The Berlinale at 61

There is no better place to meet old friends and make new ones - filmically speaking - than the terrific Berlin film festival. I came here for the first time in 1985, and except for a handful of times, I have been a regular visitor ever since.
For a film professor it's the most efficient - and fun - way to get a grip on the world scene and pursue guilty pleasures that Netflix or VOD services like Mubi cannot fulfill. The electronic library of Alexandria does not exist yet in one virtual place.

The Berlinale - and of course the same holds true for any well-put together festival - opens vistas on the old and the new, and thus becomes a necessary tool to perfect an understanding of the status of cinema and how to teach it better. In the Berlinale I first became acquainted with the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers; with the works of a then unknown Polish director of television and documentaries, Krzystof Kieslowski; here I first enjoyed the hyperkinetic Hong Kong cinema - Johnnie To being one of its most exciting representatives - and learned to appreciate the Bollywood baroque. The imaginative Latin American cinema, whether magical realist, purely political or minimalist always finds a home in Berlin. Attuned to the political, the Berlinale winked a serious eye to filmmakers in the Soviet sphere and featured the cinema of Glasnost - Marina Goldovskaya's ground-breaking documentary Solovki Power, and a flood of works undermining Soviet ideological rigidity were generously showcased by the Berlinale. Often at the Berlinale I see the birth of a critical reputation, or the recognition of a long trajectory in a national cinema - like the fiercely independent Israeli Eran Riklis (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree)and Hayao Miyazaki.

The wares have been so far a delight, a basket of very funny comedies about cultural and linguistic clashes (the French Les femmes du 6eme etage and the German Almanya, where traditional assumptions about host countries are turned upside down by sharp immigrants), mixed with a powerful contemporary reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and the role of warriors outside of the battlefield, directing debut of Ralph Fiennes; and tightly woven thrillers of sorts about meltdowns - the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the Ukranian A Saturday, and Wall Street in 2008, Margin Call, first film by an NYU graduate. How will the jury graciously presided by Isabella Rossellini decide on a winner is anybody's guess. The stars may smile on an Iranian film coming from left field, Nader and Simin, A Separation, the multilayered probe into a couple's impending divorce in present day Tehran, based on a screenplay worth dissection in film school.


Sunday was a day devoted to 3D, as used for the first time by two longtime German auteurs - my 'friends' of so many years and teaching staples in many classes: Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Courtesy of a German newspaper, I post a lovely photo of Wenders and German president Angela Merkel watching in the Berlinale Palast the Pina, the knockout documentary Wenders devoted to the work of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. By analogy, Wenders uses the 3D camera - elegantly, unobstrusively - the way Bausch created her muscular, soul-baring performances, Wenders noted in the press conference that he wanted to show "what the soul tells through our body" (a recurrent Wenders theme, beautifully rendered in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire). The director does not 'film' the company's numbers, he stages them for the camera,in theaters, parks, factories, even public transportation in Wuppertal, where the company is based, exploring the esthetic possibilities allowed by the new technology. Editing and music, combined with finely stylized interviews with dancers and footage of Bausch, who died unexpectedly in 2009 (and forced Wenders to rethink the project) create a fascinating spectacle. Warner Bros will distribute the film in the US; in the meantime, its trailer is available online to give a taste of the riches to come.

Werner Herzog seems to have had the same enthusiasm of Wenders, even though his nature documentary "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" has the limitations of works commissioned by television channels. The subject matter is intriguing: a cave discovered in Southern France n 1994 contains stunning paleolithic paintings. What begins as a run-of-the-mill Discovery Channel type of film interspersing talking heads with scenes dimly lit by flashlight, very quickly becomes something else. As narrated by Herzog, it is not only the record of himself in the filming process (with the 3D technology featured prominently)but also a probe into what makes us human; as one of the anthropologists notes, the link with the Cromagnon man and us, Homo Sapiens, throught history and memory. This is a variation of a recurring Herzog theme, since his features like Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the disturbing documentary Grizzly Man: the relationship between man and nature, and man's proneness to stumble into the abyss pushed by his own folly. The abyss, in this Berlinale offering, is made explicit in the final scene. Not far from the cave, and as a side-effect of a nuclear plant, a man-made cooling swamp is teeming with albino aligators. An extreme close up of an aligator's bloated eye is superimposed on a gracefully painted hand in the cave. Film esthetics is used to capture a collective descent into madness.

There are many other friends waiting for us in the dark - echoes of Norma Desmond - in these next days. First and foremost, a gentleman from Sweden, for whom the Deutsche Kinematek has organized a very complete retrospective. It is supplemented by an exhibit in the adjoining Film Museum. The poster movingly embodies what this gentleman thought of theater and film - his love and his mistresses, as he once famously quipped: a world of enchantment, refected in the eyes of a boy, looking up, outside of the frame. The exhibition is called "Bergman, truth and lies".