The main reason I’ve been such a useless blogger these past months will be screening as part of the National Film School’s graduate showcase in the Light House Cinema, Monday 9th June, from 6.30pm.
For more info, or if you are a journalist or blogger and would like to write about the event, please contact nfsgradshowcase@gmail.com.
I’ve co-programmed, with Esperanza Collado, the next Experimental Film Club screening happening this Sunday at 4pm in the Ha’penny Bridge Inn in Dublin. You can read my introduction to the programme here.
So my thesis is finished (and online—you can read it here.)
If I have one minor misgiving about the finished piece, it’s that I had to cut the following section from its very end. It seemed a little indulgent and redundant given the focus of the thesis—but still, it sums up why this project meant a lot to me personally, and I don’t want to forget it, so here it is, for posterity…
The motivation of this thesis has been to explore, research and engage with the political and formal practices of an older generation of radical filmmakers. Part of this has been in an effort to apply lessons from that generation as much as possible on today’s world; but part of this has simply been an effort to connect with that generation; to understand where they were coming from, seek inspiration from their efforts and understanding from their ultimate failure (ultimate in the sense that the movements of which they were part did not succeed), and in particular filmmakers of that generation whose work have been consistently marginalised and ignored.
This desire for a generational connection or legacy is something both Kramer and Godard were engaged in in the ‘60s. The collective title chosen by Godard and Gorin was the most obvious gesture in this direction. According to Gorin, the name
was to say, well, although our situation is different, we want to focus on the first filmmaker of the Bolshevik revolution. We didn’t want to find ourselves a father, because we are not Freudians, and we didn’t want to say that now we are going to do what Dziga Vertov did. We are just saying that Vertov has a concrete experience out of which some problems can be worked out and used for our own purposes.
The invocation of early Soviet filmmakers was not unique for the time; Chris Marker’s film collective, the Medvedkin group, was named after a lesser-known agit-prop filmmaker of 1920s Russia. According to Brenez, it was a case of “reinvent[ing] the 1920s for different times with different needs.”
As for Kramer, not long before his death he wrote an essay in which he reflected on his own attempts to connect to an older generation, that of the political filmmakers who were active in the Left movements of the ‘30s and early ‘40s. The experience was a profoundly disappointing one, with the filmmakers refusing to engage with him and asserting instead that “even though we did what you want to do but better, we have learned that it is not worth doing.” Nonetheless, his recollection of what he was seeking from his elders, and what he seemed more than willing to impart to the next generation, seem a fine distillation of why this thesis was written:
Most of us weren’t there out of respect or admiration for their past or what they had become. But we did want to meet them as people who made movies and who had tried to live out something through and around movies. We wanted to go deep into the detail of an experience in which each of them had given a lot. We wanted to know how they had reconciled individual and collective work, what about ambitions and careers, how had they planned out their movies, what had the role of the Party been, did their marriages survive, what about their children? … There were really a lot of things to talk about. Blindly, I’m sure, we were swimming toward the source of material that really makes a difference, material that is behind and before either judgments or positions. Material that is about how you live a life.
And that if there was anything left of the sensibility that in their pasts had led them to find a home in radical movements, or comfort in humane ideas like equality, solidarity, generosity, cooperation, it was precisely with us that you would have thought to see it put into practise. In a way, to be the people that I think they did want to be, they had to find a way to talk openly with us. We were the living presence of their past. We were their implications. We were their opportunity to look at that again from another point of view. They could say “what a drag.” Most people would agree with them, “what’s done is done.” Or you could feel that you were being given a big gift: “those not busy being born are busy dying.”
(Picture of several original Newsreel members at the Vermont International Film Festival in 1998, taken from Roz Payne’s Newsreel website.)
Jörg Bruitt, Berlin-based actor.
The makers of Seaview: on the left, directors Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley; on the right, composer Dennis McNulty and producer Maya Derrington; and in the middle, Forum programmer Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.
Philippe de Montijon, co-organiser of the Lucca Film Festival.
Rachel Rath and Kevin Marron, two actor-writers from Ireland, being followed by a foreign TV crew for reasons I still don’t understand.
The CHEAP collective, organisers of the Gossip Studio at the Arsenal Kino.
Two journalists bonding in silence.
What the hell difference does it matter what I think? It’s yours. You make art because you have to, because you’ve got no choice. It’s not about talent, it’s about no choice but to do it. Now are you any good? Well you’re 22, so who knows. Who cares. You wanna give it up? You give it up, you weren’t a real artist to begin with.
Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons (1989), written by Richard Price.
So that regular posting strategy didn’t work out quite as planned. While festival season is over for me, there are still two more posts on Berlin in the works, and one on Dublin (not to mention a few parting shots on my finally-put-to-bed thesis)… they just might take a little while longer than expected. In the short term, this blog is unfortunately going to be in hibernation. I’m gearing up to shoot my graduate film, and the amount of time and concentration it’s demanding are making blogging seem like a luxury I cannot afford at the moment. But I have a lot still to write about, so I won’t be gone for long. Indeed, it’ll be hard to let the Dublin Dance Festival slip by without a few reports, and that’s only a month and a half a way.
In the meantime, a heads up to any Irish radio listeners out there: I’ll be on the Arts Show on RTÉ Radio 1 tonight at 8pm discussing the Fresh Film Festival. I think the show will be available online after it’s aired.
…being interviewed by Peter Cowie at the Berlinale Talent Campus…
…being presented an award by Marc Siegel in the CHEAP Gossip Studio…
…listening to a young filmmaker with his wife, Bojana Marijan…
…just thinking.
Excerpt from Marc Siegel’s speech announcing Makavejev’s award:
This Award recognizes the singular, but essential talent of hysterical collage, frenzied corporality, and ethical perversion. In other words, this Award acknowledges exceptional aesthetic nourishment in matters of sexuality and politics.
For CHEAP [dramatic pause] Dušan Makavejev [pause] is a model of joyful, political and aesthetic resistance.
Dušan Makavejev’s life and work are marked by a determination to employ whatever narrative and formal strategies he has at his disposal in a struggle for celluloid freedom and shimmery, liberatory desire. Moreover, he does so with humor and joy. For Dušan Makavejev recognizes joy, laughter, and erotic desire as political weapons, indeed as tools of resistance, whether one is struggling against pesky, sexless Commies and Capitalies, dour ideologues, or any other sort of institutional stupidity that plagues us all, we good-humored perverts. His movies are sweet with that dark brown taste of intelligent pleasure. They keep us going.
On Monday, experimental filmmaker Wilhelm Hein had a open-house brunch at his exhibition space, Casa BauBou. There was food and coffee and wine, crazy pictures on the wall and Andy Warhol’s Sleep playing in the corner. Hein is a real believer in blurring the lines between the cultural and the social, and the increasing commericalisation of the Berlinale seems to give him added impetus to hack into the concentration of talent and energy that the festival provides, and funnel it into the more lively and idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of Berlin. Like Casa BauBou.
(Vassily Bourikas talking to Jerry Tartaglia.)
(Wilhelm Hein.)
With a film festival on the scale of the Berlinale, it’s difficult to write as if it was one single festival at all; really, it’s more like a panoply of overlapping film festivals with their own curatorial (and commercial) agendas, and their own audiences. Many festival-goers like myself will endlessly festival-hop from one programme to the other, mixing and matching divergent films and events to the extent that any themes or contrasts an individual programmer may have had in mind tend to get lost in the shuffle, replaced instead by the individual festival-hopper’s own impulsive selections and critical impressions. We get to be our own curators, in other words, (an idea that’s been explored in this blog from early on), and as a result there are even more irreconcilable Berlinales than there are distinct programmes.
So far, mine has been eclectic to the point of schizophrenia, crammed to the point of bulimia, rich to the point of obscenity…the superlatives could go on. It’s also founds its highlights in the hidden and lesser-known crevices of this mammoth festival.
After a few days floating down the main stream of the festival (the competition films and the attendant press conferences), I ran to the fringes of the festival, where the most revelatory surprises tend to be found—which, after the anemic predictability of the press community, became somewhat of a primal craving. The Director’s Lounge is about as fringe as you can get—not actually connected with the festival, this cosy cinema-bar-lounge has been presenting a programme of experimental cinema and video art for the duration of the Berlinale. I caught their opening night screenings and a programme of films by experimental filmmakers Thorsten Fleisch and Telemach Wiesinger a few days later.
As well as a set by a live jazz band (who also performed an improvised score to one of the films), the opening night presented a strong group of (mostly) new experimental shorts, ranging from 36 seconds to 17 minutes in length. Some were impressive elaborations of familiar avant-garde traditions (Allan Brown’s handpainted movie about chickens, Uncle Cluck (2007) or André Werner found footage symphony Flash (2008)) while others seemed a little less categorisable (Eytan Heller’s Love Sum Game (2006), where an actual game of tennis played over the Israeli-Palestinian wall). Filmmakers and projectionists Fleisch and Wiesinger presented a double bill of the former’s super 8 work and the latter’s 16mm films, and in one stunning choreographed projection, presented two films simultaenously which then merged and overlapped, the 16mm and 8mm images synergising into a bubbling unity. Apart from the formal strength and diversity of the film’s on show, the lounge-style screening environment was a significant way of recontextualising how we watch experimental cinema, which too often can get ghettoised in sterile museum-like atmospheres (even in some cinemas) that work against the kind of relaxed and even irreverent engagement that these films sometimes call for.
Forum Expanded is the ostensibly more legitimate and official alternative to the Lounge, and thanks to curators such as Stefanie Schulte Strathaus it has consistently been the home of the most daring and exceptional programming in the festival. This year was perhaps a little underwhelming in comparison to 2007, which featured Marc Siegel’s epic Underground/Overseas programme, but still full of various gems. The programme of shorts from the vaults of the Whitney Museum, mostly New American Cinema works from the 60s and 70s, was a real treat, featuring lesser-known films (at least to me) from Jonas Mekas and Paul Sharits, and fascinating films from hitherto undiscovered artists (at least to me) such as Richard Serra and Larry Gottheim. The Jack Smith programme, presented by dedicated preserver and promulgator of Smith’s work Jerry Tartaglia, was, while equally rare a privilege, a little less impressive. Presenting a compilation of raw footage either shot by or featuring performances by Smith, and a previously unseen super 8 film by Smith, Sinbad in Baghdad, this presentation was presumably thrilling for someone familiar with a lot of his work (which last year’s near-complete Smith retrospective at the Forum made possible for more than a few)—but for a complete Smith novice like myself, it was perhaps not the best entry point into the work of a nonetheless clearly unique filmmaker.
The most exceptional new discovery for me in Forum Expanded (and F.E. is all about new discoveries) was Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971), pictured above. I probably would have skipped this film, which seemed at first glance to be a zany and lightweight Sixties-with-a-capital-S celebration of free love, if Vassily Bourikas, a Berlin-based filmmaker and curator—whose passionate recommendations should never be taken lightly. After catching Makavejev’s public interview in the Berlinale Talent Campus (and, thanks to Vassily, actually having a coffee with the legendary Yugoslavian), I finally saw the film today. While there is an element of celebratory 60s free love rhetoric in the film, its collagist approach, mixing documentary, fantasy and narration, and its gift for dancing between an engaged passion and a more distanced critical perspective—well, put simply, it’s a lot more multi-faceted than a MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR slogan (speaking of slogans, the one featured in the film, KILL FOR PEACE, is pretty classic…)
Vassily can elaborate a lot better than I can on the importance of making possible the discovery and re-discovery of films like this possible, and the political implications both of their widespread marginalisation and suppression, and the attempt to counter those processes. But suffice to say, it’s what makes a festival (or should we say festival-constellation?) like the Berlinale(s) worth writing about, and almost makes you forgive all the other shit that goes on here.
My last post may have given the impression that my perspective on the Berlinale leans a little towards the uncritically enthralled side of things. Honestly, I’m well aware of the unsavoury side of this, and all other major film festivals: the commercialism, the pervasive marketing, the typically safe and unchallenging array of films selected for competition, the celebrity worship and the associated press feeding frenzy (with members of the public picking up their leftovers, vying for autographs at the hotel backdoor, some not even knowing who they’re waiting for.). Or put another way, the orgiastic (occasionally cannibalistic) media-festival-business-celebrity love-in that makes the film industry what it is. It goes something like this: The press selling festivals selling films selling stars selling products selling festivals. Everybody wins.
At the same time, the cynicism and disdain with which I view most of this carry-on doesn’t mean I can entirely resist its allure. Like the dynamic and ultra-modern skyscrapers of Potsdamer Platz, where most of the festival takes place, the scale and accomplishment of a lot of this bullshit is occasionally thrilling: a certain dazzling heartlessness, maybe. The first day of the festival presented a good case in point: prior to the opening gala screening of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine A Light, the filmmaker and the band gave a press conference at the Hyatt Hotel. The questions asked by the attending journalists, and the answers given, really aren’t worth mentioning. That’s not because they were boring, inane, or redundant—some of them weren’t—but just because they were of no particular consequence. It didn’t matter what was said. The cameras, microphones, notebooks and laptops, and the hacks attached to them, we’re going to report what they said anyway (even if in the case of Keith Richards, it didn’t always make sense). Really, the pleasure of this event on a personal level was simply to see these guy in the flesh, particularly the filmmaker (for mixed reasons that I’ve written about before). The function of it on a business level was to sell a film, sell a film festival, sell newspapers and magazines, and hell, why not sell those old guys on stage while we’re at it. I was happy to be there, but I was also unsatisfied.
What else do I expect, you might ask? Within the confines of a set-up like this, nothing whatsoever (“the medium is the message” in press conferences as most other places, no matter how talented the individuals involved are). But what do I want? Well, simple things. Dialogue. Discussion. Debate. Discourse. Questions and answers that are not simply interesting, amusing or lively (and not always utterly safe), but actually matter.
There has been one or two press conferences where the facade rippled and some of those things actually occurred.
Yesterday Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano got the conferential treatment for the flawed but impressive There Will Be Blood. Unlike Scorsese and Jagger, none of them had the smooth and controlled sheen of someone so used to media attention, and so used to using it, that they’re almost indifferent to its gaze (Scorsese is, I think, more savvy in this respect than one might think). Rather, each had their own distinct kind of discomfort: Day-Lewis, as the private and introspective actor dedicated to his craft, Anderson as the still quite young and ambitious auteur, Dano simply because it’s his first really prominent role. Dano is still young enough to be polite and unassuming, answering questions as graciously as he can, but for the other two, beneath their manners you could see their weariness as they try to answer inadequate, uninteresting or unreasonable questions; you could see people who’d rather be having a real conversation with someone. Occasionally the manners subsided, and a request for Day-Lewis to comment (again) on Heath Ledger’s death prompted the actor to say he didn’t want to fuel “a fire that’s already out of control” and contribute further to a “fucking circus”.
The comment was, of course, widely reported along with rehashed details of Ledger’s death, and details of the new film Day-Lewis is starring in.