Gems at the 69th Berlinale: "Fourteen" and "Photograph"

Some films hit you like a machine gun, as is the case of  two knock-out Chinese titles, So Long, My Son, directed by Wang Xiaoshuai (it should win the Golden Bear) and The Shadow Play, by Lou Ye, both graduates of the Beijing Film Academy. Others are a slow burn, hidden gems that can get lost in the shuffle of a festival premiering 124 new films this year. It is always a combination of tips, luck, hunch and opportunity that brings you to works that could get lost in the fog.  A festival has a paralyzing built-in anxiety, difficult to tame but overridden when one stumbles upon pearls like Fourteen, directed by Dan Sallitt, who attended the Film Critical Studies program  at UCLA in the 1970s, and Photograph, by Ritsh Batra (The Lunch Box, 2013).

Tallie Medel (left) and Norma Kuhling (right)
as friends since middle school who live in Brooklyn

Very different in genre, mise-en-scène and approach to narrative, both films deal with emotional turmoil, in friendship and love, very effectively conveyed by tight screenplays and assured direction.  From the opening sequences – all dialogue, no action, long takes, stationary camera - Fourteen feels like a French film by Rohmer and Pialat, spoken in English and set in Brooklyn. (It's an eerie feeling). Unhurriedly, it comes into focus as the record of a friendship since middle school and over a decade between two girls from affluent Westchester county, New York, who struggle in the city as young adults – the stuff of mumblecore films and cable series like Girls, made by directors a generation younger than Dan Sallitt.  What is gripping is that the various dramatic peaks of these lives are off screen, alluded to or cleverly explained by the indirect mean of a bedtime story.  

Writer, director, producer and editor Dan Sallitt
at the Delphi Palast, Berlin

Like Pavel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, the passage of time is not marked by visual flourishes or explicitly telegraphed to the viewers through dialogue. Fourteen requires full attention because these two friends – one sensible (Tallie Medel), the other high strung (Norma Kuhling) – are chiseled with the care a goldsmith gives to intricate details. You blink and you miss them.  Sallitt, who wrote, directed, produced and edited the film over 18 months, makes the point eloquently with the almost four-minute high angle long shot above a suburban train station where seemingly nothing happens.  The long take functions to make the viewer take stock of where the story is at – not to enhance its upheavals as in the recent Roma.  Fourteen places itself in the opposite spectrum of melodrama, and by eschewing almost all context and backstory, except for two dramatic peaks, creates a space where the nature of this friendship, human and universal, can be savored, understood and mourned. The Delphi Palast, where the last screening took place, was full – all 800 seats taken - but you could hear a pin drop.  Dan Sallitt came for a lovely Q&A with the audience of mostly young Berliner. I approached him at the end and introduced myself as a fellow UCLA graduate. He remembered my husband Jonathan Kuntz, his fellow mate, fondly, and he graciously posed for a photo with me.

 In the case of Photograph, the emotional turmoil is romantic in nature, and vividly set against the sprawling background of Mumbai, the third protagonist of this story. Unlike Fourteen, Photograph feeds off a strong context: social, economic, religious and geographic differences in modern India make the potential relationship between a street photographer (Nawasuddin Siddiqui), Hindi, and a middle-class university student (Sanya Malhotra), Muslin, an impossible dream.  The way out of this conundrum is tell the story as a fairy tale, otherwise it would plunge into neorealist waters, or become  the social thesis drama it obviously doesn’t want to be.  The fairy tale structure makes it a whimsical confection, one that delights in winking an eye to Bollywood popular culture by having the protagonists a few times to a local movie house, where we can only listen to the song-and-dance numbers.  This interplay between what is seen and what is implied – the city and the unspoken differences of its inhabitants - is interesting to watch; the open end it proposes may be the only optimistic way out.  Photograph works as a believable story because, like Fourteen, it hinges in the tight direction of the actors, without a hint of improvisation, keeping realism at bay.  The goal is restraint, going for small gestures to convey meaning, like the shy and tenderly mismatched attempts to hold hands at the end of the film.

Photograph will be streamed by Amazon Prime soon, and Fourteen is looking for distribution.

For the love of cinema: Pauline Kael and Agnès Varda

It took Rob Garver four years to make his first documentary feature, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, and more than sixty for Agnès Varda to sum up a life in films and, lately, the visual arts in Varda par Agnès, both playing at this year’s Berlinale. They are love letters to the movies, and their power to plunge us into worlds larger than ourselves, to make us think and feel, and to be aware of life and what connects us. It’s an “Everything is awesome” moment when we help the students glimpse what they can do with images and sound and stories. These two documentaries are cool tools to make this happen.  It was the same eureka moment I had with The Story of Film. An Odyssey, the 2012 15-hour British miniseries written and directed by Mark Cousins, which I discovered when it premiered at the Berlinale over two days of immersive, ecstatic viewing.  

Pauline Kael when she was a film critic for the New Yorker

 What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael does exactly what it promises: it throws you into the writings of a larger-than-life opinionated critic, about whom everyone I know has likes and dislikes strongly set.  Growing up in Argentina, and looking at film through a French optic – in books, concepts, understanding of history and esthetics – I did not encounter Pauline Kael until I came to the U.S. in 1987 to go to UCLA film school.  I liked what I read, but she was not a lightning rod, or a point of special reference, since I wasn’t here from the sixties to the eighties, when controversies exploded and she was at her peak (I found her Wikipedia entry, last edited in January 2019, detailed and objective). Being an auteurist by temperament, I aligned myself differently.

It has a traditional format for a documentary about film – like the Cousins miniseries: talking heads and film clips – tons of them, beautifully edited, for narrative, context, irony, fun and sheer beauty.  The interviewees are also a great mix, from fans to friends and the occasional opposing view.  Archival footage is interspersed, as in the case of Woody Allen, who famously said: "She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment. And I don't mean that facetiously. She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising”. Allen is voiced here by the filmmaker himself, and Pauline Kael by Sarah Jessica Parker.

Director Rob Garver

The most insightful line in the documentary, a Rosebud moment perhaps, is given by her daughter Gina James: “Pauline’s greatest weakness became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and a critic. She truly believed that what she did was for everyone else’s good, and that because she meant well she had no negative effects. This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint or hesitation gave Pauline a supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice. She turned her lack of self-awareness to a triumph”.

Rob Garver had a lively Q&A with the mostly young German audience in the screening I attended. Some were Kael-in-the-making for their strongly felt opinions about how the documentary should have been done – there was a lengthy and polite exchange about the use of music, for example. What She Said- I can see - will inspire vocations when used to describe the job of the film reviewer in the age of blogs and online reviews. And a bonus is that viewing a plethora of clips opens up vistas on film history to our budding filmmakers.

A still from Varda par Agnès

Varda par Agnèsis an entirely different ballgame of a documentary, since it springs from a desire to summarize a life-long relationship with filmmaking, shaped by the same experimental and joyful impulse that characterizes Varda’s work since her first film, the experimental feature La Pointe Courte (1955). This piece is set up as a causerie, or chat, Varda has with an audience in a theater first, and then a talk at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.  This pedagogical yet intimate environment provides the narrative frame of what unfolds like an oral history. It is an approach that works smoothly, in part because of the running thread set up in the opening sequence: Varda discusses what she sees as the three concepts guiding the life of a filmmaker: inspiration, creation and sharing.  These three master lines shape her comments – always insightful –, the choice of film clips, and her desire to summarize and pass on what she has learned.  

Agnès Varda at the press conference

The documentary is part  “explication de textes” – a refreshing exercise – part poetics of cinema and practical lessons for filmmakers, old and new, but also, at 90, a farewell. In her press conference, she was accompanied by her daughter Rosalie, her right hand and producer. She couldn’t see and hear very well, but as she noted, even though she may not make a film again, her imagination is fired every morning with what the day may bring.  Curiosity and imagination, Varda responded to a question, are key, regardless of age. One of the loveliest sequences in Varda par Agnès involves children exploring one of her installations, a photo of the tomb of her cat, digitally covered with flowers and with a camera that pulls up and up from the ground, until it’s out of the earth (poorly described here, but phenomenally eloquent in its implications of a connected universe).  

Berlinale red carpet

 Two lines had a special resonance for me, which I will bring up in classes as soon as the documentary becomes available. I quote them from memory: “I have always been interested in real people, in people around me”; and “Cinema does not freeze time … it accompanies time …”

Brecht and Mr. Gareth Jones get a film treatment

The films of the Berlinale are an annual treat, and not least because they enrich the lectures I prepare every semester, in unexpected ways.  Two films in particular have made the 1920s and 30s come into sharp focus: the two-part miniseries Brecht, a biopic of sorts, written and directed by Heinrich Breloer, about Bertolt Brecht; and Mr. Jones, the latest foray of Agnieszka Holland into the bloodbath of European 20^thcentury history, focused on the British journalist who first reported on the Soviet-made famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s (staggering death toll: between six and seven million).  They also propose parallels with current events, as they examine the role of the artist and the journalist, in their pursuit of beauty and truth, confronting state power.  As I like to remind the students, if they don’t make connections between the classroom and the outside world - if they don’t “think” - a college education is sterile.

Brecht (Tom Schilling) and collaborator Elizabeth Hauptmann
(Leonie Benesch) work on The Three Penny Opera

Brecht was made by Bavaria Film, the production company turning 100 this year, looking to tap on the hot market for limited and long form series, German and international, blazing the trail of Babylon Berlin (2017). It is an intelligent take on the complicated private and public sides of the German playwright.  The reviews I read, and the comments exchanged with some colleagues, were not enthusiastic, remarking that the picture was superficial and plodding - “the kind of ‘prestige’ biopic one expects from public television”, as Variety noted.  

However, it is the striking use of old and new interviews with Brecht’s collaborators, blending quite seamlessly with the dramatization, that makes the film stimulating for use in class. This archival footage sets up the historical context of Brecht’s life (1898 – 1956). The first episode is centered in 1920s Berlin, the decade of giddy artistic experimentation, and the second unfolds in the 1950s, when Brecht is charting the experimental/ideological course of the Berliner Ensemble.  But the city is now in the hands of cultural commissars, and the debate about the role of art in society (excitingly explored in the first episode) has been stifled, while the practice of socialist realism is enforced. This underlying tension between the artist and the state makes Brecht a relevant work for our students. Interestingly, the writer’s exile in the U.S., between 1941 and 1947, and his work alongside his German compatriots, in theater and in Hollywood, is glossed over. Except for the widely circulated footage of his testimony at the House of Un-American Activities Committee, an interview with his lawyer from a documentary, and a fictionalized short scene of Brecht rehearsing his speech in faltering English, we jump over from the Weimar Republic to the GDR. (An extended treatment of his Hollywood career would have brought another dimension to the film; but one understands that production costs, and, ultimately, the need to keep the German perspective must have prevailed. However, even a brief a scene with Fritz Lang and other German writers and directors would have been to die for).  

Brecht in the recreated Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm
Strasse in Berlin

Brecht is played by two superb actors, Tom Schilling (Never Look Away), as a young poet and playwright, and Burghart Klaussner (The White Ribbon, The State vs. Fritz Bauer) as Brecht in his fifties, who do look like the writer, in costume, makeup and mannerisms.  Because the film constantly jumps from archival footage (even Berlin, Symphony of a Big City makes nicely edited appearances) to the dramatizations, the effect is quite stunning. The most compelling sections are interviews with collaborators, including his long-suffering actress wife Helene Weigel, and an intriguing one with Berliner Ensemble actress Regine Lutz, still under the spell of Brecht many years later.  These interviews function like the flashbacks of Citizen Kane, to give rich insights into Brecht’s artistic idiosyncrasies, his left-wing ideas, sexual profligacies and his treatment of associates. It’s a tightly woven tapestry that kept this viewer glued to the seat for three hours. (How Brecht would have fared in the #MeToo era is a tantalizing question).

Gareth Jones (James Norton) arrives in the Ukraine in 1933

If Brecht discusses the role of the artist in society, as a prophet and agent of change, Mr. Jones asks pointedly about the responsibilities of a journalist as an investigator of truth in the era of “fake news’, to quote director Agnieszka Holland during the post-screening press conference. For Holland and first-time screenwriter Andrea Chalupa, Mr. Jones, played by James Norton, was an urgent and necessary film, since there is no democracy without free media.  What can be seen as a platitude in the current state of affairs, becomes a fascinating story, that of the Cambridge-educated journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), whose first-hand account of the horrific extent of the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, pierced through the veil of misinformation and lies woven by the Stalin regime. (He was killed by a communist agent in Mongolia at age 30.) The machinations of Soviet propaganda had succeeded because Western believers in the construction of the new Russia were willing to justify the horrendous cost in human lives, accepting Stalinist propaganda wholesale as a means to an end. The film’s historical fellow-traveler was the Moscow-based New YorkTimes correspondent Walter Duranty (a finely unctuous performance by Peter Sarsgaard), the gatekeeper for Western journalists seeking access to reporting from the Soviet Union.  

Plaque unveiled in 2006 commemorating Jones in
Aberystwyth University, U.K.

For my money, these are the most fascinating aspects of Mr. Jones: not only the recreation of a political dynamic pitting a courageous and somewhat naïve individual against a totalitarian system, but also the way a messianic ideology replaces facts with their interpretation. George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) makes a key appearance in the movie (at first, somewhat confusing) to make the point that his disillusion with the Soviet system was triggered in part by the harrowing facts uncovered by Jones, and culminated in Animal Farm, published a decade later. In the opening minutes, we see Orwell writing his novel, seemingly unrelated to the story. The connection will come two thirds into the film, when Orwell and Jones meet in London, after the trip.  There is no historical record  of such an encounter, the screenwriter answered to a question; it was an artistic license at the service of a larger truth.  

In these days of multiple platforms, I hope Brechtand Mr. Jonesreach a large audience; the use of these films in media-related classes would be a fruitful and – I know  – an entertaining addition.

On a brief aside, why is it that German filmmakers need to prove themselves against their greatest directors?  Fatih Akin, whose place in present-day German cinema seems assured, degrades Lang’s 1931 classic M (always a revelation to the students) with his Competition film,  The Golden Gloveby denying the protagonist any trace of humanity. All that is shown on screen are brutally explicit acts of violence by a retard masquerading as Peter Lorre.