for TRIBUNE : Berlinale report, part two — plus MAN OF ARAN [5+/10] (1934) review

Published on: March 10th, 2011

GERMAN CINEMA IN SEARCH OF NEW DIMENSIONS
second of a two-part report from the Berlin International Film Festival

Having last week covered the highlights of the Competition section at February’s Berlinale - as the Berlin International Film Festival, Europe’s biggest film event in terms of ticket-sales, is near-invariably known – we now move on to the most notable titles from the other sections. Divining exactly what is and isn’t in Competition at Berlin is, however, not a straightforward business, as the official Competition section always includes about half a dozen movies which are confusingly listed as “In Competition — Out of Competition”.

This designation usually signifies works by established names which, for commercial/strategic reasons, are given the spotlight of “Competition” slots without enduring the unsightly business of actually being in the running for prizes. And it can also be used to showcase particularly notable documentary films – for reasons that remain frustratingly nebulous, non-fiction cinema almost never gets to contend for the major gongs at the biggest festivals such as Cannes, Berlin or Venice.

This year the biggest buzz about “Out of Competition” titles revolved around a pair of 3D documentaries from revered icons of post-war German cinema: 68-year-old Werner Herzog, enjoying a terrific late-career purple patch with Encounters at the End of the World, The Bad Lieutenant and My Son My Son What Have Ye Done?; and 65-year-old Wim Wenders, who has slumped through a decade of critical and commercial disasters following his 1999 smash Buena Vista Social Club.

Those who saw both Wenders and Herzog pictures tended to prefer Wenders’ Pina, a tribute to the seminal modern-dance genius Pina Bausch (who passed away during the film’s pre-production) to Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a National Geographic expedition into a French cave-system in which the world’s oldest artworks, dating back to 27,000 BC.

I only caught the latter – watchable enough, but a disappointment after his recent run of terrific form (which included the belated translation into English of Conquest of the Useless, his remarkable diary of making 1982′s Fitzcarraldo). It’s nevertheless worth a look when it hits UK cinemas on March 25th – Pina comes out here three weeks later, and if nothing else it’s refreshing to find 3D being used for something other than action spectacles and computer-generated kids’ movies.

Comparing directors is always a somewhat invidious practice, but hard to resist in situation like the Berlinale’s middle Sunday – the Wenders and Herzog films were press-screened at the start and end of the very same afternoon. The final Sunday of the festival offered a similar juxtaposition, as it included the last opportunity for the Berlin public to see the Dreileben (“Three Lives”) project in its entirety on the big screen.

Seemingly inspired equally by Lucas Belvaux’s 2002 Belgian Trilogy of features and by Channel 4′s more recent Red Riding, Dreileben comprises three 90-minute films made for German TV (broadcast is scheduled for October) set in the same locality – the fictional area of ‘Dreileben’ – and dealing with the manhunt for an escaped convict. Arising from a series of e-mail discussions on the state of German cinema in general and genre material in particular, each film is handled by a separate director and crew, with occasional overlap in terms of the cast and characters.

Of the three directors, 50-year-old Christian Petzold (Yella, The State I Am In, Jerichow) has the greatest international renown – pound for pound, he’s Germany’s leading writer/director of the past decade or so. His Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod) introduces the Dreileben milieu – an underpopulated town in the former East Germany – and develops a halting romance between a young medical-student and a Bosnian refugee, with the missing criminal providing intermittent, tense distraction. There are terrific moments here – including a mighty “boo” scare near the end which had nearly the whole audience leaping out of their seats – but there’s something naggingly amiss with the characterisation and screenplay structure in the second half, rendering this slightly sub-par Petzold.

The second chapter is the weakest of the trio, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm mir nicht nach.) by 58-year-old Dominik Graf – focussing on a psychologist drafted in to help with the manhunt, but more concerned with her complicated private-life and (not-so-involving) romantic past that the hunt for the escapee. The only one of the three shot on film rather than video, it’s nevertheless by far the most “telly-like” section, and might pass muster on German small-screens.

Things get back on an even keel, and then some, with the final segment, One Minute of Darkness (Eine Minute Dunkel) by Christoph Hochhäusler – one of the most acclaimed of the younger German film-makers thanks to finance-world psychological drama The City Below, which premiered at last year’s Cannes. On the evidence of this sombre, tightly-controlled mood-piece Hochhäusler’s reputation is well-earned: he shifts the focus much more to the hunted man, revealing entirely unexpected areas of the latter’s character which make his picture an ideal companion-piece to the (relatively) more conventional and genre-oriented Beats Being Dead.

One Minute of Darkness, like of all the Dreileben films, is intended to stand alone – but, being at least as accomplished as the vast majority of films in the main Competition section of this year’s Berlinale, it deserves widespread international exposure, both as part of the wider trilogy and as an individual work. Given the success of Danish export The Killing, don’t be surprised to see Dreileben appear on a TV near you at some point over the summer – before a probably UK theatrical premiere at the London Film Festival in late October. Spread over three nights (rather than crammed into a single afternoon) it’s well worth the significant time-investment demanded.

While (predictably) almost unknown over here, Hochhäusler is already quite well-established in his native land. And the Berlinale is always a useful place to check out the next wave of up-and-coming German directors – the Perspektive Deutsches Kino sidebar is expressly designed to highlight strong, promising debuts. This year the two most talked-about films from ‘PDK’ were a documentary, Battle of the Queens (Kampf der Königinnen) by Nicolas Steiner, and a feature, The Education (Die Ausbildung) by Dirk Lütter.

Shot in gleaming, monochrome digital-video by cinematographer-to-watch Markus Nestroy, Battle of the Queens is a brisk 70-odd-minute introduction to a rural Swiss cow-fighting tradition. It adheres to several clichés of the sports-movie sub-genre, and might be accused of being little more than a glorified application letter to direct the next Guinness advert. But it wins us over through the sheer majesty of its imagery (slow motion is deployed to particularly jaw-dropping effect) and the fascinating oddity of its subjects – while the cows clash with each other rather than with human adversaries, injuries are apparently very rare and the judges seem to operate on an “artistic expression” criterion.

The Education is also shot on immaculate digital video, but there the similiarities end. Following a callow youth during his period of training at the soulless German headquarters of a multi-national air-conditioning firm, it’s a clinical skewering of workplace discontents and an examination of the dysfunctional dynamics fostered by “modern” (i.e. American) employment and management systems. At once emphatically German in its details but increasingly (and regrettably) universal in its implications, The Education follows to some extend where Petzold has already trod (in films like Yella and Wolfsburg) but finds its own acerbic, topically anti-corporate voice.

[Jigsaw Lounge's Berlin 2011 index-page]

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Man of Aran
Director: Robert Flaherty

Showing in a handful of UK arthouses this month and granted a more comprehensive re-release in the Republic of Ireland, Man of Aran is a 1934 film by a director best known for the landmark documentary Nanook of the North (1922). “Documentary” has always been a tricky, controversial term, of course, and Flaherty’s anthropological studies of remote communities are perhaps better described as “docu-fiction”, with the fiction often getting the upper hand over the documentary elements.

Man of Aran is a prime example of this, an all-too-transparently staged/restaged and generally “faked up” affair supposedly supposedly chronicling the tough lives of those living on the Aran islands off the west coast of Ireland (not to be confused with the isle of Arran off Scotland’s west coast).
It’s worth a look mainly for the spectacular shots of the stormy seas in this part of the world, some sense of scale being provided by the people – tiny specks scurrying along clifftops or rocky shores in search of shelter. An hour purely composed of the titanic ocean would have sufficed – but Flaherty is more interested in assembling a study of the local residents, orchestrating an elaborate shark-hunting sequence (even though such activities hadn’t actually been carried out in this area for over half a century) chiefly notable for some ethereal images of pre-slaughter basking shark.

In this (silent) film the landlubbers remain distant, wordless, nameless, semi-mythical figures – a “man” (Colman ‘Tiger’ King), his “wife” (Maggie Dillane), their “child” (Michael Dillane). Opening credits reveal that the man and wife weren’t actually a couple, though the woman and boy are evidently mother and son: she’s a well-scrubbed sort who tends to grin whenever the camera is present (even in situations of intense danger), the laddie looks like he’s wandered in straight off a Hollywood set.

Man of Aran now only intermittently engages seven decades on – it’s more of a curio than a time-capsule, but has nevertheless enjoyed a recent vogue as inspiration to practitioners in other artistic fields. Irish playwright Martin (In Bruges) McDonagh’s 2006 dark comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan revolves around the shooting; three years later, nautically-inclined Scottish experimental-rockers British Sea Power performed and recorded a new soundtrack – one which contributes surprisingly little in terms of mood or ambience, and which has been (perhaps wisely) left off the re-release and upcoming DVD in favour of “original” 1930s musical accompaniment.

Neil Young
1st March, 2011
(written for the 10th March edition of Tribune magazine)