Directors Lounge magazine: opening night

Friday, February 8

Be afraid, be very afraid

(JB) A couple of lines more on two other films from yesterday's opening. George Drivas' “Case Study” from 2007 is a refreshingly low-key take on surveillance and today's cities. Or tomorrow's, actually, as “Case Study” belongs to the genre of science fiction which relies on the futuristic qualities of whatever is surrounding us right now rather then constructing a projection of a possible future. Think along the lines of Nouvelle Vague Sci-Fi like Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 or Godard's Alphaville, and of course Chris Marker's seminal La Jetée from 1962. Like Marker's film, “Case Study” is told through a series of black & white photographs.

George Drivas GR Case Study 2007, 17 min International premiere

Instead of a character-driven narrative, Drivas relies on the ornamental or abstract qualities of Berlin's architecture, using landmarks like Hugh Stubbins' wonderful modernist Congress Hall or the abysmal pseudo-post-whatever Alexa Centre, which, to my surprise, blend into a very homogeneous, beautiful & unique non-place (I suppose that the lack of colour really helps in the Alexa's case). While we basically follow the path of the protagonists through a multitude of halls, stations and staircases, there is no obvious distinction between separate buildings; the space traversed by the people in Drivas' film is not meant for anything else than transit.

Obviously, this goes well with the surveillance topic, as surveillance is to large extents based on the localization of persons within space; thus, the pristine transit spaces of Drivas' film, purged of any other connotations, make the actuality of following and being followed even more poignant. Thankfully, Drivas also abstains from the popular (or populist) polemics used by most artists working on surveillance issues. Analogous to the reduction of the city to a pure means of transit, surveillance is reduced to the acts of being watched and followed. No specific antagonism – the state watching the people, the corporations watching the people, the police watching the people – is needed here; all that's left is the both abstract and highly emotional state watching someone being watched, and, of course, participating in the “Case Study” as a viewer ourselves.

Some more notes on architecture; obviously, modernist architecture and its successors have created a very distinct tradition of fear, opposed to the fear evoked by historical or traditional architecture, which usually is connected to the notion of the past, the suppressed or the hidden; think of the house of Norman Bates and his deceased mother. Interestingly, the often-heard critique of modern architecture as inhumane stands in stark contrast with the humanist concepts of modernity itself, and has produced quite a lot of misunderstandings and outright tragedies, usually symbolized in the very concept of “social housing” (you might want to check out the Candyman movie and the sad truth behind its setting for a particularity gruesome entry into the topic).

Judy Schlesinger, female lead of Flash by André Werner with sound supervisor Daniel Schubert

Let's stay on the darker side for a while. As I have worked on modern horror cinema for my MA thesis, André Werner's “Flash” (2008) seems a bit too close to home. Nevertheless, this is a very witty pastiche of modern horror techniques (especially, as the title suggests, the lighting) and trappings in just about 15 minutes. As far as I noticed, each of the base ingredients was included – the nuclear family, the possessed child, the animal, the locked doors, the archive, the asylum, the secret experiment ... well, it might have lacked the stooped figure with her face hidden by long hair, but I'll have to take a closer look during the second screening next Wednesday. It's sure to be there, somewhere. The fun part is that every element might be read in various ways to get one of n possible coherent narratives – you just have to re-build the missing links between the ingredients. So, what was the thing with the dog about, now?

See you this evening for what looks as about fifty more films -

Best, JB

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Opening Night and Two Spanish Shorts

Opening Night and Two Spanish Shorts

Thursday, February 7th: Hi, I'm Sabrina Small, blogger number 2 for the Directors Lounge. Having been in Berlin for only five months I am still fairly awed by the creative capabilities of this city and its independent filmmakers. I grew up in Los Angeles, the polar opposite of free-thinking and free-filmmaking Berlin and until I was about 21, I believed that films were made with famous actors, big studios and lots of wasted money. Ok, I exaggerate because actually, I was lucky enough to take an experimental film class in highschool and I was exposed (my eyes almost fell out of their sockets) to the non-narrative, psychologically profround, whimsical, and aesthetically free world of experimental films. The first experimental film I ever saw was Moth Light, in fact, and it was playing last night in the foyer of the Director's Lounge, perhaps as a sort of talisman for the films being shown behind the curtain.

Of the films shown last night, I was struck most by the two very different comedies from Spain. Of all the films shown, these two were by far the most traditional in their narrative structure but sometimes it's that which seems familiar that helps us to glimpse how very different these films are from the usual box office fair. In Ciro Altabás's Made in Japan, (2007, 10 min) the set up is like an old fashioned joke and like all good jokes, the success is in the storytelling. Here our storyteller is a slightly befuddled everyman with sympathetic bulging eyeballs , who must explain to his extremely ticked off girlfriend why he missed her sister's engagement party. With accelerated voiceover interspersed with bits of dialogue and some of the most economical visual storytelling I've seen recently, we follow the hero of this joke from his mother's mink coat, to the crowded airports and streets of Japan, to a kendo sword fighting competition, as he searches for his'true' father and a way to evade the wrath of his girlfriend. Altabas uses his footage to maximum comic effect, like when the hero departs the plane and is greeted by a crowd of screaming Japanese women. The side angle shot of him coming off the plane gives the viewer just enough of his expression and the blushing embarrassment on his face to make the scene intimate and hilarious. Likewise, the supporting characters are so warmly rendered that you'd almost like to see a film about any one of them as well. They seem so rich and so real. The hero's spanish couch-potato father has a truly sublime and undecipherable bullfighting demonstration with a sheet in the living room that was imaginative in its use of camera angles and very funny indeed. Altabas crams so much into 10 minutes that it leaves you on the one hand, impressed with the compression and amazed by the fullness of the film, and on the other hand, wanting to see about two hours more of whatever he'd like to show you.

In Xavi Sala's La Parabólica (2007, 12 min) the visual world builds up very slowly. There's a hill and some sheep and a man listening to the radio, the sheep herder presumably. Slowly the camera covers the village and the radio or a television broadcast keeps it's presence in every shot. Soon it becomes apparent that we are in Valencia and that the new Pope is visiting the town in his weird little Pope-mobile. There is one man in the town who seems uninterested in this spectacle and as he searches futilely for a Pope-free channel his television reception cuts out and he is forced to confront his broken antenna on the roof of his house. In a screenwriting class I took in college the most important thing we were told was 'show don't tell' and Sala's La Parabolica does a lot of showing. The action is propelled by exactly what happened before and is shifted by whatever happens next. You can almost imagine the story of this film being told at the bedside of a small very-unsleepy child who constantly insists, 'and then what...and then what,' to avoid having to go to sleep. The story is so linear and simple it makes every scene seem somehow more than it is. One man's struggle with his busted antenna becomes a metaphor for dissention from catholicism, the dichotomy of industrialisation and pastoral life in a little Spanish village, the struggle between belief and failure. Just when this man has done everything humanly possible to fix his antenna, it still doesn't work. He makes another in a series of cross village bike rides to get a large bottle of wine and he sits in his small house drinking wine in the dark with the sounds of static hissing from the tv set like some sort of spectral warning to those who think they can champion the gods of industry. Just then a chicken flies into the net of the antenna and the man gesticulates wildly and verbally to get the chicken off his roof. It was only in this moment that I realized the film was more of less silent. Besides the radio/tv broadcasts. Of course the chicken is the miracle and he lands in such a way that the tv recpetion comes back into focus with heightened powers. Suddenly this village man in Valencia is flooded with a veritable orgy of channels and we see with him the good, the bad, the ugly and the more or less indescribable world of televisual imagery.The sound of the channels keep changing as the camera pans out and closes with a bookend of images leading this time from the center of the village back to the hills.

The two films, both Spanish, both comedies, both roughly the same length have such incredibly different speeds or modalities in which they run. Altabas's film feels fast and jaunty while Sala's feels much more contemplative and slow. One is absolutely reliant on dialogue while the other's success is due in large part to the fact that there is no dialogue. But I think what they both share is a very precise sense of characterization and impeccable comedic timing.

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This is a public service announcement

Jacob Birken and Sabrina Small, the blog writers at Directors Lounge

(JB) Hi everyone, the Directors Lounge 08 has started yesterday and it's time for some first impressions & introductions. First of all, I'm Jacob Birken and will be blogging here for the next ten days. I've been living and working in Berlin for a couple of years now, but have studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and finished there with an MA in art theory & philosophy. As I've been usually working on visual arts on the one hand and popular cinema on the other, indie film-making is kind of new to me, but, well, it's moving images plus it's art so maybe I'll work this out.

As I've been told that yesterday's movies will be shown again during the regular screenings, I'll just pick out a couple for now. There was an interesting juxtaposition of two movies earlier the evening - Zhenchen Liu's “Under Construction”, and Jean-Gabriel Périot's “200 000 phantoms”, both from 2007 – which both analysed the destruction of urbanity and it's connection to what we might call cultural memory. Zhenchen Liu is a young chinese artist currently living in France. “Under Construction” is about Shanghai, though, and about the destruction of the historical parts of the city, which are radically remodelled to suit the conditions of a brand new capitalist China. While the preservation of historical buildings & quarters might seem a socio-political issue in Europe, too (think of the Palast der Republik in Berlin), the destruction of the historical quarters in Shanghai or Beijing directly concerns the living space and livelihood of the – often poor – inhabitants. The methods and effects of so-called urban planning have been a topic for Chinese Artists for some time; you might want to check out the earlier works of Zhang Dali, for example. While Zhang Dali chose a rather traditional way of urban protest – Graffiti & direct interventions –, Zhenchen Liu uses the images of the demolished buildings in a purely aesthetic and thus maybe even more radical way. The flattened cut-outs evoke a disturbing decadent pleasure, reminiscent both of theatrical scenery & the voyeuristic beauty of war photography; their ultimate flatness remains the same as the tableau of the Vanitas still life in European painting. The third dimension re-surfaces only in the very end, with the skyscrapers of a shiny new Shanghai appearing as a backdrop for the ruins of the old.

Interestingly, Jean-Gabriel Périot uses a similar technical metaphor in “200 000 phantoms”, a movie created entirely from images of the former Industrial Promotion Hall in Hiroshima, a ruin left standing after the atom bomb explosion in 1945. The art deco building, built by an Czech architect in 1915, might or might not have survived subsequent architectural fashions or urban redesign; partially & irrevocably damaged, it has been stripped of its function as a building and now exists purely as a memorial for the city's tragic past (some more photos via Wikipedia). Périot has assembled images from 1914 to 2006, ranging from early picture postcards to photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb, from political rallies to, finally, picture postcards of the illuminated ruin nowadays. As with the ruins in Zhenshen Liu's film, the restriction to two dimensions in Périot's film echoes the absolute objectification of the building, via representative postcards, via commemorative snapshots, via strategic & military decision. The building as a artefact of history can't be granted a third dimension.

(You can watch a low-resolution video of “200 000 phantoms” on the website of the Japan Media Art award)

Check back later for some more impressions - JB