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festivalists · 8 years ago

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At the margins

Still from Monangambee

Just like three years ago, Greg de Cuir, Jr is on a hot lead where many do not find time or courage to look at – in Berlinale's periphery. Originally published in the Serbian newspaper Politika on February 25th (No. 37102), we are happy to put out the English translation of his piece with Politika's permission.

General opinion has it that Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, commonly known as the Berlinale, is the most political of the big European film festivals (which include Cannes and Venice as well). When critics say big they usually mean high-profile feature-length fiction films, not necessarily the amount of films or even the audience size. Cannes has been notorious for its aversion to including documentary cinema, also an aversion to including films directed by women. Perhaps the same cannot be said to such an extent for Venice, but it also does not necessarily have the same level of anticipation surrounding it and the publicizing of its selections. Berlin, in contrast to these other venerable old institutions, feels democratic in its inclusion strategies, in terms of genre, format, gender, nationality, and many other qualifiers. Considering that the city itself is easily accessible and also affordable, and the result is an exciting mélange that is not only the first major stop on the European film festival calendar but also the most important – from the perspective of the cinephile, and the cinephilic film critic.

I tend to stay away from the main competition programmes of most film festivals. True resonance always lies at the margins. If one is looking for provocative, political content, maybe also a film that can contribute to building a better society, one has to move away from the blinding glare of the flash bulbs and onto more fertile terrain. This is no less true for the Berlinale. Of course, film critics have to eat too. But for some the trade is more than a vocation – it is a matter of life and death, a manner in which the world can be won. With this point of view in mind it seems hard to discount the role Berlinale plays in that struggle for a necessary cinema, a radical cinema, a cinema that cannot be easily assimilated into the market-driven motives of the larger industry. While it is true that Berlinale features an industry market, and is itself a marketplace, we might learn from studying why and how it also allows itself the space to experiment with a different cinema in the service of different motives.

Ground zero for a vibrant and relevant political cinema at Berlinale is the Forum, now in its 47th year, and which is a programme division that still carries the old descriptive for its founding principles in defense of a “young” cinema. The even younger subsidiary of the Forum is Forum Expanded, which is where I usually start my journey at every festival edition, though not necessarily where I finish it. Returning to the Forum proper, the film that made the strongest impact on me this year was SPELL REEL (2017) by the Portuguese artist Filipa César. She has been involved in a long-term archival project in Guinea-Bissau, where she and her collaborators excavate and examine moving images that documented the anti-colonial struggles and independence movements in this African country. This archival material is combined with new images of present-day citizens describing how they relate to this revolutionary past. The result is a dialectical, experimental documentary that looks to re-evaluate past artistic and social expression in the context of the present status quo. SPELL REEL is an important film made with sensitivity and productive curiosity. It is the type of film that will struggle to find a wider audience, but precisely because its struggle is concerned with building that better world, and with asking the viewer to do her part in contribution.

Forum Expanded, now in its 12th year, is where one can find medium-length and short work assembled into numbered sections. It is expanded in the sense that it often takes cinema out of the traditional movie theatre, sometimes even experimenting with cinema by other means. This section is where the Forum gives itself over completely to non-commercial work – though indeed some of these works find their value on the art market, which is not to say that such a value is mutually exclusive with a progressive social vision or interaction. Program #5, which included two medium-length works, offers a good example of the type of engaged cinema available to the attentive and active viewer at the Berlinale. JOKINEN (2016) by Laura Horelli investigates the case of a Finnish immigrant to the United States who was a Communist Party member, and who was denounced by his comrades for not expressing solidarity with oppressed African-Americans. The visual style of this video is characterized by photographs that are cut out with scissors, combined with published text that is masked with colorful cardboard paper in order to emphasize key passages. The raw elements of cinema seem to be under construction here, it is a format that invites the viewer to assemble meaning alongside the artist. This is a great example of what is usually labeled an essay film, and it includes an illuminating history lesson while contemplating such pressing issues as immigration, racism, and oppositional political activity. The second film in Program #5, THE WELFARE OF THOMÁS Ó HALLISSY (2016) by Duncan Campbell, was maybe the most visually dynamic and attractive of all that I saw at this year’s Berlinale. Widescreen black-and-white cinematography is joined with sequences derived from a 1960s documentary about rural Ireland. Campbell’s film is an anthropological investigation into the living conditions of poor Irish farmers, while also offering a self-critical assessment of its depiction of these people. Campbell is an heir to Robert Flaherty with this work. The urge to document a society on the brink of extinction can be romantic and exploitative as easily as it can be a laudable stance. It is a thin line that the film tries its best to plow.

In the broad Berlinale Shorts political content is celebrated and renewed in satisfying ways across all genres. Curated by Maike Mia Höhne, this selection deserves a claim to being the best of its kind at anyEuropean film festival. Each numbered assemblage of short work across all genres is presented on huge multiplex screens, and the programmes always play to a full house. This is indeed a rare sight – at least for these critical eyes. The energy that the diverse audiences bring into the theatre is infectious and makes for one of the truly generous and exciting environments within all of the Berlinale line-ups. Berlinale Shorts Program #3: The end is the beginning stands out as exemplary of the varied possibilities of political filmmaking and the open, sensitive curatorial strategies necessary to channel such work. THE RABBIT HUNT (2017) by Patrick Bresnan is an ethnographic portrait of a small community in the Florida countryside. The focus is on the particular method of hunting rabbits by hand that also functions as an initiation rite into manhood. In this modest yet revelatory documentary we witness an entire ecology that surrounds this practice, from the burning of the sugar cane fields that flush out the rabbits while at the same time rejuvenating the agricultural system, to the members of the community who buy and sell the animals. This leads to the understated and beautiful climax of the film: cleaning and cutting the rabbits, preparing the batter to fry them in, and the final touch of hot sauce sprinkled on top. Maybe this is an example of politically incorrect filmmaking for some, while for others it might represent a forthright and unpretentious way of life. If justice is blind, then politics are often deaf. THE RABBIT HUNT is a small masterpiece which is able to find a perfect means of expression through a maximum of simplicity.

Program #3 also included a film of immense historical importance: MONANGAMBEEE by Sarah Maldoror. This short was made in 1969 and is considered the first African film made by a woman. The work was preserved and restored by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, which is the institution also responsible for organizing Forum Expanded. Maldoror’s short is a cry for liberation in the form of a fictional love story. We see life as lived under colonial occupation, just as we see a cinema yearning to break free from the shackles of cultural domination. This is an imperfect cinema, a poor cinema, a third cinema – which is to say, an honest cinema. Again, at a time when the big European film festivals choose to ignore work by women, to even ignore large regions of the world that practise this form of cinema in earnest, Berlinale stands out for the inclusive nature of its festival politics. But it is rather a politics of critical writing and critical spectatorship that will elevate the margins to a higher plane so well deserved.

If you are a film industry professional, you can watch titles from Berlinale Panorama, Berlinale Generation, Berlinale Forum & the previous work of directors selected at Berlinale Co-Production Market on Festival Scope

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