Category: Film

This essay was originally published at Filmmaker.

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Last year at the 2022 Berlinale I had the uncanny experience of watching Hito Steyerl’s documentary The Empty Center (Die leere Mitte, 1998) in a 75-seat theater hidden away beneath The Sony Center. If you’re unfamiliar with The Sony Center in Berlin, take a second to Google it, or think back to the sterile postmodern backdrops of Brian De Palma’s Passion, in which architect Helmut Jahn’s eight-building complex plays a prominent role. The Empty Center is, in part, about the obscene land grab that occurred after German reunification, when multinational corporations like Sony, Daimler-Benz and ABB swept in to stake a claim on what would soon become the biggest construction site in Europe, and in the process stoked racial resentments and provoked widespread labor strikes. More than two decades after the opening of The Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz remains a deeply strange place, a shopping mall of a neighborhood that sits only a few blocks south of Brandenburg Gate and that seems to have been designed as a willful act of historical denial. When I was in Berlin this year, I met up with filmmaker Dominik Graf, and we spoke a bit about the economic toll suffered by the GDR after the wall fell, a recurring interest of his work. I mentioned to Graf how absurd it is that I fly all the way to Berlin every winter and then spend nearly all of my time in Potsdamer Platz, the site of most Berlinale press screenings. “Well,” he laughed, “we made a lot of mistakes after 1990.”

The Empty Center screened as part of Fiktionsbescheinigung, a sidebar of the Forum that spotlights underseen work by Black directors and directors of color in Germany, and that engages directly with questions of race. Launched in 2021, it’s become one of the Berlinale’s hidden gems and one of the last remaining places at the festival to see work projected on celluloid. I caught nearly a dozen films in last year’s wide-ranging program, including Thomas Arslan’s early feature, A Fine Day (Der schöne Tag, 2001); Branwen Okpako’s Dirt for Dinner (Dreckfresser, 2000), a documentary about a Black German’s fall from social icon to criminal; and the essay film Raoul Peck made as a student at the German Film Academy, Merry Christmas Deutschland(Merry Christmas Deutschland oder Vorlesung zur Geschichtstheorie II, 1985). I was especially impressed by In the West (In der Wüste, 1987) by Spanish-born director Rafael Fuster Pardo, a buddy film about two immigrants scraping together a subsistence living as artists in 1980s West Berlin. To use the metrics of the day, Arslan aside, these are all films that have been logged fewer than a dozen times on Letterboxd—truly once-in-a-lifetime screenings. Regrettably, I saw only one of the Fiktionsbescheinigung films this year. Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Order (Ordnung, 1980) is a bone-dry portrait of an unemployed civil engineer (Heinz Lieven) who, like Melville’s Bartleby, prefers to not participate in the everyday striving of middle-class life and, instead, loses himself in fantasies and impotent acts of rebellion. When, at the end of the film, his wife admits him to a psychiatric clinic for treatment, the small, unadorned room he’s assigned seems a welcomed respite from his neighbors.

Order also screened beneath The Sony Center (on 16mm!), in the larger of the two theaters that have, for more than two decades, been the primary venues for Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. Founded in 1963 as Friends of the German Film Archive, Arsenal presents year-round programming there—one of its core missions, along with archival work, distribution and presenting the Forum and Forum Expanded. Since 1971, Arsenal has set out to fulfill the Forum’s founding charge to screen “difficult, dangerous films.” However, with the arrival of Carlo Chatrian and Mark Peranson from Locarno in 2020 and their creation of Encounters in the Berlinale to foster “aesthetically and structurally daring works,” and with the expanding program at Berlin Critics’ Week, which operates independently, guided by the “principle of discussing the most stimulating works,” and which this year attracted the likes of Graf, Claire Denis, and more than 30 other guests, the lines separating the strands are becoming a bit blurred. The good news for lovers of “difficult, dangerous films” is that Berlin in February has become a one-stop shop. Frankly, there’s too much to take in. I’m eager to see how the Forum evolves in 2024 under the new leadership of Barbara Wurm, a well-respected critic, historian and programmer who is stepping into the role following Cristina Nord’s four-year stint. I’m also eager to see more of Berlin, as Arsenal will be moving in 2025 from The Sony Center to a new 180-seat facility at silent green Kulturquartier.

Of the dozen features I saw in the Forum this year, the best were nonfiction films (loosely defined) that, formal innovations aside, demanded to be reckoned with as political, historical, social—as human—material. Claire Simon’s Our Body has already been discussed in other festival reports by Giovanni Marchini Camiaand Patricia Aufderheide, but I agree with the general consensus that it was among the standout premieres of the Berlinale. A three-hour documentary shot at a French public hospital, in the units that provide care to women and trans men, Our Body has drawn comparisons to Frederick Wiseman, which is fair enough, but its genius is the first-person plural perspective reflected in the title. I’ve not seen, or felt, anything quite like it before. Because of scheduling conflicts, I wasn’t able to watch Our Body with an audience in Berlin, but I’m sure that if I had, I would have skipped my next film to take a walk and process what I’d just experienced, as I did several other times at the fest.

The story behind the making of Ulises de la Orden’s The Trial (El Juicio) is nearly as compelling as the film itself. In the spring and summer of 1985, nine leaders of Argentina’s military dictatorship were put on trial for 90 days, during which participants in the crimes, victims,and relatives of the “disappeared” testified to the horrors they’d witnessed. The Trial of the Juntas climaxed on September 18, with chief prosecutor Julio César Strassera’s famous closing statement: “I wish to use a phrase that is not my own, because it already belongs to all the Argentine people. Your Honors: Never again!” More than 530 hours of the trial were recorded by broadcast television on U-matic cassettes, copied, then stored away in various locations in South America and Europe. Orden began hunting for the footage a decade ago and eventually was able to piece together the entire trial from multiple sources, including a long-rumored VHS copy that had been safeguarded in the late-1980s by the Norwegian Parliament. His film compresses it all down to 177 compulsively-watchable, emotionally-exhausting minutes.

The style of The Trial is established in the opening sequence, when the nine defendants enter the courtroom, all in full military dress, and the camera pans to capture reactions from the public gallery. The footage is unexpectedly cinematic, in the sense that both camera operators made real-time decisions in 1985 that still generate tension, punctuate dramatic turns and shape the personalities of the key players. Part of the pleasure of The Trial is imagining Orden and his editors breaking down story beats, like in a traditional writers’ room. When lead defense attorney Jorge Orgeira, a weasel of a villain straight out of central casting, complains to the judges that the prosecutors have better seats, Orden cuts to Strassera and his charismatic associate Luis Moreno Ocampo, who are barely suppressing their laughter. On the other end of the dramatic spectrum, when a woman describes the terror and suffering she endured while being raped, he cuts to a shot of women sobbing in the audience. The bulk of the film’s runtime is dedicated to such witnesses, who sit with their backs to the cameras and whose faces are only glimpsed in profile except when entering and leaving the courtroom. The stories they tell are ghastly in their details and in the various ways they’re told. “The bastards! The bastards!” one man yells, his voice cracking. Another, overcome by the tell-tale signs of post-traumatic stress, stops to ask, “Do I have to keep telling this?” A former gunman deflects responsibility in monotone: “I’m a military man. I was given a target.” And in the closing moments of the film, and presumably the closing days of the trial, a witness states plainly and with bitterness and scorn, “That’s what they did. These men who consider themselves Christian.” For viewers, there’s really no place to hide. The Trial makes us witnesses, one step removed, to the vilest of human behavior—the naked brutality of the perpetrators and the white-collar political structures that empowered them. It’s hardly a spoiler to note that only five of the nine men were convicted and that by 1990 all had been pardoned.

Because Strassera’s closing argument is greeted by rousing shouts of support from the audience, The Trial does climax with a moment of catharsis—hope, even—despite the eventual outcome. After a decade of oppressive rule in Argentina, the public airing of criminality and the public condemnation of criminals was itself a kind of victory. The Trial, like all of the best nonfiction films I saw in the Forum, is concerned with a classic philosophical (or theological, if you prefer) question—that is, how does one productively and humanely meditate on the problems of evil and suffering by means of artistic representation? It’s certainly one of the many concerns of Our Body, in which Simon introduces us to a 30something pregnant woman undergoing treatment for late-stage breast cancer. “When is the birth?” a nurse asks casually. “Late January,” she replies. “I have to last till then.” Simon’s solution is to focus solely on this one brief moment of contact, this single conversation, and by doing so resists the temptation to construct meaning from the woman’s story by taking it from her and re-presenting it in a tidy narrative. The woman’s suffering becomes simply (but not only) a particular embodied experience worthy of contemplation and empathy.

In De Facto, filmmaker Selma Doborac focuses on perpetrators of violence—more specifically, on the challenge of representing perpetrators without enticing viewers to participate in any way in the thrills or degradation of violence. The 130-minute film consists of only seven shots, the first six of which are static images of one of two actors, Christoph Bach and Cornelius Obonya, who take turns delivering long, rapid-fire monologues. Each sits in a Franz West chair at a polished Heimo Zobering table (both designers are credited in the film and press kit). The unidentified location is a sparsely decorated room with large open windows, situated in a wooded landscape; the breeze and natural light shift throughout each extended take. All of Doborac’s formal decisions—duration, montage, decor, performance style—are self-consciously conceptual. She has designed a Brechtian alienation machine, pulling out all the stops to distance viewers from the content of the monologues, which is a text collage of first-person testimonies, confessions and statements by anonymous, real-world perpetrators of obscene violence, including men who worked in Nazi concentration camps. It’s a provocative conceit, to say the least. Another critic in Berlin told me De Facto was either a major work or full of shit, he hadn’t decided which. After a second viewing, I’m leaning heavily toward the former.

Doborac, who was born in Bosnia and Herzogovina and now lives in Vienna, describes De Facto as an “alternative testimony,” a strategy that sits outside of traditional documentary forms and archival work. (Her director’s statement is unusually direct and useful.) She has crafted what is in effect a chamber drama that would, I suspect, translate well to the stage. I’ve now seen it on a large theater screen and at home, and the experience was more or less the same—it seems ready-made for galleries, too—because the overriding effect of the staging and Straubian recitation style is to make the performers present and tangible and, somehow, instructively archetypal: two middle-aged white men, stoic and haunted, recount in grotesque detail the grimmest depths of human depravity. And we, somehow, are there in the room with them. I wonder how different my experience of De Facto would be if I were fluent in German and were able to focus my full attention on their small gestures and on the sonorities of their voices rather than having to choose constantly whether to watch and listen or to read the subtitles. Being in proximity to Doborac’s “perpetrators” is fascinating; I’d like to get even closer, I think. I won’t spoil the seventh and final shot of De Facto other than to say it uses formal means to shake viewers out of the spell (or slumber, let’s be honest) cast by the long static monologues. Whether it serves as a benediction or an ecstatic howl, I’m not quite sure. Both, perhaps.

Kurdish director Helin Çelik’s Anqa is an intimate portrait of three victims of violence and injustice. “Intimate portrait” is such a cliché, I know, but an apt one in this case. The victims are all unnamed Muslim women of unidentified nationality; the only clue in the film, for a Western viewer like me, at least, is a mention of the Royal Film Commission of Jordan in the closing acknowledgments. Çelik breaks their stories into fragments and reassembles them as a mosaic. Even after a second viewing, I can’t recount any one woman’s experience in exact detail. The film’s logline describes this as “the opaque logic of trauma.” One woman spent time in prison and now wishes her young daughters would die in their sleep rather than suffer a fate similar to her own, another had her eyes gouged out by a man and relives the terror as a nightmare each time she tries to sleep, and all three have been ostracized by their communities and now pass the days hidden away in their homes. A recurring motif throughout the film is the sound of Henry Barakat’s The Nightingale’s Prayer(Doaa al-Karawan, 1959) playing on a TV in the background. It’s a popular Egyptian melodrama starring Faten Hamama, as a young woman who seeks revenge for her sister, who was murdered by their uncle for shaming the family. The conditions of patriarchal violence don’t change, only the particulars of the crime.

Çelik and cinematographer Raquel Fernández Núñez film the women’s lives in a poetic-observational style and don’t hesitate to land a symbolic image when the opportunity arises, as when the blind woman walks up to a window, pulls aside two layers of curtains, opens both layers of glass, rests her hands on the metal bars that still separate her from the rest of the world and then closes everything again, pausing to straighten the innermost layer of lace. The window scene is typical of the strengths and weaknesses of Anqa’s style, which is always on the verge of oneperfectshot-ism. It’s too easy to imagine Núñez repositioning the camera for the balanced, planimetric frame, and I assume Çelik suggested the action. Why else would the woman open and close the windows like that? Anqa is the type of documentary that has a credited foley artist. I’m suspicious of this type of quasi-nonfiction work, generally. But for reasons of taste that are sometimes difficult to articulate, I trust the voice of this particular film. 

Anqa opens with a well-conceived six-minute sequence that establishes Çelik’s intent to present these three lives as a kind of mythical horror story. An epigraph by Rumi sets the stage: “Understand: time is an image of melancholy. Outside of time is our true form. / For this worldly time is a cage: Outside—all is Mount Qaf and the Anqa.” The title of the film alludes to the Phoenix-like bird that passes between this world and the next and that often symbolizes the very breath of Allah that gives form to our existence. Even in translation it’s a lovely evocation of despair and, for lack of a better word, faith. The film, likewise, is an unguarded and sympathetic but never condescending depiction of dreadful anguish. The opening sequence is a montage of borderline-abstract images that draw on horror tropes, accompanied by the hum of white noise. It all resolves to an extreme closeup of one woman’s lips and hand. The noise becomes a mechanical high-pitched whine as she says, matter-of-factly, “Sometimes I wish the end of the world would come.” Anqasits somewhere in the Venn diagram of Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s and Verena Paravel’s Caniba and late David Lynch. The perpetrators, in this case, are no longer present, but they haunt every scene.

Finally, a quick word of recommendation for Dick Fontaine’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), which was presented as a Forum Special in a new restoration from the Harvard Film Archive. Grapevine documents James Baldwin’s return to America in 1980, when he revisited several locations of violent struggle during the Civil Rights movement. At each stop—in Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, Jackson, St. Augustine, and then up to Newark—he reconnects with old allies in the struggle, people like Sterling Brown, Oretha Castle Haley and Amiri Baraka. It’s as much an essay as a documentary, with Baldwin a seemingly eager participant and co-author of the work. Late in his too-short life, Baldwin fully understood his public persona, and he makes iconic use of it throughout the film, posing for staged portraits in front of key landmarks, his pensive, beautiful face wearied with experience. I Heard It Through the Grapevine was the last film I saw in Berlin, after I’d already begun thinking about cinema as a mode of contemplation on violence and torment. (That’s what good programming does. It puts art, artists, and audiences in conversation.) Baldwin and his old comrades have no time for nostalgia. They’re clear-eyed and angry about the murders of dear friends and about how little progress was made despite the sacrifices. When he visits the Martin Luther King, Jr. monument in Atlanta for the first time, Baldwin says it is “absolutely as irrelevant as the Lincoln Memorial.” I Heard It Through the Grapevine gives lie to the comforting notion that suffering and sacrifice lead inevitably to justice and progress. It’s a harsh truth, precisely and artfully rendered.

This essay was originally published at Filmmaker: Dispatch 1, Dispatch 2.

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Dispatch 1

2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50^th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, we were all tracking the spread of a virus from China to Milan. I’m sure I’ll never forget the way I downplayed her concerns, assuring her COVID-19 was just another media sensation that would fade away once cable news audiences got bored with the story. Earlier that week we had announced the film lineup for Big Ears, a music and arts festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had spoken a day earlier in Berlin with Claire Denis who confirmed, after four years of back and forth, that she and Stuart Staples were coming. That the virus might affect our plans was inconceivable. But then, a week after I returned home, SXSW was cancelled, and five days later Big Ears had no choice but to do the same.

On one of my last days at the Berlinale in 2020, as I was walking toward the Palast, I passed Hong Sang-soo and Kim Minhee walking arm in arm under a red umbrella. That night I got a drink in the hotel bar after filing a festival report and basked for a few minutes in the romance of it all. Film festivals had been a soul-restoring part of my life for nearly two decades, and this had been an especially good one. Often over the past two years I’ve thought that if things never return to normal, or if the film world returned but I was no longer able to participate in it, the sight of Hong and Kim under a red umbrella would be a fine grace note to exit on.

Hong and Kim returned to Berlin this week, as did many, but not nearly all, of the people I’d hoped to see there. The decision in early January to move the European Film Market, Berlinale Co-Production Market, Berlinale Talents and World Cinema Fund to online-only events; the cancellation of all parties and receptions; and the ongoing spread of Omicron in Germany and elsewhere inevitably affected attendance and dampened the spirit of the fest. It was obvious in the uncrowded streets of Potsdamer Platz, the half-capacity theaters, and the mostly-empty press lounge (about one-third as many credentials were issued this year). Despite all of that, the organizers of the Berlinale managed to stage an event that felt like a real film festival, and god bless them for it. I know I needed it. For press, each day began with a free stop in one of two buses outfitted and staffed for rapid tests, followed 20-30 minutes later by a second stop at a nearby tent where we showed our negative result in exchange for a colored wrist band that granted us hassle-free access to every venue. KN95 masks were required everywhere, and so were seldom commented on. The online ticketing system worked perfectly, eliminating any need to wait in queues (a rare net positive of COVID times). And while I’ve heard rumors of positive cases, the only one I can confirm by name is Isabelle Huppert, who had to cancel her trip to Berlin after contracting the virus elsewhere. If the in-the-flesh Berlinale is any indication, 2022 is off to a promising start. (I hope these will be the first and last words I ever publish on the subject of the virus.)

Hong and Kim have certainly done their part to restore some sense of normalcy to this corner of the film world. The Novelist’s Film, which took the Competition Grand Jury Prize, is a story of chance encounters, artists in search of inspiration and drunken confessions—in other words, a Hong Sangsoo film, and an especially affecting one. Lee Hyeyeong plays a highly regarded novelist, which is to say she is the type of Hong character who is recognized on the street by admiring fans and envied by less successful colleagues. When she visits an old friend who has given up her own writing ambitions to run a bookstore, Lee meets an actress (Kim) who has likewise chosen to step out of the spotlight (“I’ve been dealing with some things”) and strikes up an immediate rapport with her. Within minutes, she invites Kim to star in a film that Lee proposes to write and direct herself, and Kim tentatively accepts, both of them rejuvenated by the possibilities of this new friendship. Their conversation gives Hong an excuse to put into Lee’s mouth ideas about art and filmmaking that are familiar to those of us who have followed his career. It’s become “embarrassing” to “pretend” as a writer, Lee says. Instead, she wants to try her hand at movies: “The most important thing is an actor I can freely look at.”

Lee’s presence—both here and in Hong’s previous feature, In Front of Your Face—seems to have freed him somehow to be more direct in his expression of sentiment and anger. When she first meets Kim, she is with a film director (Hong regular Kwon Haehyo) who tells Kim her semi-retirement from acting is a “waste.” It’s an off-hand line, suggesting a compliment, but Lee finds it infuriating. “How can you say that to her?” she asks, her body language punishing the man for assuming the right to assign value to a woman’s choices. “How can you say that to her!” Like so many of Hong’s men, the director tries to talk himself out of his gaff and fails badly. It’s too easy to imagine Hong relishing the opportunity to dress down the type of person who would make similar comments to Kim for her decision to forego mainstream success by working exclusively with Hong. As with many of their collaborations, Hong makes his affection for Kim a subject of The Novelist’s Film, particularly in a formal turn near the end that works aesthetically (there was a palpable change of energy in the theater) while also forcing viewers to reconsider the shape and strategy of the larger film. It’s a lovely, shamelessly romantic moment, as close as Hong has come to expressionistic melodrama.

Claire Denis also took home a Silver Bear, for directing Both Sides of the Blade—her first major award at a European festival since Nenette and Boni won the Golden Leopard in Locarno 25 years ago. There’s a much longer piece to be written about how Denis’s late career has been reshaped by her creative partnership with novelist Christine Angot, with whom she first collaborated on the 2014 short, Voilà l’enchaînement, and again three years later on Let the Sunshine In. Discussing the latter, Denis said, “The line I told Christine was: ‘We don’t have much time. We don’t have much of a budget. Let’s film your words.’” That shift from the mostly silent, expressionless, gestural performances that characterize Denis’s work with screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau to the rapid-fire dialogue of Angot’s scripts—delivered by Juliette Binoche no less—has not been greeted with universal enthusiasm by long-time Denis fans, but I find this otherstyle of Denis’s fascinating. Her earlier work is populated with unconventional women—Yekaterina Golubeva’s self-determined, misanthropic immigrant in I Can’t Sleep (1994) and Valérie Lemercier’s searching Laure in Friday Night (2002) are two favorites—but with Angot, Denis seems to have found a comrade and confidante with whom she can sympathetically and dispassionately dissect the modern woman of a certain age.

In Both Sides of the Blade (retitled Fire for IFC’s U.S. release), an adaptation of Angot’s novel, Un tournant de la Vie, Binoche plays Sara, a radio talk show host who has for the last nine years lived with ex-con, ex-rugby star, currently-unemployed Jean (Vincent Lindon). Throughout the first act of the film, Denis emphasizes, with the subtlety of wrecking ball, that the couple’s relationship is loving, supportive and affectionate. In one especially strange sex scene, Binoche, who plays nearly every moment big, cries, “Mon amour! Mon amour! Mon amour! Mon Amour!,” gradually elevating the scene to Buñuelian absurdity. And that’s the fundamental problem with the film, which tries on several different tones but never quite succeeds in bringing them into balance. Midway through, in a miraculous sequence that evokes the sensual pleasures of Denis’s very best work, Sara is reunited with her former lover François (Grégoire Colin) and for a moment I settled in happily to what I assumed would be a Pre-Code-style romance, where psychological realism is thrown off for ecstatic passions and genre plot mechanics. (Tindersticks’s strings-and-woodwinds score certainly implies we’ve entered the heightened reality of old school noir.) Instead, Both Sides of the Blade culminates with extended arguments between Sara and Jean, in which she reveals herself to be a shameless gaslighter and he absorbs her abuse with the solid, quietly threatening resignation that is Lindon’s specialty. The film is another messy but worthy experiment with Angot’s words—made quickly during quarantine, with faces framed in tight closeups and with a spirit of generous curiosity about the crazy-making stupidity of love.

Robe of Gems, winner of the Jury Prize, opens with a long duration shot that begins in darkness before slowly fading into an image of a sparsely wooded landscape. An elderly laborer approaches, stooping down and hacking at weeds with a sickle as the soundtrack becomes a fury of insects. A reflection in the image reveals it’s been shot through a window, which sets up the first cut to the reverse angle, where we see Isabel (Nailea Norvind), a middle-aged, light-skinned woman, whose breasts are being fondled from behind by her husband. It’s a transgressive rather than erotic sequence, that ends with the couple furiously breaking wooden furniture in their well-appointed home. It’s also a bold opening statement from first-time director Natalia López Gallardo that establishes the key dynamics of the film: the intersections of race, class, violence and injustice in provincial Mexico. Having edited many of husband Carlos Reygadas’s films (she also plays his wife in Our Time), López Gallardo will inevitably be burdened with comparisons to his work, but they seem justified in this case: both filmmakers are working in a similar milieu, sharing distinct formal approaches (for example, using extreme anamorphic lenses that distort the edges of the frame), and her slow fade-in recalls the memorable opening of Silent Light. I suspect the success of Robe of Gems might change the critical conversation about both of them, perhaps elevating López Gallardo’s status as co-auteur of her collaborations with Reygadas.

Isabel has moved with her family to the countryside to escape the drama of her divorce and the social niceties of her privileged upbringing, embodied by the dyed-blond hair and sun-beaten, surgically-tightened skin of her disapproving mother. “I’m sorry, but you don’t get how things work here. We see things differently,” the locals say. Rather than being only a film about a naïve, terrorized outsider (although it’s partly that), Robe of Gemsdivides its attention among Isabel and two other women of a similar age: María (Antonia Olivares), a poor housekeeper whose sister has gone missing and who has no choice but to work for the local mafia, and Roberta (Aida Roa), a police commander who accommodates corruption until it threatens the safety of her teenage son, a wannabe social media influencer and gangster. That all three stories take a tragic turn comes as little surprise; from the opening shot, Robe of Gems announces itself as the kind of contemporary art film that transforms liberal guilt and the incomprehensible brutalities of socioeconomic inequality (“As you know, we find bodies every day”) into a signature style. López Gallardo’s is marked by the staging of action along multiple planes (while two people talk in the foreground, a girl circles them on a bicycle; while two girls sit in a parked SUV, their heads turned away from the camera, an industrial belt churns in the background); by bursts of unmotivated expressionism seemingly plucked from López Gallardo’s unconscious (three gangsters move in slow motion under fluorescent light to the throbbing drone of EDM); and by aggressive sound design. López Gallardo has said Robe of Gems is about “what we carry inside after years of accumulating, in our minds and dreams, infinite images of torture.” Her style instantiates that idea by drifting between the subjectivities of her characters. At its best, the film is a disorienting and thrilling experience.

Dispatch 2

My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as the film begins she’s in an especially precarious state. The project blossomed when McKenzie met Ziyin Zheng, a neighbor who had emigrated from China to attend graduate school in Cape Breton, the isolated community in Novia Scotia where McKenzie lives and works, and also to more freely express their sexuality. In consultation with Zheng, McKenzie invented An, a volunteer at the hospital who is hoping to become a Canadian citizen. Star and An meet a few minutes into Queens of the Qing Dynasty—An has been assigned to her as an advocate and companion—and the remainder of the film isn’t so much a telling of their evolving relationship as a heightened, sensory-triggering experience of it. “We have chemistry, chemical connections,” Star tells An. “We’re mixin’ chemicals. I can feel it.”

McKenzie’s formal approach is to trap viewers immediately within Star’s subjective experience of the small and shrinking world around her. (When An scrolls through Star’s Instagram, they mostly see pictures of other hospital rooms.) The first cut of the film is to Star’s first-person perspective of her own hand, which is holding a bottle of activated charcoal; as a nurse encourages Star to drink it to counteract the poison she’d ingested, the electronic score overtakes the soundtrack, drowning out the nurse’s voice and stealing away Star’s attention. We observe Star mostly in close-up: Walker’s large round eyes stare without blinking or fully comprehending what she sees, but also without judgment or irony. One of the many pleasures of Queens of the Qing Dynastyis the emotional intimacy generated by a character who lives in a perpetual state of radical, reckless honesty. When Star and An visit the maternity ward and watch nurses swaddle newborns, pinning down their arms and legs with a knotted blanket (“I very much want to be one of those babies,” An confesses), McKenzie cuts from a newborn’s face to Star’s, reinforcing a notion I’d already become conscious of—that the film was actively situating me in a diegetic space untainted by ego. “You speak what’s in your mind,” An tells Star. “I like that.”

The only useful point of comparison I have for much of Queens of the Qing Dynasty is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and, in particular, the first encounter between Harper and Prior—the queered attraction between Star and An, the healing and liberation they both seem to experience only in each other’s presence, and the self-consciously symbolic/poetic/camp drama they occupy. The two-hour runtime allows McKenzie room to stitch together a patchwork mythology in which Star and An play epic roles. The title of the film refers to a story An shares, of ancient Chinese concubines who manipulated men to consolidate power and avoid manual labor. “They extend their empire while keeping their nails long,” An says. Star often becomes distracted by a series of grotesque and mesmerizing cartoons that seem to stream on every phone, TV, and monitor in their strange, self-contained world. And late in the film, when Star is granted a day pass from a mental health facility, An takes her to an arcade where they lose themselves in a virtual reality world. It’s a miraculous scene, with dialogue worthy of Kushner. (That’s the highest compliment I can offer McKenzie’s script—this is one of the biggest small films I’ve seen.) “I’m no longer trapped. I like your love,” An says, as the VR game’s sentimental score swells. Star lifts her goggles and smiles. “Maybe we should kiss. We are going to conquer empires.” To borrow Harper’s line: “This is the very threshold of revelation sometimes.”

The other standout of the fest was the equally ambitious and otherworldly Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s follow up to Once There Was Brasilia (2017). Queirós has said of the earlier film that its Afrofuturist, sci-fi design was, in part, a byproduct of refusing to work with the standard visual language and narrative codes handed down by traditional Western cinema. “If we follow such tropes, we’ll never have a chance to actually find our own selves in the film,” he told Ela Bittencourt. His comment came in the context of a larger conversation about “the sheer impossibility of representing Brazilian politics” in the months leading up to the election of Bolsonaro and the triumph of Brazil’s extreme right. Likewise, Dry Ground Burning is a ramshackle (in the most exciting sense of the word) mash-up of genres, equal parts Western, gangster film, Mad Max-like dystopia and documentary. Like Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacarau (2019), it instantiates a world that seems to exist outside of time, incomprehensibly cruel and unjust but also imbued somehow with revolutionary potential. Even if that potential is only aspirational—wishful thinking in cinematic form—it’s nonetheless a radical method of representing the “own selves” of Brazil’s marginalized poor.

In Dry Ground Burning, a gang of women from Sol Nascente, a sprawling favela on the western edge of Brasilia, have commandeered an oil processing facility and are selling gasoline on the black market. When Queirós and Pimenta first conceived of the story in 2015, oil was nationalized under Lula; by the time they went into production, Bolsonaro’s extractive profiteering seemed to the filmmakers to be an act of war against his own people. “All of this is federal land now,” Caca tells his sister Léa (Léa Alves), as they look out over the dry valley beneath his home. Léa has just returned from prison, like a time traveler discovering a new and different nation, and joined up with their half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc), who leads the gang. Dry Ground Burning pulls on a number of fascinating narrative and thematic threads—one woman runs for office, soldiers in an armored vehicle threaten to attack, there’s documentary footage from an actual Bolsonaro rally, Alves (either the character or the actress, I’m not sure which) is arrested for selling drugs, there’s music and dancing and a queer carnivalesque energy to much of it—but the film works primarily because of Alves and Darc, whose riveting screen presences reminded me of the thrill of meeting Ventura and Vanda for the first time when I saw Colossal Youth in 2006. Pedro Costa’s influence looms large here, not only in Queirós and Pimenta’s use of non-professional actors but also in their attention to the systemic exploitation of laborers who build our cities and cultural institutions, only to be excluded from them. Brasilia, which Queirós has called “a postcard city, a holographic projection,” is often visible on the distant horizon, like the museums and monuments of Costa’s Lisbon.

Dry Ground Burning premiered in Forum, which since 1971 has run alongside the Berlinale, with independent curation by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (previously the Friends of the German Film Archive). From its inception, Forum has been committed to spotlighting smart and politically engaged work that pushes film form, with little regard for commercial potential. Alain Gomis’s new essay film, Rewind and Play, exemplifies the best of that tradition. While researching another, larger project on Thelonious Monk, Gomis discovered two hours of unused footage from the taping of Jazz Portrait, a television program recorded in-studio one afternoon in December 1969 before Monk’s Paris concert. In the aired version of the episode, Monk answers two mundane questions from host Henri Renaud, in between solo romps through a selection of songs, but the found footage reveals a tense and disturbing production. To start, Renaud, a bandleader and music producer by trade, wasn’t prepared for such a difficult interview. Within two years, Monk would leave public life due to increasing mental health problems; bassist Al McKibbon later recounted, “Monk said about two words [on the last tour]. I mean literally maybe two words.” The Monk we meet in Rewind and Play offers direct answers to Renaud’s questions—why did he put his grand piano in the kitchen? “That was the largest room in the apartment.”—but is unwilling or unable to engage in chat-show banter. It’s an old cliché, I know, but late-1960s Monk epitomizes the troubled artist who would rather communicate through art than words. And goddamn could he communicate at the piano. Rewind and Play would be worth recommending if only for the extensive footage of Monk performing song after song—flat-fingered, perspiring, humming to himself as he tears through his signature glissandos and reinvents harmony.

I suppose simply acknowledging my use of a cliché isn’t enough to let me off the hook. I’ve already fallen into the same rhetorical trap that Renaud and the makers of Jazz Portrait leapt into without conscience, framing Thelonious Monk as an exotic type, an Inspired Genius or Idiot Savant, and holding him up for display rather than engaging the actual man at the seat. “The archive is never neutral,” Gomis has said of Rewind and Play, and the brilliance of the film is the efficiency with which it exposes the racist power structures that framed much of Monk’s career, and by extension the careers of so many Black musicians. In take after take we watch Renaud finetune his telling of a story about the trip he made, a decade earlier, to visit Monk in New York. The point of the telling is that he, Renaud, is the true hero of the story, the elite tastemaker who recognized Monk’s talents before he found wider acclaim. (That Monk had already been playing in America for 20 years before being “discovered” by Renaud is one of many unspoken ironies running through the film.) When Renaud asks Monk about his first concert in Paris, Monk, who is patient and accommodating to a fault, becomes more talkative, explaining that he was frustrated at the time to see his face on the cover of local magazines, all the while knowing he was the lowest-paid performer on the bill. Renaud’s expression turns dour and he cuts him off. “That’s not nice,” Renaud says, every bit the stereotype of a paternalistic villain. Monk expresses a lifetime of canny disappointment with his whispered reply: “It’s not nice?” Gomis designs the sequence so that Monk’s line really lands—finally, fifty years too late—while Renaud and crew reset the shot for another take.

I saw only a handful of new films from the Forum program this year, but all are worthy of a quick recommendation. In Camouflage, Jonathan Perel documents author Félix Bruzzone’s investigation into the disappearance and murder of his mother during Argentina’s Dirty War. Rather than following the standard protocols of the genre—it’s easy to image a Netflix-friendly version with expert talking heads, an affected voiceover and montages of scanned photos and archival documents—Perel focuses, instead, on Bruzzone himself. The opening shot is of his bare, running feet, and as the film evolves the images of Bruzzone’s relentless motion and expressionless face come to embody the traumatic legacy he and so many of his neighbors have inherited. After buying a home nearby, Bruzzone began jogging around Campo de Mayo, a century-old, 20,000-acre military facility in Buenos Aires that, from 1976 to 1982, housed four secret detention centers. Still an active, walled-off base, Campo de Mayo is also an overgrown nature preserve in the heart of the city and an object of fascination for some in the community, while others seem resigned to its presence and unaware of, or uninterested in, its dark history. Much of Camouflage is built from staged conversations between Bruzzone and other locals, who share with him what they know of the base, rounding out his understanding of his mother’s final days. He wanders through the ruins of buildings where she likely lived and died. He and the crew have a brief, uneventful encounter with soldiers. And in the final sequence, he participates alongside a large group of runners in an obstacle race through the property. On paper, it reads as too on-the-nose, but I found myself overwhelmed by a point-of-view shot of Bruzzone firing at a target with a military-style rifle. The noise of the gun and the casual violence of the context make the shots physically present, and terrifying, in a way I don’t recall experiencing before in a film.

Not surprisingly, Forum included a few titles that could be loosely described as COVID films. During the first lockdown, Tyler Taormina, the writer and director of Ham on Rye (2019), returned for a few months to his family home in suburban New York, where he and cinematographer Jesse Sperling rounded up a cast of friends, neighbors, and family members to make Happer’s Comet, a 62-minute experiment in tone. And it really does feel like an experiment as if Taormina challenged himself to see how long he could sustain the strange sensation of walking around your home in the early morning hours, not quite recognizing long-familiar objects illuminated by passing headlights, or noticing for the first time the machine hum of your refrigerator. There’s no plot to speak of in Happer’s Comet; rather, the majority of the film is a montage of isolated night-time incidents that Taormina gradually assembles into a portrait of an isolating community. When his tonal experiment begins to strain, he wisely wraps the project with a subdued but satisfying and mysterious climax that suggests the necessity of human connection—or at least a good romp in a cornfield. I have a weakness for films in this mode. The sound design, which was constructed entirely in post, recalls David Lynch, and the observational style reminded me of José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007) and Stéphane Lafleur’s You’re Sleeping, Nicole (2014).

In their directors’ statement, Alejo Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña emphasize that The Middle Ages is a film made duringCOVID lockdown but that it is not a film about COVID lockdown. I’m not convinced the distinction is as important as they make it out to be, but the film itself is tightly constructed, tenderhearted, and fun—another small movie with big ambitions. The co-directors and their daughter, Cleo, play versions of themselves, isolated in their two-story flat, getting by as best as they can. All three spend much of their time in front of screens: Alejo attempts to direct a play by Beckett, Luciana teaches dance classes, and Cleo makes some effort to keep up with school and piano lessons. Watching The Middle Ages in 2022 actually made me a bit nostalgic for the early months of the pandemic, when the madness of the situation still had an edge to it. Cleo wants to buy a telescope, so she begins smuggling items out of the house and splitting the profits with a friend who sells them. It’s a clever plot device that foregrounds the general anxiety of the moment, the very real fear that economic and social structures are collapsing, especially for people who make their living in the arts. The Middle Ages is a comedy concerned with life’s most persistent and absurd question: “How should we then live?” I told a friend after the screening that I enjoyed the film so much because Moguillansky and Acuña capture how overwhelming and joyful it can be to love a child, which is one approach, I think, to answering that question. 

This essay was originally published at Filmmaker: Dispatch 1, Dispatch 2, Dispatch 3.

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Dispatch 1

Two days into my first trip to Berlin, I haven’t quite got my bearings yet—for the physical landscape of the fest or for the sprawling program, which includes more than 340 films from 71 countries. Along with being a milestone year for the Berlinale (the 70^th), this is also the 50^th anniversary of Forum, the festival’s program of boundary-pushing work, and the first edition under the co-leadership of Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian. Rissenbeek joined the fest after nearly four decades in the German film industry; Chatrian moved to Berlin from Locarno, where he’d served in a similar role since 2014. In a recent New York Times profile, both describe the increasingly popular dual-leadership model, or doppelspitze, as a more productive division of labor. For Chatrian the daily work of curation, which this year involved watching more than 800 films for consideration, “would not have been possible if I had 10 meetings a day like Mariette.”

I began the fest in a sleep-deprived fugue, which only enhanced the experience of watching Raul Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, a surrealist fantasy about a man (Rubén Sotoconil) reckoning with his wife’s suicide. Haunted by her spirit—and, most disturbingly, by images of her wigs skittering across the floor—he is driven to ultimate despair himself, at which point the film breaks in half. For the remaining 30 minutes, nearly all of the earlier footage and spoken dialogue is revisited in reverse, like an extended visit to the Red Room in Twin Peaks, eventually winding its way back to the opening image of a partially obstructed view of his wife’s body on the floor. “Let’s say we killed you because you were killing us, Darling,” the man laments in voiceover.

Intended as Ruiz’s debut, the material for The Tango of the Widower was shot in 1967, but because of a lack of funding he was unable to complete the soundtrack and, so, moved on to a new project, the award-winning Three Sad Tigers (1968), which launched his career. Following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, Ruiz was forced into exile and left the footage behind, where it remained untouched until 2016, when it was rediscovered in the basement of a theater in Santiago de Chile. Sarmiento, a filmmaker herself and Ruiz’s widow and longtime editor, commissioned lip-readers to reconstruct the dialogue, which she then recorded and added to the mix in a style that recalls the bewilderingly intimate, subjective voice of Andrei Tarkovsky’s non-synch soundtracks. The fundamentally split nature of the film—one reasonable reading is that the widower is the suicide, that the wigs are his own—is reflected even in the closing titles, which list all major credits in two columns, one for the 1967 production, one for the 2019 reconstruction. Clumsy but energetic, The Tango of the Widower is impressive for its ambitions. At 27 Ruiz was already uninhibited with his camera and eager to film our most private dreams.

The Tango of the Widower screened in Forum, which is likewise looking back to its origins while remaking itself in real time. Now under the directorship of film critic and writer Cristina Nord, Forum has since its founding in 1971 been curated independently by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. For its 50^th anniversary edition, Forum is revisiting 25 films from its first lineup (more to come in a future post), in addition to 35 new films in the main lineup and nearly 40 films and installations in Forum Expanded.

Judging by the first two days of Forum screenings, one guiding curatorial principle for Nord and her team is diversity of formal practice. The Calming, like Song Fang’s feature debut, Memories Look at Me (2012), is tasteful and contemplative to a fault—aesthetic whiplash following Ruiz’s histrionics. Xi Qi stars as Lin, a 30-something filmmaker struggling to recover from a recent breakup. When we first meet her, she’s in Japan, overseeing the installation of a new gallery show. Over dinner with a mutual friend she becomes reacquainted with a Japanese woman played by Makiko Watanabe, and the tone of the film lifts suddenly, suggesting a shift toward more natural performances and the possibility of a new relationship. It’s a wonderful scene. Speaking in English, Watanabe and Xi seem to be improvising, or at least working with some amount of freedom, as their chat veers close to flirtation.

However, when Lin leaves Japan, the tone reverts back to staged, suffocating quiet. Song, who played the film student in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), is working here in the mode of Hou’s Café Lumiere (2003), using Lin as a surrogate wanderer and observer of the world. We watch as Lin watches—through car windows, from passing trains, balconies, and the sterile vantage of her bed. Often that perspective is stunningly beautiful, but an hour into The Calming, I’d given up all hopes of an Apitchatpong-like splintering of the narrative or anything approaching transgression. As I said, the film is tasteless to a fault—like the art-directed fantasies of a Pottery Barn catalog.

James Benning returned to Forum with Maggie’s Farm, which consists of 24 static shots collected in and around the California Institute of the Arts, where Benning has taught since 1987. The first eight images are of trees and tall grass, and of the parking lots and hillside surrounding the campus; the second eight are of hallways, stairwells, and classroom spaces; the final eight are of the surfaces of buildings, outdoor industrial storage containers, and a loading dock; all are unpeopled, except on a few occasions when someone is heard passing through off-screen space or when Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt drop in via the soundtrack.

As has always been the case with Benning’s films, that kind of dry, point-by-point description of his formal strategy drifts toward spoiler territory. Part of the pleasure of each new film is discovering the rules of the game. Maggie’s Farm, like so much of his work, is autobiographical—as we’re granted access to his particular perspective, painted by his particular taste—but this one has the tone of a valedictory. While I haven’t heard any official word of Benning retiring from CalArts, the film’s title suggests leaving some kind of work behind. The space where he has taught for more than three decades is populated with trash cans, dented water fountains, sloping trees, and cinder block walls that Benning’s flat DV images elevate into Mondrianesque balance and tension. (The middle section of the film reminded me of my college years, when I worked as a janitor and would quietly explore the same empty hallways and classrooms five evenings a week.) The final shot is of the top of the cab of a blue pickup truck parked in front of a slatted, deep-red wall. It’s a stunning image, timestamped by the falling ash from recent wildfires—an ending that returns to the beginning.

Dispatch 2

At the risk of being canceled, I’ll admit that in the days since I watched The Salt of Tears, I’ve found myself wondering, “Who will make films like this when Philippe Garrel is gone?” (The best answer I’ve heard so far: Louis Garrel.) By “this” I mean a stereotypically oh-so-French comedy with an existential bent. Or a season in the life of a dour-faced, impoverished young artist who beds every beautiful woman he meets and is too young and too myopic to realize he’s a gaping asshole. Or the story of a boy who loved, disappointed and mourns for his father. Or the perspective of an aging man who, to quote another now-aging man, wishes he knew what he knows now when he was younger. At the very least, I will miss the precision of Garrel’s and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière’s attacks. After the hero of The Salt of Tears cancels a rendezvous with one woman because a last-minute change of plans forces him to remain at home with another, they mock his stupid anger in ironic voiceover: “He felt his cowardice had benefited Genevieve without him deciding it.” Who will write that line two decades from now?

I suspect The Salt of Tears is the film we will most often point to when we discuss “late Garrel.” It’s a catalog of the director’s recent preoccupations and formal moves—among them widescreen black and white cinematography and joyous, kinetic dance sequences—all working to the best effect since Regular Lovers (2005). Logann Antuofermo is Luc, a provincial carpenter who, after years of apprenticing under his beloved, aging father (André Wilms), travels to Paris to interview for a position in the prestigious École Boulle and, while there, picks up Djemila (Oulaya Amamra). They meet cute, while waiting for a bus, which is an opportunity for Garrel to do what he does better than anyone: getting young actors to show the nervous excitement of first attractions. While Antuofermo and Amamra stand side by side on the bus, not quite touching, Garrel cuts away briefly from the two-shot to a stranger sitting a few feet away, our surrogate witness to what can only be described as a spark between two impossibly charismatic performers.

I’m too new to Berlin to step into the debate over whether The Salt of Tears should be in the competition; I’ll add only that it is among my favorites of the eight competition films I’ve seen. That Garrel’s signature views on the sentimental educations of young men can now seem out of date doesn’t erase the exactness and wisdom in his filmmaking. The Salt of Tears ends suddenly, like a shot, after Luc delivers a line that I can imagine Garrel carrying with him since Maurice Garrel died a decade ago. It’s a wrecking ball of a line that destroys, in surrealist fashion, the possibility of this particular movie continuing to exist for even one more frame. The ending works only because of the filmmaking choices leading up to it, including a rare (for Garrel) and deeply merciful close-up of one of the actors and the unusual decision to leave the camera on a person who is delivering bad news rather than the person who is receiving it. It’s quite a feat—I don’t know of another director who could imagine the sequence, let alone pull it off.

Garrel’s problematic fixations seem quaint compared with those on display in another of my favorite competition selections, Abel Ferrara’s Siberia. In his official press notes, Ferrara reports that after making Pasolini (2014) he began collecting “crazy images” of an isolated wilderness, putting the ideas to paper as they visited him not in hopes of creating a typical screenplay but as the necessary next step toward discovering something more elemental in his filmmaking. “I have a great appetite for what cinema can be,” he writes. The result is Ferrara’s Mirror (Tarkovsky) or his Tree of Life (Malick) or possibly his L’Intrus (Denis)—an unshackled, shameless purging of the id. Siberia is rescued from laughable absurdity by Ferrara’s filmmaking, which is as moment-to-moment thrilling as any I’ve experienced so far at the fest. (To be clear, I’m in the minority opinion here; much of the press audience indeed found the film laughably absurd.)

Willem Dafoe returns as Ferrara’s alter ego, this time playing a loner named Clint, whose days are spent serving drinks in a remote, snow-covered cabin. Almost immediately, the narrative is interrupted by visions of violence and impossible shifts in perspective that suggest dream logic—a critical cliché that, in this particular instance, is essential. A Russian woman sits at the bar before transforming into an erotic embodiment of motherhood. Her babushka sips vodka and whispers untranslated secrets before mutating into a nightmarish creature on the floor. Or, at least, I think it’s the same old woman in both images. As in dreams, the transformations are often associative: that old woman later becomes another old woman, and both are somehow also Clint’s mother. Dafoe is game for it all, as usual, slipping into capital-s Symbolic disguises and declaiming self-aware lines like, “The only thing I’m guilty of is loving you too much.” Siberia will likely end up sitting alongside Showgirls and other films of the Campy But Deadly Serious sub-genre. Its devotees will be a small but enthusiastic crowd.

The most mysterious competition film I’ve seen is Undine, Christian Petzold’s retelling of a myth in which a hopeless man stands at the edge of a lake that is hidden deep in a forest and calls forth a mystical sprite who will love him forever with only one condition: if he betrays her, she must drown him with her tears and return to the water. We meet Undine (Paula Beer) at one such moment of betrayal. In the opening shot, as she learns that her lover is leaving for another woman, Petzold frames Beer in close up, which signals the director’s first crucial intervention. Rather than telling one more story of a desperate man destroyed by love, he shifts the tale to Undine’s perspective and imagines a scenario in which she chooses to resist her nature, as it’s been written by generations of male mythmakers, and break the curse. More simply, Petzold gives Undine agency.

For 25 years, Petzold has been perfecting his unique brand of genre-adjacent filmmaking that blends the pleasures of classical Hollywood cinema with whip-smart socio-political analysis. In his previous film, Transit (2018), he transposed World War II refugee crises and police crackdowns onto 21^st-century Europe. In Undine, he reunites the stars of that film, Beer and Franz Rogowski, and tries with less success to repeat the trick, throwing them into a fairy tale world tethered awkwardly to everyday reality. I’m not convinced it works. For example, Undine is a contract tour guide at the Senate Administration for Urban Development, where she lectures on the history of Berlin as she leads visitors through a room of maps and large-scale models at the Berlin City Museum. That Berlin was built on swamps and has a long tradition of demolishing its past resonates with the myth but in fairly schematic ways. The lecture scenes, like too many of Undine’s narrative turns, will be of great interest to academic discussions of Petzold’s work, but they lack the tense coherence of his best films.

Dispatch 3

On the shuttle from the airport into Berlin I snapped some pictures as we passed Brandenburg Gate, Victory Column and the Television Tower. My hotel was just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, so several times a day, as I made my way to and from Potsdamer Platz, I would walk over the brick-drawn lines in the sidewalk that mark the former location of the Berlin Wall. East into west, west into east—that and a meal with friends at Stadtklause, the pub where Bruno S. would perform with his accordion, satisfied whatever interest I had in playing tourist. Except for taking a few short subway rides to find better restaurants, I was content to stay in the main festival area, where the press offices are a two-minute walk from three screening venues and The Barn, a first-rate coffee shop and meeting spot.

The Berlinale, I realized fairly quickly, is something like my ideal film festival, mostly because the program balances its lineup of important premieres with expertly curated sidebars. In North America we tend to draw a line between those two worlds, relegating repertory programming to a few key institutions in our major cities and adopting everywhere else a generic approach to festival curation that amounts, with varying degrees of success and ambition, to showing the best new films we can get. There are practical reasons for the situation, including the scarcity of curatorial expertise and the lack of access to public funding and film projection. Regional organizations are also burdened by keeping up with the Joneses, choosing to simply adopt the good-enough model that appears to be working in peer cities. Still, it’s a major loss for North American film culture. Without the counter-balance of older films and older forms—without the tangible presence of cinema history and the conversations and experiences it engenders—our festivals too often celebrate trends and ephemera.

As I mentioned in my first dispatch, the Forum celebrated its 50^th anniversary this year by re-presenting its inaugural program. Forum was born out of a controversy at the 1970 Berlinale, when jury president George Stevens demanded that Michael Verhoeven’s anti-war film o.k. be removed from competition. No compromise could be reached, so the competition was canceled, no prizes were awarded and in the aftermath, the festival board invited Friends of the German Film Archive (now Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art) to present a separate, independent festival alongside the Berlinale. Erika and Ulrich Gregor, who co-founded Friends of the German Film Archive in 1963, agreed to a budget and set about curating a program of “difficult, dangerous films.” (Critic Bert Rebhandl recently moderated a conversation between Erika and Ulrich Gregor, Christoph Terhechte, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Birgit Kohler, and Cristina Nord, who tell the full story.) The 28 titles screened in Forum 50 indeed include radical work of the day by Theo Angelopoulos, Nagisa Ōshima, Alexander Kluge, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, Dušan Makavejev, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, alongside Happiness (Alexandr Medvedkin, 1935) and Obsession (Luchino Visconti, 1943).

Designing a screening schedule is an overlooked skill in programming, so I want to tip my hat to whomever scheduled The Murder of Fred Hampton (Howard Alk, 1970), Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (William Klein, 1970), and Angela – Portrait of a Revolutionary (Yolande du Luart, 1971) on consecutive mornings, in that sequence, at the Arsenal theater. They were, for me, the highlight of the festival. Together, the three films are fascinating studies in political and rhetorical style—Hampton the fiery and charismatic young rapper, who might have preached the gospel if he’d found religion instead of revolution; Cleaver the kind-eyed politician/convict, who speaks slowly and in measured, perfectly articulated sentences; and Davis the philosopher/teacher, who is as quick to laugh with students as she is to call out frisbee-tossing hippies for their shameful lack of commitment to the struggle. “What are we celebrating?” she asks them with exhausted disdain.

I’ve seen clips of Hampton, Cleaver, and Davis over the years, but the films include long sequences of public speeches and private interviews that allow time for us to watch their minds at work and to experience in our bodies their control of rhythm and tempo. Du Luart and her crew followed Carter for several months, so we witness her sometimes awkward transformation from a high-achieving student of Adorno and Marcuse into the role of revolutionary icon. Of the three, Hampton was the finest improviser, a true genius at the game, who was fueled by genuine rage over injustice and by an ego that compelled him into the spotlight. At one rally, Hampton seems hesitant to turn over the microphone to his second in command, Bobby Rush. Hampton has the audience right where he wants them, on the edge of their pews with fists raised, answering in unison to his call-and-response. When Rush does finally take the stage, it’s immediately apparent why the FBI murdered 21-year-old Hampton. Rush’s nervous stringing together of Black Panther talking points would never stoke an uprising, but the threat posed by Hampton was real.

“We’re gonna make our deaths expensive,” Cleaver says near the end of Klein’s film. Although he in fact lived a relatively long life—long enough to become a born-again Reagan Republican!—Cleaver was sounding a common refrain of all three films: that fighting racist American imperialism at home was the most important battle in a war that extended from Oakland and Chicago to colonialist Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Cleaver, who was living in exile in Algeria at the time, is clear-eyed about their chances of overthrowing a well-armed technocracy. His politics are one step removed from the purity of Hampton’s “high on the people”/“kill the pigs” rallying cries. In the long-term struggle, “’The black community’ and ‘the white community’ become meaningless categories” for Cleaver, who questions every tool of power, even language itself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says to cheers and laughter, demonstrating in real time that when we exclude non-Oxford English Dictionary words from the discourse, we exclude people from the discourse. Within the context of a cultural event as grand as the Berlinale, that still felt difficult and dangerous.

As did Northwest Passage (1940), which screened in the Berlinale’s 33-film King Vidor retrospective and which is one of the grimmest depictions of racist imperialism I’ve ever seen. Starring Spencer Tracy as Robert Rogers, the film follows a company of soldiers during the Seven Years’ War as they paddle and trudge their way north to launch a surprise attack on a camp of Indians. Vidor replaced W.S. Van Dyke on the big-budget, Technicolor spectacle, which was conceived as the first of two films (Rogers’ Rangers don’t head off for the Northwest Passage until the final scene) before poor ticket sales caused MGM to cancel the sequel. Like John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, which was released a few months earlier by 20^th Century Fox, Northwest Passage puts the full force of the Hollywood studio system behind a disturbing and expressionistic study of the trauma of war. For the first half of the film, Rogers’ pragmatic-to-a-fault leadership style seems almost kindhearted: he’s just looking out for his men and giving them the best chance of survival. But the long and gruesome battle scene, which generates none of the traditional pleasures of a war movie, and the even longer and more gruesome march back home, during which Rogers loses more than half of his men, harken more to Joseph Conrad than to other historical adventures of the day. Rogers’ patriotism, duty, and honor are all false flags. His single-minded commitment to his mission is gradually exposed as sadistic race-hatred drawn to the level of madness. Northwest Passage has the disillusioned, Herzogian worldview of the post-Vietnam era. It would have fit nicely into the 1971 Forum program.

The best of the five Vidor films I saw was Street Scene (1931), a Pre-Code adaptation of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about two days in the life of six families who share a building in New York. All of the film’s action takes place on the stoop, where they gather to escape the heat and where Mrs. Jones (Beulah Bondi in her first film role) gossips with anyone willing to suffer her bitter condescension. The main focus of her attacks is Mrs. Maurrant (Estelle Taylor), a middle-aged mother of two, who is sleeping with the milk man while her belligerent salesman husband is on the road or at the bar. Barely out of her teens, their daughter Rose (Sylvia Sidney) is already worn down by the sexual advances of her boss and by the catty accusations of her neighbors, but she finds some degree of solace from her conversations with Sam (William Collier, Jr.), the sympathetic Jewish boy next door whose father speaks mostly in Marxist aphorisms.

Street Scene is a stereotypically Lefty, Depression-era scenario. When tragedy strikes, it has the weight of inevitability because it’s happened within a social space engineered as a dialectic. All of the determining forces are confronted head on: antisemitism, xenophobia, sexism, alcoholism, violence, each a symptom of the more fundamental class divide. That Street Scene never feels like an ideological tract, even 90 years later, is testament both to Rice’s screenplay and to Vidor’s style, which arouses genuine sentiment from the relatively simple means at his disposal. All of the Vidor films I saw were projected from 35mm prints onto a massive screen at the CinemaxX, which I mention because the 25-foot-tall images amplify the effects of Vidor’s blocking—the way Rose leans against one railing of the stoop, clutching her purse in her lap and putting as much physical and symbolic space as possible between herself and her boss; or the tight shot over Sam’s shoulder as he looks up at Rose and imagines an impossible scenario where they escape together, and she nods with tender resignation.