German Jamboree
By ISABEL QUIGLY THREE in the morning is the only time left here to write articles. The VIII Berlin Film Festival runs at a brisk pace. Just before mid- night we were toasting Lollo- brigida with `Happy birthday to you,' while outside the fans bayed. At midnight the big nightly reception starts, from which the old stagers may lope home at anything up to 6.30 next morning. But; apart from these extra-mural high jinks, three new feature films and about six new documentaries a day make a big enough hole in the hours. Then there is a programme of film classics, another of German films from that already `period' period, '47-'50. And, in fact, if you like to nose about, or cross to the East sector of the city, where a kind of rival performance has been put on, you can choose from as many as sixteen film shows a day. As well, of course, as press conferences, discussions, lectures, meetings (held during meals very often, for sheer lack of time), and all the paraphernalia of greetings, gossip, and the exchange of views be- tween professionals that is part, some would say the main part, of festival-going.
Here you see what a gregarious business film- making is compared with, say, writing : there always seems something a bit absurd about writers getting together to discuss something that is as personal as their own souls. But people who have been making or seeing films for twenty years seem remarkably vocal and, which is more useful, constructively communicative about it. People say the Berlin Festival used to be a more sober affair, with more time and opportunity for discussion, and that now it is too much a matter of fans blocking the traffic, and gimmicks like Jean Marais's gold tie. which electrified everyone at the opening night at the new American-built Kongresshalle. This may be true, but the Berlin Festival is a more stimulating business, cinematic- ally speaking, than the rest of the year put to- gether.
There have been no tremendous surprises so far. The main disappointment has been the documen- taries. Countries with picturesque folklore seem to have become aware of its exportable quality. This fatal awareness has produced some prize pieces of selfconscious folkloric nonsense from Brazil, the Argentine, Mexico and, sadly and surpris- ingly, Japan. The difference between folklore for home consumption and folklore for festivals is sharply shown up by comparing the Indonesian Djajaprana with any of these. It was a bit of genuine, locally intended legend, with enormously excited and over-lifesize acting of great charm. The other films have used their picturesque possi- bilities and legends with such a heavy-handed, propagandist, acting-cupboard air that the result was bursts of irreverent laughter every time another feathered head-dress appeared. And rightly. Because though feathered head-dresses (or witches or crocodiles or magic ritual or what- ever it is) aren't ridiculous at all if treated with proper seriousness and simplicity, when they are stuck on the outside of a silly story like icing on a stale cake they deserve nothing but ridicule. And in Berlin they get it.
Two entries so far most discussed, one with general enthusiasm, the other with more doubts and arguments, are American and Swedish. Stan- ley Kramer's The Defiant Ones has nothing clumsy about it but its title. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier play a white man and a Negro who escape from a convict gang chained together like the two enemies at the end of Greed. They plunge into all the difficulties and dangers of men hounded by police dogs and lynch gangs, who hate and despise, but cannot avoid, each other. The film says nothing new. Its point is, men are both vile and splendid in suffering. But it says this with vigour and some subtlety, and the acting of the two men—the little mean white whipper- snapper and the resentful, far-from-simple Negro —is superb. The other important entry is Ingmar Bergman's new film Smultronstiilet (The Garden of his Dreams), a very circumlocutory and rather literary business about an old man's regeneration from selfishness to something else—at least a recognition of his selfishness—told through a long-involved series of fantasies, in which he goes backwards and sideways in time, and swoops downwards into dream and hullucination. It has all this director's extremely high polish of style that, for its very clarity and precision, never looks lifelike, and a slightly more positive and hopeful than usual, though still depressing enough, message to put across.
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