'Some think, others act. But man's true condition is to think with his hands.' – Jean-Luc Godard.

Now, for coverage of the whole Berlinale festival, there are certainly better sources around, whether Screen international, which issues a daily magazine distributed in the festival area, with info focused on market interests, the Berlinale festival’s press releases or, this guy on Indiewire – who seems to give a pretty thorough all-in-all review of the 60th anniversary festival.

Festival anxieties

Let’s start out with the obvious: this is a great festival. It’s huge, the program is outdone only by the number of participants – the city seems to be craving for cinema at this time of the year, every single time. They claim to sell 200 thousand tickets anually, and when you see the cue at the ticket booths or the crowds coming and going in the U-bahn, that seems believable. The pleasure of sinking into a cinema, day after day, one, two or three films per day, with the press pass privilege of feeling free to leave if the film is terrible and just go to that other screening next doors, is complete. The greatness of such a great festival comes with its cons, of course, one of which is the anxiety of never having real overview, never knowing if you are really optimizing your festival experience, if you are really seeing those films that you would most like to see, and not missing out on a whole ten day program in the next screening room, that would have blown your mind more than the ones you actually saw etc. – I don’t even dare thinking of the anxiety of those who are here for the parties and networking, but it is visible in some of the faces you meet.

To be sure, this festival is a Hollywood thing, not in the sense of the films themselves, but in the social sense: hundreds of young people volunteer at the festival, working in the wardrobe or ticket sales, taking care of visitors etc. without wages – such organization is possible only wherever there is prestige and social capital to be made. Glitz. Probably all of the major festivals are like this, probably the festival route is a travelling Hollywood attracting hopeful talent (oh, which reminds me:)

Revolution? What revolution?

This aspect of the festival, its purely capital side, is underlined in many ways. Of course, it is not merely a festival in the same sense as a literary festival, it is also a marketplace, the equivalent of Frankfurt’s annual bookfair. Every event that involves something more than just seeing a film is tinted by this, sometimes in quite intolerable ways. For example, I have not yet seen a presenter or a moderator capable of asking the filmmakers interesting questions – not once. By far the harshest example yet was during a panel held with ten Mexican directors who collaborated on the film Revolution, to commemorate the Mexican revolution’s 100th anniversary.

The film consists of ten short films, where each director investigates what the revolution means for him or her today. To the project’s merit, two of the ten directors are women, which is certainly not revolutionary, but a considerably higher proportion than the female 5% of Mexican working directors. To the panel’s ridicule, however, the moderator, Mike Goodridge, editor of Screen International, forgot to ask one of the women any question at all, until an hour and a half had already passed and the audience had already been given a microphone. This failure of even acknowledging a female director’s existence was only the top of the moderator’s iceberg of ignorance.

First of all, the discussion was held in English. This may seem pretty straight-forward under any circumstances where you want to serve an international audience – but in the case of discussing South America’s social struggles in the year 2010, it is a strange decision, to put it mildly, when the whole continent, not least Mexico, experiences the English-speaking USA as a violently oppressive force. Some of the directors spoke fluent English, such as the beloved Gael Garcia Bernal – others had to really struggle to find their words, or even gave up. Through the years, there has certainly been no lack of capable live translators at such events at the Berlinale or other events in the city – and they certainly are not an expensive extra feature – it just seems that no one thought of this. Actually there even was a translator on stage, but presented rather as an embarrassing backup plan, than part of the program – and so the directors rather stayed in their silence than ask for help.

Second, the moderator was not merely incapable of asking any questions relevant to the film’s theme, meaning or intentions, let alone the contemporary context of the revolution and its heritage – whenever a directed digressed into speaking about the issues involved in the films, he forcefully pushed the conversation back into its place by asking about the practicalities of filmmaking. This became most painful in a sequence of Oscar nominee Carlos Reygadas‘ attempts to actually speak about his contribution to the film in the context of the revolution. I don’t know much about the director, and I suspect that I might dislike most of what he had to say – but to his merit he did try to say something. ‘Many people, he started, in Mexico speak about the corrupt government and bad government etc. – but I want to speak about how things really are, the chemistry of things’ and then he spoke of Mexico’s diverse social and ethnic groups referring to chemistry of metaphors, adding the occasional ‘As I say this is very politically incorrect. I thinks the killings etc. are just a reflection of who we are …’ – and every country gets the government it deserves and so on and so forth – he really got going and captivated the audience by saying something, even if these were reactionary clichés, they were something, and surely called for a response. I think I even saw Gael Bernal sink in his seat under the rant, or perhaps it was just my wishful thinking that someone would address and answer the essentialist – discussion, even heated discussion, was in the air.

The moderator, however, skilfully supressed the looming discussion by swiftly asking: ‘Did you do shorts before you did feature films?’ – in no relevance at all to the topic Reygadas had just opened up, but surely within the scope of Screen International’s intelligence services. Reygadas, however, is not over and he bravely makes another attempt at opening up a discussion, runs down the field with a ‘I don’t belive cinema is a narrative art form, although narrative can be the consequence of cinema’, but the moderator gets even faster to the defense and goes: ‘Did you work a lot with the actors?’ Reygadas is not yet subdued and for the third time he attempts to say something interesting, and succeeds, with ‘I know the concept of freedom is a complex philosophical topic and all, but then freedom is also that if you want to kick the chair in front of you, you can kick the chair. You know, in Europe everyone is free with all these civil rights and everything, but if the body is free, if you are free inside – how free can you be when you go to school for so long?’ – a fantastic, valid question, fundamental to the revolution, to cinema, and to our contemporary predicament and the moderator follows it up by asking: ‘Did you hold the camera yourself?’

At which point Reygadas cynically surrendered: ‘No, I just ate and drank while the film made itself.’ The editor of Screen International had successfully managed to steer off the danger of any interesting dialogue that evening.

When the moderator, Mr. Goodridge, finally remembered that the woman sitting next to him, Mariana Chenillo, existed, he asked her if being a female director in Mexico was hard. She said yes, certainly, only 5% of directors there are women. He then asked: And do you believe this? She: What, that it’s hard? He: Yes. She: Er … yes, it’s a fact. Goodridge then gave the word to the audience again.

Don’t know

Reygadas was certainly not the only person on stage who had more interesting things to say than the moderator could acknowledge – that was obviously the case for many of the directors, some of whom would have been capable of doing so in English, while others would have benefitted greatly from a translator. The whole episode, however, is noteworthy precisely because it is not unique, but completely ordinary. Discussions about cinema, even at prestiged events, with smart people, tend to be banal and stupid. Equivalent to asking a writer whether he or she uses Word 95 or Word 98, if they use the keyboard or the mouse to copy-paste paragraphs …

I’ve heard that this is the case at venues such as the Frankfurt book fair, as well, which is a pure market-event – an event for publishers and distributers and not a literary event at all. At the Frankfurt parties even Germany’s most distinguished philosophers speak about their books in terms of euro-palettes – that is how many palettes have been printed etc. As mentioned before, the Berlinale has a double nature, as a film festival and a marketplace. As we should all know very well, however, if you show the market too much leniancy it ends up taking over the whole thing – which inevitably leads to stupidity.

To some extent, however, stupidity is the order of the day. I have seen some pretty decent films at the festival, but none of them is as subtle, as profoundly intelligent and as artistically whole as Werner Herzog’s 1968 Lebenszeichen, screened in the Retrospective section. Herzog was 26 when the film was premiered, at a point in time in which the whole world seemed to be craving for something smarter, at the beginning of probably the most wonderful decade in the history of cinema yet, when cinema opened up for thought, or thought opened cinema up, invaded it and impregnated it. Then Jaws came along and ate us all.

Chronic infancy

This is not to be nostalgic, to glorify Herzog personally or declare cinema dead – far from it – but to name our predicament, in comparison to what went before us. (With all the necessary preliminaries, I didn’t see that many films, yes I’m oversimplifying, yes, this is unfair, judgemental and please correct me if I just missed all the films that would challenge this perspective on current cinema, I know I might be wrong. But I think I’m not.) We belong to a generation of constant infancy. Iceland’s foremost musicians (múm, Sigurrós etc.) have been dubbed ‘the cute generation’. Their cuteness however is not theirs alone, but a situation of a generation, who has faced no real common project or goal in which to show or practice a certain maturity that used to be taken for granted. Unlike our grandmothers and grandfathers who all around Europe were occupied by rebuilding a continent ruined by war, or in the case of Iceland, building a country from scratch, unlike those people who facing the physical desolation in all directions knew their efforts, building schools, hospitals, laying phone cables, laying roads etc. would be worth the while, our options have been between taking part in a competition of grabbing the biggest piece of the cake and munch on our own, or silently go and play with our legos. Whichever game you prefer, the greedy one or the cute one, they are certainly neither adult nor mature in any sense that earlier generations would acknowledge.

Now, again, this is not to induce a nostalgic trip. There are certainly large advantages to our Western situation – such as the simple one of already having decent houses and buildings for most of society’s fundamental needs. However, the difference involves serious drawbacks, as well, and one of the most apparent ones is this childish state when words and deeds remain ineffective – whatever you say or do, for a pretty long time already, it has not seemed to be capable of fundamentally altering anything.

In Germany, this generation wonders why it doesn’t protest against the war in Afghanistan – actually even the military wonders why young people who are actually against the war, are not protesting more, as discussed in the strange film Day of the Sparrow (I don’t know yet if I find it rather good or bad, but it’s certainly strange enough to be a bit of both). This is not to be pessimistic – but to note a difference between where we stand now, and where we, or those who came before us, stood in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

An American critic who sat next to me during one screening told me that in his opinion all the 14+ program short films he had seen, that is short films aimed at teenagers, had been better achieved than almost all of the short films aimed at adults. I cannot verify whether this is true, but it is noteworthy how many of the winning films in the short film competition itself actually dealt with children. Venus vs Me is an impressionistic piece about a girl at the beginning of puberty. Colivia is about a ten year old boy – in both films the adults are almost cartoon-like, though in very different ways, simplified creatures as witnessed by a child. The Golden Bear went to Händelse Vid Bank, a fantastically achieved film from Sweden about a bank robbery. Coherent to our chronic infancy, the beautiful one-shot CCTV-ish cinematography, however, keeps a far distance from all the characters involved, with both a storyline and characterization that could easily fit within a Donald Duck comic or the Olsen-gang. This is not meant to offend, as I genuinely liked the film.

The Silver Bear, then, went to the Israeli film Hayerida – about a family of three, mourning their recently deceased son, which seems to have died ’serving the military’. The problem with this film is of a different kind. Here we surely stay close to the complexity of an adult world – adult feelings convincingly portrayed. Visually the film is very sophisticated. The whole narrative, however, is supported by the film’s blind spot, of not translating ’serving the military’ into ‘terrorizing Palestinians’ – of keeping the camera far away from the wall, from occupied roads, or any other evidence of the constant militarized harrassment at the center not merely of Israel’s politics, but at the heart of the film’s narrative.

This forced ignorance is perhaps precisely what defines the existence of a child, supposed to either believe or feign belief in Santa-claus, in daddy’s greatness, in an asexual and non-violent world of charm, flowers – and then at odd moments, which the child is not supposed to fully understand or know the reasons for: silence.

We live in an era defined by enforced silence, not so much about the world’s harms, but about its reasons. This silence lies at the heart of our childlike existence. Cinema is being fenced in and turns a blind eye.

Gunpoint Glitz

The Berlinale film festival now celebrates its 60th anniversary. From the beginning of film festivals, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as humanity celebrated still being alive, the films and the festivals not only signalled an opening of the world, a forerunner of what we now know as globalization, they were themselves such an opening. Now, in only a few years, all that has changed. Whereas the cinema, the place with the seats and the curtains, had the function of a window to, if not the outside world, then to some other world, we are now surrounded and occupied by such windows all day long. With the advent of high speed internet connections the technical hindrances that were the raison d’etre of film festivals have, in only a few years, not only become evident, but obsolete at the same time. In that way the role of film festivals has been fundamentally reversed, simply by their not changing: they no longer signal the opening up of cinema, but the closure and limitations manufactured to sustain markets. That is, the only reason that the films are now screened in selected places, at chosen times, to a limited audience, is marketing, and the necessity of hype.

Of course then, there is habit – there are those, like David Lynch, who find the idea preposterous that you would watch a film from anything else than a projector in a crowded hall. (Which reminds me, there is a documentary at the Berlinale this year, about a young man’s journey through the TM meditation movement that Mr. Lynch has been advocating for the last years – according to the film’s synopsis the young man does become somewhat disillusioned along the way.)

To be fair, there is, at least ideally there should be, some intelligence in hype. By going through the screening process of industry, media, cinephiles or movie-buffs and die-hard fans, before films hit the general public, free-market theory would argue that a lot of work has already been done for the general audience, who can rely on that process for information about which films are worth seeing and which ones are not. Let’s leave that claim there, to be taken at face value by those who want, rejected by those who know better. Nói Albinói, a splendid Icelandic film, would hardly have hit Icelandic audiences at all, if not for the prestige it gained on the festival route.

So let’s say there are pros and cons, however you evaluate them – nonetheless the fact is that a profound change has taken place, turning the nature of cinemas and film festivals upside down. Not only the festivals but ordinary cinema houses no longer open up a channel for what you couldn’t get otherwise, but actually are sustained by an enormous effort of copyright laws, lawyers, policing and ideology – an whole edifice of nuts and bolts to keep those who don’t go through the rites of standing in line, paying, the whole abracadabra of capitalism, from enjoying the technological benefits of our times, that could allow just about anyone access to anything at any time. These restrictions are sustained through violence: in Germany you can expect a fine of 1200 euros if caught illegally downloading a film – and if you don’t pay, of course the debt goes through its ’standard procedure’, which in the end always lead to the arms of police officers. If film were a person, this involuntary change in its ‘meaning of life’ would certainly call for a serious existential crisis.

My legal stomach likes exotic

Copyright lawyer Mareile Büscher and Milena Fessmann, founder of Cinesong, spoke about the reality of creativity’s legal restrictions in a panel for filmmakers, on the rights to music. First of all, if you’ve heard the rumor that the song ‘Happy birthday’ is copyrighted and cannot be sung or even hummed in a film without bought permission, this is true – record company EMI holds the rights and protects them fiercefully. The same goes for any other copyrighteds songs – if a character hums it, even in a documentary, technically speaking you must clear the rights – and practically you better should, because according to Ms. Büscher the staff of right holders scout film festivals to check if any violations take place. ‘Traditional’ songs are mainly those whose composer has been dead for 70 years (‘You can use Mozart of course, because he’s dead enough’ said Fessmann), and these can be recorded without anyone’s permission – except in the case of complex pieces such as symphonies, the score sheets of which are usually rented by the publisher for a certain occasion – so even if a philharmonic orchestra has given you permission to use their performance of a piece for your film, and the composer is long dead, the publisher of the notes might send his lawyers in case the orchestra rented the notes only for one performance, and not for inclusion in a film.

‘In my case children are performing Bach. I don’t know where they got their sheets,’ said one filmmaker.
‘Yeah, but you have to find out,’ urged Fessmann.
However, if you shoot documentary footage from a samba band in Brasil ’somehow, I would tend to just use it – something my legal stomach says it would somehow be alright. Intuitively.’ Said the lawyer. So remember kids, if you’re going to violate anyone’s rights, it better be in the third world.

That is the edifice that cinema is now part and parcel of, the global injustice sustained by an army of lawyers, an army of armies, and a a whole array of everyday ideological self-evident truths such as ‘you should not steal (from those who afford lawyers)’.

Grow up!

Long ago, sociologists wrote about how the cinemas took on the role of the churches – but if cinema adhered to a theology at the time it was a liberation theology. Theology enforced at gunpoint is something else entirely. So we stand in line, waiting for tickets, for the sake of collective absolution.

Fittingly, the Berlinale festival has for ten years been centered in Potsdamer Platz, a pseudo-public space built and run by Sony and Daimler-Benz. There’s a lot of glitz and the hotels in the area have drive-ins for limousines and everything else needed to serve super-stardom.

For your average independent filmmaker, however, or journalist, or the general public, Berlin certainly offers cozier places to spend your time in between screenings. Even the starting point of entering a film festival now involves turning a blind eye to your surroundings, acting as if you are not following orders at gunpoint, but practicing freedom. Of course partly you are, but a half truth tends to be a whole lie.

I did turn a blind eye and enjoyed those films that I found enjoyable. But we really need to talk.

We are not children. Regression or retreat into infancy is a common post-traumatic symptom. It’s understandable, even a necessary survival strategy at times. A virtue can be made of that necessity, and some artists have mastered this state of infancy supremely – reached astonishing heights even. Even so, it remains a state to be dealt with. It is time to grow up again. I look forward to a Berlinale where the moderators are not representatives of enforced stupidity, where the best short films are not restricted by children’s perceptions, where German documentarists no longer spend 90 minutes wondering why they are not protesting, where cinema shows itself capable of thought, subtle, dignified and ruthlessly compassionate.