Masters: Old and New

For a film professor the Berlinale is the best crash course on the old and the new, a ten-day field trip through history and current cinema, a full immersion into what, badly paraphrasing J.R.Tolkien, is an ‘enchanted state’.

The Museum für Film und Fernsehen, located in the Sony Center and occupying three floors of  the Filmhaus in Potsdamer Platz, is a stone-throw away from the hub of the festival.  On three floors the Deutsche Kinemathek runs a beautiful and compact facility.  It is comprised of materials coming from its archive – photos, stills, film prints, personal archives – and a plethora of film clips illustrating the history of German cinema, from its inception to today.  It also holds special exhibits, this year, the work of production designer Ken Adam, born in Berlin in 1921, who worked in Kubrick’s 2001 and Barry Lyndon, and in the James Bond films of the 1960s and 70s.

The main section of the museum is organized chronologically, around the big blocks of film history: the development of the technology in the late 1890s, with special attention paid to the Skladanowsky brothers, inventors of an early movie projector in Berlin; the 1920s and the impact of Expressionism; rooms devoted to the key names of the Weimar era (week 4 of the semester!): Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, F.W.Murnau and Wilhelm Pabst; the film industry under National Socialism; the Hollywood exiles of the 1930s and 40s (the subject of the current Skirball exhibit, though from the angle of film noir), where costumes worn by Marlene Dietrich are a highlight; the two Germanys during the Cold War organized as one section, a study in contrast; and German cinema after the reunification in 1990, with a wall display of posters for each year.  

You can breeze through it in an hour, or spend a long time in each room, going through the film clips, home movies … and taking copious notes of great use in Power Point presentations. All the information is in German, with English translations. A well supplied bookstore in the ground floor sells books, DVDs and BluRays, posters and movie-related tchotchkes.  This visit is an obligatory stop each year, and courtesy of the Berlinale, the entrance is free to accredited guests and journalists.

The “old of this entry refer to an encounter with Sergei Eisenstein, courtesy of Peter Greenaway’s latest provocative foray into film and architecture:  Eisenstein in Guanajuato.  I could paraphrase – without the irony – Captain Renault’s line of feigned indignation in Casablanca -  “I’m shocked, shocked, shocked”, but I will quietly note that Greenaway makes a sexual caricature of the great Soviet director.  Fictionalizing from the interstices of Eisenstein’s year-long stay in Mexico in 1930 with his collaborators Eduard Tissé and Grigori Alexandrov, shooting materials for an epic poem on Mexico’s history and people, Greenaway reduces Eisenstein’s artistic experiences to a series of explicit erotic encounters with a professor assigned as his guide.  Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the Mexican intelligentsia so influenced by this force of nature, are seen on the margins once at the beginning.  And except for some clever split screens, interplay play with color and b&w, and the contrast of real photos of Eisenstein with those of the actor portraying him – the Finnish Elmer Bäck with an uncanny resemblance, especially in the leonine hairdo - there is no hint of the creative storm Mexico spurred in the filmmaker. The argument advanced in the dialogue between the screen Eisenstein and the doe-eyed gentleman object of his desire is that Mexico embodies sex and death as explained by Freud.  Other clichés are attached to this trite view of country and the Mexicans: sombreros, bandoleros, Frida Kahlo-style of hairdos and flowery tunics, skulls and Church processions. 

In competition for Golden and Silver Bears, the film may end up taking something home.  The press conference verged on the bizarre: Greenaway presumed that Eisenstein has been largely forgotten, and so he made the film as a palliative, to bring his contribution to the forefront (not unlike the angle about Alan Turing’s computer work in The Imitation Game).  After many years in the teaching trenches, though, the shrinking of Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for life, art and politics to a very limited view makes this film irrelevant in a history survey class.

For the press, the layout of the Berlinale screenings offers possibilities of chance encounters, and the omnipresent selfies.  I had just spotted Greenaway doing an interview in the lounge of the Palast, when I saw the Eisenstein screen persona Elmer Bäck walk by me on his way to the same event.  We chatted two seconds about his portrayal of the director and he willingly posed for a selfie - mad as I was deep down!

The ‘new’of the title on the other side, is Wim Wenders, the subject of this Berlinale’s homage. Turning 70 in August, with gray hair and tick rimmed glasses, he looked youthful and at ease with the journalist attending the press conference. He discussed the importance of film preservation, the promotion of new talent, and his teaching activities, discussing the retrospective of his work at this year’s Berlinale.  Asked about the future of his own work, he noted that the creation of the Wim Wenders Foundation had made this non-profit organization the copyright holder of his films, facilitating fund-raising and restoration. Designed like the Murnau Stiftung and the Fassbender Foundation, this organism is the best way devised so far to preserve cinema, along the line of what the World Cinema Foundation, founded by Martin Scorsese and of whose advisory board he is a member. 

It may look from this account as if the press conference was a dry affair about numbers and the fear of cinematic destruction, but far from it.  Wenders recalled fondly his love of bicycling in Berlin, to see the changes of the city, to which he so movingly paid homage in the magnificently titled Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), and Faraway, So Close! (1993). He talked about the comedy he dreams of making, and he never will, and about the excitement of shooting in 3D which has broadened the “emotional scope of film”. He is still very much interested in the possibilities of language and communication, as he was in the film that made his career Alice in the Cities (1974).  I would like to argue that his latest work, the gentle drama Every Thing Will Be Fine shown outside of competition, still revolves around how a person can come out of an emotional anesthesia emerging from geographical deserts, like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (1984), spiritual isolation or moral inertia to live a full life in contact with the others.

The Berlinale is over tonight, when the international jury headed by Darren Aronofsky announces the Golden and Silver Bears.  I will perhaps leave the city tomorrow – the storms in the East Coast have disrupted flights as far away as Berlin – carrying a suitcase full of papers, and many new films and ideas in my head.