Documentary explorations at the 67th Berlinale: "Beuys" and "Monsieur Mayonnaise"

Of the 18 films in the Competition section of this Berlinale, there is only one documentary vying for the Golden and Silver Bears, the remarkable Beuys, directed by Andres Veiel.

Beuys paints a tantalizing portrait of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), the German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist, whose teachings, artwork and installations sought to redefine and expand the place and function of art in modern society.  If anything, the film is a feat of research and editing, as the director noted in the press conference: 20,000 photos, 400 hours of video and 18 months of editing. 

What makes this documentary compelling is not the Sisyphean task of sorting through archival footage, but the way these building blocks have been organized to yield a film that combines a poetic and performative approach to the life and work of an artist.  I use the terms “poetic” and “performative” in the sense of Bill Nichols’ documentary modes, six useful categories to help the students make sense of that vast continent we call the non-fiction film.  (In his words: “The poetic stresses tvisual and acoustic rhythms, patterns and the overall form of the film … the performative emphasizes the expressive quality of the filmmaker’s engagement with the film’s subject, and addresses the audience in a vivid way “, Introduction to Documentary, 2^nd edition, 2010).

Beuys has no narrator, the story does not follow a strictly chronological order, there is no climax, and the talking heads are few and far between.  And yet, the portrait has clear contours and a moving depth, partly by lingering on photos of Beuys’ haunted face and the scope of his projects – like planting 7,000 oak trees, with a stone next to each one, the tree grows, the stone doesn’t, hence the statement.  A recurring visual device is the use of a large display of contact sheets, with the camera zooming into photos to open up short narratives, or stringing them together for a motion effect., very pop art. 

The mark of a good documentary like Beuys, simply put, is that at the end you are still asking, no, begging the filmmaker to tell you more …

Along different lines, and in the Culinary section of the festival (eleven years old now, and pairing films with chefs that cook meals inspired by them), I saw an Australian documentary, Monsieur Mayonnaise, featuring the LA-based filmmaker Philippe Mora, a dear friend, two of whose 1970s documentaries I feature in my class every semester, Swastika and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?.  

Directed by Trevor Graham, a filmmaker based in Melbourne, Monsieur Mayonnaise follows Philippe Mora engaged in two tasks, one pursuing his personal history  - that of an emblematic European Jewish family marked the hecatomb of World War II - and the other, Mora the painter making a comic book from these facts in Los Angeles today.  The documentary is engagingly observational - Mora is a born storyteller and entertainer - as the director accompanies Mora in various trip:  Melbourne, to see his mother (a force of life) and brother, and to Leipzig and Paris to interview people and dig in archives.  Mora carries his easel, canvas and brushes, to capture places and paint emotions in bright colors - the Eiffel Tower and the Branderburg Gate are iconic locations in his search.  There are significant expository sections about key moments of his father and mother: they met in Paris after the war and later settled in Australia where they opened a restaurant. Their life story is explained with photos, documents, anecdotes, and, of course the mayonnaise recipe of the title.

It would seem that the subject matter of Monsieur Mayonnaise – the title comes from the nom de guerre of Mora’s father, who was a member of the Résistance, as the film explains – is not the stuff of comedy. But this is the road taken by the film, and it feels integral to the story, with Mora as its narrator, on camera and voice over. He is first seen, shot in black and white, writing his family history on a vintage typewriter as a Hollywood writer in the 1940s working on a film noir. It id a distancing effect repeated throughout the film, that sets the comedic tone and poke some fun at the artistic style of the era.  This narrative conceit, and the humorous tone of Mora’s narrating his family escape, gives this serious film a light touch. 

Perhaps the most valuable lesson of this film for my documentary class, is how Graham and Mora succeed in transcending the “home movieness” of their materials. They embed a family story, woven from anecdotes, fading photos and assorted documents, into the larger tapestry of 20^th century.

The cost of an idea: "The Young Marx" and "Últilmos días en La Habana"

One of the benefits of watching four or five films a day is that unexpected connections are formed when mixing and matching titles from the Berlinale sections, based on screening times.

In the case of The Young Karl Marx, directed by Raoul Peck, and Últimos días en La Habana, by the Cuban Fernando Pérez, these connections were too obvious to miss: the birth of communism as an ideology that ... (fill in the blanks) the 20^th century; and the impact of these ideas in Cuba for over five decades and still counting. More indirectly, an Argentine first person documentary essay, Cuatreros by Albertina Carri, and Sally Potter’s satire The Party, show the ramifications and appeal of these ideas in the 1970s Argentine left, and in a pre-Brexit academic circle in London.

Cobbling together a variety of European sources for producing the film, Peck also wrote the screenplay together with Pascal Bonitzer, and cast two German actors, August Diehl and Stefan Konarske, fluent in French and English, with all three languages spoken in the film for historical accuracy. The Young Marx covers the first three years of the friendship between Karl Marx, a recent Ph.D. from a German university who wants to change the world with the might of the pen, and Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile manufacturer in Manchester, UK, a first hand observer of unfettered capitalism.  The climax of this biopic of sorts is the writing of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, treated in this picture as a sacred text.  The film’s angle is to bring Herr Marx down from a marble pedestal. It does so by concentrating on his marriage and family life, as the husband of a German aristocrat and the young father of two girls, throughout a hand-to-mouth life in Paris and Brussels.  Engels’ milieu is a Dickensian England, in the style of BBC productions.  Asked about the inspiration for the screenplay, Peck noted that an important source were the letters exchanged by the friends that allowed for a detailed recreation of their domestic world.  The key ideas are explained without didacticism through conversations and meetings: class struggle, surplus value, means of production, alienation, and the motto “workers of the world unite”. It has a refreshing dramatic impact – Marx and diapers.

It will be interesting to see how the film fares in theaters, DVD and streaming, after its world premiere at the Berlinale.  Its production values will appeal to the consumers of historical dramas and Masterpiece Theater, but I bet it will disappoint those looking for a meaty political film like Peck’s powerful Lumumba  (2000) and his knockout documentary essay I Am Not Your Negro, up for an Oscar in two weeks.  The Young Marx takes the road of melodrama, or as an Italian colleague noted somewhat sarcastically,  “it’s just a feuilleton”.   Other reviews have been harsher.

If The Young Marx romanticizes the birth of these ideas, Últimos días de La Habana shows the cost of the communist ideology on the Cuban population, since the Revolution of 1959.  This cost is the subtext of the cinema of Fernando Pérez, one of the most interesting filmmakers working in Cuba today. I use his 1998 Berlinale entry La vida es silbar, a magical realist portrait of Havana in the decade the Soviet Union collapsed, with good results in my courses on international cinema.  Pérez is back this year in the Berlinale Special section with Últimos días en La Habana, the third of his trilogy on the city. It is a loose follow up to Suite Habana (2002), a documentary-style portrait of a cross section of the Cuban society.

The trilogy is best explained against the context of the Castro era, and its political evolution and fossilization during the past fifty years.  In light of the political stagnation in the two decades since La vida es silbar, the characters and plot of Últimos días retreat from the willfully optimistic vision proposed by the on-camera narrator to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The allegorical ending suggested where the foundations of the post-Castro Cuba should be rooted, mainly tolerance for other political, cultural and religious ideas, including a healthy respect for dissenters. The film called for Fidel to be a father to all.  In Últimos días, the ending is very similar: a young girl, who has nothing and goes nowhere, again addresses the audience directly, but now with a mix of defiance and despair in her lively monologue about an uncertain future – symbolized by the death by AIDS and the exile of the two protagonists.  In the press conference, Perez kindly answered this very question I asked,  saying that “it’s not that the Cuban situation has worsened, it’s that it has become more complex” (he used e neologism  in Spanish, “complejizada”).  If you put the endings of the two films side by side, the material deterioration is visible (the 1950s cars on the road are emblematic), and the deflation of hope too evident to ignore. Últimos días en La Habana the film proposes friendship and laughter to fight the dampening of dreams and the scarcity of goods.  With a documentary eye, trained in the making of newsreels for the Instituto Cubano de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, Perez captures the current phase of Cuban politics, and what you infer is a question mark. No ending set in Plaza de la Revolución this time.

A last minute addition to these comments is the German dramatic comedy I saw last night: In Times of Fading Light, adapted from a novel, and directed by Matti Geschonneck, that centers on the 90^th birthday celebration of a fervent communist (Bruno Ganz, phenomenal) in 1989, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The party is a minutely described microcosm of the tightly-surveilled GDR. The family and functionaries toasting to a forgetful comrade are rocked by the unexpected defection of the only grandson to the West.  The son’s Russian wife, an alcoholic with a quick wit, has the best lines. “What happens when our children - the future – no longer believe in it and leave ?”(It was too dark to write down the exact lines). Different in tone and style to Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006) In Times of Fading Light, and as entertaining, this is a political comedy of manners about people with regrets, acknowledged or buried, about how they could have lived. Distributed by Warner Bros. Germany, film deserves to do well in Germany and abroad.  

I come back to the hotel every night walking on Stresemannstrasse, in the city’s Mitte district.  The Berlin Wall used to go through that street.  Now two parallel lines of cobblestones, as shown in the photo I took, remind us where the Mauer stood.  The irony is not lost when you watch these films and think about the cost of the ideas that got this wall built.

The fullness of life: 3 films at the 67th Berlinale

Unfolding from February 9 to 19, the 67 Berlinale hit the ground running on Thursday.  Already by day three, there are plenty of films to write about, from the Competition and Panorama sections I have attended so far. Two films have made a strong impression On Body and Soul (Hungary), directed by Ildikó Enyedi, and Félicité (Congo/Senegal/ France/Germany), by Alain Gomis. We teach our students that cinema, as a medium rooted in the material world, can reproduce photographically and in movement what we perceive through our senses.  The supreme challenge, we hammer in also, is to create the intangible world of the spirit through the materiality of images and sounds.  This is done, as Paul Schrader described in his study of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, through the ‘transcendental style’.  I should add a third film to these comments, the Austrian comedy of manners Wild Mouse, written, directed and starring Josef Hader, because in the tragicomic escalations of a lies told out of embarrassment, much is said about a more abstract topic, the state of the self in times of flux, as rendered by plot, staging and dialogue, and the rhetorical device of the synecdoche.

I watch the competition films as a tabula rasa: before the light goes off in the spectacular Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz, I don’t know the title, the director, the country of origin, and I haven’t read any reviews.  The film has to win me over by its formal merits and by the manner– paraphrasing Lillian Gish in the 2008 Brownlow documentary on Griffith – it deals with the human experience.  Interestingly, all three pictures, On Body and Soul, Félicité and Wild Mouse are concerned with the fullness of life, and how pain, suffering and loss are factored in the equation.

Body and Soul poetically connects the animal world – in its natural beauty, seen in a winter forest, but also in its subjugation to man, a slaughter house clinically observed  – with the realm of human interactions.  It does so in an unexpected way, mysteriously hinted in the eye-catching opening sequence. The deer and the doe in the woods stare at us, and their recurring presence is explained as a dream, uncannily shared every night by a restrained, rational middle-aged manager in the slaughter house (Géza Morcsányi), and a younger, emotionally damaged, semi-autistic new beef quality control employee (Alexandra Borbély). Their quirky, tentative courtship and romance blossoms in a wickedly funny and imaginative handling of the plot, with a sense of humor that is both dry and poignant.  The director talked about her goal of depicting the  ‘fullness of life’ , the complete picture of a person’s existence, in the well-attended press conference after the press screening. It is through the lingering close ups of the protagonists'faces that the full connection between beauty and a love that accepts flaws and pain is finally established, allegorically through the repeated dream, and dramatically in the climax, a little jewel of timing and nuance. 

Shot in verité style in Kinshasa with two simultaneous hand-held cameras, Félicité is a slow-burning portrait of a fierce woman, who ekes out a living singing in a rowdy café, reacting to the motorcycle accident of her teenage boy, with shock and numbness. There is a fully developed and class-conscious world around the proud Félicité, with the cameras capturing the chaos of Congo’s capital. The director Alain Gomis, an auteur whose art house work has been made possible through European sources, like the World Film Fund, attached to the Berlinale, roots this woman (Véro Tshanda Beya) in the realistic environment we have seen in previous generations of African filmmakers. But his contribution - à la Apichatpong Weerasethakul I thought - is to place her in a background of animistic beliefs, shown but not explained, coexisting with a French cultural and linguistic varnish.  It is proposed as a recurrent dream set in a primordial river and a strangely patterned zebra, that the protagonist embraces at the end as a source of vital strength. This surreal encounter, beyond the physical reality and reminiscent of Uncle Boonmee, triggers Felicité’s acceptance of life’s limitations.  Like On Body and Soul, the uncanny is the bridge connecting the material and the spiritual realms.  To further the connection, Gomis intercuts through the film a choir singing with great beauty; it is a Greek chorus outside of the action but integral to it. The human experience has been illuminated by the weaving of the real, the magical and the impact of musical beauty.

Wild Mouse is a comedy of manners and matrimony built on an escalation beginning with the white lie a well-established music critic in Vienna (Josef Hader) tells his wife (Pia Hierzegger), to avoid disclosing that he has lost his job in a prestigious newspaper.  The lie grows unmanageable when the protagonist – a volcan of pent-up rage underneath superb manners – embarks on a path of revenge against the newspaper publisher. The comedy is so well planted on the everyday of a well-put together intellectual that unravels, and the acting so well timed, that the absurdities piling up seem to flow effortlessly. The comedy goes beyond marital troubles to offer a satirical description of all Austrian society grappling with an unstable world that destabilizes identity and vital purpose.  The current political anxiety gripping Europe is present, but kept in the background, on television.   The matrimonial crisis of two sophisticated professionals in Vienna brings up a memory of Freud – the wife is a therapist – and is resolved at the end in a lovely metaphor of cars blocked in traffic finally able to move. Manners and what they cloak is what the film tackles with dry humor, and the ending brings a breath of optimism.

For these three very different films the common point of departure is that we are truly ourselves when we accept our warts and imperfections.  They are works of philosophical optimism.