|
international
filmfestspiele Berlino, 10 / 20 febbraio 2011
|
|
|
|
|
|
> utopians di Zbigniew Bzymek > the residents di Tiago Mata Machado > SUICIDE ROOM di Jan Komasa > tomboy di Céline Sciamma > swans di Hugo Vieira da Silva > a dream of iron di Kelvin Kyung Kun Park > the future di Miranda July > a separation di Asghar Farhadi > under control di Volker Sattel |
|
swans
Forum |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
Outer bodies With a suggestion to open our senses and a review promising somatic experiences, Swans has caught its Berlinale audience by the hand. Sadly, it let go mid-way, leaving a rather unsettleing sense of abruptness. Director Hugo Vieira da Silva’s cinematic investigation into the image of the human body aims at creating an affective attunement between body of film and bodies of his audience. In turn, its editing choices and recurrent themes surfacing in the images have the ability to create another type of body, to which audiences do not seem to be able to connect with. It is a body of the performer, an artificial body; its internal workings visible to the audience; its intentions persuasive, and its making exposed. Somehow, at the end of the screening one is left with a feeling similar to going to the chocolate factory as a child: excited about the prospect of witnessing the process in its entirety, with all the hidden and mysterious passages, but saddened by this disclosure, acutely sensing something was lost. By the same token, Swans displays body paraphernalia in full throttle, looking for hands that come together in clingy gestures, making visual parallels with large machines performing human-like actions (I am referring to a particular scene at the beginning of the film when a plane is preparing to stop at gate, whilst the expandable terminal passage extends to meet it and arrives in place though a form of suction). Touch is visible, the body is in focus. Central to this large array of touch-performances is a comatose body, the epicenter binding all characters but leaving underdeveloped the body of film, the only one that could offer an opening for an empathic vision. At times, the audience’s senses are opened, as advised prior to screening; there are scenes in which moving images move the spectators’ bodies. Sadly, these images are intermittent; they are just flashes of a desired body, of potentialities projected onto the images. And it comes again as sheer dissatisfaction when there is no sense of attunement due to the lack of a body to attune to. Notwithstanding, multiple bodies are offered to our senses though the images: they stand before the gaze, inviting our touch, smell, taste. They are not making offerings for visual empathy, but only inhabiting a moving space before us: clothed or naked, appealing or appalling, comic or tragic. Repeatedly, these bodies are merely presented on show for our vision, they could never be part of it, one might argue. Nevertheless, a truthful feeling for the other body is impossible in as much as we think we can imagine being that other, but the empathic vision that the film wishes to convey is one where there is feeling for the other entailed in its irreducible and inaccessible difference. Why I believe it fails to achieve this? Because it comes full circle in this process and can only lay in front of our eyes bodies that blur their own inaccessible differences. And because the film relies so heavily on these bodies to facilitate the emergence of a body for itself, it expels empathic vision through an excessive flow of touched and touching bodies. Thus, it becomes an outer body, one which we look at from a distance, like it is believed a comatose persons’ vision of his/her body might be. |
|
tomboy
Panorama |
|
|
|
24/30 |
|
|
|
She is ten years old. Living with her family
(sister, pregnant mother and father). Her name is Laure. Yet, everybody is
calling her Mikael. She told them that she is a boy. "Stop lying!”, asked
her mother. Yet, does Laure really lying telling that? Where the truth lies?
asked Celine Sciamma with her film
Tomboy, opened the Panorama Section at the 61st International Film
Festival in Berlin. The French director took up quite a sensitive subject in
a way that may provoques some controversies as Larry Clark movie
The Kids brought up sixteen
years ago. Sciamma movie is much more subtle and feminine in a way, still
references to that "so called scandalist’s” debut enriched
Tomboy’s plot. Celine Sciamma is telling the story about a girl as much as a story about a circle of primary school children. Laure/Mikael came into the group as a new child in the neighborhood (she’s just moved in the new flat with her family). She has an opportunity to start everything once again – as bizarre it may sound when we know how young she is as true it became while we living cinema after the screening. Sciamma is using very unusual background to tell a story about self-identity, sexuality and transgression. She entered the children world (full of games, innocence and illusions) to show how it may turned out into disturbing space shaping by cultural and biological aspects of gender. With Laure’s story the director denied conviction that sexual problems concerns only adult people. Sciamma observed the obvious truth – she perceived that sexuality is extremely important factor determining life from the early years. Laure is feeling as a boy – her age does not matter. Sciamma is not trying to show that her heroin is a girl, who is playing/pretending to be a boy. She lets us believe that the she is a boy. She’s delicate, shy, but for long there are no moves or traces which could bring up a conviction who Laure really is. We – as a viewers – feel unsecure as much as the young heroin feels. Laure is playing football as a boy, takes of her T-shirt as other boys do, kissing her new friend Lisa. There’s just one scene which let us know “the truth”. The sequence in the bathroom, when Laure is taking a bath with her younger sister. Even if we know, nobody else does. There’s a children game called "Truth or challenge?”. Laure made her decision really fast – she choose challenge rather than telling the truth about her gender. Being a girl is kind of mask she is wearing. It occurred as a really obvious thing when Lisa put a make-up on Mikael’s face. It is a game they are taking part in. Culture is that kind of game. One can choose who wants to be as long as he/she follows the rules. Laure is crossing them as much as Celine Sciamma who showed children’s sexuality. There’s no vulgarity in „Tomboy”, but the film is unveiling things we usually do not remember or do not want to know. Larry Clark showed what young people are talking about. Sciamma uncovered their intimate, surprising and sexual complicated inner side. Still, her film is based on contradictions which may be a little bit irritating if we put them along. There is a Laure – a tomboy and her little sister – type of Lolita-girl. Laure’s mother is pregnant – there’s too much oppressive womanhood in her home. Is it the reason for conformity she is choosing? The cultural requirements are too strong to cross them over? It is hard to tell interchangeably what interpretation we should choose. Be disappointed or glad about Laure’s final decision? Celine Sciamma choose culture pattern which have been given to her from the outside. It is too obvious to not be disappointing a bit. Still, I don’t believe that the game of pretending is finished at the end. I would rather think that it have already begin. |
|
the residents
Forum |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
A film about a film and also about a movement
in art that was about political struggle and social engagement The Baudlerian concept of derivè, revisited by the Situationists; Goddard’s flag raised high on the frontispiece of cinema, reading his famous formula of making not political films, but making films politically; a beginning paying homage to the Letterist International’s subversive methods of tackling and attacking the everyday; close-ups and inter-titles; cultural revolutionaries undermining borders between public and private property. All these elements act as layers creating the Brazilian film Os Residentes . On the surface, a strong impression of a common familiarity settles in amongst viewing eyes. Resembling the sight of a cultural history wall calendar, its pages flipped through one by one, each showing a surprisingly arbitrary yet somehow familiar mountain landscape, a running river or a wild animal that would wonder one dusty path in the centre of an autumnal forest. Mild to violent existential dialogues, appropriations on anti-art space interventions and kidnapping an artist, as well as long monologues on The French Revolution, seasoned with postmodernism’s pride and joy of the free-flow of the signifier all create a preliminary sense of the film purposely sentencing itself to banality and artistic déjà vu. As if it is following and instructional email that one day fought spam into the director’s inbox. But technology is eradicated from this setting, money is abolished and contemporary values rejected by yet another group of urban revolutionaries. However, the substitutes are yet to be found, the protagonists of the revolution are engaging permanently in critical discourse, leading to subversive action. The battle is constantly fought and it is only interrupted by the lack of an opponent. The presence of a mirror is not enough to keep the battle going. The space where the residents fight their battle is more than anything a mirror. If we were to begin to understand what it stands for, it would be a Foucauldian mirror, at once an utopia, but also a heterotopia, a space where the gaze discovers its presence and is confronted with its absence; a space where “I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am”. Os Residentes comes backs to itself with the choice to address critically only by showing. Apparently, the film is following the instructions of the DIY political art film, ultimately becoming self-referential through its unabridged and uncompromising strictness of sticking to the instructions. By doing so, it creates an inner critical language and achieves a visual performativity which could be referenced back to John Smith’s 1975 Girl Chewing Gum. And yet again, we come full circle. |
|
A separation
Concorso |
|
|
|
24/30 |
|
|
|
Asghar Farhadi’s
Separation is the Trojan
Horse of this years’ Berlinale Competition. One film after another was a
little bit disappointing. There left viewers with the strong feeling of
unsufficiency. Till today, everything was equal in its mediocrity. Yet, it
seems that Iranian issues are strongly supported by Berlinale. Asghar
Farhadi’s new film Separation
appeared among other movies selected to the Competition as the best written,
best directed and extremely important as a political and cultural gesture. In brief introduction, Asghar Farhadi is trying to deconstruct the idea of modern Iranian family. There is simply no-men’s land. As far as we consider Iranian culture as strictly patriarchy, Farhadi change all the symbols that are usually connected with manhood. Rafi Pitts in his Shekarchi (featured at the festival last year) deprive landscape of his story from women. In the Iranian cinema shaping nowadays by waves of feminism, he made a neo-western, a story for boys. Shirin Neshat combined her plot only with women stories. Both of them have chosen the easy way turning the scale. The director of Darbareye Elly niuansed his new story in an extraordinary way, even if his men-characters are weak and powerless. In times where Iranian people need fast answers, he just multiplied questions. Even if he is not telling the last word, he does not lead his characters into dead end. He made them suffer, he complicated their lives or changing familiar paradise into hell. All what he is portraying is much more subtle to be called political propaganda, still it is like strong cultural-sociological-political manifest. Farhadi seems to be close the theory that all oppressiveness starts under the roof of one’s home. He is telling the story about Nader and Simin. Lack of love is going to tear their marriage apart. Their decision is dictated by very obvious and institutional decision – the woman wants to leave the country which offers her nothing more than metaphorical loop around her neck. Yet, her husband is living in symbiotic relationship with his fathers’ tradition, what is as much burden to him as her needs of freedom. Rather than journey to the heaven round the corner, he wants to stay in his flat to taking care of his sick father. As soon as his wife left him, he puts all the responsibility to his father’s carer. Soon, the accident occurred. During fight with the carer, he pushed her away. The woman fell down from the stairs, loose her baby and the drama begins. All what is happening later is not tragedy in a sense. It is story much more related to Kafka novels where the main character never know what really happened, who is responsible for the mess and when will be the end. Farhadi is subtle enough to shape his characters with all the features, which does not let us know who they really are and what kind of decisions shall they make according to them. Men are trying to put the blame and responsibility on women. They decide to leave them or stay. Religion is strong factor which determine their behavior. Institutions are connected with their feeling of the truth. Farhadi does not give the answers you want to hear. There is no time for them? Perhaps – if we believe that Iranian people do not need decisions as much as movement – even while the changes to their political situations came firstly through their houses’ doors. Separation is like thriller with suspense that switch your stomach for two hours of projection. With no answers, it leaves you in a need, which make one to find them for themselves. Everything what came from the inner world is growing under your skin strongly fed by political factors which are shaping Iranian environment after the Green Revolution and freedom movements. What needs to be say, will be said – never in an easy way. |
|
15 julie
the shower
back by 6
Berlinale Shorts |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
Everyday drifters The space of the screen in the black box where we are all sat is divided into time slots. A series of short films is about to be screened for the press. It is the second in the Berlinale Shorts competition. Before entering, we have all drifted between several black boxes, between cinema seats of burgundy or violet velours, around food stalls in the Postdamer Platz Arkade. We are now seated, about to experience the drift anew whilst bodily restrained in the comfortable seats, gaze forward, curiosity sharpened. This new drift is contrasting our stillness, uncomfortable and hard to stomach in one go. It is not scenes of horror that create this visce-reality, nor experimental camera movement that swirls and shakes the image. It is the restlessness of the moving images, the rhythm of montage and the rhythm of affects drifting alongside. In actuality, not even alongside as that implies a separation is still in place, but intimately close, in synchronized breathing and pacing up aimlessly. The inner rhythm of the moving images experiences this intimacy with the characters, the rhythm of the characters' affects experiences this intimacy with the often closed spaces where the film is set and these rhythms together birth an intimacy of the spectators with the films. This is the common grounds where the inner driftings of Back by 6, 15 Iulie or La Ducha meet and form that sense of an unknown body that Deleuze believed cinema has the ability to create. In the case of the above mentioned films, this body is created mainly by an affective drift. Back by 6 has its characters' bodies experience a physical and emotional derive, leaving their affects visible to the spectators' gaze, welcoming the strange and the random encounters, creating an altogether sense of familiarity and awkwardness. Investigating the everyday with a curiosity we can easily identify with and finding small spaces as secret doors to new dimensions of the concrete, this film's inner rhythm carries us through moments of exaltation and utter sadness. And as it happens in real life, our emotional derive finds us at times wondering how was it that we reached that point. And then, everything that at some point was naturally familiar becomes surreal, fermenting with our stirred emotions, just like one of the characters finds himself more agoraphobic on a street suddenly populated than he was when it was completely deserted. The space closing on one's emotions, suffocating one's sense of normality is at its best depicted by Cristi Iftime in 15 Iulie, a journey inside a family's affectual worlds, a drift between rejection and closeness, offering a sharp sense of empathy with the struggle of a girl to create bridges and bondage in the constant emotional rejection that is her relationship with her father. Shot in a small apartment, the short film manages to escape into the unspeakable cracks of a damaged affective state, the drift comes here from within, and it surfaces in the extended spaces of this apartment, like emotional waves hitting the walls and retaliating with increased power due to the lack of response. This drift is strange, it is extremely uncomfortable, leaving the viewer part of the scene and a powerless bystander at the same time. With La Ducha, we find ourselves present in another closed space, between the intimate walls of a gay couple's bathroom. But here, the waves have already smashed into the walls, the storm was there and we are opened to the images of emotional shores being washed already by pain and drama. The couple is broken, the negotiations over emotions and possessions are over but they are both still drifting, suspended in this space that used to be a shared intimacy and the reclaiming of their own paths. The cat stands as living battle ground, it remains the only open affective drift that can bring them together and make the separation complete. Negotiations over who gets to keep the cat become the last posibility to escape this suffocating space, a buffer zone between the necessity to claim an emotional despair and simulate a sense of normality in the everyday. As viewers, we drift inside these stories, drift out of them with each turning on of cinema lights, falling in and out of love with their passages, joining them emphatically and detaching ourselves rationally once the projection diminishes into complete darkness. It is an affective jouissance to be able to step close to the moving images and dance with them, then drift away and birth them anew by drifting through words about them. |
|
the future
Concorso |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
There is no future, when time does not exists.
What is really important seems to be called the continuity of experience.
It’s term taken straight ahead from the postmodern art. Still, if we
consider Miranda July’s new film as a part of her creative activity, there
is no words that belongs here more than mentioned ones. THE FUTURE was
featured in Competition Section 61st International Film Festival in Berlin
and it stands in opposite to reality, political and culture manifests, which
are usually transmitted by socially engagement directors which Berlinale
prefers much more than the others. Miranda July works seem to exist is
symbiotic relation to each other. If we would like to find the main quality
for all of them, we should take a good look into the so called magic realism
on everyday life, enchanting flightiness and naivety, charming, childlike
way of seeing everything that is hidden deeply in adults souls, hidden and
consider as unreal and unimportant. After Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July is telling another story about charming freaks living in the suburbs of the big city. Yet, not the environment around is important, but their inner lives, relations between them and the others, fantasies, which shaping their perspective of life and images that built it up layer after layer changing objectively existed reality into their own, private life. The screenwriter/director is also appearing in the leading role in film as Sophie. Her character there is a kind of transcription of the previous one – Christine Jesperson from Me and You. Sophie is now in four-years relationship with Jason (Hamish Linklater) and as we may anticipate from the very beginning – it is not easy time for them. Even if they sit together, sleep together, being together – there is some king of fissure between two of them. They seem to have their own world, yet both of them are looking into a different picture. Jason needs movement which would change his world into important one, he enjoy meeting people (as a solicitor selling trees) as he needs to go out from his inner, closed door. Sophie on the opposite, needs just easy “being” together. The thin fissure slowly turns into large one, when the woman meets Marshall (David Warshofsky) and have an romantic affair with him. Seemingly July’s story is nothing new for the indie movies industry if we consider the film as a story about a young couple facing their problems along with the gallery of freaking friends wandering around. However, not the innovations but continuity of experiencing life is meaningful here. Miranda July seems to be author that we may understand according to French politique des auteurs. Her works (films, video arts, performances) are feed by her obsessions, which are conceptual magic and moving pictures. No one else belongs to her world more than her even if the narrator of some parts of the movie is a sick cat waiting for her and Jason comeback. The feeling of togetherness and being for somebody and to someone is the main factor shaping life of her characters. Being together in specific situations but not time. Time in The Future is kind of a circle without the beginning and with no end. There is even no regular happy end, because the story is still alive, circulating somewhere, not cached by camera lenses, not focus in the one place. Every morning just after waking up, Miranda tells “Hi, Person” to Jason lying next to her in bed. One after another there is no-name morning. One after another July’s stories concerns conceptuality mixed with unsecure, charming immaturity and liquid identity of nowadays thirties. |
|
A Dream of Iron
di Kelvin Kyung Kun Park
Forum |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
One dream led to another... …and it became a sharp, horrific reality that blends again with more dreams and myths. In a similar manner the poetic is entangled with the thorough process of archiving reality and the mythological and dream worlds in Kevin Kyung Kun Park’s documentary. The film follows The Cheonggye stream which runs through Seoul and it builds a narrative that is permanently disrupted by intrusive elements outside the objective reality. If after the Second World War and the Korean War, the stream and characters associated with it have stood witness to unreal disruptions in the usual running of things, the present time has modern urban planning and gentrification as main actors in the rupturing of reality. In the midst of all disruptions, witnessing and being affected by change, the characters belonging to the stream area try now, as then did in the past, to transform the challenges into opportunities, to adjust to change and continue their lives. As utopian as this endeavor might seem, their beliefs are kept alive, they dream as much as night as they daydream during the working hours, their folklore and mythology, their culinary and beverage habits are kept alive. In the centre of their dreams lays Iron, one of the metals that brought upon its handling in the past as much social disapproval as it brought the butcher slaughtering pour souls of animals together with their bodies. More so, it is believed in Korean folklore that dreaming of iron is a bad omen, yet this unworthy metal is the core elemts of the lives of so many Cheonggye’s workers: from the foundrymen, cutters, welders to an artist who creates stunning iron musical instruments. Above all, iron is what will be lost when all their shabby workspaces are to be relocated in what is the embodiment of a western utopian commercial centre, sterile and dreamless, a non-place. This superficial mirror image of a modern Korean iron industry is at its most ridiculous when one of the workers re-settles his business and performs the traditional inaugural ceremony, including spreading salt in the room corners and presenting money offerings to a pig’s head on top of one of the machines, now functioning as altar. Infinitely more subtle, Kevin Kyung Kun Park does not critically address the situation, but engages the viewer in an affective and poetic manner with the succession of images, sounds and words. More than this succession, the documentary stands as kinesthetic statement to the director’s emotional involvement with this space, with working with iron, a trade that his grandfather used to practice. Entangled and quintessential to the viewer’s affective reception are the director’s own essayistic awakenings and dream-like states taking shape in imaged letters to his dead grandfather or inner questionings and disruptions of his own thoughts. What dream may form from these? Who will appropriate it and with what scope? Is it a bad omen or just the natural process of modernization? |
|
utopians
Forum |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
Who are the Utopians? The visual counterpart of the Pixies' song “Where is my mind?” was just screened in the Forum section of Berlinale's 61st edition. It seems unsurprising that Utopians is the work of director Zbigniew Bzymek, who's practices range from film to video art to performance. In this manner, aesthetics offer the birth of an event for the moving images, portraying problematic stances of identity, status and gender. What does rejecting the cartesian mind/body dualism mean to film? And what does it mean for the inner workings of this particular film? This is a story of how this film its not its synopsis, i.e. “A yoga teacher attempts to find home with his ex-military daughter and her schizophrenic girlfriend.” Firstly, what “Utopians” does is render a series of unsympathetic, unemphatic and unapologetic moving images built around its three characters. Presented to the viewer's eyes, these images manage to blend the boarders of identity and memory, leaving the event bare. The manifold identities of Roger, his gay daughter Zoe and her schizophrenic lover Maya are continuously negotiated in everyday events. One would assume a sharp contrast is drawn between the myriad assemblages that form Maya's split personality and a middle aged fatherly concern with his daughter's well-being. However, in a remarcable attempt at surpassing the boarders of character shaping through traditional narrative, Zbigniew Bzymek deconstructs and constructs its characters identity crisis at the same time, using sequences of contradictory events. The tensions as well as the moments of relaxation experienced by Roger, the unidentifiable nuances that lead to his unexpected actions make the yoga teacher claim his own identitarian unbalance over the challenges of the situation. On the other hand, his recently discharged trouper daughter Zoe ultimately aspires to her newly found identity to be reshaped into a state of normality. Her permanent struggle to reach this normality at time reach surreal points of the absurd. In a particular scene where her, her topless girlfriend and her pretending to be asleep father are all sat in a bedroom and Zoe's only line after carefully staging this instance is “Now we watch TV”. Just like a casual event in the everyday life of your typical family. Nevertheless, the event which opens the viewer up to be affected is Robert claiming his own identity crisis over the situation to Zoe. Rooted in a single change of events in the everyday lives of all three characters, this crisis is shifted on its axis throughout the film, scenes fading to black only to open up to kaleidoscopic insights on the shattered identities. Trapped in loose selves, each character's identity is mirrored in the others, constantly negotiated by uncertainties, even that of the stray pitbull rescued by Roger. The are all the utopians of their own making, faced with their inner contradictions. Utopians is Zbigniew Bzymek's first written, directed and produced feature film after a series of video art and theatre work including 7 short films he made at Polish language films and his work associated with the New York The Wooster Group |
|
SUICIDE ROOM
Panorama |
|
|
|
24/30 |
|
|
|
It is easy to find a new way of filmmaking in
Polish cinema, said the director of
Suicide Room, featured in Panorama Special Section at this year’s
International Film Festival in Berlin. According to his words, I need to
admit, that even if it is not hard to find original way of making movies
among Polish filmmakers, it is not so easy to approach European level of
quality and formal-content equality. Still, director’s fourth feature seems
to anticipate his future moves on the one hand, on the other, it is strictly
connected with Komasa’s previous works. The director’s main focus is teenage
identity. As far as I remember his hero/heroins were dealing with problems
of adolescence. Yet, enter to real mature life is alike enter the void –
more horrifying as Gaspar Noe’s one. Suicide Room is a story deeply connected with so called emo-subculture. Jan Komas is focus on eighteen years old boy, Dominik (Jakub Gierszał) and his last days before high school graduation. There is something bizarre in the actor’s face and behavior that make the viewers fascinated in all the little details which shaping his identity. He seems to be a young rebel and subtle, sensitive boy at the same time. There is something in his look that nobody understands, yet everybody wants to come closer and look deeper into them. So subtle as Dominik is, so easily wounded he could be. Komasa is coming into his hero life just before the prime, showing his last days at school leading to final party where after few drinks Dominik is taking a challenge and kissing his friend before his friends’ eyes. Couple of days later, at the karate lessons, fighting with the same boy, Dominik has ejaculation. Before the evening everybody in school knows all about the situation thanks to Facebook. Dominik is called to be a fag – solidarity of pupils is beyond the control. Dominik is furious and depressed at the same time, closing himself in his room and makes “real” connection only with Sylvia (Roma Gąsiorowska), which he met in chat. After quoting William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in the opening sentence, boy starts to be like English hero was. Jan Komasa goal was to combine classical tragic character with nowadays subculture of hypersensitive, sad and passive-aggressive young people who does not want to live so they leading themselves into deeper level of self-destruction. The director is using all the schemas that are quite known from the documentaries, articles and sociological analyses to create world for that kind type of hero. According to Dominik fascination in internet group called “Suicide Room”, animators made for the feature animations that are fulfilling boy’s world, entering the one for the viewers who are able to go with him and his avatar deeper and deeper into his inner world. Combining all this with sociological background, Jan Komasa criticizes also the environment, which pushes Dominik into depression and suicidal thoughts. As in America in the fifties, behind the closed doors of white houses on the suburbs of the cities, tragedy of misunderstanding each other and insincerity among family members leads straight ahead to drama. Nothing full us, that his parents are not such great people at home as they supposed to be in their workplace. The boy’s father is minister, his mother has advertising agency. “Mad Men” was the trade name for the ad men in the late fifties. Mad (wo)man could be good name for Dominik’s mother. As elegance and sophisticated she is as hypocritical and reactionary she seems to be. There are lot of tiny details in Komasa feature that prove that Dominik’s parents are much more tragic characters than boy, who at least tries to be sincere with himself, find a way to cross over his “illness”, wants to communicate with a girl met via Skype and reconstruct her suicidal identity, falls in love with her for real. Nothing like emotions lead his parents to do what they should, nothing more than cold calculation what should be good in perspective of the others. What is good in Jan Komasa movie? Not the script that telling the story we know from the newspapers and television. Not the hyper emotions, naïve dialogs either. Yet, there is something that make you think about the events you’ve seen no matter how sentimental they were. There is actor in the leading role that should be known, that is worth to be known. There is subject that is too deeply rooted into reality and virtual world at the same time. There is no frontiers which we could not cross. |
|
under control
Forum |
|
|
|
25/30 |
|
|
|
PS to Post Societies of Control In what the author of the film Unter Kontrolle envisages as a portrait of an aged utopia, the cinematic claims its subversive rights. Just as if the moving images overwrite a post-scriptum to a long letter that was trying to convey meaning in a sealed bag. Unter Kontrolle (Under Control) is a documentary that depicts the atomic energy scenery of today’s Germany. The challenges of portraying this scenery that director Volker Sattel addresses in his documentary are the product of a three year research conducted after receiving a Gerd Ruge Projektstipendium in 2008. Building up the research with atomic energy as an overarching theme, the director’s choices of filming, editing and montage aim at creating a broad perspective that spans from functioning and disused nuclear reactors, institutional bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency to events like the Annual Meeting on Nuclear Technology. With this choice, Sattel wishes to offer to the viewer’s glance small peep holes, some sort of visual spectrum of access into worlds normally entirely inaccessible. Making a choice of leaving these worlds and its characters to ‘speak’ for themselves without any control over form and rejecting the fly-on-the-wall serious narrator voice, Sattel lays bare these stances of unknown territories. The ones who speak to us are by no means familiar to the majority of our everyday acquaintances: nuclear power engineers, physicists, chemists, computer scientists and academics in their work fields, using a language that renders them most likely as part of a science fiction set although deprived of the Tarkowskyan mysticism and left naked in front of the eye, plainly uncomfortable. Moreover, the director’s choice to shoot the film in 35mm Cinemascope and the overall decrepitude of a scientific dream of the 60s and 70s renders the cinematic experience distant and bare. Yet at the same time, a strange sense of nostalgia settles in. Whether it is nostalgia over what the director calls the Aged Utopia of man as maker and controller of a technological power greater than himself; or a sense similar to screening Super 8 films in an all digitized cinema theatre, the sense of losing control feels rather acute. Firstly, it seems that nuclear plant workers have had a strong disillusion and have lost control over the downfall of a dream and by doing so have managed to perfect the material control over the ongoing operations of the plant. Institutional bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency seem to offer control to whomever might be in need of it, clearly separating between geopolitical and economical issues in the countries which produce and use nuclear power (Germany included), and those who make nuclear weapons (Russia, China, USA, France, UK). The critical response comes from the academic institutions in the form of questions: who regulates these ‘offerings’ for control, who ultimately decides who receives the power to regulate and control this fallen dream and its current remains now in the form of market products privately own but nationally accounted for? The filmmaker wishes to free the moving images from the control imposed by regulations and conditions which come with shooting ‘on location’ in a nuclear site, where each interview had to be agreed with by the company’s management, and where the characters mostly escape in a sterile language seasoned with incomprehensible acronyms. Nevertheless, the space towards which the ‘kino eye’ is directed creates its own internal discourses. The director’s utopian wish to free these images from the closure of one interpretation is his way of trying to let go of control. Despite that, his letting go becomes at times the viewer’s frustration with losing control over meaning, a dream long outlasting the technological dream, one in front of which the viewer can only in turn, let go. This letting go of control over meaning, over what is expected from the documentary form, is the only way of entering the cinematic meaning of these images. And it came not as a surprise to me that this was probably achieved by few of the viewers in the audience today. Those who communally and silently agreed to a different type of power, confusing and at times contradictory, that of images forming their own language and speaking to us, to our dreams. The over-rationalized view of the man controlling technology and everything else material is juxtaposed by the speech of the moving images with an affective, at times absurd and even comical view of the futility of such enterprise. As is the futility and comic aspects of an enterprise to make sense of all moving images, leaving no loose ends, no interpretations uncharted, no meaning buttons un-pushed. Sattel believes that the relationship between man and machine is questionable and ultimately escapable to our understanding. In his view, “The escaped spirit of the atom leaves its mark” and he asks “What does it have in mind with us?”. I believe the escaped spirit of the moving images leaves its affective mark on the spectator. But only when the spectator is willing to let go of control and stops asking the recurrent questions “what do the moving images have in mind for me? / what do I have in mind for them?” |
|
international
filmfestspiele Berlino, 10 / 20 febbraio 2011
|
