Yearly Archives: 2009

Film Jukebox

THEORETICAL GIRL’S FILM JUKEBOX

Theoretical Girl

Photo by Pavla Kopecna

Chic chanteuse Theoretical Girl pens elegant 60s-inspired pop gems. Her album ‘Rivals’ is out on May 25 on Memphis Industries. She plays in store at Pure Groove (London) on May 29, at the Borderline (London) on June 17 and at Glastonbury Festival on June 27. For more information, visit her MySpace. Below, she tells us about her favourite films.

1- Historias Mínimas (2002)
This has to be my favourite film of all time. It’s a road movie set in Patagonia and follows three beautifully simple and profound characters whose stories interweave as the film progresses. All of the actors are amateurs. It’s just a really moving and intimate film that gets you rooting for all of the characters!

2- The Harry Potter Films (2001-2005)
I love the way these films suck you into a whole new world. I want to go to school at Hogwarts, but only if I’m in Gryffindor!

3- Three Colours: Blue (1993)
On this list simply for the most amazing portrayal of grief I’ve ever seen, by Juliette Binoche. The scene where she scrapes her knuckles along the wall is so powerful.

4- The Vanishing (1988 version)
The most chilling plot of any film I’ve ever seen. Everybody’s worst nightmare!

5- The Sound Of Music (1965)
I was so scared thinking about The Vanishing that I needed a bit of cheering up. And there’s nothing better for that than The Sound of Music!

6- The Piano Teacher (2001)
I do like a dark and twisted love story!

7- The Seventh Seal (1957)
I’m sure that everybody picks this! At one time I was going to project it behind me while I played at gigs, but then realised that everyone would end up watching it instead of me!

8- Period Dramas
There’s nothing I like better than curling up on the sofa, Earl Grey tea, chocolate and a period drama. It’s the only time I can ever get a fix of romance in these un-romantic times! And I do like a man in boots and britches! Doesn’t really matter which one, any period drama will do! How girly of me!

9- Educating Rita (1983)
Julie Walters is genius in this film. She’s so brilliant at portraying characters’ sadness and humour. I love her.

10- Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
An odd choice, I know, but I think it’s the funniest animated film there is. Sacha Baron Cohen as King Julien is amazing and I saw it at the IMAX, which always makes a film seem a little better than it actually is!.

Festivals

SCI-FI LONDON 2009

Stingray Sam

SCI-FI LONDON

29 April – 4 May 2009

Venue: Apollo Cinema

Festival website

Now in its 8th year, Sci-Fi London has developed into a more wide-ranging science fiction festival than ever before. In previous years, 90% of the festival was focused on films and the Arthur C. Clarke awards for sci-fi literature seemed a strange satellite event not fully integrated into the rest of the long weekend. Now, albeit still housed in a cinema, Sci-Fi London includes talks on literature, science and comic books that not only sit alongside the film events in the programme, but provide a dialogue with the screenings: TV and radio writers will discuss sci-fi comedy while comic book artist Kevin O’Neill will talk about his drawings on screen and the film based on them, Hardware (1990), which will be shown afterwards.

Perhaps due to growing maturity, the festival is less embarrassed to be associated with what casual observers might see as the more kitsch aspects of SF fandom than in previous years – the opening film is Eyeborgs, which stars ‘TV’s Highlander‘ Adrian Paul. A perennial and popular strand at SFL is the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 all-night screenings, where fans of SF B-movies watch a TV version of those films, with heckling by an onscreen astronaut and two robots. This year’s festival takes that idea into the realm of stand-up comedy, screening one of the films showing in the festival again with a live redub of the soundtrack by improv comedians. Elsewhere there are different kinds of interaction with SF fans. For the first time in its history, SFL 8 will screen a ‘fan-film’, The Hunt for Gollum, which boasts production values similar to any of the authentic Lord of the Rings films and should keep devotees of the saga happy before the official prequel hits the big screen. In addition, SFL features an on-stage reading of a radio play script, The Brightonomicon, by some of the original cast, allowing the audience to see behind the scenes of something they’d normally only hear.

The films at this year’s SFL are a mixture of old and new, Western SF and films from further afield. As well as The City of Lost Children (1995), featuring a Q&A with co-director Marc Caro, there’s a kids screening of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), Ever Since the World Ended (2003), and four of the best Star Trek movies from the 1980s, which fans can see for free. World cinema is represented by Turkish comedies G.O.R.A. (2004) and A.R.O.G. (2008), Japanese SF epic Twentieth-Century Boys part 2 and a selection of Israeli short films. New films and premieres include Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels, Stingray Sam (from the director of The American Astronaut, a low-fi American indie favourite of recent years) and new Japanese / American co-produced animé Afro Samurai: Resurrection, featuring the voices of Samuel L. Jackson and Lucy Liu. Perhaps the most obvious example of combining old and new at the festival is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2.0, which is a remix of the original film, replacing all of the backgrounds and some of the characters with new visuals. Whether Oshii’s interference with his own film is on the level of George Lucas’s endless tinkering with Star Wars – making it worse each time – or Ridley Scott’s various re-edits of Blade Runner – all equally as good and as unneeded – remains to be seen.

Full details of this year’s festival are available online at their website, including last minute changes and additions to the programme.

Alex Fitch

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH NICOLETTE KREBITZ

The Heart Is a Dark Forest

Format: Cinema

Title: The Heart Is a Dark Forest

Screening at: Birds Eye View

Date: 6-7 March 2009

Director: Nicolette Krebitz

Writer: Nicolette Krebitz

Original title: Das Herz ist ein dunkler Wald

Cast: Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Franziska Petri

Germany 2007

86 mins

Birds Eye View website

This year’s Birds Eye View Festival opened with German writer-director Nicolette Krebitz’s second feature The Heart Is a Dark Forest, a daring, darkly stylish and artfully constructed marital drama centring on a woman’s emotional meltdown after she finds her illusions about bourgeois family life shattered forever. Vacillating between social realism, emotional tragedy and mysticism, Krebitz (who is best known in Germany as an actress) dissects what lies underneath the grid of social roles in contemporary society through an increasingly surreal modern-day version of Medea that is not always easy to digest, both formally and thematically.

With a mesmerising Nina Hoss and Devid Striesow in the lead roles, who last performed together in Christian Petzold’s remarkable thriller Yella, the film centres on Marie, who one morning accidentally discovers that her husband has a double life, with a second wife and little child in another suburban house just like hers. Utterly shaken and bewildered, Marie escapes into the nearby forest where she passes out. After returning to her children, strangely calm and collected, she attends a masked ball held in a friend’s country mansion in a scene reminiscent of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There, she confronts her tragic fate and the inner demons that haunt her.

Pamela Jahn spoke to Nicolette Krebitz during the Birds Eye View Festival in March 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your film is based on a tragedy of betrayal and focuses on a woman whose love ultimately leads to her destruction. What attracted you to this kind of subject matter?

Nicolette Krebitz: I saw Medea on stage and read the play again when I started working on a new script, so the story comes partly from Medea, and partly from some real-life cases that I discovered during my research. I found out that there were basically two different types of women, two different reactions, when they found out about the double lives of their partners. The first type just remained silent and never said a word about it, not even to their children, for fear of losing their husbands and the lives they lived. The second type of women reacted in a very extreme manner, most of them tried to kill themselves, and I was shocked by this. I started asking myself all these questions: Why would they do it? What’s the point? Are there really no more reasons to go on living? My conclusion was that it must have had a major impact on their desire for being wanted, being needed, and that it has something to do with their roles as mothers in society. They must have felt betrayed also in the way that they had given their lives and bodies to build a family, to become mothers and to raise children… It’s still a big deal, I think. And it’s this archaic feeling that caused such an extreme reaction, that I found very fascinating.

PJ: The metaphoric title perfectly matches the theme and the increasingly gloomy atmosphere you’re creating in your film. What does the image mean to you?

NK: Neither the man nor the woman in the film is to blame for what they do because of love. Most of the time, you don’t really know what it is that you love, or what you long for. Basically, you just don’t really know what you want when you love, and this for me is like a dark forest. It implies a lot of things that are hidden or invisible, but they are all part of what we call love…

PJ: In addition to the literary and cinematic references such as the masquerade scene in the castle, the film also has many theatrical elements, in particular the scenes in which Marie plays out her memories with Thomas on a sparse Brechtian stage. What was the idea behind this?

NK: To me the scenes that take place on a stage are the ones that draw the audience into the story. I think they are very necessary because they are the only moments were you see Marie and her husband Thomas, happy or not happy, but actually together. The rest of the film focuses on Marie and her point of view. To me these scenes are the soul of the film, because you see what their life as a couple has been, you witness their conversations, and thus you realise that everything that happens was mentioned before. It’s like psychoanalysis, when you reconstruct the past and look at what really has been said and done, and then you compare this to what you’ve built up in your mind.

PJ:Although we’re drawn into what happens to Marie and how she tries to cope with the situation, it seems that in a subtle way we’re also kept at a distance from her…

NK:Yeah, we change perspectives when we follow Marie. Sometimes we are inside of her, looking through her eyes, and sometimes we are spectators of the whole scenario. What I tried to do here was shifting between being part of society and being part of the person involved in this tragedy. And I think it’s important to get this distance from her, because she does something very cruel in the end.

PJ:Was it always your intention to end the film in such a surreal, nightmarish way?

NK:I don’t see it as unreal as a nightmare would be…It’s reality. Of course it is not a documentary, it’s a fiction film, and I tried to not let the audience down by being too…grey. But what fascinated me most was the fact that, if there is somebody just like you and an entire situation that mirrors your own life, you could just as well be deleted, because you are no longer of any use. This is how Marie feels, and this is because she had already given up on everything. It is possibly the most irrational decision and the darkest way to end this story, but my aim with this was to provoke a discussion in the audience.

PJ:What sort of reaction did you get from the German audience, especially women?

NK:A lot of women said they were very touched by the whole story, even the ending. Of course, they said they wouldn’t have gone that far, but they know that this is how it feels, and maybe it’s what they forbid themselves to do. But they could allow themselves to think about it through the movie…it’s a relief in a way. Because society expects all these things from a mother, and sometimes it’s just too much. And by the end of the day it’s a story about two people, a man and a woman, and too often it is down to the woman to deal with the situation.

PJ:You’ve recently contributed to a film called Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation, which premiered at the Berlinale in February, and your segment, ‘The Unfinished’, tells the story of a young writer who travels back in time to meet with Ulrike Meinhof and Susan Sontag in 1969. Do you feel an urge to make films about women or women’s issues in your work as a writer-director?

NK:I’m a woman and I tell stories and make films, and I think the film industry needs more women because they make different films. It’s a way of showing even to the male audience how we are, how we see things, how we feels things in order to understand it instead of treating women like objects or reduce them to being only mothers or only daughters. Yeah, so that’s my contribution but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will also make films that deal with emancipation issues. It can be anything, but it will always be seen and told through my eyes.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Short Cuts

GLIMMER 09

Love You More

Still from Love You More

7th Hull International Short Film Festival

21-26 April 2009

Reel Cinema, Hull, UK

Glimmer 2009 website

Short films are often the ideal form for fledgling filmmakers to develop ideas and themes, whilst also honing their storytelling skills, although they are often unjustly overlooked by mainstream audiences. Laurence Boyce, director of Glimmer, insists that ‘Any good film – whether one minute or four hours long – will ultimately justify its running time. We hope that people will find things to discover and enthuse about, and realise that short films are brilliant slices of cinema despite their smaller running times’. Now in its seventh year as an event, and in its second year under the Glimmer banner, the Hull International Short Film Festival celebrates the recent output of the short film community, whilst also providing educational sessions for aspiring visual artists, and a social-political context that is often absent from such events. Boyce believes that ‘shorts are a great indicator of a culture and a time in society, as if they were snapshots of a particular idea or concern’, and by programming films that deal with life in Israel alongside retrospectives of the work of cult animator David Firth and the experimental filmmaker John Smith, who will be on hand to discuss his career to date, the 2009 Glimmer Festival promises to confirm the importance of the short film format.

This year’s line-up of over 200 shorts from the UK and overseas will compete for the inaugural Anthony Minghella Awards for Best UK Short and Best International Short. Appropriately, one of the main attractions in the UK competition is Sam Taylor-Wood’s Love You More, which was produced by the late Minghella himself and screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 before being nominated for the 2009 Best Short Film BAFTA. Written by Closer scribe Patrick Marber, this is an affecting portrait of youth in 70s London, in which two teenagers bond after they find themselves in the local record shop where they both want to buy a copy of the new Buzzcocks single, ‘Love you More’. The coming of age theme is also explored in Muriel d’Ansembourg’s Play, in which children discover what happens when dares are played for real, and Ryd Cook’s Away, which follows a young boy as he runs away from home and spends the night in a decrepit barn. Grisly pleasures are promised by the Yorkshire competition, which offers a girl coming to terms with her transformation into a zombie in Duncan Laing’s Bitten, and a family outing becoming something more sinister with the arrival of a stranger in Matt Taabu’s Into the Woods.

Aside from rewarding the industriousness of short filmmakers, the festival is not afraid of examining pressing issues within the industry itself, and the Pay to Play? section of the programme will discuss the attitude of the business towards its unpaid workers, many of whom make the realisation of both short and feature length projects possible, and the ethical legitimacy of festivals charging submission fees to filmmakers. Anatomy of a Film 2 focuses on the process of developing and making a short film, while a panel of industry insiders will contribute to What Happens Next?, which will deal with the necessity of advertising and the role of film critics in bringing audience awareness to such projects. With a programme that includes such a wide range of screenings and topics, the 2009 Glimmer Festival should prove to be an essential event for anybody interested in the short film sector.

John Berra

Festivals

FLATPACK 09 REPORT

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Waller Jeffs

Birmingham, UK, various venues

11-15 March 2009

Website

I’d been looking forward to Flatpack ever since interviewing the organisers, Pip and Ian, way back in December. At that point the schedule was in its embryonic stages – with many films and speakers still to be confirmed – but, even then, it was clear that there was a rare thoughtfulness and passion behind the festival’s programming. And spending five days zig-zagging between Birmingham galleries, art-house cinemas and specially converted warehouses, I wasn’t disappointed.

A perfect combination of careful programming and a jumble-sale of treasure troves, Flatpack is a breath of fresh air among increasingly industry-focused UK festivals. Community is paramount to its identity – whether between visiting filmmakers or local cinema-goers – and there was clearly a great deal of reciprocal love between city and festival.

The opening night paid homage to Birmingham’s answer to Mitchell & Kenyon – the entrepreneurial Waller Jeffs – and Brum made recurring cameos throughout the programme, from a delightful selection of films made by a local boys’ group in the 1950s (my personal favourite was their attempt at sci-fi shot against a chalkboard solar system) to Peter Watkins’s magnificent Privilege (1967). A satirical look at the record industry, the film opens with Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones, an increasingly reluctant pop puppet in the government’s manipulation of youth, on a messianic pilgrimage through the city streets. With a hilariously wooden performance from Jean Shrimpton, psychedelic renditions of ‘Jerusalem’ and some wonderful 60s tailoring, the film is at once a trippy, hallucinogenic dream and an acute critique of the commercialisation of youth and protest.

As always, music films were very strong at Flatpack, from the hip-hop classic Style Wars (1983) to Kieran Evans’s lyrical and beautifully paced documentary Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before (2008) – a fascinating look at the myths and memories involved in the folk singer’s now legendary 1960s’ horse-and-cart journey to the Outer Hebrides.

One of my personal highlights of the festival was ‘Unpacked’ – a day-long series of panels and discussions exploring the creative methods behind many of the works being screened at the festival. Animator David O’Reilly proved particularly popular as he gave a whistle-stop explanation of the theory behind his animation film, Please Say Something (winner of the Golden Bear for best short film at this year’s Berlinale). Several panel discussions explored the use of pre-cinema technologies – a strong element across many of the films and art installations displayed at the festival. With many of the guests coming from fine arts backgrounds, it was interesting to hear differing approaches to the filmmaking process. These talks are a new feature of Flatpack and make a very welcome addition to the programme – the audiences were really engaged and the warm atmosphere prompted some very fluent and insightful discussions.

Another nice new touch to this year’s programming was the children’s strand, which took in a wide range of material from the Moomins to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic, The Red Balloon. Paper Cinema was a particular gem among the children’s screenings as illustrator Nic Rawling moved paper cut-outs (think Quentin Blake crossed with Saint-Exupéry doodled onto old cereal packets) in front of a live video camera. Watching the film being created before their eyes, the audience was enthralled. It was great for children to be involved in the festival and exposed to imaginative works of art at such a young age. Just like Unpacked, Paper Cinema provided inspiration and an intimate, inclusive atmosphere, sadly lacking at older, more institutionalised affairs.

A young, fresh festival with a fantastic range of films, discussions and installations, long may Flatpack reign!

Eleanor McKeown

Film Jukebox

THE SLEEPING YEARS’ FILM JUKEBOX

The Sleeping Years - Dale Grundle

Since the release of the Sleeping Years’ debut album ‘We’re Becoming Islands One by One’ (Rocket Girl) last year, Dale Grundle and his band have been busy playing shows in Europe and the UK. Formerly of indie darlings The Catchers, Grundle’s new project pays close attention to his Irish roots with a highly personal collection of songs swathed in gorgeous melodies, intelligent lyrics and heart-wrenching melancholy. They have just played some shows in Spain and are playing in London throughout April: catch them at The Troubadour on April 2 (solo show), The Slaughtered Lamb on April 8 (full band), at the Local (downstairs at the Kings Head – full band) on April 17 and at the Downtown Diner in Ashford, Kent, on April 30 (acoustic). For more information go to their website or MySpace. Below, Dale Grundle tells us about his favourite films. LUCY HURST

1- The Night of the Hunter (1955)
I don’t think I will grow tired of watching this. Robert Mitchum is outstanding and the movie flows from one memorable scene to the next – from Preacher Harry Powell’s hands battling for good against evil, to the children escaping along the river under the stars, to the corpse in the water… Famously, it’s the only movie actor Charles Laughton directed. Well, if you are only going to do one…

2- Stalker (1979)
The first Tarkovsky film I discovered. People travel from their monochrome town (shot by Tarkovsky in almost tar-like tones of black) in search of truth or meaning that they believe will be found in the Zone (itself shot in a subdued green). It’s not for everyone – it’s a slow movie with lots of long shots (some lasting minutes), but it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

3- Touch of Evil (1958)
It opens with an amazing three-minute uninterrupted shot winding through a Mexican border town full of characters, including a grotesque Orson Welles, Charlton Heston as a Mexican, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich. It feels like a movie taking risks and certainly seems a little out of step with Hollywood at that time.

4- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
America at its most paranoid. All is not what it seems when a doctor’s reception begins to fill up with people convinced that their husbands, wives, parents are not who they are supposed to be. I still think of this movie every Xmas when I see lorries driving around with Xmas trees all bound up, pod-like in the back.

5- Jojo in the Stars (2003)
A really beautiful animated short created by Marc Craste. It’s a strange little love story set in a freak show where Jojo, the main attraction, glows brightest throughout. The animation stays in black and white and I love all the little details that appear, for instance the debris that blows up around the tower. It is worth tracking down for the soundtrack alone! Craste also directed a great video for the Icelandic band múm…

6- Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)
The stories in this docudrama are based on 19th-century newspaper articles from the town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin. German and Scandinavian immigrants come to Wisconsin in search of what they think will be the Promised Land only to find barren soil and unforgiving winters. What follows is sometimes madness, murder and a struggle to survive. I love the whisper used by the narrator Ian Holm when he speaks of someone being taken away to the Asylum. I borrowed that effect for a line in my song ‘Human Blues’. A fascinating glimpse at an episode in American history.

7- Cat People (1942)
When I was growing up I was taken to Scotland every year to spend some time with my grandfather. One of my memories from that time is staying up to watch the old RKO and Universal horror movies. Lots of shadows and fog! This film stands apart from most of those movies partly because of Jacques Tourneur’s style. Some scenes are still very powerful – I love the pool scene that uses the reflections of the water on the ceiling and the reverb of the room to great disorientating effect.

8- M (1931)
A subject that would probably be hard to film these days – that of a child killer – in a movie that gets turned on its head. M is unique in that the mark – a chalked ‘M’ – sets Peter Lorre apart even from his fellow criminals. His murders have terrorized Berlin to such an extent that the police investigations have started to interfere with the underworld’s ability to continue with their own business. Lorre is unforgettable.

9- Wages of Fear (1953)
My keyboard player Dan introduced me to this. It’s full of thoroughly dislikeable characters trapped in a small town. They are so desperate to do anything for money that they sign up to drive trucks full of nitroglycerin along a hazardous journey. The cinematography is stunning, the language is brutal and the movie full of an almost uncomfortable tension. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot thankfully seems more intent on making great cinema than pleasing his audience.

10- Hana-Bi (1997)
It’s hard to choose which of Takeshi Kitano’s movies to add to this list but let’s go for this one. Poetic, violent, infused with moments of humour and serenity – you never know where he is going to take you next. Stylish cinema with Kitano at his most deadpan.

Festivals

LIDF: JOHN SAMSON RETROSPECTIVE

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review_samson.jpg

London International Documentary Festival

John Samson Retrospective

Screening on: Saturday 28 March and Monday 30 March

Venue: Horse Hospital, London

LIDF website

A political activist who came of age in Scotland’s shipyards during the tumultuous 1960s, John Samson (1946-2004) discovered documentary film after he met his wife-to-be, a student at the Glasgow School of Art. Trading precision tool making for the bohemian art world, Samson began experimenting with photography before moving on to filmmaking in the early 1970s. His first short, Charlie (1973), earned him a scholarship to the National Film School.

A 2008 exhibition at London’s Seventeen Gallery that featured three of Samson’s films was entitled ‘More Quoted than Seen’, an indication of both his cult status and the paradox of his obscurity. This year, the London International Documentary Festival is featuring a special retrospective dedicated to the ground-breaking filmmaker, screening five of his rarely seen films: Tattoo (1975), Dressing for Pleasure (1977), Britannia (1979), Arrows (1979) and The Skin Horse (1983). Drawing on his own experience as an outsider, Samson’s films reflect a fascination with the lives and behaviour of people living on the margins of conservative, mainstream society.

Tattoo opens with tight close-ups of a work-in-progress: a man’s arm is being shaved, the skin prepped for a tattoo that takes shape throughout the film. Interviews with both artists and the tattooed delve into the links between exhibitionism, pain, and very personal desires. But the film’s climax lets the tattoos speak for themselves: the camera lingers on the elaborately decorated bodies of both men and women, wordlessly offering the audience a glimpse at an otherwise very private art form.

Banned by London Weekend Television, Dressing for Pleasure is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. An interview with John Sutcliffe, the legendary clothing designer who also founded AtomAge, ‘a magazine for vinyl wearers’, is woven through the film, while blown-up pages from the magazine are used as a backdrop to the carefully composed scenes of participants parading their outré costumes. An interview with a shop assistant at Sex, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, one of the few places that openly sold latex and rubber wear, links fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. There’s nothing deliberately sensational in Dressing for Pleasure, and what emerges is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.

One of Samson’s more compelling films, despite its relatively tame subject matter, is Arrows, a 1979 film about Eric Bristow, aka The Crafty Cockney – a young, cocky champion darts player who became a national celebrity in the UK. The most captivating scenes are those of Bristow drinking pints and smoking his way through an exhibition at a working men’s club; the film is a revealing snapshot not only of Bristow, but also of an England that’s virtually disappeared.

Although there are elements in Samson’s films that are undeniably dated – notably Tattoo‘s classic 70s soundtrack – the lifestyles he captured on camera are still strikingly relevant. His refusal to sensationalise and exploit his marginalised cast of characters makes his documentaries all the more remarkable in the current era of gossip-driven reality television.

Sarah Cronin

The John Samson retrospective is screening on Saturday 28 March and Monday 30 March at the Horse Hospital (London). More details on the LIDF website.

Festivals

59th BERLINALE

Love Exposure

Berlinale

5-15 February 2008

The 59th edition of the Berlinale film festival was challenging before it had even started. After a day-long delay in snowed-in Heathrow, the first film that was on offer on arrival was Sion Sono’s dizzying, daring, nearly four-hour epic Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi). Outrageously irreverent, both visually and thematically, the film is a fast-paced saga that follows a rebellious young boy whose life is thrown into complete turmoil upon the death of his saintly mother. The only way for Yu to gain the affection of his father, who has become a Catholic priest, is to perpetually commit sins, and by doing so he eventually runs into Maria, a man-hating riot girl. Possession, perversion, mass murder, up-skirt sneak photography, Christianity and mysterious religious cults, a sprinkling of martial arts and bold references to films such as the 1970s Female Convict Scorpion series are just some of the elements that make up this unique adolescent love story. Although the film starts off at a frantic pace, it gradually slows down as the devious plot develops before concluding on a surprisingly serious and truly emotional note.

After such a thrilling start, it was difficult not to wonder whether the rest of the selection could possibly match it, and it has to be said that on the whole this year’s Berlinale was fairly downbeat and uneventful. Despite this, there were pleasures to be had: although not quite on the same level of inventiveness as Love Exposure, there was something disturbingly funny and compelling about seeing a baby sprout wings in Franí§ois Ozon’s bizarre new feature Ricky, one of the films competing for the Golden Bear. However, once again the true gems were to be found not in the official competition but in the Panorama and Forum sections. Take, for instance, When You’re Strange, Tom DiCillo’s insightful feature-length documentary, which explores the rise and fall of The Doors against the violent backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Nixon era. Incorporating previously unseen footage, it provides the first detailed record of the band’s early years on film, from their initial performances to Jim Morrison’s tragic death in Paris in 1971.

Also of note was the new film by Lucí­a Puenzo, the Argentine writer-director behind 2007’s well-received XXY: engaging and handsomely shot, The Fish Child (El Niño pez) mixed teenage romance and soft-centered thriller. This year’s Forum programme was dominated by four Korean productions, the most impressive of which was Baek Seung-bin’s debut feature Members of the Funeral (Jang-rae-sig-ui member), a quietly riveting and grimly funny drama. And the festival even offered a spot of Midnight Movie-type deviance with Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’, a phantasmagoric vision of the legendary ‘Dancing Outlaw’ Jesco White, who has spent most of his life battling madness, obsession and an uncontrollable wicked streak. Even though Murphy’s wild re-imagining of White’s story is at times somewhat over the top, White Lightnin’ was an enjoyable splash of cinematic ferocity, more of which would certainly be welcome in future editions of the Berlinale.

Pamela Jahn

Explore the alternative side of the Berlin film scene with our online feature on Julia Ostertag’s DIY punk film Saila or read an article on Berlin squat cinema in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. Our spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kí´ji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!

Features

BERLIN DIY PUNK FILMMAKING: JULIA OSTERTAG’S SAILA

Saila

Saila website

Julia Ostertag website

Julia Ostertag is an underground filmmaker from Berlin on a mission to challenge representations of female characters in film, particularly those that are violent and sexualised. Coming from an art school background and finding her early influences in the cinema of transgression, she is a filmmaker whose work elicits a love or hate reaction from the audience. She delights in provocation, and her first feature Saila is further proof of this.

Ostertag recently screened Saila at Schnarup-Thumby, a tight-knit Berlin squat with a strict ‘no photography’ policy – a somewhat different venue to those chosen for the L’Oréal-sponsored 59th Berlinale which opened a few weeks later. The squat provided a particularly intense and appropriate atmosphere for a chat with Ostertag about the film and her intentions. The screening brought together the voluntary and largely amateur team that comprised Saila’s cast and crew for a manic and rewarding evening, which for Ostertag ‘mirrored the two-and-a-half-year filmmaking process itself’.

Saila centres on the title character, a dreadlocked outsider searching for a ‘lost memory’ in an increasingly violent ‘Berlin punk dystopia’, where time and space no longer appear to obey conventional rules. Through a bewildering cycle of psychosexual visions and phantasms, Saila discovers her own violent truth. As Ostertag explains, it could be described as a ‘female revenge film without a specific reason for the revenge’. One of the most dynamic elements of the film is its unpredictability. Ostertag feels that this may come from the challenging method in which it was shot: ‘neither the actors nor myself knew where the journey would take us’, she explains. ‘It was a total challenge and very different from the other shorts and docos I’ve done’, she says, referring to the spontaneous performances and to the unstructured nature of the narrative.

Saila was shot guerilla-style within urban Berlin, in abandoned warehouses, decrepit apartment blocks and industrial wastelands. This shooting style was only made possible through working with a team that knew this side of Berlin from experience – the film’s locations are situated in parts of the city that are completely off the radar for the majority of the Berlin film industry. Ostertag’s choices have paid off handsomely: although set for the most part in a fantastical post-apocalyptic future, the film displays an authenticity and genuinely punk sensibility that is impossible to feign.

The film has been described as ‘probably the Berlin Punk film right now’ and a must-see ‘if you care about the Berlin D.I.Y. scene at all’ (Andreas Michalke, 26 November 2008, berlindiyhcpunk.wordpress.com). Through Saila and her previous films, particularly documentary Gender X (Berlinale 2005) and experimental short Sex Junkie (2003), Ostertag has placed herself at the dark, pulsing heart of Berlin’s underground film scene. Her bold representations of female sexuality and the unashamed insertion of her own personal concerns within these representations (including the decision to perform in the self-sexploitative lead role in Sex Junkie) certainly deserve our attention.

The filmmaker proclaims passionately that Saila and her other films aim to ‘question civilisation’, and that they could possibly provide some answers for ‘middle-class audiences coming to a crisis’. Her films represent characters who willingly thrust themselves at the fringes of society. Ostertag wants her work to provide an alternative in an industry which to her is all about ‘creating films for TV stations’. This ability to question and to challenge through her filmmaking shines through boldly in the complexity of her female characters.

Saila contains one of the bloodiest love scenes in cinema history. It is visually harsh and yet erotically charged, its intensity heightened through the awareness that we are watching local punks on screen, not professional actors. Ostertag points out that at no point did her non-actors feel that things were going too far: ‘Not everyone’s up to rolling around in broken glass. But my actors completely slipped into their roles and the broken glass and the filth never stopped them.’ In spite of the unpredictability of the journey she took her actors on, Ostertag did attempt to prepare them for their roles by showing them films such as Richard Kern’s Submit to Me Now (1987), chosen especially to help her actors discard any assumptions about acting ‘narratively’. Although there is no conventional narrative thread to guide us through the decaying dystopia, we feel compelled to continue through the dark by Saila herself, a damaged and fascinating female character, both fragile and vampy in equal amounts. It is Saila’s predatory side that ultimately wins out, which for Ostertag is the focal point of the story as well as what drove her to make the film.

Ostertag intended the character of Saila to represent a strong female identity, a female sexual fantasy even. Many women in the audience have told her that they find Saila’s character and her sexual encounters a strong turn-on. ‘It’s especially interesting that girls are getting turned on by the aggressive sex’, she says. ‘The way I picture sex is still an important thing for me. But I like it when girls also see the romantic side of the scenes and connect to them on a very strong emotional level.’ Ostertag points out that she has also heard the opposite point of view: some women find her approach to sexuality offensive and believe she is pushing things too far. This is the filmmaker’s response: ‘I can never figure out exactly what it is that they mean by “too far”. Maybe they think that girls are not allowed to have fun in that way, even when it is depicted from a girl’s point of view.’ Ostertag concedes that as a female director it is easier to push these kinds of representations of women further, that as a female you can generally ‘get away with more’. That said, Ostertag also admits that there are very few female directors working with these concerns, particularly in such a visually provocative way.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Want to find out more about the DIY cinema scene in Berlin? Read Siouxzi Mernagh’s article about Berlin squat cinema in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. Our spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kí´ji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH PAOLO SORRENTINO

Il Divo

Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 March 2009

Venues: Curzons Mayfair and Soho, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Paolo Sorrentinon

Writer: Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Giulio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci

Italy 2008

117 mins

Best known for his impeccably stylish modern noir The Consequences of Love (2004), Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, Il Divo, reunites him with his Consequences star, Toni Servillo, and together they revisit the subject of Mafia involvement in Italian life. However, this time the action centres around a figure from the real world, seven-time Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was tried on multiple occasions for murder and corruption, but never convicted. Alexander Pashby spoke to Paolo Sorrentino during the London Film Festival in 2008.

Alexander Pashby: What was the inspiration behind Il Divo?

Paolo Sorrentino: The idea was to make a film about a character who had accompanied the lives of the Italian people for such a long time. It was something that I’d had in mind from the very beginning, when I started to enjoy cinema. And I decided to do it now because I could afford the luxury of taking a little time. There was no guarantee that I would actually be able to get this project together. I knew that it would be difficult to get funding, but at this stage of my career, it was a risk that I could take. If it wasn’t a particularly successful project, it was not going to be a disaster.

AP: Is that because of the success of Consequences?

PS: It’s really more a case of… When you want to make films, when you haven’t yet done so, you have this sense of urgency. When you’ve actually achieved your objective and made a couple of films, that degree of urgency is reduced. So there’s not that same driving need to make them relentlessly, one after the other.

AP: Andreotti is a popular author in his own right, there’s a wealth of academic writing about him and of course you lived through the events depicted in the film. How did you go about approaching…

PS: … the mass of material? Well, there was quite a lot of study and work involved, probably because I like studying. For Consequences I set myself the task of studying all the mass of material about the Mafia.

AP:I love the scene in Consequences where Toni Servillo’s character is taken to Mafia headquarters and you can really believe that every extra he passes is a member of the Mafia just from the way they look.

PS:Exactly. And in order to get there, you have to study. You have to deal with things that are real, and you have to keep to the facts otherwise you will be accused and exposed. And those true things also have to be material that is appropriate to be filmed. Not everything that is true in life is true on film. And so the difficulty with Il Divo was in the selection of the material and how to make everything fit. Because although the film takes things from reality, it becomes borderline once it’s on screen and it tends to tip over into the grotesque.

AP:Irony is very important to you, isn’t it? And the grotesque is linked to that…

PS:Yes, I always look for irony. The biography of Andreotti is the story of a man who makes an enormous use of irony himself. So it is a part of his way of dealing with things in the film. And then there’s the whole process of transforming reality into cinema reality, being distorted and turning into the grotesque. You could use the example of the scene with the cat. A man who encounters a cat, there’s nothing ironic about it, it’s a normal thing. But put it on the screen and this sort of distortion that the process imposes makes it tip over into the grotesque. That’s when you get the irony.

AP:This is the third time you’ve worked with Servillo now [the first being 2001’s One Man Up]. What’s it like working together?

PS:I wouldn’t really know how to describe it now because, having known each other for such a long time, the whole process is sort of an automatic thing. But it’s based on the fact that we get along very well. We share the same sort of ideas. We have a common view of things and that’s very, very useful.

AP:Your cinematography is very dynamic and your composition very precise. Where does that come from?

PS:I would say that it comes from what I like as a spectator. Reality is fairly random and imprecise, and if I were to make a film in which I presented something that is as imprecise and as random to my viewers, I would be afraid of boring them. So I prefer to make a film in which reality is real, but it’s also something else, and that other thing is, more or less, how I would like it to be.

Interview by Alexander Pashby