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. 

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" at the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles

Below are the Program Notes I prepared for the screening of Kiss of the Spider Woman(1985), directed by Hector Babenco, at the Million Dollar Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, on June 9, 2018. It's part of the Los Angeles Conservancy series "The Last Remaining Seats".

"If Busby Berkeley had ever made a movie about politics and illusion,
It might have come out something like this infectious, sobering film".
                        Richard Schickel, Time magazine, August 5, 1985

          

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles is pleased to present Kiss of the Spider Woman, the first of three American films directed by Héctor Babenco (1946-2016). Born in Argentina, in an immigrant family of Jewish Ukranian and Polish roots, Babenco grew up in Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata, dropped out of high school, then moved to Spain where he worked as an extra in Spaghetti westerns and other US-production shot in and around Madrid. He settled in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, where he worked on shorts, commercials and a handful of documentaries.  He directed his first feature King of the Nightin 1975 and two years later the crime film Lucio Flavio, Passenger of Agony(1977), a controversial portrait of a real-life bank robber, a huge box office success. The international critical acclaim of his next film Pixote, a heartbreaking documentary-style look at the desperate lives of homeless children in Sao Paulo, brought him international success. This led to three directing opportunities in Hollywood: Kiss of the Spider Woman, in 1985, Ironweed (1987), with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord(1991), shot in Brazil like Kiss of the Spider Woman. His last major film, before his untimely death of a heart attack in Sao Paulo, is the memorable prison drama Carandiru(2003).

Héctor Babenco and William Hurt on set

For his U.S. debut, Kiss of the Spider Woman/O beijo da mulher aranha, Babenco adapted the homonymous book by Argentine writer Manuel Puig, an experimental novel published in Spain in 1976. As noted by Barbara Fulks, Puig’s work deals with the “ “polemical nature of the relationship between sexuality and revolutionary politics. The conflict between power and sex, and their functions in society”. The novel’s protagonists, Valentín Arregui Paz, a leftist political prisoner, and Luis Alberto Molina, a flamboyant homosexual, share a cell in a South American prison; they embody extreme perceptions of different realities.  Through the retelling by Molina of embellished film plots, and various narrative twists, the relationship moves into sexual and political territories that made the novel a publishing success.

Raúl Julia as Molina
and William Hurt as Valentín

Adapted by Leonard Schrader, the screenwriter brother of Paul Schrader, the film shed most of the original’s self-reflexivity to concentrate on the verbal and visual clash of Raul Julia as the virile political radical Valentín and William Hurt as the effeminate storyteller with hidden intentions, who casts a celluloid web with three very different film plots, starring Brazilian beauty Sonia Braga, in order to make the revolutionary answer a question about the place of pleasure and imagination in life: “What kind of a cause is that, a cause that won’t let you eat an avocado?”.

These three exaggerated melodramas tinged with noir elements cleverly provide refracted images of the main plot, and the last one’s schmaltzy climax stands in for Valentín and Molina’s separate tragic endings.  As the protagonist of all three plots, Sonia Braga, the Spider Woman of the last pulpy movie fiction, embodies Molina’s seduction strategy, and, ultimately, makes splendidly visual Manuel Puig’s own discourse about the workings of literary fictions as webs of enchantment.

William Hurt received an Academy
Award for Best Actor

The film received Academy award nominations for best picture and director, and Oscar to William Hurt for best actor. Hector Babenco was the first Latin American director to receive a nomination.  Twenty five years later, Mexico would step into the plate with the wins of Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del  Toro for Gravity(2013) Birdman (2014), The Revenant (2015) and The Shape of Water(2017).

Sources

Tangled Web: Making “Kiss of the Spider Woman”(2008). Documentary video directed by David Weisman.  Included in Disc 2, 2008 DVD release of the film by City Lights Pictures, Independent Cinema Restorative Archive.

Fulks, Barbara P. "Kiss of the Spider Woman(El Beso de la Mujer Araña). Novel by Manuel Puig, 1976." Reference Guide to World Literature. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 3rd ed. Vol. 2: Works. Detroit: St. James Press, 2003, 1341.

Keller, Gary D. "The Works of Hispanic Directors in Hollywood." Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States. Ed. Sonia Benson. 3rd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 

Schickel, Richard. Kiss of the Spider Woman, Time magazine, August 5, 1985.

Simon, John. “Tangled web”. National Review, September 6, 1985.

Lucrecia Martel: Salta es su Macondo

En septiembre de 2014, en el marco del programa Pacific Standard Time: Latin America in Los Angeles, hice un trabajo de investigación para el Visual History Program de la Academia de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas.  Se trataba de preparar un cuestionario para que la documentalista Lourdes Portillo entrevistara a Lucrecia Martel, una de las trece personalidades del cine latinoamericano y  Latino en USA, invitadas a participar en el PST LA/LA, con el formidable patrocinio económico del Getty. 

Las entrevistas están archivadas electrónicamente en la página web de la Academia: http://pstlala.oscars.org. Además de entretenidas son conversaciones instructivas y cálidas. Fue un gusto trabajar con Lourdes Portillo en esta y otras entrevistas - Héctor Babenco, María Novaro, Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, Arturo Ripstein, Bertha Navarro y Alfonso Cuarón. 

Como la investigación sobre Lucrecia Martel fue la primera que me asignaron, pareció interesante en ese momento poner por escrito algunas ideas que ayudaran a explicar la imaginación cinematográfica de esta directora. Lucrecia Martel, junto con  Lisandro Alonso, Daniel Burman y Damián Szifrón, es una de las caras más visibles del cine de autor argentino en el plano internacional.

En octubre de 2014, cuando se hizo la entrevista en el teatro Linwood Dunn de la Academia, en Hollywood, Zama,la última realización de la directora, todavía no se había rodado. La película se estrena en Los Angeles en los próximos días, por eso me apresuro a desempolvar estas observaciones sobre Lucrecia Martel y Salta, su Macondo.

Son observaciones modestas, pensadas para describir el yo y las circunstancias de la directora a un público anglohablante.  Las escribí en castellano, como parte de ese trabajo de investigación, y las pobres pugnan por salir de la carpeta olvidada donde las había guardado.  Los dos últimos párrafos quedan tal cual los escribí, aunque hayan perimido. 

1.  Salta, el Macondo de Lucrecia Martel  - de los años sesenta a los ochenta

El universo cinematográfico de Lucrecia Martel sale de sus experiencias de infancia y adolescencia en Salta, una ciudad de provincia de fuerte raigambre hispánica, muy diferente de Buenos Aires, un puerto abierto al mundo. 

La han formado artísticamente la fuerte presencia de tradiciones orales vividas en su casa - una experiencia similar a la de García Márquez - el catolicismo y la dinámica de clases.  Esto último aparece en la contraposición blanco/indio, una presencia constante en su cine, especialmente en su corto Nueva Argirópolis(2010), hecho para conmemorar el bicentenario de la independencia argentina de España.

Todo esto provee el contexto para aquilatar La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa(2004) y La mujer sin cabeza (2008).  Estas películas proyectan artísticamente (“cocinan”) su pertenencia a la burguesía provinciana aristocrática del noroeste argentino en la que nació en 1966, constituida por familias extendidas y emparentadas entre ellas.  Martel las describe como caóticas, claustrofóbicas, disfuncionales, decadentes; es una clase social que coexiste con sus siervientes indígenas, los coyas, sin interactuar con ellos. Martel observa ese mundo de mujeres protagonistas en crisis, de manera subersiva y con elegancia salvaje (a través de la banda de sonido, los encuadres y los diálogos).  

Considero que esta trilogía salteña, examinada con atención, tiene mucho en común con Luis Buñuel: la burguesía provinciana conservadora, católica contra la que el español se rebeló toda la vida, y cuyas características más negras Martel también pone de relieve.  Buñuel usa la comedia negra y la sátira (Él, La vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz), mientras que Martel se inclina por ciertas convenciones del cine de horror. Y al igual que Buñuel, el de Martel no es un cine de activismo político, sino de alegoría y símbolo. En el caso de la directora salteña, el agua estancada de ciénaga y piletas de natación es su metáfora clave.

2.  Buenos Aires, aprendizaje y primeros pasos cinematográficos  - años ochenta y noventa)

Se traslada a Buenos Aires a finales de los ochenta.  Estudios de cine aquí y allá, aprendiendo a filmar casi por cuenta propia.  Su primer corto importante, Rey muerto(1995), es una suerte de homenaje a Peckinpah (hay momentos que salen de The Wild Bunch), que la lleva a encontrar una productora importante, Lita Stantic. Gracias a ella, trabaja para televisión. Se destacan dos documentales históricos, sobre personajes femenimos muy diferentes, Encarnación Ezcurra, la mujer del dictador porteño del siglo XIX, Juan Manuel de Rosas, y Silvina Ocampo, la escritora miembro del grupo de Borges, cosmopolita e inteligente, cuyo recuerdo evocan, en forma considerable, las personas que trabajaron para ella, no sólo escritores u otras personalidades.  Una suerte de mirada de clases, por así decirlo.

En los noventa hace, pues, sus primeras armas profesionales.

3.  La trilogía salteña – La ciénaga, La niña santay La mujer sin cabeza (2001-2008)

Producida por Lita Stantic, con fondos en parte europeos, La ciénaga causa una fuerte impresión en el circuito internacional de festivales.  Se considera a Martel como una figura clave en el renacimiento del cine independiente argentino de finales de los noventa.  Este cine, a pesar de agrupar a realizadores dispares con estéticas muy diversas, muestra elementos en común: cine de autor, de bajo presupuesto, con impulsos experimentales  o proponiendo formas narrativas alternas, con el énfasis puesto en lo contemporáneo. Representantivos de este Nuevo Cine Argentino, como lo bautizó la crítica, son Martín Rejtman, Daniel Burman, Pablo Trapero, Ana Poliak, entre otros.

 Entre 2001 y 2008, gracias a estos tres largometrajes, hechos en coproducción con países europeos, Martel se convierte en una figura internacional de relieve – particularmente entre los críticos norteamericanos de la Costa Este.  Estudios académicos y ensayos de interés general destacan el estilo elíptico de la directora, su manera particular de trabajar los encuadres dotándolos de sentido alegórico– figuras decapitadas, incompletas -, su uso complejo y modernista de la banda sonora, también altamente alegórico y con ribetes de género de horror, su predilección por un relato fuera de los cauces clásicos hollywoodenses – no hay ‘establishing shots’ ni tomas de transición.  Una de las características, del estilo Martel es privilegiar la atmósfera sobre el diseño psicológico de personajes, y esencialmente, el sutil  uso de la metáfora y la alegoría al servicio de un mensaje político, amplio, en sentido clásico como la propia directora ha manifestado.

4.  Lo político y lo experimental entrelazados en los cortos – los últimos diez años

Los cuatro cortos de Lucrecia Martel - su obra más reciente - son notables por la manera como combinan un contenido político con una forma experimental: La ciudadd que huye (2006), Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) y Muta (2011).

La ciudad que huyees un breve pero contundente ensayo visual sobre la proliferación de los barrios cerrados en el conurbano de Buenos Aires a partir de los años noventa. En este documental realizado para la Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, en cinco minutos la realizadora expresa de imaginativa manera visual y sonora la fractura social que simboliza este fenómeno socioeconómico: la separación de la población entre los que tienen y los que no, y que paradójicamente comparten un espacio geogrráfico contiguo, seccionado por  muros, garitas y guardias armados.  El corto no se nutre de la dialéctica peronista – piénsese en el cine de Solanas y Getino - ni tampoco formula los argumentos convencionales de la izquierda argentina.  

Artista sin pertenencia partidaria, Martel nos ofrece la misma visión de la trilogía salteña (un microcosmos de la Argentina) sobre la coexistencia incómoda, muchas veces invisible, casi siempre mansa, entre los pudientes y los desposeídos.  

 Esa misma contraposición es el núcleo del corto de ficción para el bicentenario, Nueva Argirópolis.  Martel pone patas para arriba la propuesta (hoy vista como utópica) de Sarmiento de superar el conflicto entre civilización y barbarie – creando una entidad suprapolítica al estilo norteamericano con tres naciones desmembradas de la corona española: Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay. La realizadora propone, no sin ironía, una confederación de comunidades indígenas, los marginados de la historia nacional.

La forma y estilo de contar la historia se emparentan con la trilogía: ambigüedad, opacidad, alegoría sutil, hondo sentido del paisaje y lo humano insertado alli (otra vez el agua como metáfora, esta vez el río Paraná) y un final abierto.  El tratamiento de la banda sonora, en sus tres aspectos – efectos sonoros, lenguaje y música – es puramente marteliano.  En apenas 9 minutos, desde la ficción, una revision audaz de la propuesta no concretada de un prócer nacional.

Los dos últimos cortos, Pescadosy Muta comparten la fascinación por el mundo animal, realista en el primer caso (peces en un estanque) y simbólico en el segundo (las modelos sofisticadas y esbeltas son crisálidas que se convierten, fuera de cuadro, en mariposas).  El universo cinematográfico de estos cortos de ficción es igualmente inquietante. 

En Pescados, lo familiar esta desnaturalizado por el casi plano detalle rodado como plano secuencia, enfocado en peces que, en diseño distorsionante de la banda sonora, hablan un lenguaje cuasi incomprensible.  Lo mismo ocurre en Muta: las modelos están "desrealizadas" por la puesta en escena y los movimientos lánguidos, a los que se une el enmarcamiento y los ángulos de la cámara que “cortan” los cuerpos.

Los títulos de los dos cortos permiten una lectura simultáneamente literal y metafórica. Lo que vemos en Pescados son realmente “peces”, animales vivos, aunque el título en castellano signifique “pez muerto”.  Se trata de un grupo vivo que quizás habla desde la muerte, ocurrida, quizás también en el auto que vemos moviéndose en  ruta de noche, y que emarca la  toma de los peces. Todo queda ambiguo, excepto la surrealidad de peces hablando a cámara.  

Lo inquietante de Pescadosse magnifica en Muta. Allí el juego lingüístico se basa en el italiano: “muta” es la tercera persona del singular del verbo “mutar”, cambiar o transformar, según se ve en la crisálida que se torna en mariposa al final de la historia. También es el sustantivo/adjetivo que describe la mudez, la imposibilidad de hablar: el lenguaje de estas modelos es, como el de los peces, incomprensible. La ironía, en última instancia, es de sesgo político: estas mujeres bellas y misteriosas – vestidas con la fabulosa colección de la diseñadora Miu Miu para Prada – desaparecen al final, tan misteriosamente como aparecieron en el barco igualmente misterioso flotando en un río.   La moda es frágil, pasajera, impermanente, como estos insectos en los que se transforman  especímenes femeninos tan etéreos. (Es el anti-prêt-à-porter, la democratización de la moda …) El sentido implícito del corto – la impermanencia de la manufactura humana - es clave para organizar el contenido y estilo  de las imágnes: objetos preciosos y efímeros.

El proyecto en que Martel y su equipo de colaboradores están trabajando desde 2013 – la adaptación de la novela histórica Zama,publicada en 1956 por el escritor mendocino Antonio Di Benedetto –marcará por un lado la superación geográfica de la trilogía: en vez del noroeste argentino, la zona del río Paraná, en el noreste tropical del país. Pero por otro, la novela le permitirá reelaborar su interés por los mundos pequeños, asfixiantes y de los que no consiguen zafarse los protagonistas en crisis.  Es decir, bien puede ser la continuación de la guerra por otros medios. 

Habrá que ver cómo se adapta el estilo narrativo y audiovisual tan característico de Lucrecia Martel a un material literario salido de otra imaginación.

"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.