NEWS

58th BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

20 December 2007

The 58th Berlin International Film Festival will take place from 7 to 17 February 2008, with the Greek-born, French-domiciled director Costa-Gavras as President of the Jury, whose names have still to be announced.

So far eight titles – from China, Brazil, Mexico, Great Britain, USA, Poland and Germany - have been definitely confirmed for the competition. Germany herself is represented by the world premiere of the latest film of Doris Dörrie, Kirschblüten – Hanami, the story of a sick man who only begins to discover his wife of many years after she suddenly and unexpectedly dies.
Sickness and death are apparently popular themes this year. Having won the 2001 Silver Bear with Beijing Bicycle, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai returns with Zuo You (In Love We Trust), about a mother with cancer who resorts to unusual strategies to save her first-born child. The second feature by the Mexican Fernando Eimbcke, Lake Tahoe is about a sixteen-year-old boy coping with the sudden death of his father.

From the USA, a new film by Paul Thomas Anderson (whose Magnolia won the Berlin Golden Bear in 2000), There Will Be Blood is adapted from Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil”, the story of an unsuccessful silver miner who rises to become a US oil magnate in the early 20th century. Daniel Day-Lewis heads an almost exclusively male cast. A British-American co-production, Damian Harris’s Gardens of the Night describes the fate of two children who are abducted and held captive for over nine years, before escaping and tending for themselves on the city streets.
The Brazilian political thriller, José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad), which has already broken all home box-office records explores the brutal effects of the drug mafia on the poorest inhabitants of Brazil, and reveals the daily routines of a corrupt special unit of the Brazilian military police. America’s human rights record and the abuses of “the war against terror” come under scrutiny in Errol Morris’ documentary S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure, investigating the activities at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison complex near Baghdad.

Out of competition, the veteran Polish master Andrzej Wajda, who received an Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement in 2006, presents his latest work, Katyn, out of competition. The film breaks a long taboo to expose the massacre of thousands of Polish war prisoners by the Soviet secret service in 1940.

The other regular side-bars of the Festival – the Panorama and the Forum of Young Film Makers – have still to announce their programmes. Regular features of the festival, including the Film Market and the recently inaugurated Talent Campus are in place. This year’s annual retrospective series is dedicated to Luis Bunuel.

In an attempt to reach a wider audience for the long-established Children’s Film Competition, it has since 1907 been given a not-so-catchy new title “Generation 14plus”, though a bigger attraction is likely to be the venue for its premieres, the Babylon Mitte Kino in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. A wonderful example of 20s architecture of the Neue Sachlichkeit school, it was designed by the architect Hans Poelzig, whose work as a production designer included Ernst Lubitsch’s Ann Boleyn and Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (both 1920).

Entries for the “Generation 14plus” competition include the debut film of the youngest member of the precocious Makhmalbaf family of Iran, The 19-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, already known as a lyricist, shot Buda az sharm foru rikht (Buddha Collapsed out of Shame) in Afghanistan. Other titles for this section are: Cykelmyggen og Dansemyggen (Denmark, directors Jannik Hastrup, Flemming Quist Møller), Flower in the Pocket (Malaysia, director Liew Seng Tat),

Hey Hey it's Esther Blueburger (Australia, director Cathy Randall), Mutum (Brazil, director Sandra Kogut), Titanics ti liv (The Lives of Titanic the Cat) (Norway, director Grethe Bøe) and Waar is het Paard van Sinterklaas? (Where is Winky's Horse?) (Netherlands, director Mischa Kamp).

DIGITAL ON THE MARCH

21 January 2007

The conversion of all commercial cinemas to digital projection rapidly comes closer. In London the principal exhibition chain, Odeon, has announced the launch of two all-digital multiplexes, at Surrey Quays, the rapidly developing area of London’s former docklands, and at the nine-screen Odeon Hatfield. At Surrey Quays the installation, integration and service will be provided by Arts Alliance Media, which is handling the U.K.Film Council’s project to establish a network of 240 digital screens across the country. At Hatfield Bell Theatre Services will provide the digital installation and maintenance.

GAMES WAR

17 January 2007

A bill currently before the German parliament seeks to ban videogames that depict acts of violence against human characters – which could include such mega-sellers as the STAR-TREK series, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, THE BATTLE FOR MIDDLE-EARTH II and SCARFACE: THE WORLD IS YOURS. The move follows incidents which have caused countryside concern at the link between the games and real-life violence. An 18-year-old videogame addict, Sebastian Rosse shot up a high school in Emsdetten before killing himself. The shootings were reportedly carried out with the methodical strategy of moves in a game. Further concern was aroused by a post on an internet games forum that involved a death threat by someone (still not traced) who said his aim was to kill school pupils. Police and a public poll have declared that the link between the games and the violence is undeniable. Games are seen as more dangerous than other media involving the representation of violence because of their interactivity. The player is pulling the trigger.
Germany is Europe’s biggest videogames market, and hosts major tournaments where games are played in big arenas with audiences of thousands. But these spectator-sport events are already controlled, with constraints on the depiction of blood-letting.
The concern over violent videogames is shared within the European Commission, which has launched a study supported by the British MEP Michael Cashman, who is seeking a European ratings system for games. If the German bill is passed, developing or even playing games involving violence could consiitute a prison offence.

FILM INTELLIGENCE'S BEST OF 2006

1 January 2007

FILM INTELLIGENCE’S Best Film of 2006 is neither a Hollywood megabuck spectacle nor a pregnant European art movie, but a one-hour zombie horror from a 12-episode American television series “Masters of Horror”? In HOMECOMING, Joe Dante reveals himself a true master, using the venerable and unadulterated genre conventions of the zombie movie to make a ferocious political statement.
Sam Hamm’s script follows all the rules: here are the haunted, decaying relics from the grave, agonised in their indestructibility; and here too are the fearful, chattering living, rallying to combat the other-worldly threat …
The difference is that the living are a right-wing political commentator and a presidential speech-writer. Cornered on a tv talk-show by the mother of a GI killed in Iraq, the White House man declares his wish that her son could come back to testify to his pride in sacrifice for his country. The President himself takes up the refrain, “If these boys could only come back to tell us ….”
And they do. In their numbers. They stumble from their coffins, poor putrefying maimed things, casting aside the flags draped over them. They do indeed want to testify and can only die when they have cast their votes against the administration that has sent them to their deaths. The people in the White House gladly let them vote - after all, they can rig the count as they have done before. But when the zombie army sees they are yet again being deceived, they call in reinforcements – the dead of Vietnam and the Second World War.
Dante handles this unique and risky combination of tawdry genre and passionate human indignation faultlessly. He exploits all the banalities of the genre, the conventional combination of shivers and giggles, at the same time as he ferociously assaults the deceptions of politics and politicians. Even more brilliant is his achievement of creating these very contemporary and present zombies without disrespect or loss of dignity to the young dead men whose fate he protests in this extraordinary and unprecedented manner. To see the popular media engaged and embattled in this new way is heartening for our messy and misguided century.

Cinémathèque française

8 December 2005

On 28 September 2006, the Cinémathèque française - one of the world's oldest archives - opened its new premises in rue Bercy, Paris, facing the four-towered Bibliothèque Nationale across the River Seine. The building - designed for an American cultural centre which closed ignominiously after some two years' operation - is one of the worst dsigns by the American star architect Frank Gehry. Adorned with gigantic grey images of Muybridge's naked athletes around the windows, and with refurbishment still going on inside, the place is peculiarly melancholy. However Parisians seem to like it, and the five admirably equipped theatres are doing better business than Cinémathèque shows have ever done before.

The Cinémathèque authorities have made it clear that the great Musée Henri Langlois will never be re-made. Instead an impressive - though proportionately small - selection of the unparalleled collections formed by the Cinémathèque's founder are on show in a sizeable gallery. The displays are elegant but probably meaningless for the uninitiated casual visitor, sinc there is no attempt at the kind of didactic "story-telling" which would explain the significance of this heterogeneous collection of apparatus, costumes, scripts, programmes, designs, posters and pre-cinematic optical toys. Moreover, the collection virtually ends with the Second World War, so that there are few titles or personalities readily familiar to the contemporary public. A supplementary exhibit of "New Acquisitions" includes some of the superb costumes and designs of the pioneer French magician-filmmaker, Georges Méliès, recently acquired from his grand-daughter.

The first temporary exhibition, dedicated to the Renoirs, has the naive concept of juxtapositing paintings by father Auguste with clips of comparable scenes from the films of son Jean Renoir. But even a naive idea, carried out with care and sincerity, can have its charm. And the paintings (mostly from the Musée d'Orsay, are a joy.

Photograph: Stéphane Dabrowski

BAD MANAGEMENT - THE ARCHIVE NIGHTMARE

13 September 2005

The greatest social disaster of the turn of the 21st century is the mystical belief of governments in “management”, and the concomitant disregard for experience, education and expertise. Britain, for instance, has seen its railways, health services and schools wrecked by the official belief that because a “manager” has made a success of a retail store or a sausage factory he is naturally equipped to reform a nation’s hospitals. It’s a fallacy.

When it is applied to archives – of film or any other historic material – it goes from fallacy to disaster.

Yet in more and more countries culture ministers are putting archives into the hands of people with no understanding of what is in their custody, in a (generally mistaken) belief that they are somehow equipped by “management” skills to make the collections commercially profitable. Thus the British culture minister has entrusted the National Archives to a new chief executive officer, Natalie Ceeney (34), who has no experience of archives or historical studies, but clearly appeals to the government by referring to her work as “The Knowledge Industry”

Even worse is the news from the Slovenian Film Archive (Slovenska kinoteka). It was founded and directed by the cultivated and brilliant Silvan Furlan, who died tragically young this Spring, still pushing ahead with ambitious plans. His colleagues say, “it looked for a while like the preservation and presentation of the international film-heritage in Slovenia had become an integral, solid part of Slovene cultural policy. It looked like Silvan Furlan's legacy would live on.”

It was confidently believed that his successor would be Stojan Pelko, an undisputed authority on films and archiving and the natural successor to Furlan. There was therefore deep shock when the Minister of Culture appointed instead a theatre dramaturg with no understainding of cinema or archiving.

The staff of the Cinematheque made a clear and simple protest to the Minister:
“An institution that is bound to uphold the FIAF code of ethics for film preservation, as well as to promote film culture and facilitate historical research on both a national and international level can only be led by a candidate who is not only fully aware of the issues at stake, but is also deeply committed to the presentation and preservation of the international film heritage.
Based on his application, we can confirm that Mr. Ravter is not a credible candidate to us.”
Ravter’s application was indeed a naïve document, not even mentioning the Cinematheque’s library and archive, and apparently unaware of its membership of the International Federation of Film Archives. The essence of his stated policy is that the Cinematheque should concentrate on collecting DVDs: “not a lot of financial resources would be needed …. The costs would easily be recouped by a policy of lending out these DVD's”.

The trouble is, these are precisely the kind of sentiments which, however senseless, Culture Ministers love to hear.

Death of a Museum?

1 May 2005

The 20th century has not been a good time for film museums. London’s much-loved Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) was closed down largely as a result of mismanagement by its parent organisation, the British Film Institute. The venerable Musée Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque français in Paris – one of the world’s first film museums - was peremptorily closed by a fire, apparently never to be remade. And now the more Moscow Film Museum is evicted and homeless. The was created over the past twenty-five years by the great film scholar Naum Kleiman and a loyal team, despite financial privation as acute in monetarist times as it was when it began at the close of the Brezhnev era. Against all odds the Museum built up an audience for historic and international cinema. It assembled a vast archive of documents and artefacts from Russian and Soviet cinema history which would otherwise have been dispersed or lost. It mounted exhibitions which demonstrated the triumph of knowledge, taste and elegance over money. All the time its director and collaborators worked for pittances (which were often not even paid). As the British Film Institute is answerable to Britain’s Film Council and the Cinémathèque française to the Centre National du Cinéma, the Moscow Film Museum also found itself under the leaky umbrella of a national organisation with a primary commitment to furthering the commercial cinema industry and little interest in history or heritage. On 20 March 2005 the Association of Film Makers of the Russian Federation, which owned the building, evicted the Museum. The intention of the Association and its President, the internationally admired director Nikita Mikhalkov, was to sell the building to the Arlekino Casino and Night Club, though Mikhalkov has subsequently declared his moral support for the museum, and claimed to have made personal representations on its behalf to President Putin.Téstà