Berlin Blues

By Tony Rayns

Berlin used to be the least risk-taking of the major European festivals. Back when the city was still politically divided, its programming—and prize-giving—always had détente in mind. Political balance ruled, and the humanist rhetoric never ended. And even when programmers did stick their necks out, it was only in the most stereotypically German way: flirtations with gay porn in the Panorama, six-hour minimalist slogs in the Forum. Things are a little different now, of course, but Berlin has made heavier weather than its peers of the adjustment to modern programming. The strains have been particularly obvious in the Forum’s evolving sense of its role.

The International Forum of New Cinema was founded in 1971, a product of the same wave of opposition to mainstream and establishment culture which produced the exactly contemporary Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes and the Rotterdam Film Festival. Its role was initially clearly defined: it came into being to champion, promote and promulgate the various kinds of filmmaking which had no place in the Official Competition—that is, the independent, the political, the counter cultural, and the avant garde. The inaugural event included a selection of prime antecedents (L’âge d’or [1930], La vie est à nous [1936], films by Vertov, Medvedkin, etc) plus new work by Straub/Huillet, Oshima, Angelopoulos, Chris Marker, Makavejev, and Alexander Kluge, amongst many others. The political stance was overt but admirably undogmatic: space was found for David Larcher’s lengthy acid diary Mares Tail, Uwe Brandner’s gay Heimatfilm I Love You, I Kill You, and several more misfits.

In those heady days, it was relatively easy to sense what types of filmmaking would “belong” in the Forum. Virtually all the more interesting developments in auteur film, in documentary, in activist film and in formally and conceptually innovative film lay beyond the pale of the Official Competition. The same, of course, was true in Cannes and Venice, both of which had also been disrupted in the wake of the Paris événements of 1968. But it took very few years for the Quinzaine in Cannes to turn into a clone of the Competition (the two frequently competed for the very same titles), while the Forum —like Rotterdam—has remained surprisingly faithful to its founding principles, even as its scale has expanded and its spectrum broadened to embrace what Manny Farber used to call “termite art.”

In both Cannes and Berlin, the competition organizers eventually fought back against the Quinzaine and the Forum by launching their own parallel sections. Cannes wrestled with such atrocities as “Les yeux fertiles” before settling on “Un Certain Regard,” and the section’s relative adventurousness in programming non-mainstream work (such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours a couple of years ago) may have played some part in pushing the Quinzaine towards bland, middle-class dreck. No such problem arose in Berlin, where the festival administration hired former Forum mainstay Manfred Salzgeber (recently returned from a sojourn in New York) to create the Panorama 20 years ago. The late Salzgeber’s chief interest was clearly in creating a home for lesbian and gay filmmaking, but for reasons best known to himself he also allowed the Panorama to become a dumping ground for rejects from the Competition—thereby quickly cementing its enduring reputation as an anthology of mediocrity. This left the field clear for the Forum to maintain its commitment to alternative cinemas.

The Forum’s problem is that “alternative” no longer means what it meant in 1971, and its attempts to explore the world of “new alternatives” have been less than sure-footed. Its program hit some kind of nadir in 2004, when a scattering of orthodox Forum choices (some of them decent, such as Jem Cohen’s Chain, Pan Jianlin’s Good Morning Beijing, and Zhu Wen’s South of the Clouds) sat alongside such wretched mistakes as Johnnie To and Wai Kar-Fai’s Running on Karma, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs III, and Ann Hui’s Goddess of Mercy. The choice of Miike Takashi’s One Missed Call was particularly instructive: the Forum finally “discovers” Miike nine years late, having ignored all of his groundbreaking and genuinely radical movies, and promptly screens one of his worst and most derivative, a feeble clone of Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998).

By that measure, the 2005 selection was a triumph: there were only a couple of lousy Asian pop-genre movies (Wong Ching-Po’s execrable gangster fantasia Jiang Hu— why screen this when they didn’t choose his much more defensible indie feature Fu Bo last year?—and Uchida Tomu’s inexpressibly tedious The Mad Fox from 1962) and most of the program represented a return to core Forum values. But there were still some grave mistakes. Alexander Shapiro’s Guidebook (Ukraine) gave me the worst two hours I’ve spent in the movies in several years. It’s a juvenile “psychedelic” mess which purports to provide an insider’s guide to “the real Kiev” through a series of crudely improvised conversations; the Forum’s catalogue note quotes the director’s own description of his efforts, including scenes conspicuously absent from the film itself—which inevitably suggests that no one had actually seen it before inflicting it on audiences. Or Nakagawa Yosuke’s hopeless Starlit High Noon (Japan), a footling hitman romance which comprises the dregs left when you extract all the protein and nutrients from Miike’s minor classic Rainy Dog, a movie the Forum somehow overlooked in 1997.

Every programming team makes mistakes, and as a part-time festival programmer myself I’m certainly not in any position to cast the first stone. But these Forum mistakes raise some interesting questions about policy and role. I know next to nothing about the current state of Ukrainian culture, so should I take Shapiro’s film as a measure of how low things have sunk? Can I assume that the Forum preferred Guidebook over other potential choices from Ukraine? Or did they stumble upon this film by chance and program it simply because it was a premiere? I would genuinely like to know. I do know something about the current state of Japanese culture, and so I can be categorically sure that Starlit High Noon represents nothing but the creative failure of the legions of filmmakers hammering on the doors of the majors, hoping to be assigned big budget, big star projects. Coming in a year which saw such remarkable Japanese indie work as Takahashi Izumi’s The Soup, One Morning, Hirosue Hiromasa’s Sayonara, Sayo-nara, Hirabayashi Isamu’s Textism, and Yamada Masafumi’s Tsuburo (this list could go on), the selection of Nakagawa’s film for the Forum seems unaccountable. Were bullshit detectors not working, or does someone actually believe that Starlit High Noon matters?

The Forum in 2005 did an excellent job in presenting current trends in Mainland Chinese cinema, both underground and overground. Liu Jiayin’s documentary-framed-as-fiction Oxhide is a quite remarkable discovery (not far off the milestone status of Jia Zhangke’s debut Xiao Wu [1997]), and the other Chinese films screened were interestingly varied and each was, in its way, successfully achieved. If the Forum can get this so right, how come it gets other areas so wrong?

Oxhide

Festival Highlights

Rotterdam
An Anorexic’s Case Against Uchida Tomo
By Quintín

Berlin
Berlin Blues
By Tony Rayns

Sundance
Crisis In Park City By Robert Koehler

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