EUROPEAN AFTER ALL : a Gijon Film Festival report : by Stefan Ivančić

Saturday, 08 December 2007

Last Wednesday (28^th November) I discovered that "there are 250 film festivals that coexist in Spain". This was written on the front-page of the cultural supplement of Spanish La Vanguardia, one of the leading newspapers in the country. Obviously neither I nor anyone else was surprised - it is a fact that nowadays there is a film festival in every single village - but 250 of them is news. Finally someone decided to count them.

When talking about Spain and film festivals it is common to mention San Sebastián and Valladolid, the oldest film events in the country. However, they are still the leading events only in terms of media coverage - not for their film selection. San Sebastián is a festival that years ago managed to programme films of authors such as John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer or Terrence Malick, but nowadays it allows Paul Auster to hand in its main prize (the golden shell) to his friend Wayne Wang. Valladolid is even worse - it's essentially a paradise for a few bad Spanish distributors.

It could be argued that there is noticeable decadence of both festivals in recent years. On the other hand, lots of smaller festivals have been born (Las Palmas, Sevilla, Pamplona) or reborn (Gijón). The Gijón Film Festival has been running since 1963 - first as a film and TV festival for kids and youngsters. In 1986 it became international. I don't know for certain when the ‘breaking point' occurred, which made Gijón the most important of all the film events in Spain regarding the film selection, but I am quite sure it is related to the appointment of its current director José Luis Cienfuegos (1995). Apart from the competition programme, the Festival has since organised retrospectives of the most significant contemporary filmmakers, including Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis among many others. For seven years now there has been a retrospective on the "New Cinemas" as well, which concluded the Junger Deutscher Film this year.

Before this year's programme was announced, there were some films that I was expecting to find there - the "Coming" syndrome described by Neil Young in his text for Contrapicado - because they are really Gijónesque films. It is a pity that Christian Petzold's Yella, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park and Todd Hanyes' I'm Not There were missing. For that we can thank a few of the other Spanish festivals, for offering ludicrous amounts of money and thus ‘stealing' films not to mention some quite ridiculous issues with the distribution.

Nevertheless, the 45^th Gijón International Film Festival plunged us into great films and crazy parties, and we met up with some old friends. Europe was the main subject in many of the films seen in the competition, but Asia was the big winner of the Festival - Help Me Eros by Tsai Ming-liang's leading actor/boyfriend Lee Kang-sheng took the main "Asturias Principality" prize (20.000€). Pere Portabella's Die Stille vor Bach [7/10] was the only Spanish film in the competition and it won the special jury prize, while Aleksey Balabanov achieved the award for best director for Cargo 200 [8/10]. However, Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export [10/10] and Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector [9/10] were the best films I have seen in Gijón, even though neither won any significant award.

That said, let's go back to the above-mentioned topic of Europe. Import/Export is probably THE example because it fuses both sides of Europe - Western and Eastern, the EU and the ‘rest', the purely economic one and the human-cultural one. The slash between import-immigration and export-emigration of Ulrich Seidl's film title is not arbitrary - it symbolizes the presence of The Wall which today still divides the continent in two sides. Many may say that his point of view is cruel and that he is mistreating the old men at the geriatric hospital - I even heard someone saying that Seidl "is a bad person". However, I see Seidl as quite the humanist - one who looks after the people that modern society is not only marginalizing, but has fully forgotten. His point of view is close enough to emphatically portray all the emotions present, and yet at the same time he manages not to steer too close and appear voyeuristic.

While Seidl finds the right way through contemporary Europe, Catalan veteran experimental director-politician Pere Portabella loses track in some moments - he chooses Johann Sebastian Bach as the icon of European culture for his film Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence Before Bach). The German composer certainly does not represent the whole of Europe, especially not when Portabella uses him to please an intellectual and bourgeois class (e.g. Àlex Brendemühl plays a truck driver that plays the piano, the bassoon: his truck is full of paintings of Virgins and he has philosophical thoughts: "You can dismiss ideas only if you have them"). Apart from this, the film has many brilliant shots, such as its opening long take - the camera seems to float inside an empty art gallery with nothing but the white paint of its walls... soon a player piano will enter the screen and along with the camera it goes back over the same path. Die Stille vor Bach does not recreate an époque - it reconstructs people's cultural consciousness though the praise of architecture, of music and, when all is said and done, of cinema.

If Die Stille vor Bach stands for the idea of unity (economic unity in a way too, although Pere Portabella denies it and says his thoughts are against it), Aleksey Balabanov's Cargo 200 (based on real events) can be seen as its opposite: It is the image of 80's Russia - a time when the communist regime in Eastern Europe was collapsing. It is a depiction of the rise of the individual against the collective ideals of socialism. It works as a prelude to David Cronenberg's last masterpiece, Eastern Promises [10/10]. The power of Cargo 200's images is not found in the explicit scenes, but rather in the passive shots. The image of an old woman sitting in front of her TV was never so chilling - she looks hypnotised by it, but she is not - she is perfectly aware of everything that surrounds her but prefers to look into a different direction while the whole country is falling apart.

Deep down contemporary imaginary Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector (aka La question humaine), this film turns out to be crucial for an interpretation of Europe. The film is more a piece of hard work than talent, where everything (i.e. script, mise en scène, performances, music, art direction, etc.) strides asymptotically towards perfection. Its aim is a tough one - recover the power that words once had, nowadays turned into mere technicalities. Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval (his wife and scriptwriter) trace the greatest tragedy of Europe's 20^th century History - the Holocaust - and they introduce it as, at the same time, both a reality and a metaphor. It is a film with a very physical approach to spaces and bodies - e.g. everything concerning the rave party or the quasi-theatrical use of the off-space and the actors' gestures and moves. Once more (as Portabella's Die Stille vor Bach) it is a film about historical consciousness above all things. In this way Heartbeat Detector works as a unique and essential experience.

There were some non-European films screened in Gijón that deserve to be mentioned as well: the American The Darjeeling Limited [7/10] (Wes Anderson) and the short masterpiece that works as its prologue, Hotel Chevalier [10/10] (available on the Internet at iTunes, and I suppose at a number of other download websites); the Mexican Cochochi [7/10], a sort of review of Kiatostami's Where is the Friend's Home?, by first-timers Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán; and finally the almost-silent self-made A Short Film About the Indio Nacional [9/10] by 23-year old Raya Martin. As its subtitle says, it is a film about the prolonged sorrow of Filipinos, but the latest Filipino films are not exclusively about their history but the flow of the whole of mankind's History.

Stefan Ivančić
Barcelona 6^th December, 2007

Features seen (50m+)
(all at Cines Centro cinema unless stated otherwise)

- The Adventure of Denchu Kozo : [6/10] : Shinya Tsukamoto : Jap 87 : 47m : 22.11
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God : [10/10] : Werner Herzog : Ger 72 : 93m : seen 30.11
- Cargo 200 : [8/10] : Aleksey Balabanov : Rus 2007 : 90m : 23.11
- Cochochi : [7/10] : I.Cárdenas & L.A. Guzmán : Mex 07 : 87m : 28.11
- The Darjeeling Limited : [7/10] : Wes Anderson : US 07 : 91m : 22.11 Teatro Jovellanos (TJ)
- Ex-Drummer : [0/10] : Koen Mortier : Bel 2007 : 104m : 27.11
- La France : [5/10] : Serge Bozon : Fr 07 : 102m : 25.11
- Heartbeat Detector aka La question humaine : [9/10] : Nicolas Klotz : Fr 07 : 141m : 24.11
- Import/Export : [10/10] : Ulrich Seidl : Aut 07 : 135m : 27.11
- Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten : [3/10] : Julien Temple : Ire/UK 07 : 123m : 23.11
- The Last Resort : [8/10] : P.Pawlikowski : UK 00 : 73m : 25.11
- A Lost Man aka Un homme perdu : [5/10] : Danielle Arbid : Fr/Leb 07 : 97m : 28.11
- Nightmare Detective : [6/10] : S.Tsukamoto : Jap 06 : 105m : 25.11
- Photos in the City of Sylvia aka Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia : [6/10] : José Luis Guerín : Spn 07 : 67m : 26.11, TJ
- Serbian Epics : [8/10] : P.Pawlikowski : UK 92 : 50m : 29.11
- A Short Film About the Indio Nacional... : [9/10] : Raya Martin : Phi 2006 : 97m : 27.11, Antiguo Instituto (AI)
- The Silence Before Bach aka Die Stille vor Bach : [7/10] : Pere Portabella : Spn 07 : 102m : 28.11, TJ
- Tetsuo II - Body Hammer : [9/10] : S.Tsukamoto : Jap 92 : 83m : 30.11

Mid-length (31m-49m)
- Dostoyevsky's Travels : [8/10] : Pawel Pawlikowski : UK 95 : 45m : seen 29.11
- From Moscow to Pietushki : [7/10] : P.Pawlikowski : UK 91 TV : 45m : seen 29.11
- Haze : [8/10] : S.Tsukamoto : Jap 05 : 49m : 22.11
- Tripping With Zhirinovsky : [9/10] : P.Pawlikowski : UK 95 TV : 45m : 29.11
- Twockers : [7/10] : P.Pawlikowski : UK 98 : 40m : 25.11

Shorts (30m or less)
- Darío y Verónica : [2/10] : Alberto Rodríguez de la Fuente : Spn 07 : 17m : 23.11
- Dog Altogether : [6/10] : Paddy Considine : UK 07 : 16m : 28.11, TJ
- Friends Forever : [1/10] : Marçal Forés : UK 07 : 22m : 28.11
- Hotel Chevalier : [10/10] : Wes Anderson : US 07 : 13m : 22.11, TJ
- Las horas muertas : [3/10] : Haritz Zubillaga : Spn 07 : 13m : 23.11
- Las variaciones Marker : [8/10] : Isaki Lacuesta : Spn 07 : 34m : 23.11, AI
- Liebe der Lieblosen : [4/10] : Benjamin Tholen : Ger 06 : 31m : 27.11, TJ
- Muybridge 2.0 : [5/10] : Gonzalo de Pedro : Spn 07 : 3m : 23.11, AI
- Tabla Aeróbica nº4 : [6/10] : Gonzalo de Pedro : Spn 07 : 8m : 23.11
- Yolk : [1/10] : Stephen Lance : Aus 07 : 15m : 25.11, TJ

Features already seen, elsewhere
- Dai Nipponjin : [6/10] : Hitoshi Matsumoto : Jap 07 : 113m : seen Oct (Sitges Film Festival)
- Fay Grim : [2/10] : Hal Hartley : US/Fr/Ger 06 : 119m : seen Apr (IndieLisboa FF)
- In the City of Sylvia aka En la ciudad de Sylvia : [7/10] : José Luis Guerín : Spn 07 : 90m : seen Oct (Barcelona)
- Mister Lonely : [7/10] : Harmony Korine : Fr/UK/Ire/US 07 : 112m : seen Oct (Sitges FF)

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