The Berlinale premiere films “The Turin Horse” and “Sleeping Sickness” have two things in common: They both totally forgo any notion of classical ‘story,’ and they both take their sweet time. It has been written that Hollywood films move at least five times faster than real life. While there may be scenes which are in real time, the entire pace of the film should feel like it goes by five times faster than reality–every minute is at least five minutes, every hour, at least five hours.  These films lay waste to this Hollywood archetyp, they move at the pace of life, if not slower.

It’s an understatement to call ‘The Tourin Horse’ meditative: it is a second by second account of a man and his daughter’s life, somewhere in europe in the mid 19th century.  We watch a potato boil, in real time. We then watch as the two humans peel their potatoes with their hands and devour them, also in real time.  The cuts only occur when the camera cannot follow the action of the characters within frame any longer–I would say the whole 2 hour film consists of no more than ten or eleven takes.  Indeed, the cinematography in Turin Horse is breathtaking; shot entire in black and white, the film brings to mind Bergman, but darker and more morose–the images are so bare bones we cannot help but to examine every piece of them, every minute detail.  This can, at its best, be meditative and somewhat beautiful.

Tourin Horse is, as my colleague Ben has already noted, minimalist at its most absolute.  Would I recommend it? Oddly yes, but only to those with extreme patience and a love for black and white photography and the mundanities of every day life of peasants in the 19th century.  If thats your bag, this film is the masterpiece youve been waiting for.

Sleeping Sickness somehow violated my taste for story even more.  I have rarely had such distate for a film: terrible acting, irredemable cinematography, and a pace so slow a tortoise could walk a mile before the film shows a trace of exciements, intruige or entertainment, this is the worst film I saw at the festival.  While the Tourin Horse moved at the pace of life, there was still something fascinating, exciting in watching the characters go about their rituals, over and over again.  In sleeping sickness its just damn slow.

Those who liked it (my festival friends included) might claim that being “enjoyable” was not what the movie was about.  It was about being immersed within the scenes, in Cameroon, and giving us a sense of place and time.  However, I got absolutelz none of this from teh film–I learned nothing revealing at all about the life of a French doctor in Cameroon, nor anything about the life of the people of Cameroon themselves.  And if there is not an ounce of revealing human observation, or even interest in a film, then there must be something else that makes it worth while.  To me this film had nothing of worth.

Although there were several frustrating technical difficulties (caused by the cinema) I did enjoy Scenes from the Suburbs, however it was by no means my favorite short of the night. Instead it was Stick Climbing, an Austrian and Swiss production, which struck a nerve with me. The film is 14 minutes long and consists of one shot, filmed entirely from a person’s POV. However, one never sees the person, it has if one is viewing the film through his eyes. Lastly, there is no dialogue over the course of the entire short.

Here’s the plot: A man walks through a village and follows a path into the woods. What initially appears to be a harmless stroll, changes dramatically when the camera zooms upwards and shows the person standing in front an enormous rock face (a mountain at a ninety degree angle to the ground). There are two thin wooden poles attached to the rock face, which the protagonist holds on to to treacherously climb up the mountain. The higher he climbs the heavier his breathing becomes. The camera begins to shake with an increasing frequency. At one point he loses his grip on the wooden poles and nearly falls off the mountain. Finally, the protagonist reaches the top and turns around to showcase a breathtaking view of the village.

Stick Climbing leaves the audience with more questions than answers. How was this film shot? With a hand-held camera? Or with the camera attached to the protaganist’s head? Since the short only consists of one 14 minute shot, how many takes were there? What was the security risk involved with climbing the mountain? When the protagonist nearly falls off the rock face, was this actually a death-threatening situation? It is this uncertainty, which makes Stick Climbing such a intense and thrilling experience.

Taking a break from all of the premieres and movies that won’t be shown in the US until later this year, we decided to hit up the Ingmar Bergman retrospective that’s going on for the entirety of the festival.  I don’t know exactly why they’re doing a Bergman retrospective–he died in 2007 on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni and hasn’t been in the news recently–but it’s been really great getting to see his lesser-known works that aren’t The Seventh Seal/Wild Strawberries/Autumn Sonata/etc.

Today Shea and I went to go see Music in Darkness, a little-seen seminal Bergman film from 1948 that concerns a musician, serving in the army, who is blinded and almost killed by friendly fire during a routine military drill.  Thematically, the film has a lot in common with En La Ardiente Oscuridad (1950), a play about a group of blind people living in a center for the blind together, and it tells a decent story.  The musician, after he becomes blind, gets involved with a lower-class woman, and the blindness metaphors get a bit heavy from then on.  It’s fairly easy to spot the themes and ideas that Bergman would come back later to in far superior films, such as the Virgin Spring, but Music in Darkness still absolutely feels like a minor work in the Bergman filmography.

One other aspect of the film which stood out was the amazing dream sequence at the beginning of the film that makes excellent use of double exposures and matting to craft a series of images that rival the beginning of Wild Strawberries.  And while not as ambitious as the beginning of 8 1/2, this again makes the case that Bergman did dream sequences better than anyone, including Fellini.  I look forward to seeing more of Bergman’s films during our last few days at the festival–it’s always exciting to see the early work of a genius/master and be reminded that everyone is still human.

Lollipop Monster, the first film by Ziska Riemann, is a completely nuts and off-the-wall story about two teenager girls, distraught in very different ways, who come together and forge a friendship based on rebellion, anger, violence, and mutual respect/love for one another.  The two main actresses, Jella Haase and Sarah Horvath, manage to infuse somewhat stereotypical characters with entirely unique personalities and senses of humor.  Like most great comedies, the film balances precariously on the line between hilarious and very screwed up.  That it manages to do so in a story filled with mostly unredeeming, horrible people is a testament to the strength of the two lead performers who create an entirely believable and truthful friendship.

The film takes risks everywhere from its story to its cinematography and sound.  There is a very random but extremely funny Japanese pop song, being played on a TV by two bizarre performers, that takes over the story for a small section.  Riemann crafts a perfect balance in the color temperature between the blue, cool household and life of Oona, the more morose of the two, and the bright, exuberant, candy-red home of Ariane.  The end of the film could have verged on the unrealistic and melodramatic, and almost does, but everything that has been set up for the previous hour and a half makes the final confrontation not only inevitable, but extremely relieving.

Lollipop Monster never takes itself too seriously and that’s where its strengths lie: in its ability to laugh at itself and simply tell a really, really good story.  Definitely the most fun that I’ve had at the festival so far.

Granted, it’s a clichéd question, and I know one can easily respond: “a great film is whatever the viewer feels is great.” I understand that there is no broad definition for what “great” art is and that the experience of all art is inherently subjective (that’s what makes art art).  One may also comment that all art inherently has worth, and that there is no reason to place value rankings on any piece of art—leaving out my own art biases and tastes, I tend to agree with this in theory.  

That being said, we must take into account that many of us read subjective film reviews for a reason, and that certain films are globally popular while others remain shrouded in darkness no matter the heaps of critical acclaim and cult status they receive.  Of course, the reasons for these phenomena are too many to list here.  

Instead, as a film lover and filmmaker and for the purposes of a digestible blog post, I’d like to take this time to briefly:

1. Dissect my own personal tastes and preconceptions of “great cinema” and, more broadly, “great art,” and…
2. Discuss how these tastes and preconceptions (specifically related to pleasure fulfillment) have been challenged at the Berlinale film fest.

Like much of the world, I’ve been watching primarily Hollywood films my whole life.  My real foray into international cinema has been relatively recent, besides the odd couple of foreign hits that get distribution in the U.S. primarily because of their similarity to Hollywood formula films.  My history of movie watching clearly makes my answer to this question extremely U.S.-syncratic, as I think most of the world’s movie-going population is (except perhaps India).  This trend may could certainly be changing, as it becomes cheaper to make movies and easier to distribute them locally at home.

As Hollywood is fond of saying, a great “story” makes a great film; I think my taste for cinema is largely based around this precept.  I would consider the classical story arch to be the basic foundation of what makes 95% of U.S. films.  Now of course, we can ask: what is story?  For now I’m just going to assume we’re on the same page for what I mean by “story,” although I’m sure it can have many interpretations:  in short I’ll say that it involves conflict, progression and change for characters (whether human or otherwise) over a stretch of time (whether linear or non-linear).

My general preconception for the last five years, pre-Berlinale has been: it’s pretty damn hard for the director, cinematographer, or actors to make up for a “bad story.”  In this Hollywood preconception was: you can make a 90-minute film about a person reading a newspaper, or doing laundry, but beauty (whether cinematographically and otherwise) and great acting can’t save it.  It’s going to suck.  Why? Because there’s no story, in a Hollywood, and I guess classical way—there’s no conflict or chance for internal change for the characters on screen.  

I think this is usually what we Americans (perhaps I should I just stick with the subjective I) mean when we call a film “boring,” whether conscious of it or not: there is no conflict that has the possibility to induce internal change to the character on screen.   As American screenwriters love to claim, when we see no possibility for conflict within 10 minutes, we begin to lose interest.

For reasons far beyond my mental capacity at the moment / the scope of this post, conflict and internal character change gives me pleasure, specifically when that conflict is “resolved” at the end of the so-called story.  I’m not going to make a blanket statement about human psychology, but this is probably true for all Western filmgoers.  Of course, the “resolving” can be for the “better” or for the “worse” (again, these value judgments are all culture/place specific). And as we all know, happy endings, endings where conflicts are resolved and characters change for the “better,” are widely more favored by the majority of U.S. movie focus groups, and thus probably by the majority Americans.  I’m not sure if I get more pleasure out of “happy” endings or “sad” ones, but I certainly get pleasure out of seeing conflict created and resolved.   Whether this is strictly due to my Hollywood preconceptions or to some aspect of universal human psychology has yet to be tested—hopefully some day it will.

Now on to the films themselves:

Two high profile movies at this festival, the German “Sleeping Sickness” and the Hungarian “The Turin Horse” both intensely challenged my preconceptions for what I what “good cinema” is, if not at least for what I find pleasurable and fulfilling about watching movies. Did they change them? I’m not sure. Stay tuned to hear my reviews of each film, a continued query of why some of us like and don’t like certain movies and whether audience “pleasure” is mutually exclusive with great filmmaking.

So here’s the plot: Vienna, 1939. Victor Kaufmann (Moritz Bleibtreu) is a Jewish owner of a gallery and best friends with Rudi Smekal (George Friedrich). Rudi is not Jewish. After the Anschluss, Rudi joins the SS. He then betrays Victor and the rest of the Kaufmann family, which results in their deportation to a concentration camp. Shortly before the family is deported, the Nazis confiscate an original Michelangelo painting, which has been in the Kaufmanns’ possession for decades, for themselves. A few years later the heads of the Nazi Party decide to give the painting to Il Duce as a present, however it turns out that it is a fake. The Kaufmanns are still in possession of the original.

Rudi’s ordered to remove Victor from the concentration camp in order to interrogate him concerning the location of the original painting. Rudy and Victor travel by plane to the interrogation hearing, the plane crashes and only the two of them survive. Using some cunning trickery (although it appears that Rudy is pretty dumb as well) Victor convinces Rudy to switch clothes, so that Victor is wearing the SS Uniform and Rudy is clothed in the concentration camp garb. Suddenly, a group of Nazi soldiers find the two of them. Since the soldiers do not know Rudy personally, they believe that Victor is the SS officer, while Rudy appears to be the Jewish prisoner. Victor quickly picks up on the soldier’s misperception and presents Rudy as his prisoner to them. The roles are suddenly reversed and Victor tries to use his new status to save himself and his family from the Nazis.

The press packet for Mein Bester Feind describes the film as a tragic comedy. In my opinion the attempt to equally combine both elements of tragedy and comedy is the reason for the film’s downfall. The tone of the movie is far too inconsistent. For the first 45 minutes there is virtually no comedy (I remember laughing once, at a fairy inappropriate moment, during that first chunk of time). The story of the best friend’s betrayal and the family’s deportation to a concentration camp are particularly depressing.

However, when Rudy and Victor switch clothes, the tone of film suddenly changes from dark and somber to upbeat and comedic. I did laugh quite frequently after this point, however this was not without my conscience questioning the legitimacy of my laughter. From the moment the film begins the audience internalizes the film’s somber mood  and tone. When the tone suddenly changes it’s as if the director is asking the audience to forget what happened in the first part of the film. But of course this isn’t possible. Thus it’s logical that the comedy in Mein Bester Feind is not without a guilty conscience, because it’s very difficult to neglect the context in which the comedy takes place.

In an interview with the director (Wolf Murnberger), Murnberger states that it was impossible for the Mein Bester Feind to entirely be a comedy because of the setting in which it takes place (The Third Reich). I strongly disagree on this point. Films like The Producers, To Be Or Not To Be or Mein Führer prove that comedies, even if they might be in bad taste, can exist in this dark setting. The trailer for Mein Bester Feind proves this as well. The trailer’s tone is very straightforward, it is humorous and upbeat. If one saw the trailer before seeing the film, one would expect that Mein Bester Feind is a pure comedy. However, as stated previously, this is not the case.

Here’s what happens when you’re in a foreign country with friends and none of you have a phone: it’s the ’90s again, guys.  After waking up at 6 AM, getting our tickets for tomorrow (including Tax Driver with Paul Schrader!  And a talk at 11 with Paul Schrader!) coming home and taking a much-needed nap, I woke up to find two of my compadres gone and an email in my inbox saying that they hoped to meet me in front of the theater at 4:40 and if either of the groups didn’t make it, well…too bad.  Luckily I’ve gotten pretty good at seeing a name on a map and connecting it to the label on a train, even if I can’t understand half of the letters (a monkey could get around this city better than I can), and we met up just in time for the 5 PM screening of Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse.  I’m very glad that it all came through.

Let me preface this by saying that The Turin Horse screening that we went to was in Hungarian with only German subtitles, meaning that there was no way to understand what was going on, dialogue/voice-over wise.  In spite of this, the film was so good and gave me so much enjoyment, along with the fact that it was so lean and economical that there is hardly any dialogue at all, so we didn’t really miss out on much, that I entirely enjoyed the full 146 hour minute run time.  The film did have the most walk-outs of any movie that we’ve seen at the festival, however.

If there’s one overly-simplistic and cliche description that I could use to describe the majority of films at the 2011 Berlinale, it would be “minimalistic.”  Putting aside any notions of Hollywood films and expectations that American viewers can have, these past few days have shown me more scenes and films which appear to go nowhere and are almost unfathomably sparse compared to what I expect out of a film.

In The Turin Horse, which seems to be a far less funny Samuel Beckett by way of Tarkovsky and Bergman, Bela Tarr shows us six days in the life of an elderly Hungarian man who lives with his grown daughter and their horse in a ramshackle house on what appears to be a grassy plain that is constantly being hammered by wind.  The opening shot of the movie is enigmatic–the camera bobs up and down and forward and back as it follows the older man as he rides his horse and tawdry carriage along a road.  Typical of Tarr’s other films in which he uses extremely long takes, the shot sets up the rest of the movie perfectly and surmises everything that we have to know about the horse and the man.  While we don’t get to learn much, if anything, about the man and his daughter, the pure excellence of the filmmaking as well as the authenticity of the period makes the movie a riveting, albeit slow, watch.  This also isn’t Au Hasthard Balthaszar–we don’t learn anything about the horse, even its name, and it has very little horse-y functions apart from the opening shot.

Fans of Tarr’s earlier films, especially Wreckmeister Harmonies, will likely find The Turin Horse, his last film, entirely worthy of their time and energy.  Others may find the repetitiveness and stark combination of black and white photography and one single musical piece repeated over and over a bit daunting.  Seeing the film again with English subtitles may change my impression of it slightly, but it’s clearly a good indicator that what was essentially a silent film was so compelling.  If The Turin Horse gets distribution in your country, I would definitely recommend that you buy a ticket.

Viewing Context: On Sunday Aaron and I realized that we were the only ones that had tickets to Fjellet (I don’t know either), aka The Mountain. After much sprinting and confusion through Berlin streets, the U-Bahn, and a quick stop for some currywurst, we got into the theater just in time to get the last two seats far off to the side and directly in front of the screen. Before the movie started, the manager of the theater invited Ole Giæver, the director, to come up and say a few words. After telling Giæver that he had “nice style” for “wearing a tie” and has heard that “men often wear ties, yes?”, we were treated to a few words, the only ones which I remember being “I hope everyone has a nice movie.”

Review time!
The movie got off to an excellent start–it’s extremely minimalistic with only one location (guess what it is?) and two lead female characters. No flashbacks with children or previous happy times to be found here…with a great sense of atmosphere, amazing scenery and cinematography, and very little dialogue, the movie reminded my buddy and me of a Terrence Malick film. Eventually, though, the impetus for the characters’ journey is revealed, and from then on it’s mostly just watching two people walk through the snow and argue. This was fine for the first 45 minutes, but got a bit tedious after a while. There are still some great moments in the movie, and the two leads are incredible, but I’m glad that it ended up being a pretty brisk 75 minutes total. I would definitely recommend Fjellet–it’s the type of patient movie that isn’t made often anymore and is a wonderful example of great filmmaking and acting (that was done in only 12 days!)

More Context:
I’ll end this by saying that the last question from the Q&A after the movie came from an elderly woman who basically took the mic and said “I didn’t understand why the characters were so mad at each other…..I was very confused for the first part….I didn’t like it I think….I was very confused….just wanted to say that……” I don’t really see a question in there but whatever. The director said that that was their intention and I think that it paid off very well.

Coming soon: Review of Lollipop Monster (And The Future probably)

-Ben

‘Pina,’ Wim Wenders documentary about acclaimed dancer Pina Bausch, is the greatest dance film I’ve ever seen.  I’ve never seen a film about dance, so this isn’t saying much, but Pina’s dance scenes are far more cinematic than I’ve ever thought a live filming of a dance concert could be.  Indeed, had I not known this was simply footage of a live concert, I would have thought that Wenders staged the entire thing.  The camera is given full access to the show, and close-ups and sweeping camera moves make the dance feel like a silent film crafted from scratch.

The dancing itself–there are a few side pieces in the film, and one main piece–is wonderfully primal.  There is no semblence of modern life in the piece, only a struggle between humans, men and women, for one piece of red cloth.  This is the ‘plot’ of the film if there is one–the red cloth seems to contain power, and the men and women scantily clad in primitive clothes, fight over it.  Wenders enhances the drama of the dance through his directing, and brings out tension and some serious powerful cinematic moments–all in a live dance.