BERLINALE 1 – RADIATION THROUGH EIGHT DAYS
This is a festival report from Berlin. It is a missive from Berlin — the first — written in a hotel room (dry air), the curtains slightly open — motionless. It is a festival report that attempts to reconstruct the films I’ve seen (as many as twenty five) — over the course of seven or eight days — without reference to my notes (because, stupidly, I lost my notebook). It’s an attempt to exhaust my memory of films that I’ve seen, half-cut Perecianism. If you find my notes, good luck: the handwriting is unreadable.
I also want to direct your attention to the three bumper festival reports (here and here and here) that myself and Ralph have recorded so far, from our flat near the Platz der Luftbrücke. I’m writing this bit in Berlin airport, having just eaten — I think — singularly the worst blueberry muffin of my life. Like really bad.
TAKE YR SEATS
— Head slips beneath oil; brown furze of seat — it is dented; caved in — ear pressed into shoulder, expressionless. Lips seem to draw backwards, as if into his own teeth. This is Guy, film critic for Cahiers du Cinema — fictively, in 1989 — in Les Sieges de L’alcazar, a film by Luc Moullet. “I’m here out of dedication to my profession. I don’t like Antonioni”. Collar is yoinked over his lapel (grey); head bowed as if in reverence. His brow is furrowed.
— Operatively, the here (or, hier) is a cinema — a retrospective — which Guy is covering. There isn’t much to say about the auto-mythologization of the critic, of what they do — with/against films, subject to them – in dark rooms. This is my sixth day of Berlinale. It will drift into my seventh, and my eighth. The latter two days were unanticipated. I should be on a flight, even this evening — a flight, which is (without me) taking off at 10.50pm. I lost my passport on the u-bahn, an event which I can ascribe only to sleep-deprivation; now finding myself touching the labyrinthine hem of the British consulate, who — even now, just as my plane is likely ferrying passengers elsewhere —are preparing my ‘emergency’ paperwork, which will allow me to depart under an assumed-but-actual identity (of myself); counterfeit duplication. I find myself in a prolapsed Berlinale, beyond my imagination of it — and write this from a black-red hotel bar whose music is New Wave, 1980s, as if the wall hasn’t yet fallen, and — around me — blue-chip gallerists discuss a swollen curatorial project; one which — I imagine — is blindly indifferent to the nearby machineries of the film festival that has occupied my hours and days and yes, my nights, for the past week. I feel a bit uneasy.
— I once met Joanna Walsh and asked her — it was a pub, somewhere near Victoria — about the strange distresses of the hotel. She writes (in Hotel) that such a space “cannot be a home, not even a home away from home”. Bruce Begout (stimming on Musil) observes, archly, that a hotel is a “home without qualities”. Evacuation is paramount, and everything that this hotel should represent becomes, instead, a signifier of my deferral — my delayment from an actual, very real home; which I will be traveling toward only theoretically, later, this evening, at 10.50pm, or — better still – will be translating toward, my ticket ID, seat empty, which — I imagine — my neighbour (no less or more real than I) will place their jacket on, or a newspaper, glad of the unexpected room in which to stretch and yawn. I envy them. Do they think of me?
— Right, right. What follows are reviews — or something like reviews — that will proceed at really a very sharpish pace, and I’m going to not give myself loads of room; a paragraph each, only. Sitting at my bedroom desk (hotel), I can hear a sort of submerged creaking above me — footsteps, shifting weight. I’ll continue the reviews in part 2.
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD — AFIRE
— I didn’t see more than twenty seven seconds of Afire. This is because — after sitting down — I realised I’d lost my passport, and then I had to beat a retreat, and was flooded with doubt. But I did glance over my shoulder and hold the screen in my eyes (for a moment [twenty seven seconds]). Two men, wall of foliage, a car engine erupting into smoke. I don’t know what happened next.
HONG SANG-SOO — IN WATER
— Richter’s blur paintings (deranged mass culture, specularly), but Eric Rohmer (generously). I don’t really enjoy Hong Sang-soo’s films. I enjoyed In Water much more; probably because it pursues a properly formal strategy. This is down to its single plane of focus (very shallow, very close to the camera), which means — for much of the time — the shots are out of focus, and expressions are dis-embodied (twitching and the eye’s glance reduced to illegibility). They (the characters) are trying to shoot a film, but on a very low budget. For the first time, Hong Sang-soo balances his compositions, lending them depth — meanwhile, the blur induces a kind of smearing, which is vaguely impressionistic, here and there, but not always convincingly. I liked it, the proceduralism — strained conversations that drift (knowingly) toward the rocks of awkwardness. Drinking soju.
INFINITY POOL — BRANDON CRONENBERG
— Everybody is obsessed with the dalliances of the ultra-rich. White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, Succession. Rabelesian excess and schadenfreude. Everywhere the rich are being lambasted, spat on, reviled. This is good, probably, in the round — but not necessarily healthy as a filmic mode (where is our Bunuel, our Pasolini?). Brandon Cronenberg — son of David Cronenberg — offers probably the worst version of this trend. Giallo gore-fest with intellectual pretensions about — what? Doubling, morality. There is some inventive lunging and crane shots in the film’s opening. It promises something more fraught and strange. The rest is just noise. I think — now; later — about resortization, which Isabelle Graw (writing in Texte zur Kunst) conceives of as an abstracting machine that produces only social homogenization. Flattening, smoothing; these works (like Infinity Pool) believe themselves to participate within a particular mode of social critique, but they have no fangs, and reproduce — instead — the very homogenization that they seek to dismantle. It is the withdrawal of consequence — for James, the protagonist — that ‘enables’ his descent into murder; a thing seemingly unconditioned by his material or class status (where was his sense of permissibility generated? The film doesn’t ask this, is unequipped to answer this). Maybe: Under the Bin (like under the skin, get it). Silly film.
PAST LIVES — CELINE SONG
— What if a film was an Ottolenghi cookbook? What if it was a ficus fig tree, casting a soft, smeared shadow on a chalk wall. What if it was a tastefully un-large Matisse print (like — Blue Nude, 1952) — or a dish of madeleines (cooked that very morning by a girl called [idk] Poppy or Sarah). What if it left viewers blithely “devastated”? What if a film was just lovely? What if it fished feelings of tasteful (i.e., not too garish) melancholy from those who saw it, and provided — let’s say — fuel for a first date organized through Hinge? What if a film was rain falling against the window of a Parisian cafe. What if a film — any film; I mean — was designed to provide a core personality reference for a — any, I mean — 24-37 year old resident of Brooklyn or Clapton? What if a film was a tote bag woven out of organic fibres — and what if it was entirely bloodless? Luckily, I do not need to wonder — because Past Lives has answered these questions for me.
SHORTS PROGRAMME III — VARIOUS
— I’m not sure that any of the films — four films — in this short programme really had any impact on me. I don’t like animation. The other three seemed sloppy and incoherent — style over substance. One film, Caterpillar, invoked some really heavy-handed discourse about (I think) the political economy of silk production and the social reality of living in the Middle East, and about migration and exile, but in a way that was both too blatant and too myopic. The Veiled City was about London, and used a lot of found footage — gnarled; blown out — to create a sort of La Jetee redux, but more obviously science fiction (against Marker’s dissociative, defamiliarizing effect), and it was also ‘about’ climate change I think? It was probably the most competent, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that none of this was really film — just images, and heavy-fisted politics.
SAMSARA — LOIS PATINO
— First glance, you’re in the world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul — dislocated into Laos. Patino shoots on film, and — at first — you wonder what it brings, exactly [the film stock], except a certain burr and softly-textured immanence. Patiño’s is a tripartite film; split into three distinct, but interpolated, chapters — a journey into (or, through) death, reincarnation. The first chapter follows a young man who is helping to prepare an elderly woman for death. He reads to her from a Tibetan book of death — the guidance that she will need to navigate the perplexity of the afterlife, and beyond it (through it). The final segment shifts its location to Zanzibar, the birth of a young goat and the girl who cares for it. What deserves most attention — I think — is the film’s centre, its stomach. For here, we’re subject to a disorienting, defamiliarizing barrage of colour and flicker and light that comes across like a catatonic, trembling, technicolour Kubelka or Tony Conrad — and at its very heart, the epicentre of deathliness, a black wall of leader, the heavy buzzing (thick) of flies, which Patiño sustains, beyond the point of probability. Perhaps, after that opening softness and the visual assault of the middle, the final segment seems to drift — deflate. I might also raise an objection to an intertitle (placed between chapter 1 and 2) which instructs us what we are about to see, or experience. This was already obvious, and suggested a distrust of the aesthetic and formal machineries that were about to be unleashed on us. This could be excised and the film would not lose anything. Actually it would gain something. I’ve not even mentioned this quite sublime encounter with an elephant, filling the broad massif of the screen, sudden — or how the young monks (novices) and the young man wander beneath a soap-soft waterfall and play tinny Laotian rap on their phones, how dissonant and strange that all is.
MAD FATE — SOI CHEANG
— Here, Cheang brings a strange, bravura intensity on the subject of death, fate, feng shui. It is quite an unhinged thing that seems to sop up some of the visual and narrative excesses (twists and follies) that we might expect from a South Korean cinema (Park Chan-wook, Etc). I will use a very blithe cliche here: it overstays its welcome. But! There are flickers of real gravitas and formal sublimity in the warp and weft. Bodies framed (a la Vertov, Dovzhenko) against broiling, grey skies. It has more than a little Sion Sono to its armature (say, Love Exposure [2009]). B-movie bombast. The opening scene — in the cemetery; a ritually ‘falsified’ burial (here, to prevent a death) — is extraordinary, the camera leering down on the morass of graves swept with rain, bursting with light; a face (a woman’s) gasping for breath beneath flooding soil. Later, we see an entire hillside of tombs collapse and disintegrate, and then its hysterical, melancholic aftermath. It’s not a great film, but it is very surprising and excessive. The melodrama — I think — is contorted into such a disfigured narrative shape that you end up warming into its excess. Like Sontag, here, on ‘camp’, it converts “the serious into the frivolous”, a sensibility of obliteration. Goof aesthetics.
OTHER VIEWINGS — AMBIENTLY (THAT HAVE NOTHING REALLY TO DO WITH BERLINALE)
— Looking up (it is raining, has been raining) — the sharp spear of the Fernsehturm tower pierces underbelly of fog. Red light, neon of Cubix cinema reflected in the puddles. I walk back and forth for a time, fail to buy a pepsi (they won’t accept my type of card), think how easy it would be to remain here (in Berlin), but also how difficult. I didn’t lose my passport on purpose, though the possibility seems vaguely exciting (just as it is unlikely). I’m staying in a very beautiful, very expensive, and — ultimately — very soulless hotel. I watch a documentary about the life of Mizoguchi. I watch Moyra Davey’s Hemlock Forest (2016). These were my own self-propelled watchings. Just as I rewatch the opening sequence of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), and this becomes a kind of self-programming festival that I assemble in my room, in the hotel, and whose contents I communicate to barely anyone. Earlier, I had dinner with George. The restaurant (Vietnamese) was playing music at such a fast pace that it felt like a kind of Taylorist experiment in hurrying us up through our rice.
If you liked this newsletter then please consider liking, sharing or subscribing. It’s lonely here.