Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The UCLA connection

The six degrees of separation work in unexpected, whimsical ways. What do two beautifully crafted Japanese films – Ototo and Kyoto Story, by veteran Yoji Yamada – have in common with Zona Sur, the no-holds barred metaphorical critique of upper class Bolivians, directed by US-trained Juan Carlos Valdivia? Nothing at all, if one looks at how film technique, storytelling and human emotions are handled. There is no connection either between a filmmaker in his eighties, who looks at people and cities with affection and nostalgia, and a young director from Latin America with a knack for casting and an ax to grind at his social milieu. To use a quick film history shortcut, both are as far apart as John Ford and Luis Buñuel.

However, a connection, both geographical and academic can be established, when one realizes that Ichiro Yamamoto, the producer of the Japanese films, and Zona Sur cinematographer Paul de Lumen coincided at the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media between 2006 and 2007. They probably never met, but both certainly benefited from the talents and possibilities offered by our film school and the UCLA infrastructure.


A veteran producer at Shochiku – one of the major Japanese studios, already a hundred years old, and the home of Yazujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, among others – Mr. Yamamoto came to Los Angeles in 2006 on a sabbatical of sorts to learn in situ about the workings of contemporary Hollywood and imbibe the history of American cinema through classes and screenings – moving around the city by bus. Friendly to professors and students, and enthusiastic about the possibility to learn, he also had much to give. I invited him to talk about the state of Japanese production to my students in a class on the history of Asian, African and Latin American cinema in the summer of 2007. He used as an example Yamada’s Love and Honor (2006), which he co-wrote and produced. Ichiro expanded on the connections between Ozu, Kurosawa and Yamada, and their links to Shochiku studios. For one hour, the masters came to life and Japanese culture and values – as embodied in these directors – were lovingly discussed.

Mr. Yamada is in Berlin to showcase the latest work by Yamada: Ototo is the closing film of the Berlinale, and Kyoto Story was selected for the Forum. In a visual style reminiscent of Ozu and broaching a similar subject matter – six decades later – the films are delicate explorations of family and social relations, among ordinary people caught in situations of change and upheaval. They celebrate traditional values, much in the John Ford style, with a scent of nostalgia and a love for goodness. Paul Schrader might look at these pictures of Yamada as examples of ‘transcendental style. These two films, as well as the samurai trilogy preceding them – The Twilight Samurai (2002), The Hidden Blade (2004) and Love and Honor (2006) – would be a programming coup for the Billy Wilder Theater.

I had read about the successful career of Zona Sur – recent awards at Sundance for writing and directing, and the cinematography prize at Huelva, a Spanish festival devoted to Hispanic cinemas. Shown to a packed audience at the Berlinale – unfortunately minus the director and other cast and crew members, who had already left the city – the film is an impressive work, by itself and also as an example of social critique in the grand Latin American tradition.

Zona Sur is centered on a patrician and seemingly wealthy family of La Paz, headed by an elegant and tough matriarch. Not unlike Y tu mamá también in its portrait of a self-centered privileged milieu, the film subtly becomes a metaphor for Bolivia’s contemporary social and political dynamics. It avoids the trite left-wing clichés of established Latin American political cinema – and even the magical realism attached to it in the 1980s and 90s – to provide a ferocious critique of present day Bolivia, where both the Spanish-descent ruling class and the Indian masses in the Evo Morales era are reassessing themselves. This state of turmoil is stunningly captured by the sophisticated use of the camera: 360-degree pan shots, mostly of interior scenes in a beautiful home perched on the hills. At first, one wonders about this bravura camera work until it becomes evident that the meaning of Zona Sur is visually embedded in this graceful but implacable movement: the family, and by extension, the Bolivian upper echelon, is trapped in a circle of false appearances and hypocrisy. Only at the end, the camera leaves ground and literally flies unbound into the sky. In the last scene, it returns to its graceful movement to present a sweetly ironic portrait of (wishful) racial and social harmony.

Carl Laemmle – “Der Pionier von Hollywood” - at the UFA Fabrik
The UFA Fabrik is a vast cultural and ecological center in Tempelhof, a neighborhood in southern Berlin. Its oldest buildings date from the 1920s, and they were used by the UFA studio after it moved to suburban Potsdam as its post-production center. Its state-of-the art theater at the time, is still in use today. There, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, received a lovely homage, on the occasion of the centennial of his first feature film Hiawatha – recently shown at the Academy as part of its 1909 program. The print came from the UCLA Archive, and before its screening, Dr. Udo Bayer, director of the Laupheim Museum, in Laemmle’s hometown, gave a short talk about the pioneer’s early years in southern Germany and his life in the US, illustrated by photos.

UCLA was greatly thanked for loaning the print – that looked lovely in that historical theater – and its charming director Siegrid Niemer and associates hoped that this would be the beginning of a steady collaboration in film programming.

The UFA Fabrik has an informative website, in German and English, found at www.ufafabrik.de, with interesting historical facts and a detailed account of its multiple activities.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Return of History

The Berlinale is a natural fit for documentaries and fiction films dealing with German history and politics. And every year the festival presents intriguing or polemical works shedding light on a still painful 20th century. Two documentaries in the Panorama section brought to the forefront aspects of that perennial staple, the Third Reich: German filmmaker Ilona Ziok’s Fritz Bauer – Death by Instalments, and young Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished.

The remarkable historical documentaries of Ms. Ziok deserve wider circulation and are certainly inspirational to those interested in the craft of writing history with visual materials: Kurt Gerrons Karusell, The Sounds of Silents, The Count and the Comrade. German art and politics are interwoven in a complex tapestry where the individuals at the heart of these stories become emblematic of their times – a German Jewish actor of the Weimar cinema era, a pianist of silent cinema in Berlin, an aristocrat and a communist whose paths cross in a concentration camp and symbolize post-war Germany. In her brand-new documentary, the director examines the career of Fritz Bauer, a no-nonsense German Jewish lawyer who became the chief prosecutor of Nazi crimes. A finely tuned piece of non-chronological editing, the documentary has as its linchpin an extended interview with Bauer made for German television of the 1960s. In the guise of a conversation with young people, Bauer summarizes the legal and moral implications of these crimes, less than a generation away, and urges the country to proceed with the prosecution of those responsible. Interspersed with interviews to family members, friends and colleagues, the documentary recurs to archival materials, including newsreel footage of my hometown of Buenos Aires at the time of the capture of Eichmann by Israeli intelligence forces, acting on information provided by Bauer. By the 1960s the prosecutor had despaired that the German legal system would bring this and other criminals to justice.

Today, Fritz Bauer seems to be largely under the historical radar, as the questions from the all-German audience at the screening I attended seemed to reflect. I remembered that the prosecutor in The Reader is patterned after Bauer; the film, like this documentary, ends up being not only about the responsibility of individual Germans in the commission of crimes during the war, but also about the price paid by a society as a whole. Without being didactic or preachy, the documentary succeeds in making this courageous tough-as-nails prosecutor embody the voice of moral clarity in post-war Germany. The fateful end of Bauer (quickly ruled as a ‘suicide’, in spite of evidence to the contrary at the times) brings an element of suspense to the biography. The choice of music by composer Manuel Göttsching combines Gorecki’s Third Symphony, a work of mourning for the victims of the he Holocaust, with Frank Sinatra singing ‘I did it my way’ when the credits roll. These are one of several bold choices.

The profound impact of A Film Unfinished lies in the intelligent handling of the subject matter: footage of the Warsaw Ghetto taken in 1942 for use in a German propaganda film surfaced in a GDR archive in the late 1980s. A Film Unfinished is the historical investigation of how this roughly edited hour-long material was shot. What emerges is a detective’s account of an unfinished propaganda project, with its emotional punch provided by survivors of this horrific episode of WWII, who watch the footage unfold and provide an eye witness account of how it got made. The use of diaries, German reports and even the words of one of the cameramen (in a reenactment) create a polyphonic if disturbing effect. The unadulterated use of the footage – as found in four cans, without soundtrack, listed as “Ghetto, 1942” – would have made this descent into the horror unbearable, as the filmmaker wisely noted after the screening. What the documentary brings, however, is another dimension to the horror: by uncovering the ‘staged’ the reality of the images themselves (hunger and death don’t even begin to paint the picture of the physical and spiritual indignities), A Film Unfinished gives this very ‘staginess’ a ‘documentary’ reality. In this sense, when the director decides to stage the interview with the cameraman who died a few years before (and whose words come verbatim from a legal document, she pointed out), she is doing the exact same thing the original material did, the ‘manipulation’ of reality. Hersonki is, in fact, not only showing the footage as shot but also commenting on its nature. Not quite a first person narrative – even though the director is the voiceover narrator – the documentary begins and ends in a deeply symbolic manner: the camera tracks slowly through a corridor to find the shelf where the cans are kept – it is the filmmaker’s journey into a heart of darkness.

The screening of the German competition entry Jud Süss, the Rise and Fall could have provided an interesting complement to these two documentaries, as a biopic-style account of how the historical novel by the German Jewish writer Feuchtwanger became an anti-Semitic Nazi film. Barely rising above the level of a TV movie, melodramatic and shallow, it makes one fondly recall Tarantino’s witty take on German propaganda films in Inglorious Basterds …

These notes are far from light and conversational in tone, as would befit the Blog Café … Perhaps next time I should dwell on two lovely Bollywood films, that use of the genre’s conventions to explore serious social and political issues … singing and dancing: My Name is Khan and Peepli Live … But now it’s off to the movies again …

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

From Berlin

One of the challenges of landing in the crowded pad of huge film festival like the 60th Berlinale, is to hit the ground running – a complex task requiring scheduling skills, a good press badge and physical stamina.
Serendipity plays a big role – not all the films will be equally relevant or interesting - and sometimes just luck, or buzz or even a hunch will make you discover a gem.

The lights go off, the screen lights up and you surrender to the delights of an imaginary world. The ‘tabula rasa’ approach is one way to keep your impressions and thoughts as free as possible from expectations. Reviews and interviews, press kits and promotional materials are best left for after the viewing, to keep a sense of wonder. This 60th edition of the Berlinale - running from February 11 to 22, 2010 - is no exception.

The delights of seeing works by established directors are many – mainly, the conversations among the films themselves and the connections the viewer can trace. Discovering a new filmmaker – or one known only by reading about his reputation – is a treat that often happens in a festival.

A few examples about well-know directors who contributed to an exciting launch of the Berlinale. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island impresses as a commercial project undertaken with gusto by an enthusiastic kid with a big box of tools.
This horror story staring a haggardly-looking Leonardo Di Caprio as a marshall with a traumatic secret is a triumph of style over content, a thrill ride about another beleaguered male at odds with the world, a muted version of taxi drivers and boxers, with a somewhat predictable narrative twist.

If Scorsese is all melodramatic flourishes – with echoes of Bernard Hermman and Hitchcockian touches – Roman Polanski’s doom and gloom The Ghostwriter, with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, is a timely reminder of how character, story and logic function at the hands of a master at the top of his game. Based on a British novel about a thinly disguised Tony Blair, out of power and writing a tell-all memoir, The Ghostwriter is a return to the political thriller. Even though the central contention of the film comes across as silly – the British Prime Minister of the Bush second era is a puppet of the CIA – it is fun to see in McGregor a variation of Polanski’s concern with characters searching for the truth and paying dearly for it … The ghosts of Rosemary’s Baby and Tess float in the background, as does Hitchcock and his haunted houses, ugly guilts and innocents hounded by evil. Polanski himself was an absence deeply present on the red carpet of the Berlinale Palast.

Zhang Yimou’s refreshing period comedy A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Soup – his first in an international career that started in the Berlinale 20 years ago – is a funny take on the Coen brother’s own cinematic debut Blood Simple. Marrying noir elements to slapstick, bright colors, spectacular scenery and jabs at the westernization of China, the film has the potential to be an international crowd-pleaser. At the heart is the typical Zhang Yimou conflict, a woman struggling against oppression – in this case an old, rich and mean husband. But the director has strayed far from Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and his other metaphorical critiques of the Chinese history and politics on which he built his international reputation. The anthological moment in this story of greed and revenge is a beautifully choreographed kitchen scene where the making of noodle dough is given a graceful and swift Hong Kong sword play treatment.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, about the writing of the Allen Ginsberg poem does not compete with these films at the level of spectacle, but it is a worthy contender for the finely crafted performance of UCLA alum James Franco.
Imaginatively combining four narrative threads and breaking up the chronology, the film illustrates the struggles of an unknown poet struggling for recognition in the 1950s. The obscenity trial to the publishers of the poem (using court records) is interspersed with a reading of Howl by Ginsberg (Franco in the trademark thick glasses of Ginsberg) in San Francisco in 1955, alternating also with a psychedelic animation of the poem and Franco again in a long interview, using a collage of published materials.

Berlin offers other film-related delights even though squeezing them between screenings is no easy task. Of interest to the academics and film buffs is the exhibit on Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Filmmuseum, showcasing the saga of its most recent reconstruction – the 2010 restored version premiered last Friday at the Berlinale. Also not to be missed is the homage to Universal founder Carl Laemmle on the centennial of Hiawatha, the first production of his Imp company. It will be at the UFA Fabrik, a cultural center functioning in the buildings where the UFA studios had their sound labs. The UCLA Film & Television Archive provides the print.