"Mug" and "In the Aisles": Glimpses of Easter Europe today

The last two films shown in this 68 Berlinale, from Poland and Germany, continued the conversation the festival has always carried with the history and politics of what during the Cold War was Eastern Europe.  Mug, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, and Thomas Stuber's In the Aisles explore a current state of affairs, through the lens of a village in southern Poland, and the interactions of Costco-style warehouse employees in the former East Germany, regarding life in a capitalistic environment as it affects ordinary folks.  However, their overt or subtle critiques are not against the new system, now in place for 25 years, but about the its impact on the social fabric. Pointing at this films, Marx would have been pleased to show how alienation works, and Freud would have been equally interested in the functioning of the super ego. For the Frankfurt school, the pictures would be a field trip to dissect the dominant ideology.

Mug is a modern day Polish fairy tale that works seamlessly at two levels: the first one is a restrained satire on consumption and materialism, made explicit in the opening sequence, a YouTube-style video with frenzied customers on a super sale day. It lays the subtext for the story involving a family of peasants. The second one makes the various members of that family, owners of some land and cows, a microcosm of Poland today.  Traditional and Catholic, the family has one black sheep, Jacek (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), who plans to leave for Britain (to wash dishes, or to become someone, depending on whose family member is talking).  The director and writer Szumowska, an habitué of the Berlinale, describes with loving care the rituals and customs of the family, rooted to the soil and the Church, until an accident derails the plans of Jacek and makes him the “mug” of the title.  The second part of the film is a transparent and intricate allegory about the “other” in Polish society; an exploration of social and political identity; and most importantly, a search for a place. 

Visually, Mug is structured as a game between seeing and how we are seen. It proposes a way to look at the Polish landscape, dreamy and romantic; and the Catholic Church, with her folk traditions and scary practices like exorcism.  This context of soil and culture frame the gently ironic portraits of mothers, fathers and siblings.  At the center is Jacek, a symbol representing the fear of the other, in his physical deformity (like the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, alluded in the makeup) and as a political metaphor.  Mug is an interesting complement to the thriller Traces, Agnezka Holland’s Berlinale entry last year, also an allegory about Poland today that packed a punch.

German writer Clemens Meyer, born in 1977 in then East Germany, has captured in novels and short stories the everyday life of ordinary people as they are shaped by forces outside of their control, like the Wende (the change), or reunification of 1991. Director Thomas Stuber, a graduate from a German film school in 2011, also born in East Germany, adapted with Meyer one of his short stories, a 25-page account of a young man (Franz Rogowski) who begins to work in a warehouse operating a lift fork, in eastern Germany.  Minimalist, with a lot of the action happening outside the frame, or left unexplained, even though its impact propels the story, In the Aisles works like Mug at two levels.  However, there is no explicit laying out of the subject at the beginning, nor any specific moment where the characters’ interactions point out to something else – namely the loss of social cohesiveness and a sense of isolation.  The film works by an intriguing accumulation of details about how humans figure out their most elementary bonds – friendship and love– and cope with emotional catastrophes.  Sandra Hüller (the daughter in Toni Erdmann) and And it is also a very wry comedy about the absurdities of modern shopping and what goes on, precisely, in the aisles.  (One cannot shop at Costco the same way).

Smart and poignant, In the Aisles is every bit as fascinating as last year’s Berlinale Special In Times of Fading Light, a dramatic comedy directed by Matti Geschonneck from a novel by Eugen Ruge, another writer from East Germany. Both films show a cross section of the German Volk – high and low – as they cope with the cards history deals them.

Long takes and computer screens: "U-22 July" and "Profile"

 In 2012 the Berlinale screened the documentary Side by Side, a timely record of the celluloid vs. digital clash.  A few films this year show us what storytelling can gain with the digital technology.  They provide useful examples to discuss for example digitally-stitched long takes, in the Norwegian U-July 22; and films combining Skype calls, text messages, Facebook and Instagram, on a computer screen, such as Profile.

U-July 22 recreates the attack on a summer camp on an island not far from Oslo, by a heavily armed right wing extremist in 2011; he hunted and shot 69 children, after having exploded a car bomb in the capital as a distraction. The killing spree lasted over an hour, and it is reconstructed here as a single terrifying long take. Prefaced by news footage of the bombing, to set up a minimal context, the narrative strategy is to circumscribe the point of view to a first person with restricted information.  In this case, the 19-year-old Kaja (Andrea Berntzen) as a composite character of survivors, thrown in a maelstrom of extreme emotions and utter confusion. Three of these survivors came to the Berlinale, and participated in the press conference .That must have been a terrifying experience all by itself.

These bravura long takes have almost become standard operating procedure, and a call to cinematographers to climb technical Everests, as in Gravity, Birdman, Victoria.  What makes this one a nerve-wracking breathless 72-minute ride is how the viewer is forced to become the hunted without an exit strategy on a rough confined territory. (It may look an experience similar to The Hunter Games, but by virtue of its realism it is not). The hunter is glimpsed only once, far back, in black armor. Except for a short explanation before the end credits, no other information is given about him.  Context, psychology and interpretation are purposely replaced by a raw experience of terror and survival, in large part conveyed by the soundtrack, where bullet shots become a rhythmic leitmotiv.  Relying on visual strategies familiar to cinéma vérité, the films creates suspense in a classical anticipatory manner: will or will not the hunter find his prey? Directed assuredly by Rick Poppe, with Martin Otterbeck as cinematographer, the film functions much like a VR experience – think Carne y Arena, González Iñárritu’s recent installation at LACMA about the US/Mexican border.  Difficult to watch, but nonetheless mesmerizing, U-July 22 is a film where much can be learned about the marriage of storytelling and camera work.

In the thriller Profile, directed by Kazakh-born action director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Ben Hur) the suspense comes from a very different source: the increasingly melodramatic twists of the plot, all played out in the digital world.  Like U-July 22, it is also based on a true story – but with a heavy dose of ornamentation, one has to presume.   The director and two cowriters adapted the book In the Skin of a Jihadist, by Anna Erelle, about her experiences as an undercover journalist tracing how ISIS lured young European girls to their cause.  A British journalist (Valene Kane) creates a fake Facebook profile as a Muslin convert.  What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game when an alarmingly charming  British jihadist of Pakistani roots Bilel (Shazad Latif) starts an online relationship with her from Syria, that is equal part recruitment and courtship, marriage vows and a trip to Syria, derailed in Amsterdam.  Progressively more outlandish, the film is played out in a single computer monitor, without sets or props, or hands typing. (Nice to see that in this cinematic universe, the technology works without a glitch!). Profile creates a mesmerizing experience – breezily edited – of how a user of social media becomes embedded in vast digital networks, without geographical boundaries, exhilarating, in real time, and with tangible consequences.

Ultimately, what flattens Profile two thirds into the film is that the thrill of the chase becomes the driving factor of the story.  The dynamics of online recruiting, the tragic stories, the brutal reality of unhinged Islamists, everything the picture has tantalizingly brought to the forefront, dissolves into a suspenseful question: how will the journalist extricate herself from the danger of a roguish double-faced liar?  The film is confortable working with the conventions of thriller and melodrama, without taking the subject matter further.  It is also a good example of cool entertainment for the millennial generation.  What would Hitchcock have done  - one wonders - with this material in this day and age. It’s always fun to wonder.

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.

"Death of a bureaucrat" (1966) at the Palace Theatre, downtown LA

Every year, the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles has a slot in the series Last Remaining Seats, organized by the LA Conservancy.  On June 14,  it will be La muerte de un burócrata/Death of a Bureaucrat (Cuba, 1966), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

I'm always honored that Michael E. Díaz, its founder and director, asks me to write the program notes.

“Had Kafka been a Cuban, instead of being a writer of the absurd, he world have been a writer of customs and manners” – Virgilio Piñera

The cinema of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea cannot be properly understood without grasping a historical event - the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – with its ideological roots and political objectives.  The success of the Revolution, fought in the rugged Sierra Maestra of southeast Cuba for several years, brought to power a small and audacious group of guerrilla fighters, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, after toppling the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and enjoying popular support.

Like the Russian Revolution of 1917 fifty years earlier, this call to replace the social, political and economic order of the former Spanish colony and a de facto American protectorate, appealed to many in Cuba, especially young intellectuals and artists.  Successfully exported to Latin America, and elsewhere, as a leftist ideological paradigm and a praxis to take over power, the fascination the Cuban Revolution still exerts could be felt in November of last year when most reactions to the death of 90-year Fidel Castro, in power for forty years, unelected, glossed over the brutal price exacted by the communist leader and his regime on the Caribbean nation.

This is the context in which Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996), the most significant of Cuban directors, has to be placed to examine his film career.  Known as “Titón”, and born to a family of means and progressive ideas, Gutiérrez Alea studied law in Cuba and then filmmaking at the renowned Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, in the early 1950s.  He observed first hand the punch Neorealism – then at its heyday – packed when portraying the social and political struggles of post-WWII Italy.  Back in Cuba he directed a documentary about coal workers,  El Mégano (1955), with Julio García Espinosa.

Fervent supporters of the Revolution, they joined forces with others from the cine club circles of La Habana to found the Instituto de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, or ICAIC.  It was set up as a state-sponsored institution designed to manage the Cuban film industry, under the ideological and financial aegis of the new regime that soon declared itself a one-party socialist state under communist rule and the patronage of the Soviet Union.  “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing”, proclaimed Castro in June 1961, considering cinema a weapon of choice to educate and proselytize.

Gutiérrez Alea never wavered in his support of the Revolution, but good director that he was his pictures never toe an overt propaganda line.  They are aligned with the tenets of the regime but at the level of form, they are an artist’s creative take on the medium.  La muerte de un burócrata is a case in point, both in content and style.  Fifty years after it was made, La muerte is still a refreshing, almost post-modern, satire on the plague of bureaucracy … under any type of government and organization.

In La muerte de un burócrata, Alea develops a skill we’ll see at play in his later work, especially in his best films, Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), La Última Cena (1976), Fresa y chocolate (1993) and Guantanamera (1995): a sharp eye “for identifying and then dramatizing the historical and cultural legacies that stand in the way of turning Cuba into a truly socialist society” as Paul Schroeder wrote in his doctoral thesis for Stanford University in 2000.

La muerte de un burócrata uses the conventions of the satire to blast the bureaucratic mindset that reduces life to a succession of absurdities, with witty homages to films and directors, in the guise of scenes filmed a variety of comedic styles: the assembly line of Chaplin’s Modern Times, the clock from which Harold Lloyd hangs in Safety Last, Dracula’s fangs, the pie fights of Laurel and Hardy, a scattered and curvaceous Cuban Marilyn Monroe, and surrealist dreams like those of Buñuel. The potpourri works very well, and gets hearty laughs from the audience.  

The film is centered on the predicament of a hapless nephew (Salvador Wood) to retrieve the ID of his recently deceased uncle, a model worker and inventor. His widow (Silvia Planas) placed it in the coffin, but now needs it, admonished by a bureaucrat that she will not get a pension without this piece of identification.  But the bureaucrat in the cemetery tells him no exhumation is possible without a court order.  A clandestine operation yields the coffin, but the nephew has to wheel it back to their home when the police unexpectedly show up.  (Imagine the depredations of the Caribbean heat on an unrefrigerated cadaver). The farce escalates, the lampooning of recognizable government employees gets more ridiculous, and some sacred cows are turned upside down – like socialist realist art, and the fact that everybody is equal but some are more equal than others.   

The film opens with a typewriter typing out the first page of an “expediente”, or administrative file, listing the credits of the film, while Chopin’s funeral march is heard in the background. After finishing typing the film acknowledgments, the document is stamped with a “Nihil Obstat”, alluding to the Church official’s seal of approval – not objectionable on doctrinal grounds.

Shot on location in central Havana, in black-and-white, the film quite unexpectedly becomes a portrait of what the bustling city looked like in the sixties (those American cars!) before the benign neglect of the ensuing decades.  The viewer gets to see what Cuban life was like then, under the lens of a black comedy that gets progressively blacker. In the mayhem and slapstick of the final scene – punctuated by expressionistic sound effects – the nephew has a nervous breakdown and kills the bureaucrat of the title, who couldn't approve a re-burial without a proper certificate of exhumation. A Chinese national looks at the camera and says something unintelligible to the Spanish speakers, in the melée on screen or the spectators viewing the film. La muerte de un burócrata ends where it began, in the cemetery, with a view from up high that becomes an eloquent comment on the folly of men adhering to rules which defy common sense.