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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1985
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BERLIN 1985
– THE 35TH
BERLINALE FILMFESTSPIELE A KNOCK
ON YOUR AXIS by Harlan Kennedy For those struggling
through ice and snow in search of celluloid – it was the coldest German
winter since 1941 – the 1985 Berlin FilmFestSpiele
was like a movie maven's version of John Carpenter's The Thing. The
specter of good cinema hurtled semi-invisibly from spot to spot amid the
Arctic tundras; it tended to stand still and
manifest itself only when it had cannibalized enough vivid controversy and
livid history. At Berlin this was a year of fact, not fiction. Gone were the
cuddly gusts of good narrative that usually cheer this competition. Instead,
howling blasts of documentary truth issued from everywhere: World War II
Japan, Nazi Germany, Auschwitz, Nicaragua.... The army of
documentaries at Berlin was led by four-and-a-half hours of Japanese war crimes
in Masaki Kobayashi's The Tokyo Trial. Amazing – a festival audience
that can start shrinking after only five minutes of, say, a 90-minute
Rumanian fiction film about revisionist rhubarb growers, will stay to the
bitter end of a 277-minute real-life courtroom epic. Kobayashi, best known
for costume gigs like Kwaidan and Rebellion, cut this blockbuster
together from half-a-million feet of Pentagon film on WW II and the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The latter is, of course,
the Nipponese answer to Nuremberg, with the irresistible force of Western
law weighing in against the inscrutable object of Japanese pride and
nationalism. These were far tougher and more elusive propositions to confront
– as the film makes clear – than the garish evils of Nazism, whose
humiliation by Allied jurisprudence (i.e., Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster)
every filmgoer knows by heart. Kobayashi, not
surprisingly, puts the weight of sympathy on the 28 defendants – former
generals, admirals and prime ministers arraigned on a "basket" of
charges including conspiracy to make war and commit atrocities. Though the
trial is the movie's meat, WWII archive film is frequently cut in to give a
bigger perspective. And there is a long but brilliantly concise résumé of
Japan's prewar Manchurian adventure, which was (claim the prosecutors) the
limbering-up exercise for their wartime expansionism. But it's the trial
that boggles the brain cells. It's a wonderful mixture of the heroic and the
asinine, as twelve good magistrates set out to implement their laws, several
of which seem to have been invented specially for the trial. Led by an
Australian judge with a staggering likeness to Harry S. Truman, they eyeball
across a crowded courtroom the accused Orientals, who eyeball them back with
an attitude somewhere between incomprehension and unconsciousness. The most
distinguished defendant, Hiruta, spends the whole trial in what seems to be a
deep sleep. There is comedy: One
prisoner suddenly and inexplicably clouts a fellow prisoner across his bald
pate and then stands up to begin a filibustering monologue. (He is quickly
removed and later diagnosed as a tertiary syphilitic!) There is drama: the
faces of the accused as, led in one by one, they hear their sentences of life
or death. And there is culture-shock surrealism, as the pragmatism of Western
law keeps colliding with the serene stoicism of Eastern mysticism. The
Japanese defense counsel, we are told by the narrator, "based his
summing-up on Oriental metaphysics." The material is such a
knockout it hardly matters that Kobayashi spends much of the time adjusting
the scales of justice to suit his compatriots. Pearl Harbor was no
unprovoked military atrocity but a "triumph of tactical surprise" MacArthur is a running dog of the imperialists –
"From that moment [Hirohito's surrender] says
the narrator, "Japan became MacArthur's
empire." And the film adopts the device of swerving off in a new direction
whenever things get sticky for the accused. The "atrocities"
section of the trial is given about five minutes, before it's interrupted by
some irrelevant Tokyo strike footage. And earlier, archive glimpses of the
horrific Nan King massacre – when the Japanese, venturing deeper into China,
slaughtered a whole town – are juxtaposed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gotcha: anything the East could do the West could do worse. But the bias is brazen
enough to be noted and ignored, if one so chooses; and then one can gaze in
untroubled wonder at the priceless raw material Kobayashi has assembled. ● These ransackings in the vaults of history are a feature of
the Berlin FilmFest. Last year it was Edgardo Cozarinsky's Memories
of the Camps. The strength of these documentaries is that they are coming
from ever more surprising quarters. Gyula Gazdag's Group Excursion is a Hungarian sidelight
on Nazi atrocity. A coach flotilla of Auschwitz survivors journey from
Hungary to the former death camp, stopping en route to eat, drink, and be
melancholy as they recall (for one another and the film crew) the horrors of
life under Hoess and Mengele.
Finally they reach the camp. Here the grim ghosts hover even more vividly in
the camouflage of the gray sheds, the model crematoria (the real ones were
destroyed by the Nazis), and the "Arbeit
Mach Frei " on the main gate. The movie shows us a
group of concentration camp survivors who have moved out of Hell to become
"ordinary people." In doing so, it provides the priceless reminder
that there are no ordinary people. Even your next-door neighbor can wear a smile
over a nightmare. Thomas Harlan's Wundkanal and Robert Kramer's Notre
Nazi
are
no less grimly hypnotic halloos to Nazism. Harlan, son of Third Reich
filmmaker Veit Harlan, has got hold
of a Nazi war criminal – "Alfred F.", released from prison in 1977
– and shoved him in front of the camera for a two-hour docudrama
interrogation. Playing a thinly fictionalized version of himself, the
cadaver-faced SS veteran keeps tweaking our reluctant sympathy. As the camera
probes, the tears start as he recalls his brother, who died in a
concentration camp after speaking out against the Führer. At times Alfred FF seems
like an unjustly bullied old codger.... And then we realize the ghastliness
of our own compassion for a codger who helped to kill 11,000 Jews.... And
then we wonder if, even with a man like this, one shouldn't feel
compassion. ...And slowly the movie pries open the spectator's ethics. Kramer's film about
the filming is, if anything, even more riveting. His two-hour video record
throws as harsh a light on Harlan as on Herr
F,
as it becomes increasingly clear that the director's enthusiasm is not only
for unearthing the truth but for exorcising his guilty love for his father,
who died an unpunished and well-cushioned death on Capri. ● Elsewhere, amid the
traffic jam of good documentaries at Berlin, three stand out. From Germany
came Tosca's Kiss, by ex-Fassbinder collaborator
Daniel Schmid. Schmid pokes a microphone at the joyously
batty denizens of Rome's Casa Verdi, a
home for ex-opera stars bequeathed by composer Giuseppe.
There's
Signora Scuderi, wearing a wig and
shrieking "Vissi
d'arte" at anyone who'll listen. (She knows how to empty rooms.)
There's a mad maestro out of a caricature, with shoulder-length white hair
and the gleam of craziness in the eye. And there are moments of sudden shock
and exultation when a correct note is finally hit by La Scuderi,
or by her peers, or by the whole Casa
joining
in the slaves' chorus from Nabucco. Kazuo Inoue's I
Lived, But... is a
tour of the Casa Ozu.
This
is a documentary biography of the great Japanese director, who made films
about people going in and out of the front door, shaking their umbrellas, and
having tea. Ozu friends, actors, and
collaborators chime in with clinks of insight; the movie is like an ice
bucket being rattled in memory of a great bottle of champagne. But the real
stirrer-upper among the documentaries was Werner
Herzogs Ballad
of the Little Soldiers. This intrepid jungle-beater has now macheted his way into deepest Nicaragua, there to film
the anti-Sandinista guerrilla groups being formed by tribes of Meskito Indians. "For sree
veeks vee tramped sroo jungle
and svamp...," burbles Werner as
the film opens. But this predictability is soon exploded by political heresy.
Is Herzog siding with the opponents of the Sandinistas
as the Meskitos curse the Communist raiding
parties who have turfed them out of their villages,
slain their men-folk, and driven many into refugee camps over the river in
Honduras? He is, much to the horror of the
European Left, who have anathematized the film. But its grim sympathies are
never simplistic. The camera looks on aghast as nine- and ten-year-old
children are weapon-trained by former Somoza
National
Guardsmen to replace their dead fathers or brothers in the anti-Sandinista
struggle. The resistance, suggests the film, is no less tragic than the
oppression. But Herzog continues the Fassbinder tradition
of having the courage to rile both Left and Right when it comes to despots. And who is so rash as
to complain of any Herzog movie in the current
state of German cinema? The German New Wave has turned into the German Low
Tide, a dismal mudflat strewn with seaweed and wormcasts.
The
festival's annual New German Cinema program boasted not a single must-see
movie. Trite thrillers (Carl Schenkel's Abwärts)
jostled
with twitches of yesterday's surrealism (Herbert Achternbusch's
Blaue Blumen). And political docudramas lay down with
an interminable series of après-Fassbinder fishings in the waters of the drag world and demimonde.
One could become certifiably insane sitting through every film about aging
lady buskers (Gertrud
Pinkus' Duo Valentianos), or aspiring drag artistes
trying to break into the Berlin nightclub scene (Lothar
Lambert's
Drama in Blond). The German films in
the competition section were no better: Egon
Gunther's Morenga, a piece of cap-a-pie
nothingness set in colonial Africa and photographed as if through a sack;
Christian Ziewer's The Death of the White Horses, earnestly and endlessly
"mythic"; or Horst Kurnitsky and Marion Schmid's aridly pretentious Niemann's
Time, a semi-documentary
Gordien chop-up about the evils of German gemütlichkeit, juxtaposing everything from picture postcards to old
travel posters – a sort of Gunfight at the OK Collage. The main competition
is never Berlin's happiest event. But brief sparks did fly from four films
this year: David Hare's Golden Bear-winning Wetherby, Bobby Roth's Heartbreakers, Hugh Brody's 1919 and – it's that man
again – Jean-Luc Godard's Je Vous Salue Marie. Hare's neat little
English thriller, set in a Yorkshire village, has schoolteacher Vanessa Redgrave witnessing a young
man's suicide and discovering a whole web of sexual and social repressions radiating
out from this violent center. Redgrave is superb,
and Hare's script is full of tangy one-liners about Anglo-Saxon angst
and attitudes. The icky-centered Heartbreakers is applaudable
for its performances, its incidental comedy, and the satiric lids being
noisily taken off L.A. life. From Britain, 1919 is
a drawing-room tragedy spinning round two ex-patients of Sigmund Freud.
They meet in Seventies Vienna – Austrian-born Maria Schell (now
living in America) and White Russian Paul Scofield
(now settled in Vienna). Buffeted by flashbacks and newsreel footage, they
recall their crises of yore. Microscopically dovetailing private and
political fates, the Brody film is a humdinger haiku
of 20th-century evolution. As for Godard, his
is as impossible an act to follow as Wagner's or Joyce's. His new essay in
breaking the rules has had cries of "blasphemy" hurled at it by the
French, since it concerns a young girl called Marie who, though a virgin,
gives birth to a child. She (Myriem Roussel) loves a man called Joseph (Thierry Rode),
whom she meets off and on at a gas station. The latter has a big sign saying
"Change, Tabac, Oil" – which I
submit is a modern variant on gold (change), frankincense (cigarettes), and
myrrh (oil). This is a film you
spend your whole time wildly trying to lasso with such inferences, since it
stampedes past you at a great speed and distance, full of rapid cutting,
often-inaudible dialogue, surges of string music (à
la First Name: Carmen), shots of sun, moon,
and sea, and hanger-on characters (a seedy gent called Uncle Gabriel) who
leap up in mid-scene as if from a hole in the ground. The film is wonderful,
it's exasperating, it needs at least four viewings,
and
one ends by urging less talented directors to admire but not necessarily
to imitate. ● The Berlin FilmFestSpiele has now been in the hands of Moritz de
Hadeln for five years. And though he hasn't cured
the chronic ills of the competition – an invalid long before he came to power
– he has done wonders for the rest of the festival. The market is edging
close to Cannes for richness and prolixity: twelve theaters offering some
half-dozen movies each per day. The Information Show and the Young Filmmakers
Forum have both made themselves far more accessible to the harassed festivalgoer
through good documentation and extra screenings. And the retrospective beats
anything other fests can offer in the way
of looking back in amber. This year we had "Special Effects" – a
program ranging from neglected classics (The Devil Doll, Forbidden Planet) to
understandably neglected classics (Abel Gance's La
Fin Du Monde, which is 85 minutes of pixilated
domestic melodrama followed by five minutes of falling masonry and montage)
to classics that aren't neglected at all and never should be (The Student of Prague, King
Kong, Orpheus). The old rubs reels
with the new. Films are tickled over and explored. Their syntagmas are diegeticised (if that turns
you on). And each year the Berlin fest
finds
a new way to recharge your batteries and blazon the importance of movies as
challenge and change. Leb wohl, 1985. Heil dir, 1986. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE JUNE 1985 ISSUE OF FILM
COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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