The Seventies as background: three films of the 68th Berlinale

How many times can I write that attending the Berlinale is the best field trip ever for a film professor?  None too many. The geographical excitement is unmatched: you are on a bus to a movie in Alexanderplatz, and you think of Inspector Lohmann in M, sending assorted delinquents to the police headquarters, “Alex!”.  You can stream in Netflix a stylized version of the city in Tom Tykwer’s Babylon Berlin series, with Fritz Lang written all over.  And there is Walter Ruttmann’s frenzied ode to 1920s Berlin, which I showed in the documentary class last week, the day before flying to the Grosstadt. Really, a never ending list of films set in Berlin.

The excitement for new and classic movies, especially this year’s pithy retrospective on Weimar cinema in new restorations, never abates. Surprising connections are made among films that on their own would seem unrelated.  One such link these first days is a view of the 1970s from three very different angles: Dovlatov, a remarkable Russian biopic about artistic and literary circles in Leningrad, under Brezhnev; That Summer, a documentary made with found footage shot in East Hampton and Montauk, in Long Island, by artists and eccentrics; and 7 Days in Entebbe, about the successful raid by Israeli special forces to free a hijacked plane in Uganda.

Like the restored version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire shown at this Berlinale for its 30^th anniversary, the Seventies feel remote, a bubble lost in space - you have to tell your students what it was like; their parents may not have even been born then.  These three films prick the bubble, if anything with their sets (those rotary phones!), costumes and music, and can be useful in class.  Dovlatov, directed by Alexey German Jr., the son of the banned Soviet-era director, centers on one week in November 1971 as journalist and writer Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990) and his friends, including future Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky (1940- 1996) go about the business of life and art in Leningrad, their hopes crashed by the strictures of cultural commissars. The loving, luminous recreation of this milieu, partly underground and never officially dissident, offers some great scenes to illustrate not only the meaning of Socialist Realism – a concept our students don’t initially grasp - but also how ideological censorship worked in the everyday operations of literary magazines, writers and artists unions, and newspapers.  It is ultimately a film about the destruction of talent and lives as much as the moral crisis of Dovlatov, an astute observer of Soviet reality. He cannot bring himself to parrot the party line about beautiful and positive workers’ stories in the communist paradise he's commissioned to write, and the price he has to pay for it.  “The story is all dreamed up, Alexey German said in the press conference, but it’s authentic. It’s about people who would not be bent, distorted”. Like Tarkovsky and Sokurov, the director celebrates Russian literature and art, the non-material world that the apparatchiks were obsessed with controlling for seventy years. As an Italian colleague noted, Dovlatov is the director’s Fahrenheit 451, with a Russian sensibility about the endurance of art, beauty and truth, that is very moving to see on screen. The camera work deserves recognition – tracking shots and close ups in warmly lit interior scenes to evoke the fraternity of artists under siege. Very much like German’s other remarkable but more experimental film Under Electric Clouds, competing in the Berlinale three years ago.

"Little Eddie" Bouvier Beale, left, and
Lee Bouvier Radziwill

Jump one year later.  In the summer of 1972, Lee Bouvier Radziwill – Jackie Kennedy’s sister – and her photographer friend Peter Beard decided to make a record of her childhood on Long Island, New York. Among those behind the camera were David and Albert Maysles. The unfinished project became mostly a record of Lee’s unusual aunt and cousin, the Bouvier Eales, both named Edith, who lived like recluses in their colorful derelict mansion Grey Gardens.  Swedish documentary filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson, with the collaboration of Peter Beard edited this family material.  In spite of an extended interview with Beard, now retired in his Long Island home; footage showing his artistic friends during that summer, including Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas; and an audio interview with an aged Lee Radziwill discussing the summer of the title, this documentary has an unintended consequence: it makes you understand what makes the Maysles’ Grey Gardens of 1975 a masterpiece of Direct Cinema … and this one, just a collection of home movies, albeit about interesting people. That Summer is an excellent example of how difficult it is to shape home movies into a good documentary. No wonder the Maysles, fascinated by Big Eddie and Litte Eddie and their grasp of life and art, came back, on their own, for more.  As a tool to teach the cinema vérité approach to documentary filmmaking, Grey Gardens is unsurpassable; the lessons it offers to our emerging filmmakers, priceless. A side to side viewing of Grey Gardens and That Summer is one way of showing what the Maysles got right.

Another jump in time lands us in 1976. Over a decade ago, the Berlinale invited a Brazilian documentary filmmaker José Padilha to show a knockout political/crime film, Tropa de Elite (2007) in competition.  The Golden Bear launched his international film and television career, and led to the remake of Robocop in 2014, and the series Narcos.  His latest foray is 7 Days in Entebbe, was presented outside of competition. Based on a book that challenged some aspects of the Israeli government's account, the film reconstructs the rescue mission of the Air France plane hijacked by Palestinian and German “freedom fighters” or “terrorists”, as it is carefully explained in a short preface to set up the story.  The dramatic flaw of the film comes precisely from this disclaimer, designed not to ruffle feathers about contrasting points of views. It is the 1970s played out as movie of the week, a history lesson of sorts, with actors reciting rather than living the ideological polarizations of the decade.  In Tropa de Elite, Padilha threw great punches about power and corruption; in 7 Days in Entebbe, we get a lame illustration of what happened, complete with slow motion, and a muscular ballet framing the story - it ends up being the most intriguing part of the film.