Appointment with Berlin.

BERLINALE (BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)

BERLIN

FEBRUARY 7-17, 2008

This year's Berlinale (the 58th Berlin International Film Festival), like that of many Berlinales past, was soaked in history. Given its Cold War inception and combative orientation since then (in 1970 director George Stevens led a jury walkout in protest of a film critical of the Vietnam War, for example), it would be difficult for it to be otherwise. As wide-ranging and colossal as the city in which it is located, a social focus ran through the offerings from the retrospectives of Luis Bunuel, Francesco Rosi, or American films on the Vietnam War, to films based around the struggles of homosexuals in Egypt and hip-hop musicians in Uganda. It was present in the new documentaries from the cataclysm in Iraq, like Full Battle Rattle (2008, by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss), and Heavy Metal, in Baghdad (2007, by Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti). So, one of the world's largest--and for the European market, most crucial--film festivals was far more than a fashionable premiere for new films. Contained in various forums and alternative groupings that have proliferated over the years, festival offerings ranged from potential blockbusters to the more experimental fare as shown on tiers of the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, such as Isabella Rossellini's take on the sex lives of insects in Green Porno (2008), to revisited structuralist classics.

By any measure one of the more extraordinary offerings on hand was the epic 190-minute "docufiction" United Red Army (2007) by Japanese new wave director Koji Wakamatsu. Now 72 years old, Wakamatsu was smack in the middle of the militant New Left in Japan and often sought to explode the erotically charged and scandalous "pink eiga" genre from within in films like Secrets Behind the Wall (1965), Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), and Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), all of which were shown at the Berlinale in a tribute to the filmmaker. United Red Army is several films in one: a black-and-white documentary of the Japanese student and antiwar movement (in the form of a relentless display of demonstrations, riots, and statistics of arrests and killings, which convey an inexorable and violently contested history); a partly fictionalized account of the relationships of members of the various militant student factions that ultimately join forces as the United Red Army; and a docudrama of the United Red Army itself in its clandestine mountain base. Wakamatsu's film culminates in the group's takeover of a mountain ski lodge in Asama in 1972 and the ensuing firefight with police. For the sake of a certain "realism," Wakamatsu shot these scenes at his own mountain cabin, destroying it in the process. Scored to rumbling, splintering psychedelic music by Sonic Youth's Jim O'Rourke, Wakamatsu presents one of the starkest portraits yet committed to film of the disintegration of once hopeful, revolutionary idealism into despair, fanaticism, and mad fratricidal violence.

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This year's Berlinale was riddled with dilemmas of history. Documentaries ranged from portraits of Vaclav Havel and Ariel Sharon to the denizens of Mafrouza (a poor section of Cairo) to Isaac Julien's Derek (2008) and Jesus Christ Savior (2008) by Peter Geyer. Typical of the festival, the results of these were wildly uneven. Steven Sebring's Path Smith: Dream of Life (2008) presents the punk chanteuse largely the way she wants to present herself--as an elder statesman. Sebring's film is long on showing its subject refracted by celebrity--Smith showing off a beaded necklace Robert Mapplethorpe made her after their shared peyote experience or hugging politician Jesse Jackson at a rally--and short on any suggestion of drug problems or controversial details of her marriage. Dror Moreh's Sharon (2008) is notable for the dubious reason that in the year 2008, a propaganda puff piece made by a close associate of the Israeli government can pass muster at one of the world's most important film festivals. An argument for former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a serious peacemaker, the film nevertheless includes several of Sharon's more addled public pronouncements. Anxious to show the man's humanity, Sharon is depicted as someone who cherishes fine food and art by Picasso. Such filmmaking provides a striking contrast to Errol Morris's method of ambivalence and many-sidedness, often too ambiguous for its own good and certainly too much so to serve as state propaganda. Such a method is surely put to the test here in Morris's Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Painstakingly showing the intense pressures inflicted upon the guards at Abu Ghraib, and structuring the film to a large extent both around their versions of events and the subsequent investigation by Brent Pack, one senses the filmmaker's jaw dropping as the story unfolds. Morris's film is an arresting glance into the mentalities of the poor and white working-class soldiers who found themselves cannon fodder and inexperienced jailers in Iraq. It is likely to have a long life in classrooms as an accumulation of evidence on the bureaucratization and "banality" of complete moral collapse.

In a film festival this large, one of the pleasures is coming across an oddball surprise. One of these was first-time Russian director Igor Voloshin's Nirvana (2008). Driven by tremendous performances from the female leads, a music video pace, and Iurid and outlandish punked out makeup and outfits, the film takes some well-worn themes--a young woman looking for a new life in a new town, the perils of drug addiction, "co-dependency"--and creates a highly Brechtian and affective combustion. Voloshin's title contains a double meaning, but the film focuses on the more negative aspect--not an ultimate bliss of happiness and ecstasy, but the bliss of unconsciousness through destruction. During the discussion after the screening, Voloshin said he was inspired by Siberia's shamans and their current warning of auto-destruction and eco-apocalypse, hoping his film would have a greater resonance.

This aspiration for larger social projection or relevance is what linked films as disparate as first-time director Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town (2007), which becomes a fable on the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami, and Tilda Swinton's letter to the deceased artist Derek Jarman about the state of the film industry in Derek. It is a sprawling, globalized conversation for which the Berlinale, with its highs and lows, continues to serve as a hub.

JAY MURPHY is a writer living in New York City and Aberdeen. Scotland. He recently curated the multimedia exhibition "Present" at H.P. Garcia Gallery in New York City.