Berlin Film Festival
Endurance test
Neville Shack
Even Christopher Isherwood would have said goodbye to Berlin far earlier if weather conditions had been as bad as they were during this festival, the 35th International Film Festival of Berlin. The city, he wrote, 'is a skeleton which aches in the cold'. Now the 'chill factor' has been discovered and mercury plunges to new depths. These are bleak times: slush har- dens fast into lethal, glistening ice under- foot, while film critics, hurrying to the next screening, seem to turn aerial somersaults. But cinema-going has inspired some great feats of endurance. Crowds wait patiently in queues outside for tickets, and the many posters splashed around testify to the number of events on the outer fringes of the official festival. And so Berlin is sustained by a passion for films ranging from the pompous to crazy squibs of celluloid which blow up in your face as proof of their experimentalism.
Thirty-odd features line up here in com- petition for some enamelled toy bears; the prizes, no less. This is akin to a beauty contest mostly consisting of misshapen uglies. There are the Ben-Hur-like epics with three dozen out-riders too many chopping up the turf, or the screaming heads so full of existential angst that most of the audience have to leave early in order to see their analysts. Appearing in the vaguely tolerable category came Robert Benton's Places in the Heart (reviewed on p.34), a would-be tear-jerker about childhood and survival in Texas, before 'cotton-pickin" became a swear-word. The cinematography, by Nestor Almendros, deserves all the praise it has received. Yet the film as a whole only succeeds in taking fine sentiments and enfeebling them.
One of the British entries was Wetherby, scripted and directed by playwright David Hare. Set in the Yorkshire town of the title, the story concerns a lonely school- teacher, played by Vanessa Redgrave, whose life is hit by shock-waves when a young stranger appears at her dinner party and returns the following day — with awful consequences. Starting from an inexpli- cable piece of behaviour, the narrative unfolds fascinatingly enough; background events are cut in, providing a few clues to the mystery. Miss Redgrave's performance has a commanding quality about it which suggests both skittishness and poise in the .character's make-up. Perhaps Hare is trying to demonstrate too much about individual and collective psychology, a catalogue of English symptoms. As always, he states his arguments with a great deal of 'force. But he overloads the circuits; itrauma, political despair, frustration and ,abnormality tend to complicate the action, in excess.
Various short films packed more style and expression into a span of ten minutes or so than could be seen in many of the longer soporifics. From West Germany .there was the mind-expanding Stars, a ,cartoon by Thomas Struck, whose images dissolved, transformed and made contact with each other, all to the accompaniment of a gliding soundtrack with vocals by Fassbinder actress Eva Mattes. And the 'French veteran Chris Marker offered a quick-fire medley of thoughts and pictures, 2084, playing with the paradox of using the future to look at the past.
The phantoms of lifeless movies were forgotten, too, during several of the inter- national Special Screenings and the Forum of Young Cinema. The Forum was origi- nally a product of cultural radicalism, the Alternative. Its director still speaks about opposing the mainstream and presenting films which open up new horizons. As a practical manifesto for 1985, the ideal appears more a matter of common-sense, absolutely necessary for the survival of the art; forget the woolly phrases. True to this approach was an unassuming Spanish film, Berta's Motives, which portrays a young girl growing up in the bare countryside of Castile. The landscape contains her im- aginings like a hard, featureless shell, and the slow flux of childhood changing into adolescence is sensitively conveyed.. The Lute of the Blind Monks of Satsuma, a Japanese documentary, shares the same low-key method and gentle pace, also using open space to set human figures in relief. A special lute, considered to be an incarnation of Buddha, is played by the monks as part of an ancient tradition. Their travels on foot from one village to ' the next, together with the serenity of the music itself, lend the film a lyrical sense of motion, just as the whole ritual • remains largely inscrutable to a western audience.
Mrinal Sen, the Indian director highly respected for his acute view of society, has produced a classic example in Their Own , Faces. It takes up the proverbial 'little • man' struggling for dignity and importance in a minor clerical job. His fight against • hostile officialdom leads him to fantasise ; about how life could be more favourable. ' So the film shifts from the banality of the everyday world to a dream-like conversa- tion between the clerk and his progenitor, the fictional author of the story. It is a felling exercise in human fickleness which works as fluently on the parabolic level as on the realistic. You can only admire Sen s skill at managing his narrative with such whimsy throughout. Erich von Stroheim (who died in 1957) is better known today for his career as an actor. He enjoyed earlier fame, though, as an extravagant director in the 19205. S. ° extravagant, in fact, that Hollywood dis- carded him altogether. Queen Kelly, With Gloria Swanson in the lead, was his last big chance to redeem himself. Inevitably, he clashed with her, and the film was scrap- ped; less than half of it properly finished. Now, 57 years later, it has benefited from a painstaking reconstruction, using odd seg- ments and stills. This bizarre and salacious tale about a queen, a prince and an orphan girl who inherits a bordello in East Africa conjures magic and gives even greater poignancy to the later Sunset Boulevard, when von Stroheim appeared as Swanson s ' butler and ex-husband. If the extreme cold doesn't numb your senses, one critic commented, then watch - mg too many 9f these films will certainlY have that effect. True. Yet, ironically, the best compensation for everything could be found very late each evening in a draughrY cinema: a season of vintage jazz film Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charge Parker et al flickered across the screen: Well into the small hours, the cadences and pcahdeere linzakse nothing would meltthe frozen atmas"
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