It`s in wintry, desolate West Berlin–this year, from Feb. 20 to March 3
–that the international film season begins. Those are the dates of the Berlin International Film Festival, the first big festival of the year, and it`s there that hundreds of film critics, festival directors, and film buyers for distribution companies meet to start the winnowing process that will eventually produce the handful of foreign films destined for fame and commercial success in the fall.
The Berlin Film Festival, with somewhere between six and seven hundred movies shown in its various sections, functions as a sort of wholesale market. No one knows, quite yet, what these films are, and each of them has a more-or- less equal chance of attracting the few lines in a newspaper report, earning the slot in another festival, or piquing the interest of a foreign distributor that will allow them to emerge from the undifferentiated mass.
Attending a large festival like Berlin means necessarily seeing a large number of bad movies–there`s little or no advance word on any of the offerings, and although the festival rumor mill quickly begins functioning at full force, the only reliable method of finding things is to go and see them for yourself. Disappointments outnumber discoveries by at least five to one.
But the possibility of discovery is always there, which is what makes Berlin, in spite of its frequent disasters, such an exciting event. Taking a chance on an obscure Taiwanese feature might reveal a filmmaker as
consummately talented as Hou Hsiao Hsien, whose ”Dust in the Wind” was shown in this year`s festival. A side trip into the depths of the Film Market–where screening slots are sold on a strictly cash basis–might reveal something as astonishing as Jean-Francois Stevenin`s ”Double Messieurs,” a wrenching, Cassavetes-like improvisation on themes of male role-playing.
Still, even the disappointments contribute to a sense of the state of world cinema such as cannot be gained elsewhere. Only a large festival can provide the perspective necessary to see the art as it exists and as it is practiced, before it is filtered out by the critics, distributors, and other professional tastemakers.
If one thing emerged clearly from this year`s Berlin festival, it was the sure knowledge that there is more creativity, more experimentation, and more diversity out there than the ”art film” market, as it`s presently constituted in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, is allowing us to see.
Take the example of ”Mon Cas” (”My Case”), the new feature by the 76- year-old doyen of the Portuguese cinema, Manoel de Oliveira.
In the first of the film`s four movements, a man bursts onto a theater stage where a silly period melodrama is being played, loudly insisting that the audience pay attention to ”his case”–his pain, his suffering–rather than the artificial play that is being enacted. The second movement replays the first, but in black-and-white and with the action sped up as if in a badly projected silent film; on the soundtrack, a narrator intones ominous phrases from a Beckett play. The third movement repeats the action again, though this time the sound is played backwards, turning the actors` lines into gibberish, and a movie screen appears at the rear of the set, carrying images of wartime atrocities that suggest Beirut or Vietnam. On the fourth run-through, the action has become the story of Job, pleading ”his case” before an indifferent God.
Oliveira, with his fable of the authentic struggling to break through layers of the artificial, the conventional, and the complacent, seems to have put his finger on precisely the crisis that faces the movies at this point in time: How can the movies, buried now under 90 years of stylistic and rhetorical elaboration, return to a notion of the real and immediate? How can they escape sophistication–and the awful self-involvement that goes with it
–and recapture their original innocence?
Many of the most interesting films in the Berlin festival addressed these same questions, directly or indirectly. ”The Death of Empedocles,” a West German-French co-production directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, offered the most radical answer: Based on an 18th-Century closet drama by Friedrich Holderlin, the film placed its cast in a natural, open setting on the edge of a forest, the camera looking on absolutely motionless as the actors, motionless themselves, read through their lines in perfect monotone.
Straub and Huillet seemed to be searching for a kind of filmmaking degree zero, stripped of all stylistic or rhetorical elaboration, in which Holderlin`s text, held up as an example of pure poetic artifice, is played in contrast to the chance events of nature–the sound of wind rustling through the trees, the light changes caused by passing clouds–that unfold
unpredictably around it. The film recaptures some of the startling beauty of the first, primitive film experiments of the 1890s–the camera, simply looking out at the world, discovers the rhythm of its breathing.
In contrast to the stark classicism of ”The Death of Empedocles,” Raoul Ruiz`s ”Memories of Appearances” (the title itself is a lovely summation of the nature of the film image) took the high baroque route, multiplying its plot lines through dream sequences, surrealistic invasions, and half-a-dozen films within the film.
At the center of the story is an exiled operative of the Chilean resistance, who, ten years ago, used the text of Calderon`s play ”Life is a Dream” as a mnemonic tool in memorizing the names and addresses of several hundred fellow agents. The time has come when he must re-create the list of agents, but to his horror he finds that he`s forgotten the play. Going to the movies, though, somehow stimulates his memories, so that a fifth-rate science fiction film will lead him to a chunk of the Calderon text, which leads him to an identity. The film, wildly inventive and often hysterically funny, traces in reverse the circuitous path that leads from life to the movies, from the stimulus to the dream.
The French film ”Mauvais Sang” (”Bad Blood”), directed by the tremendously gifted young filmmaker Leos Carax, takes ”innocence” as its overt subject: set in a lightly stylized future, it`s the story of a young idealist who undertakes a shady job for a middle-aged industrial spy; as he prepares for his task, he falls in love with the spy`s young mistress. But if Carax is exploring the possibilities for a pure, romantic love in a tarnished world, he is also exploring the possibility of tearing something spontaneous and authentic from the overcalculated aesthetics of the movies, circa 1986.
At first glance, the film appears to have the same sleek, synthetic, fashion magazine look that made Jean-Jacques Beineix`s fortune with ”Diva”
and ”Betty Blue.” But Carax, unlike Beineix, doesn`t freeze his film at the level of the visuals. With his bold, outsized metaphors (skydiving as an image of the glory and perils of love), lyrical explosions (his hero performs a running dance that has all the spontaneous grace of Gene Kelly), and allusions to the spectral world of silent film (he has given his heroine the look of Lillian Gish), Carax leaves himself open to charges of naivete and
sentimentality. But this is a naivete that blows fresh and cool through a stagnant atmosphere–a sublime innocence, proudly unprotected.
