The question of evil: "Irradiés" and "There Is No Evil"

The last two films shown in the Competition section are in the tradition of political awareness that has shaped the Berlinale for 70 years: Irradié / Irradiated, directed by the veteran Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh; and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil.  Shown back to back yesterday, they are also in conversation with one another, beyond their historical, cultural and political specificities, since their underlying theme is the value of human life in contexts of evil.  They both have a moral urgency that elicited a warm reaction from the hardened journalists in the press screening I attended.  A few minutes after the Iranian film finished, I overheard a Spanish journalist filing his report over the telephone, saying: “I cried many times”.

In Irradiés, a documentary essay on evil in the 20^th century – name the usual suspects, they are all there – Panh revisits the horrors of history from a perspective grounded in his own family history: the destruction of parents and siblings in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and, ultimately, his escape to freedom via Thailand. He eventually settled in France, graduating from the topnotch Institut des hautes études cinématographiques.  The antecedents for his latest documentary are in plain sight, beginning with Night and Fog (1956), Chronique d’un eté, the 1961 Rouch/Morin documentary, and most of all the work of Chris Marker, with Sans Soleil (1983) coming to mind.  Panh shares here their modernist impulse to see politics from the lens of the personal, and eschewing a Griersonian approach in favor of an experimental form.

Irradiés, however, is not a derivative or redundant work. In the press conference, Panh was asked about his decision to work for most of 80-plus minutes with a three-split image on the screen: the central panel is related but not similar to the two identical lateral ones, using the music as a somber and sometimes discordant counterpoint to the visuals. Panh faced the same issue a young Alain Resnais confronted when deciding on a narrative, visual and sound structure for Night and Fog: footage from the concentration and extermination camps had been used until then as evidence for the Nuremberg trials, and though professionally edited by the Allied teams in charge of the prosecution, they were not arranged for esthetic purposes.   This is a matter that comes in my documentary class time and again: how do you/should you portray “the horror, the horror” without trivializing its nature? Do you/should you make choices that privilege film language over ethics? Peter Jackson approached it, but from another angle, in the drastic shaping of archival footage from the Imperial War Museum for They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

Rithy Panh started by responding that Irradiés is above all a "shout", a reminder of how evil irradiates. His challenge was to keep the attention of the audience past the first minutes of  

watching images of brutality. How to make the images resonate was the director’s guiding principle. If you build the work as a catalogue of horrors, the director continued, the audience checks out.  The rhythmic repetition of the three-split image structure is a form of abstraction that helps the viewer concentrate and dive into the materials. If the images speed by, truth is lost.

An Italian critic friend of mine, noted as the credits were rolling: “Ecco un capolavoro”. Beautifully said.

Shot in Iran under difficult circumstances, Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil is a work of great courage and beauty.  Like Jafar Panahi and other Iranian directors who have gained international recognition, Rasoulof is at odds with Iran’s mullahs, his latest trouble being a pending prison sentence for  “propaganda against the system” – namely his 2017 drama A Man of Integrity, that won the Un Certain Reard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of the Berlinale, which as expected he could not attend, his plight was covered by the accredited press. An empty spot with his name was set up for the press conference.

Mohammad Rasoulof 

There Is No Evil is comprised of four interlocking stories involving a very specific moral choice, to be or not to be an executioner of prisoners, as determined by the state. Like Kieslowski’s Dekalog (1988), individuals are faced with moral dilemmas, for which there are attenuating circumstances, or so it seems.  In the four stories the male protagonists are part of the prison system – a metaphor for the regime at large – but their circumstances and decisions, widely different. The narrative structure of each episode is shaped by the social, economic, intellectual and geographic specificities of each case – the society at large. The viewers find themselves observing life in Tehran and then in the countryside, sharply photographed in the city, and with great beauty in the countryside.  The minute unfolding of the first story sets the tone for the film with its unexpected and stunning twist in the final shot. It is the peg on which Rasoulof, who also wrote the screenplay,  hangs the progressively more outspoken critical tone of the ironically yet poignantly titled film.  It is all about how each character – and by extension ourselves, the viewers, through fear and pity, as Aristotle would have argued – will respond to “the horror, the horror”.  

There Is No Evil shares with Dekalog 5 a profoundly humanistic point of view, a stubborn reminder that all life has value, and that maybe, at some point, facing evil, we will have to make a choice. In the context of today’s Iranian politics, it takes courage – and European production funds – to make such a statement.

The international jury will award the prizes tonight.  I hope that these two magnificent works will be recognized and launched into a long viewing life.  

Siblings Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, Bill and Turner Ross made two sensational movies.

A delight of the Berlinale every year is to find a film or two that will make students share emotional truths on the screen, as Scorsese notes in “The Persisting Vision”, an essay of 2013. Last year was what turned out to be Agnès Varda’s farewell, Varda, by Agnès, a documentary about her love of cinema.  Now available on DVD, I have used it this semester, a great gift of the director to my emerging filmmakers.

Bill and Turner Ross

Fabio and Damiano D'Innocenzo

I have seen many films these past week, interesting for a number of reasons, but the two I discuss below are excellent for the classroom: Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, the fifth feature by Bill and Turner Ross, filmmakers in their late thirties, working from New Orleans; and Favolacce, or Bad Tales, second film by Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, twins in their late twenties, born in the outskirts of Rome and not the product of film school. Both works defy the pigeon-hole of genres, and categorization in general. Hence, their value to show students how to think outside the fiction/non-fiction framework, in the first film, and the subversion of narrative logic, in the Italian case.

I had read about Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by Bill and Turner Ross in the Los Angeles Times when it premiered in Sundance in January.  When I saw it in the Panorama section of the festival, I understood why this “documentary” is the right one to bring up the key philosophical issue on day one of the documentary class: what makes a film a documentary.  Bloody Nose is a “creative treatment of actuality”, per Grierson, but like Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), it ultimately escapes the boundaries of the non-fiction film. This question is unavoidable after viewing Bloody Nose, one that pits the purist against the pragmatic - the critics that still object to Flaherty enlarging Nanook's igloo versus those that forgive interventions in search of a larger truth.

The Ross brothers had a lively Q&A with the public after the screening.  They described how they were interested in making a film about “a space of shared events” – in their case, a bar. A source of inspiration, they noted, had been The Iceman Cometh, the Eugene O’Neil 1940s play, where the saloon is the “container” where the hopes, illusions and despair of the characters play out.  A bar in New Orleans, the Roaring 20s, became the locale where in November 2016 they shot the interaction of people they cast during one unbroken scene for eighteen consecutive hours, with two cameras and fifteen mics.  The conceit was no script, no staging, and a point of departure: the last night before the watering hole closes its doors forever. Twenty people – bar habitués, carefully selected to represent “archetypes” - reacted to the “stimuli”, as the directors referred to this set up, and they in turn responded to their dialogue and movements. In direct cinema style, no conflicts were staged but the brothers gave their actors some cues, so that they would have a dramatic arc within which to play themselves.  The Ross siblings captured some raw emotional truths on the screen, shaped and trimmed in an editing process that unfolded over three years, while they supported themselves doing other film work.  The music is purely diagetic, coming from the bar’s juke box. 

To the brothers’ surprise, Sundance selected Broken Nose, Empty Pockets for their always very strong documentary section, a decision that opened up a frank conversation about the nature of documentary.   The brothers recounted how the Sundance programmers argued that Broken Nose “constructs situations in order to invite a level of chaos and candor that feels more fitting for the nonfiction space.”

After their Q&A, I approached the very personable Ross brothers to ask about what comes next.  Distribution is still in the works, they replied. One of them could not help but say about the Berlinale, “Being here is f … unreal”.  

In Favolacce (a made-up Italian noun, with “fabulation”, perhaps, in its root), the D’Innocenzo siblings plumb a dark quarry, one that the English-language translation of the title aptly captures: a fictional story with moral and/or esthetic connotations.  The intriguing voiceover that opens and closes the film is both self-reflexive and revelatory; it alerts the viewers that the tragic events at the heart of the story may also be embroidered by fabulation; that there is something else to the story of middle-class children and their parents, set in a cookie-cutter suburban development encroaching on nature during a torrid summer.  Realism and logical plot construction may be a façade waiting to be subverted.  Fellini’s 8 ½ and Buñuel’s logic of dreams help make sense of the unravelling of four pre-teenagers, whose fathers are totally toxic and the mothers ineffectual, while other adults are literally and morally dangerous. Since realism is not the name of the game, the audience is  challenged to sort out what is actually happening on the screen, and who doing the telling.  Like the opening monologue of Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), the clue to the story is hidden in plain sight. 

The press conference was lively; when asked about their influences, one of the D' Innocenzo brothers provided an eclectic list: Gus Van Sunt, Takeshi Kitano, John Cassavetes, John Ford, Billy Wilder and Chantal Akerman. Regarding Italian directors, they acknowledged Matteo Garrone, Ermanno Olmi, and Pietro Germi as references.

Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, and Bad Tales merit a wide audience, and their directors, the recognition that fresh talents have arrived to the film scene.

Back to the source: Carlo Collodi's "Adventures of Pinocchio" (1883), redux

Three slabs of the Berlin Wall in Potsdamer Platz

I am in Berlin again, attending the 70^th edition of its film festival.  I first landed in the city in February of 1985, its 35^th, thanks to the invitation of Argentine filmmaker Manuel Antín, then director of the Argentine Film Institute, who had appointed me to the Film Rating Commission, and included me in the Argentine delegation.  The wall still divided the city, and it seemed unbridgeable. Manuel Antín advised me to get a press credential for the following year, and I have been coming ever since, skipping only two or three times. What a treat it has been, the highlight of my professional year.  I saw the collapsed wall in February of 1990, three months after it happened – an ideology and a praxis shattered  to pieces. At the time you could pick bits of concrete from the two walls and no-man’s land had stood. Now for a few euros you can get a small piece encased in acrylic.

Every screening I attend in the Competition – a lean 18-title section this year - opens vistas on unexpected things, since I read nothing beforehand, and I get to the Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz as much a blank slate as I can be.

Matteo Garrone’s visually dazzling Pinocchio was great treat for me on Sunday, mainly for its Proustian reverberations; but also because the film fits Bruno Bettelheim’s observations on the moral and pedagogical role of fairy tales. Like Capra with the Why We Fight series in WWII, Disney’s handling of the Pinocchio story in the 1940s – “sanitizing” could be, but is not, the right word – shape the way we perceive it today.  It seems as if Collodi has been edged out of existence outside of Italy, or perhaps more kindly made a mute presence everywhere else. Watching this Pinocchio I thought that Pope Francis – a cinephile best explained by his Italian Argentine background – would love it, and have much to comment about fatherhood in a Sunday address to the faithful.

 I had never known who Carlo Collodi - author Carlo Lorenzini’s pen name - was, even though his was a familiar from my childhood. Courtesy of the Britannica, I absorbed the details of a life: Born in Tuscany in 1826 into a working class family, and after a stint in the seminary where he gained an education, Collodi became a journalist supporting Garibaldi and the Risorgimento against Austria, publishing political satires until the reunification of Italy as a kingdom in the 1860s. He then left political writing for children’s literature. I realize that the immediate success of the book in Italy in the 1880s quickly led to translations, and that it must have become a children’s favorite for the generation of my grandparents – born between the 1890s and the 1900s.  I wonder what they made of it.  How did they absorb the adventures of an obnoxious and disobedient puppet, that can still scare the hell out of kids (maybe not the media savvy ones of today). How did they relate to a bratty character that ditches school and wants to have fun.  The novel is fraught with unimaginable dangers, all of them at the hands of  cruel or selfish adults: robbery, kidnapping, hanging, slavery, near drowning, transforming into a donkey, before Pinocchio is reunited with his loving creator Geppetto, courtesy of a mother-figure fairy and the ghost of a talking cricket Pinocchio killed with a hammer at the beginning of the story. But all’s well that ends well. In the serialized novel, the protagonist dies in chapter 15 but the clamor of readers made Collodi resurrect him in chapter 16. 

Matteo Garrone, the director of the brutal Gomorrah (2008), about the Neapolitan camorra, and a take on fairy stories, Tale of Tales (2015), wrote and directed this version, casting the exuberant Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, and the cute child actor Federico Ielapi (who won over the journalists at the press conference) who looks awfully wooden behind the makeup and costume, sporting the proverbial pointy noise. 

What makes Garrone’s a fascinating take on Pinocchio is the issue of what a Midwestern American did with the original novel in the early 1940s when looking for a project after the success of the lovingly-gestated Snow White. This Disney layer of meaning is now such an integral part of the story, that one imagines that “When You Wish upon a Star” may have been culled from Collodi’s original.

The journey from an Italian 19^th century sensibility and landscape – how to live, work, raise children in a society that was quickly being industrialized – to an 20^th century Anglo-Saxon mindset – is the intriguing part for me. The way this creative process unfolded at the Disney studios in Los Angeles has already been written, and it is fun to read about it: the technological achievements in animation in Disney’s second feature, and Pinocchio very soon becoming an archetype recognizable everywhere.

Now I have an idea for an assignment in the adaptation class I often teach: ask the students to read the original Collodi novel, and describe the nuts and bolts of the adaptation process in the Disney and Garrone adaptations, observing the key differences in text and context.  Not unlike what I have been doing since the same 2012 with the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, the Gold Bear of that year, and the 1953 Joseph L. Manckiewicz adaptation of Julius Caesar. Classics matter and Shakespeare speaks to us today. Now its Collodi's turn.  “Para novedades, los clásicos”, as Miguel de Unamuno duly observed.