William Collier, Jr.), the sympathetic Jewish boy next door whose father speaks mostly in Marxist aphorisms.
Street Scene is a stereotypically Lefty, Depression-era scenario. When tragedy strikes, it has the weight of inevitability because it’s happened within a social space engineered as a dialectic. All of the determining forces are confronted head on: antisemitism, xenophobia, sexism, alcoholism, violence, each a symptom of the more fundamental class divide. That Street Scene never feels like an ideological tract, even 90 years later, is testament both to Rice’s screenplay and to Vidor’s style, which arouses genuine sentiment from the relatively simple means at his disposal. All of the Vidor films I saw were projected from 35mm prints onto a massive screen at the CinemaxX, which I mention because the 25-foot-tall images amplify the effects of Vidor’s blocking—the way Rose leans against one railing of the stoop, clutching her purse in her lap and putting as much physical and symbolic space as possible between herself and her boss; or the tight shot over Sam’s shoulder as he looks up at Rose and imagines an impossible scenario where they escape together, and she nods with tender resignation.